HP’s Mess: Blame the Board

James Stewart of the New York Times has a fascinating, depressing story on why HP is apparently about to terminate yet another outsider CEO:

Interviews with several current and former directors and people close to them involved in the search that resulted in the hiring of Mr. Apotheker reveal a board that, while composed of many accomplished individuals, as a group was rife with animosities, suspicion, distrust, personal ambitions and jockeying for power that rendered it nearly dysfunctional.

Among their revelations: when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker.

“I admit it was highly unusual,” one board member who hadn’t met Mr. Apotheker told me. “But we were just too exhausted from all the infighting.” During Mr. Apotheker’s brief tenure, once-proud H.P. has become a laughingstock in Silicon Valley. Its results have weakened, its stock has plummeted and his strategy shifts have puzzled people inside and outside the company. Hewlett did not respond to an email seeking comment.

You gotta think there’s a decent chance that Meg Whitman or any other new chief will reconsider Apotheker’s desire to get rid of HP’s PC business. But I don’t dare dream that the bizarrely rapid termination of the TouchPad might also be subject to revisiting.

Facebook’s F8 2011 Keynote: Live Coverage on Thursday

I’ll be attending Facebook’s F8 developer conference tomorrow. It kicks off at 10am with a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg, who will apparently talk about new media-sharing features, presumably among other topics. (I’m still holding out for a great Facebook app for the iPad.) I’ll liveblog the keynote at technologizer.com/f8, and hope you’ll join me…

What Was Facebook’s Best Redesign, Anyway?

Over at PCWorld, I had fun looking back at the fruitless nature of Facebook redesign backlash. No one is surprised anymore when a redesigned Facebook home page–such as the one that rolled out today–causes an outrage.

But that made me wonder: what design, exactly, do people want? Was there ever a single home page layout to which Facebook users, given the choice, would happily revert? In other words, have we cooked up in our minds some ideal vision of an “old Facebook” that never really existed?

Continue reading this story…

Me on Macworld’s Podcast

Hey, I guested with Jason Snell on Macworld’s podcast, and it’s up now for your listening pleasure. The topic: Windows 8, especially as it relates to Apple’s products.

The iPad Challengers

Over at my new Challengers blog on Cnet, I took a look at the present and future of the four major platforms that aim to rival iOS as seen on the iPad: Android, WebOS, QNX, and Windows. I like competition, but so far, there hasn’t been a whole lot of good news for anyone except Apple.

Twitter To Sell Political Advertising

With the 2012 campaign expected to cost candidates well over a billion dollars, it’s no surprise that companies that count on advertising are angling to get a slice of that huge pie. Twitter is one of them, and plans to market its advertising services to the campaigns thanks to a key hire of a former political marketing executive from Google.

Twitter told Politico that it plans to sell ads through features such as promoted tweets and trends. At least five campaigns have already signed on to the new offering, including Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign. Twitter declined to specify the other participants.

One thing it will not do is insert ads within user’s timeline, a new advertising option that it has been experimenting with over the past few months. It also plans to differentiate a political ad from a standard one: the ad will carry a small purple checkmark.

You won’t see the standard “I approve this message” tag on tweets. Twitter won’t display them directly with the tweet, however hovering over the tweet would show who purchased the advertising if the campaign decides to disclose it. (It should be obvious anyway, since the ads would direct to a URL or Twitter account where the identity would be disclosed, I’d guess).

I wonder if like TV and radio, Twitter will become a sea of political ads in the days before an election, with the candidates sniping at each other continuously. Let’s hope not.

Google+ Goes Beta, Makes Hangouts the Star Attraction

Google+ has shed its invite-only status, and is now open to all in public beta. That’d be a bigger deal if the service wasn’t already open to anyone with a Google account, and if existing members didn’t each have 150 additional invites to hand out.

The real news here is about Google+ Hangouts, which began as a 10-way video calling service but is now showing grander aspirations.

Continue reading this story…

Qwikster: The People Speak! (Unfavorably!)

Someday, the name “Qwikster” may be famous, even beloved–or at least tolerated. For now, even pundits who think that Netflix is doing the right thing by splitting its Internet streaming and disc-by-mail services in two seem to be pretty much unanimous in regarding the name the company is giving the disc half of its business as dippy. But what do real people think?

Branding company Strategic Name Development–the outfit that named Wendy’s Baconator, among other products and companies–has already conducted a survey of five hundred consumers, and…they don’t like “Qwikster” either! Or at least they find it confusing. (Only 19 percent say it’s a good name for a service that does its business by mail.)

Continue reading this story…

HP Terminates the WebOS Team

Sigh. HP, having ended development of WebOS tablets and phones, no longer needs the people who created them, reports All Things Digital’s John Paczkowski:

Sources close to HP say the company plans to lay off as many as 525 employees, and that it began carrying out that dreadful duty this week.

Logitech’s Harmony Link Turns iPads into Universal Remotes

The most fully-baked thing about Logitech’s Revue Google TV box from last year wasn’t the Google TV part. It was Harmony Link, Logitech’s technology, drawn from its venerable Harmony line of universal remotes, for controlling an entertainment center full of gadgets from one remote.

