Hmmm, what is wrong with this picture? The call-to-action on this screenshot below clearly says FREE. The app is also listed in the navigation section of the App Store under the FREE app sub-section. But then the first sentence of the app description says you will be charged $9.99 per month for the application. WTF? Can they be any more confusing?
As it turns out, the app (or better put, the shell of the app minus the part that actually does anything uesful) is free. You can download it and you won't be charged a dime. Just don't expect it to do anything useful! Once downloaded, you can then launch the app and decide at that point whether or not you want to register for the service and opt-in to the monthly subscription fee.
Perhaps I'm the odd ball here, but couldn't they have described that whole process a bit better in the app description? Looking at the comments from users in the app store, it appears that I'm not the only one that was confused.
Targeting is something that people have talked about with web products for a long time, but it's disappointing to see so many products still get this wrong over and over again. This morning I was reminded of how when targeting is done right it is an incredibly effective engagement tool, and when done wrong just plain annoying.
Targeting & personalization done wrong:
Like many others, the economic situation has me thinking about my personal wealth (or rather the destruction of my personal wealth!) more than normal. So I go to my eTrade account a little more often these days than typical. In any event, here is a partial screenshot of the home page I landed on this morning after signing in:
Why on earth are they showing me a banner ad for a Complete Savings account when they know that I have a Complete Savings account already! In this case it's made even more ridiculous by the fact that the offer is literally pixels away from my account information. Considering there are a fair number of eTrade products that I don't have (e.g., a 401K roll-over) you'd think they'd be pitching me something else. I generally like eTrade, but this is really bad. Not only is it annoying, but they are also leaving money on the table.
Targeting & personalization done well:
Thankfully others out there are doing a much better job. And I'm not just referring to ad targeting. Check this out. This morning I get the following email from MyBlogLog:
Absolutely brilliant. I read techticker quite a bit, but I had never taken the time to join the techticker MyBlogLog community. Rather than wait for me to do this on my own, MyBlogLog pushed me along and helped me do what they already knew I'd like to do, but am just to busy or lazy to do myself. And of course they also show me how to opt out if I really don't want to join the community for some reason.
Experiences like this one remind why I love the web so much. A newspaper has no idea which stories I read over and over again. A bank can't change their advertising banners hanging from the ceiling for every customer that walks in. But the web fixes all of this. The web can be built specifically for each one of us. If you are out there building a web product take advantage of this. Your users will love you for it.
Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves BroughtonAbsolutely brilliant!
There is an interesting theory out there saying that Harvard grads (and in particular HBS grads) collectively serve as a good leading indicator of where the US equity market is going. In a nutshell, the theory goes that if lots of HBS grads are headed to Wall St., then the markets are overvalued and headed south. Conversely, if fewer HBS grads are going into the world of high finance, then the markets have goodness in store for all of us. Basically, HBS students don't like to show up to the party until everyone else has already arrived, and more often than not, they arrive just as everyone else has decided to leave and go home.
As for the 2007 HBS graduating class, it appears that 40% are headed for "market sensitive" careers, up from 37% in 2006 and 30% in 2005. So if you believe the theory, then you better be selling! Or rather you better have been selling already because as you see in the graph below, all of the major indices are down in the last 12 months (i.e., basically since the time the 2007 class graduated).
But enough with the intro. On to my point. Fortune magazine just came out with its annual list of the top 100 most desirable MBA employers. And while it doesn't allow you to break out the list to just HBS grads, let's assume for a moment that all MBA grads - not just the poor folks at HBS - are bad at picking their career paths. If the theory works for all MBA students, then perhaps this list enables you to infer not only which way the stock market as a whole is headed, but also where specific companies are headed?
Who's at the top of the list for the class of 2008? Google. Does this mean GOOG is ready for a fall? Well, they were #2 in 2006 and the stock rocketed upwards during the year that followed that class's graduation. By 2007 they had got the #1 spot, but the stock is still slightly up since the 2007 MBA grads joined the workforce.
Could this finally be the year the theory works and GOOG drops? Should we sell? Should we sell AAPL (#4 on the 2008 list)?
My own hypothesis: the theory might work fairly well when guessing the direction of the market as a whole, but it will break down and have less success when applied to individual companies. Get a big enough sample size and you will be okay. Focus in on a single data point (or company) and there are too many external factors that could change the outcome. In statistical terms, pick a single point in a normal distribution and you may be well off the mean. But take the full sample and you'll zero right in on the mean.
Or perhaps the MBA grads are not as quite as useless as every engineer in the valley suspects!
