photo credit: hotcactuspepper

The Start Of The Microbrewery Revolution

The beer shake-up started around the 70s, when consumers started to revolt against the macrobreweries (Budweiser, Miller, Coors).  These companies produced, and continue to produce, very inoffensive and inexpensive beer. And as the big boys grew, they bought and consolidated their competitors, centralizing production, cutting costs, and providing the catalyst for revolt.  They followed the success of Coke and Pepsi — consolidation and uniformity were their selling points.

For many, there were few or no alternatives.  However, globalization and tourism increased the exposure of alternative beers.  “Why can’t I drink beer like the beer in Belgium?” consumers asked.  Grumblings began.  And technology stepped in to solve the problem — home-brew kits. Consumers, not driven by cost concerns, started to make their own beer.

The Growth Of The Market

Successful home-brewers started to expand.  Their friends liked their beer.  Their friends’ friends liked their beer.  “Could they start to sell this beer?” they wondered, and they gave it a try.  If you look at the big names in microbrewing — including Sprecher, Goose Island, Brooklyn — they all started around the same time.  The incubation of this idea happened across the country.

Fast forward a few decades and I can get Brooklyn Brewery beer in Chicago.  I can buy Colorado’s Fat Tire Amber Ale at the corner store.  And new guys keep entering the market — in Chicago we have Metropolitan Brewery along with Half Acre now challenging the incumbent micro, Goose Island.

The Macros Respond

The growth in this consumer-driven market is where the action is and the big boys want a piece too.  Budweiser released American Ale a few years ago to directly compete with microbrewery ales.  In addition to new products, the macros are reintroducing long-dead names like Schlitz and Stroh.  They’re making every attempt to appear de-centralized and non-homogenized.  They’re flooding the market with brands, because the future is no longer a single beer — it’s a beer for every palate and region.  It’s the wine model, not the cola model.

What Can The Media Industry Learn?

The media industry is going through a similar revolution.  The future was once a single, centralized news source, but that’s no longer the case.  Technology stepped in and unhappy consumers have mucked everything up.  Like a home-brewer making his own stout instead of buying Guinness, anybody with $100 and a free weekend can become a media entity on the internet.  The established companies don’t know how to respond.

One response is restricting content (tablets, apps, fee-based consuption) — and it’s a ridiculous idea as soon as you translate it into the beer equivalent — the Budweiser store experience, the only place you can enjoy the cool, crisp flavor of Bud Light, complete with specially-designed chairs and TVs to enhance the user experience.

Another response is to allow customization — tailor the CNN experience to fit YOU, send us your recipe and we’ll make your beer.  But in a sea of infinite choices, my ideal news and beer flavor already exists (and I probably don’t even know what I like).  The extreme example of this approach is to build a site entirely on the contributions of your readers — the Digg model.  Have something we should read?  Share it with the site’s community.  But social sites like Facebook and Twitter have taken the need for ‘community’ out of the equation.  I don’t need validation from faceless Digg readers; I can get that from my friends on Facebook.

The most promising is to de-centralize, or at least appear to de-centralize, so that you can more directly compete with your challengers — like the release of American Ale.  This seems to be the way to go.  AOL’s Engadget competes with both the NYT tech section and sites like BoyGeniusReport and Gizmodo.  Nobody is directly challenging a big player — there’s no New New York Times — the challengers are going after the weak points.  The Huffington Post is a great example: Your news not liberal enough?  Get it here.  Not conservative enough?  Try Fox.

So that’s my pick on the future — the wine model — a flavor for every palate.

Online, it’s best to be female

Over the last year, Huffington Post traffic is up 118% and the Daily Beast’s is up 270% (check out compete.com for numbers).  Conrad Black is in jail, Arthur Sulzberger is bankrupt (along with Sam Zell), and Rupert Murdoch has never surfed the information superhighway.  Sex sells.

photo credit: priceyeah

Technology doesn’t matter, even on your iPhone

Mashable uses WordPress; HuffPo uses Moveable Type.  You don’t need to go custom to succeed.  Reader’s don’t care how your content is organized; they only want to read it quickly and easily.  In fact, it’s probably better to use a canned solution — save some money (just don’t spend it on an iPhone app).

Who has an awesome iPhone app?  NYT, AP, Chicago Tribune … bankrupt, old-media newspapers.  The Daily Beast doesn’t even have one.  Mashable’s is odd and clunky.  HuffPo has one that seems to be somewhat popular.  Only the NYT is hoping for the iPad to save it.  A simple mobile site is enough.

