“It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase popularised by a Bill Clinton campaign strategist during the 1992 US presidential elections, in which the incumbent was widely considered unbeatable thanks to his achievements in foreign policy. The economy was in a recession, and the incumbent lost.

Out of all the blog posts written about Steve Jobs since his resignation as Apple CEO was announced, the piece that stood out to my mind was “What Makes Steve Jobs So Great?” at Fast Company’s excellent Co.Design blog.

Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live.

In short: It’s the user experience, stupid.

Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple has become the most innovative user interface company on the planet. When it comes to technology you either get the user interface right, or you lose.

Below are two photos that show Apple’s closest competitor in the MP3 player market in 2001, Creative Labs’ JukeBox, next to the original iPod. Could everyone who owns a CreativeLabs JukeBox please raise your hand?

Below is a screenshot of what the web-search incumbent Alta Vista looked like compared to the new kid on the block in 1998. Google didn’t only provide better search results, they had a much better user interface – one which has been copied across the board.

In order for a product to conquer the world, it’s not enough to have perfect timing, the best technology, the longest list of features or the most awesome distribution channel on the block.

It’s the user experience, stupid, and Apple owes its success to a man who understands it better than anyone else.

This post originally appeared on the Brand Regard blog.

On one hand it’s useful to know exactly when the page expires and I can’t purchase tickets anymore, and on the other hand it raises my blood pressure.

I wonder whether Rupert Murdoch should add such a countdown to his web estate. The Sunday Times could give you 5 minutes free per article, and charge you 10-20p if you wanted to read more. That way, people could still link to and visit articles via Facebook, but would eventually have to pay for what they really want to read.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?”

More than a decade after Benioff asked himself this question, it is still timely. Why is so much enterprise software ugly and difficult to use?

In the article, Benioff asks a new question: Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?

Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time.

To address this, Salesforce has launched Chatter, a “realtime collaboration platform”.

Salesforce’s Chatter reminds me of an IBM commercial where an executive with magical powers can see into the future. When his colleagues excitedly ask him what he sees, he replies dreamily:

“Everything is integrated”.

Many months ago at Pizza Express I fell into a well laid trap and assumed the second cheapest bottle of wine would be the second one on the list – below the house wine. I was wrong: The second and third cheapest bottles had switched places.

Now, check out the signup page for 37Signals’s Highrise shown below.

When I first saw this page I thought the Highrise house wine would be on the far right. It’s not. The solo and basic accounts are positioned the same as the Italian Merlot I ordered.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with this. It’s  logical for businesses to try and draw attention to their higher margin products. The Guardian recently did a piece on “how restaurants entice us into choosing expensive meals“. The short answer is menu layout. The same as the Merlot and 37signals.

Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid. The theory that advertising revenues will cover that, in any medium, is tosh.

Full article: If the future’s worth having, it won’t be free

This is very much in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell’s book review in the New Yorker (where the illustration is from) of Chris Anderson’s book, Free.

Both Purves and Gladwell maintain that the advertising industry simply isn’t big enough to support expensive content such as investigative journalism. Anderson on the other hand maintains that in the future, most things will be free for the consumer and funded by advertising.

On both sides of the argument, the debate seems to be based more on dogma than data. Where is the emperical data that shows whether the ad industry can or cannot support a future of free? It would be refreshing if the debate would become more rigorous and scientific rather than being based on gut instict.

1. Subscribe to the column online for a year for £50,
2. subscribe for a month for £10 or,
3. buy a single column for £1.

At the time you could buy the whole paper for 60p, 40% cheaper than a single online column. Unsurprisingly, the columns didn’t exactly fly off the digital shelves and eventually they started giving them away for free.

In all likelihood, this is not a good long-term solution. An annual survey run by Pew Research Center showed that in 2008, the Internet had become more popular than newspapers as the primary news source for US consumers. So, it hardly makes sense to use digital content as a loss leader to increase sales of the print edition. Soon enough, there will be no print edition. It also seems that banners, as effective as they actually are, aren’t enough to support proper journalism.