Now Logitech is readying a stand-alone Harmony Link that lets you use an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android phone as a Harmony remote. The setup includes a flying saucer-shaped gizmo that talks to entertainment devices via infrared and iPads and phones via Wi-Fi, plus iOS and Android apps. And it uses the same online configuration and database of 225,000 devices as traditional Harmony remotes to let you configure it for your entertainment setup with a minimum of fuss.

Continue reading this story…

The American Customer Satisfaction Index: Apple Aces It, Again

The American Customer Satisfaction Index rates various industries and companies for–you can probably figure this out on your own–customer satisfaction, based on a poll of 70,000 consumers. It’s released its latest numbers for the PC industry, and there are no surprises: Apple has a clear lead on everybody else that the survey has enough data about to rate.

Here are the ratings for 2011, on a scale of 100. (Unfortunately, there are some major players that it doesn’t have specific data for, such as Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba–they’re part of “All Others.”)

Continue reading this story…

The Upside of Qwikster: Video Games

Harry’s already written a bunch about Qwikster,  Netflix’s newly-named business for mail-order DVD rentals. And while I agree that it’s a silly name, and that the announcement was pretty sloppy, I’m still excited about the news simply because Qwikster will rent video games as well as movies.

Netflix–er, Qwikster–hasn’t described its game rental service in detail, but did say that it’ll be an optional upgrade to movie rentals. As someone who subscribes to both Netflix DVDs and to GameFly, that’s an appealing alternative.

Continue reading this story…

Netflix Price Hike: One Plausible Theory

Why did Netflix raise (most of) its prices in July? Weirdly, given all the consternation and CEO Reed Hastings’ mea culpa/rebranding announcement this week, it’s never explained its decision in anything like a direct manner. But venture capitalist Bill Gurley has a logical theory: Hollywood is treating Netflix like a cable company:

So here is what I think happened with Netflix’s recent price change (for the record, I have no inside data here, this is just an educated guess). Netflix has for the past several years been negotiating with Hollywood for the digital rights to stream movies and TV series as a single price subscription to users. Their first few deals were simply $X million dollars for one year of rights to stream this particular library of films. As the years passed, the deals became more elaborate, and the studios began to ask for a % of the revenues. This likely started with a “percentage-rake” type discussion, but then evolved into a simple $/user discussion (just like the cable business). Hollywood wanted a price/month/user.

This is the point where Netflix tried to argue that you should only count users that actually connect digitally and actually watch a film. While they originally offered digital streaming bundled with DVD rental, many of the rural customers likely never actually “connect” to the digital product. This argument may have worked for a while, but eventually Hollywood said, “No way. Here is how it is going to work. You will pay us a $/user/month for anyone that has the ‘right’ to connect to our content – regardless of whether they view it or not.” This was the term that changed Netflix pricing.

Why Have People Stopped Posting on Google+?

So young, so promising. It was in its prime, and stood to reap the rewards of all of Facebook’s flaws—and in a weird twist, made Facebook copy Google+ for some of its newest “changes.”

But the fact of the matter is, public posts on Google+ have decreased 41 percent since the social networking service launched a few months ago. Even Larry Page, you know – Google’s CEO – last updated one month ago. And I thought something was wrong with me when I forced myself to post something on Google+ so my friends didn’t think I’d virtually disappeared.

Continue reading this story…

Qwikster: Not to be Confused With Quixtar, QuickStar, Kwikster, Quickster, Kwik Star, Quik-Star, or Kickstar

The best-known name in the business of renting DVDs by mail is, of course, Netflix–a brand that’s been with us since 1998, and which is as synonymous with its category as any American company ever has been. But now it’s reserving the name “Netflix” for its streaming business and redubbing the snail-mail portion as “Qwikster.” By doing so, it’s dumping a great brand and beginning all over again with one that starts with absolutely no value whatsoever.

Already, people are amused by the fact that there’s a @qwikster account on Twitter that has nothing to do with Qwikster. But that could be just the start of the confusion. You see, it’s not instantly obvious how to spell “Qwikster”–I’ve forgotten repeatedly already–and there’s a fascinating roster of existing products and services that have similar names.

Continue reading this story…

Netflix (or is That Qwikster?) Apologizes, Splits in Two, Doesn’t Explain Price Hike

I like Netflix. I was a happy subscriber to its DVDs-by-mail service for years. Today, I’m a happy subscriber to its streaming service, which is the form of Internet TV we watch most often in this household. But I’m happiest just enjoying its services–the more attention I pay to the company, its actions, and its explanations for those actions, the more confused I get.

Back in November of 2010, Netflix introduced a streaming-only plan and hiked the prices of service tiers that included DVDs. Then in July, it split up the streaming and DVD services in a way that amounted to a stiff price hike if you wanted both. Its explanation of why it was doing this was oblique at best. Some customers got irate and issued threats involving leaving for Blockbuster–and enough of them apparently made good on their warnings to rattle Wall Street last week.

Now Netflix founder and CEO has blogged to say he’s sorry about not clearly explaining the July changes himself–although not, apparently, about the price hikes themselves. But that’s not his big news. That would be the announcement that Netflix’s DVDs-by-mail service, which has gone by the name “Netflix” since 1998, will soon be rechristened Qwikster. It’ll be a separate division of Netflix, and will add video games to its DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Henceforth, if you subscribe to both the streaming and DVD services, you’ll essentially have to deal with two different companies, with separate plans, separate billing, separate queues, and separate customer service.

Continue reading this story…