The future of mobile media isn’t a repackaged, miniaturized newspaper (or magazine, sorry Esquire).  It needs more reach than that.

Social reach trumps mobile reach

Digg just realized that Facebook and Twitter matter.  The web is real-time and you don’t need user effort to measure it.  Look at BuzzFeed.  They’re the Digg of today and nobody needs to vote to bubble things up — it just happens.  Social networks make that possible — reading and sharing determine popularity.

Mashable focuses on Twitter and Facebook.  Huff Po was an early Digg adopter, then moved to Facebook Connected social news (now including Yahoo, Google, and Twitter integration).  The Daily Beast is heavily invested in email newsletters.  All three have realized that integrating into another facet of a reader’s online life leads to increased readership.  Sure, David Carr has 244,000 Twitter followers and the New York Times has 2.3M but Mashable has 2M too — and guess which company has lower overhead.  Every story Mashable posts is a social home run.  Successful sites are harnessing the power of user-generated traffic.  The old boys are not.

The widget communitistas are dead

To each according to his patience, from each according to his widgets.  Widgets were the future in 2008.  “Customized” homepages, like those offered by Netvibes and PageFlakes, are impossible to differentiate, easy to replicate, and worthless.  Customization isn’t the future.  The future is filled with a site that fits everyone — given an infinite number of options, your dream site is likely out there waiting for you.  Think about clothing — do you buy custom shirts?  Nope, you get them from the Gap.

Conclusion

So that’s it: be female, don’t worry about tech, forget about apps, focus on social, and hit a niche without customization.  Simple!

Then, somebody had the genius idea to turn each piece of content into a mini-forum — comments were born!  I post something on my blog, the readers discuss, I participate, and we’re one big happy family that turns into a billion clones over night.

The Digg model followed.  Why go through the effort of creating content when all you really need is the discussion — the readers?  Instead, the site was a community center and anybody could bring up any topic at the community discussion as long as they went through the effort of bringing it up.  Instead of getting everybody to discuss the latest New York Times article on NYTimes.com, some of the discussion was siphoned off to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.  The discussion was no longer owned by the content producer.  The discussion was part of the community.

Digg is now faltering as its centralized-community model crumbles to the customized-community model.  Why should I discuss the latest news with a bunch of trolls on Digg when I can discuss it with my friends on Facebook?  I don’t care what LuvPalin_2012 thinks about the latest news in Iraq.  I care what my friends think.  I’d rather discuss it with them.

And this makes it tremendously more difficult for content producers to benefit (get pageviews) from the discussion happening in the community.  Instead of a single Digg link that drives thousands of visits, producers need hundreds of Facebook links or Twitter tweets to show up in hundreds of their reader’s micro-communities.  But if content producers can harness these communities to drive traffic, they’ll be on the cusp of the next big thing.  Mashable is already there.

So that’s the shake-up we’re in.  Facebook has already replaced Digg and is now challenging Google.  Facebook, or its successor, is going to win.

1. It’s basically a raise.  Asking employees to work from home means they make more money.  How?  Lower commuting costs is the most obvious.  Then there’s the home office tax deduction (where most of the money is).  Lastly, there’s the ancillary stuff associated with daily office work — the morning coffee, the nice clothes (regularly dry cleaned), the lunches, and the downtown after-work drinks.  All this adds up to more money in the employee’s pocket.
2. It’s like giving employees 2 more days every year … of life.  People spend, on average, about an hour a day commuting.  Giving that back is significant.  And what’s more, because the employee has been given this new perk, he’s more likely to just give that time back to the company.  Loyalty is about relationships, not salaries.

In the age of cell phones and email, virtual offices are not a technological hurdle.  They are a management hurdle.  Can you manage a virtual staff?  Maybe not, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to manage employees that are happy, and a virtual office gives them plenty of reason to smile.

iJobs is a CEO robot that wears New Balance shoes and black mock turtlenecks.  He is very involvement in the user experience.  He is modeled on Steve Jobs circa 2008.