Enter: Google. It seems that they might start helping news outlets charge for their content by adding micropayments to Checkout, their payment platform. Surely, this is the way forward.

If Simon Carr’s column takes 2% of the real estate of one  Independent issue, charge 3% of the newsstand price for it. Or give the columns away for free and charge for the investigative journalism.

Micropayments might actually end up saving journalism. And Google will take a cut. They seem to be taking a cut from a lot of business models these days.

Why were the winning bidders willing to pay so a high price for a company whose very existence could be threatened by this lawsuit? One possibility is that they have nerves of steel. The other is that they know something nobody else does.

It’s an interesting question. With the lawsuit from the Skype founders, Zennstrom and Friis, hanging over the company like a dark cloud, it seems like a colossal gamble. Even more so given the current economic climate. Following this story is going to be very intesreting.

Skype has more than 400 million registered users. It has a  de-facto monopoly on VOIP. So why aren’t there donzens of desktop and web applications being built on top of the Skype technology? Why hasn’t Skype become a platform?

As a platform, Skype could solidify its hold on the market and it could make more money on SkypeIn, i.e. charging Skype users for calls to landlines. If it’s technically feasible, it seems obvious.

One answer might be that when eBay bought Skype, the underlying technology wasn’t included (which makes you wonder what eBay was smoking when they signed the $4 billion deal). Is that why the desktop client has been moving forward without any sign of development on the underlying technology?

Office doesn’t get much attention from commentators but it is one of Microsoft’s most important products. A few weeks ago, Business Week published an interesting article called “Microsoft Defends its Empire” where they discuss this importance and outline some changes that are being made for Office 2010.

The core problem with Office is that it has completely dominated its market for more than 10 years. Back when MS was launching Internet Explorer 7, I was at a conference where the lead developer was speaking. When he was asked where MS had been for the past 5 years the jist of his reply was, “it’s hard to innovate when you have 95% market share”. That’s why Internet Explorer was innovation free until Firefox started round two of the browser wars.

When you dominate:

• It’s hard to justify a big budget
• Innovation slows down because the development team doesn’t have “the fear”
• The innovator’s dilemma means that existing fat-margin markets get all the attention at the expense of emerging technologies

So now, in a classic case of innovator’s dilemma, Google docs might slowly be getting “good enough” to undermine MS’s dominance in the word processor and spreadsheet market.

With each new episode of the browser wars, the blogosphere becomes very excited. And for a good reason: Each iteration means the technology moves forwards.

I’m not sure bloggers will become as excited about innovation in the word processor market, but innovation – and competition – certainly is due.

Here come the barbarians.

Peter Day has been spending some time in Iceland and has produced two excellent episodes of his In Business radio show from “the island that went bust” as he puts it. The first episode was Iceland feels the chill and the second one was Iceland: Women.

Strangely, both episodes somehow sound optimistic. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In the first episode Halldór Eyjólfsson, former fisherman and CEO of 66 Degrees North, says that his company’s ads, shown above, explain the Icelandic character: “Some people say they are sad, but they’re not sad. They are fighting. They are survivors. They are living on the edge of where it’s feasible to live and they are surviving.” In fact, I know that facial expression very well. It’s how you look when the wind chill is -20° celcius.

The second episode is about the investment fund Auður Capital. It was founded by two female heavy-weights from the Icelandic investment community, Halla Tómasdóttir and Kristín Jónsdóttir, and it has feminine oriented approach to investing. “We’re prepared to use our logical intelligence as well as our emotional intelligence when it comes to investing,” they say. Their main point is that any business that is either too male or female dominated loses out on the benifits of diversity.

The situation may be bleak at the moment, but there is optimism in the entrepreneurial circles. Various Icelandic start-ups are using the sudden availability of a vast talent pool to do some very interesting things. The country will without a doubt rise from the ashes stronger than it was before, with a more diverse source of income than previously when it relied so heavily on one sector, be it aluminum, banking or cod.