Listen to the undertones and you’ll here this: The iPhone 4Gs is coming to Sprint.

photo credit: 91RS

Here’s why it makes sense:

1. The iPhone is getting some serious heat.  AT&T is getting some serious heat for their shitty network, halting sales in New York, and general ineptitude.  Add in competition from the Nexus One, the Droid, (the) Google, Palm, etc.  Apple needs a distraction.  Enter the iSlate … a computer so far behind its competitors that it exists only in rumor form.  It buys them some time while they sever ties, upgrade, and switch to …
2. Sprint.  Sprint has the the largest (only?) 4G network.  The iPhone is a data hog.  It needs 4G.
3. Then there’s the exclusivity … but not the exclusivity you’re thinking.  The thing needs to be perceived as rare and premium, so Apple can’t partner with Verizon.  Can you imagine what would happen if any corn farmer in Iowa could buy an iPhone?  Or if Bob the grave-digger developed a GPS-enabled plot finding app?  The iPhone is an exclusive status symbol — it can’t become ubiquitous.
4. And think about it: the Apple II GS came out twenty years ago.  Last year there was the 3Gs … the 4Gs makes sense.  And who has a 4G network?  The infinite rumor loop continues!

So, there you go.  Get your iPhone 4Gs this spring from Sprint.

*This article may be entirely untrue … or is that what Steve Jobs wants us to think?

What’s that mean?  When times get tough, evaluate employees individually.  Sure, global pay cuts are an easy out, but it’s going to be tough for Dan from accounting to accept a global cut when Mary from sales spends most of her day on the phone chatting with her wedding planners.  If you have too many regional managers or under-performing sales people, you owe it to the rest of the team to downsize.  Dan shouldn’t be punished for Mary’s shortcomings.  Furthermore, failure to hold under-performing employees accountable will hold your over-performing employees back.

Why is that?  Well, without carrots to reach for, what’s the point of hard work?  If Dan works 60-hour weeks and has lowered accounting costs, then he should be rewarded.  If he realizes that he will not be rewarded for any increased effort, then he will apply his efforts elsewhere — like job hunting.  Nobody wants to stagnate in a role.  Good employees need to feel like they’re growing, like their roles are expanding.

Gawker is a great example.  As soon as the economic outlook became clear, they downsized, (in theory) ridding themselves of the under-performing and solidifying their base.  Then, last week, they leaked their new bonus program.  Their actions are perfectly transparent (hell, they blogged about them): when times are tough you may be fired, when things go well you’ll earn more money.  Meritocracy!

But maybe I’m wrong.  Are there unhappy people working at Gawker?

UPDATE: A “few hours” was a little optimistic.  Try again around noon, according to CNN:

“Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET, Google will make some kind of announcement related to its Android smartphone operating system.”

Hard on Terrorists

photo credit: dan paluska

It had been two weeks since the Prosthetic Penis Bomber had struck, and the United States was again winning the War on Terror.  All males were now padded down at airport security and those with a hard, potential stick of dynamite in their pants had some explaining to do.  The soft, good Americans were allowed right through.

Of course the Defeaticrats said this was un-American and grotesque.  They didn’t understand that “we have to fight them down here (the President said pointing to his crotch with both arms), so we don’t have to fight them here (now pointing at his head and heart).”  It was very simple, the President explained after raising the threat level to orange in front of what could have been the flaming wreckage of flight 333, Southwest’s flight servicing Chicago Midway and Oakland, California.  “We cannot afford to be soft on terrorists.  We have to be hard on terrorists.  Good Americans with soft penises will not have any trouble at airport security.  You are all good Americans, aren’t you?”  The Press Secretary would have more explaining to do later.

“You don’t understand,” he told a reporter.  “The new rule is exactly like the rule requiring all laptop computers to be turned on before passing through airport security.  It’s just the opposite.  We can’t treat this like the shoe-bomb situation of a few years ago.  Not only can we not send a male’s member through the scanner, but the explosive potential of a prosthetic of this nature is significantly greater than that of a Dr. Scholl’s gel shoe insert, and we haven’t even allowed those on planes in over a year.  We can’t just ban men from flying, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” he said with a laugh.   It was the reporter now that looked ridiculous.  How could she even suggest banning all men from flying?  That would be ridiculous!  The president’s solution was the same type of knee jerk protection that didn’t do anything but needed to be done so that it looked like he was doing something so it had to be done.  And something had to be done; the threat level had already been raised to orange.

No, men could not be banned from flying like dangerous Dr. Scholl’s gel shoe inserts and Revlon Extreme Hold hair styling gel.  And men couldn’t be scanned with the airport scanner like a dangerous pair of Allen Edmonds, and they wouldn’t fit into a bomb-proof, pint-sized zip-top bag like a deadly tube of Colgate Total Whitening either.  America had no choice but to pat down each male as he passed through airport security and to single out those potential offenders and make them turn their penises off.  It was just like the laptop computer rule that stated all computers had to be turned on.

“The computer rule states that all laptop computers need to be turned on,” the airport guard told a person that can only be described as a white potential terrorist.

“I’ve told you already, this isn’t a laptop computer,” the white potential terrorist said.

“Then where is its screen?” the guard asked.

“It doesn’t have a screen.  It’s a server.  I’ve already told you that.”

“Well, we can’t let it on the plane unless your laptop turns on.  I’m sorry, but you’ll have to board without it.”

“I can’t board without it.  My only reason for flying is to take this server from Chicago to LA.”  The white potential terrorist was supposedly an IT Administrator from the law firm Womanizer, Idiot and Jackass LLP, or something.  He showed his business card to the airport security guard, but the guard’s job was to follow the rules, not to read.

“Well, you have to turn all laptops on at airport security.”

“I can turn it on, but I don’t have a screen, so you won’t be able to see anything.”

“Then turn it on.”  The guard crossed his arms.  He was hard on terrorists.

“I need to plug it in,” the white potential terrorist IT Administrator from Womanizer, Idiot and Jackass LLP, or something pulled a cord from his carry-on bag and carried what was either a bomb or a server over to the wall outlet.

“See, it’s on.”

“What’s it do when it’s on?” the airport security guard asked.

“This green light blinks.”  The white potential terrorist IT Administrator pointed at the green blinking LED on the server.

“What about those red ones?”

“They only blink if there are problems.”

“Well, it is on.  I guess you can fly with it,” the guard said because nobody had ever been able to build a bomb that you could plug into a wall with a blinking green light not to mention a bogus bare-bones computer that could boot, but was really a bomb.  And this guy was white and a nerd and had a business card and his penis hadn’t been hard when the airport security guard had checked.

“I feel some hardness here,” the security guard said to an elderly gentleman that had just walked through the scanner.  The guard working the scanner heard his cue and scanned the elderly gentleman’s carry-on bag and walker twice to make sure he caught everything.  He saw what looked like Dr. Scholl’s gel shoe inserts in the man’s Velcro shoes and what looked like Colgate Total Whitening toothpaste and Burt’s Bees Lifeguard’s Friend lip balm in what had better be a zip-top bag.  He called over another guard to investigate.

“You’ll have to turn that off,” the guard said pointing to the elderly gentleman’s groin.  You can do so in cubicle six.

“It’s the Viagra,” the man explained.  “I’ve been hard since last night.”

“Well, cubicle six is all ready for you.”  The guard felt sorry for the man even though he could easily be a terrorist, so he pulled the man’s walker from the scanner and let the man use it to get to cubicle six.

“Do you have any lotion?” the elderly gentleman asked.

“If you needed lotion, you should have brought it in your zip-top bag.”

The elderly man rose to find cubicle six.  Four other men were utilizing cubicles one through four and an airport guard was cleaning number five.

“When will it end?” he asked, to nobody in particular, though nobody was listening because all the guards were busy terrorizing the passengers by being hard on terrorists and nobody had any time for logic and reason because the threat level was orange and something had to be done.

The man in cubicle two smiled while those in the others gritted their teeth.  “Inspection!” the cubicle monitor guard yelled to the guard cleaning cubicle five.  The man in cubicle two had ejaculated and had cleared his name.  He could now fly.

America was now filled with men that had to fuck themselves to fly.  And when you’re fucked, the only solution is to stay the course and win by adapting.  Men adapted by wearing frozen pouch boxers that were frozen the night before in their freezers until the FAA found out that the frozen insert was a gel and had to be banned from flight.  Men stayed the course by continuing to fly and by not causing a scene when they needed to jack off to do so.  And everybody ignored the Muslim world, which was outraged in their hearts and minds at the hedonistic lack of morals the United States showed by making their citizens masturbate in their airports.  But it had been two weeks since the Prosthetic Penis Bomber had struck, over two years since the Shoe Bomber had struck, and almost a year since the Gel Bombers had almost struck and the United States was again winning the War on Terror and that was all that mattered.