While reading a friend’s Windows 8/ARM article on Forbes, I had what is often described as a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious).

For a year now, we’ve all been theorizing (err… guessing?) what Windows 8 on ARM would look like. The biggest question has been the will they/won’t they of the Win32 desktop on ARM. Early on I thought it’d be there. Then later last year I thought maybe not. Now, I think, I’m all but certain it won’t be. This is unfortunately all still supposition, since we have no more info to go on yet – but regardless, let me explain.

On my blog yesterday, a reader named Sebastien pointed out that Gartner has expectations for over 404M PC’s to be sold this year, and that ARM tablets would be additive to this. I was doubtful, and I even commented as such. Rather than Windows 8 ARM tablets taking sales from iPads, I felt that they would nibble at the Windows 8 x86 desktop/laptop market instead. Depending on the price that the ARM tablets land at, the price x86 tablets land at, and how far WinRT apps go in meeting consumer’s day-to-day needs, this could still be the case. However unless they offer distinct value above the iPad (not counting screen size or other “specs”), they need to be price competitive to the iPad (, without carrier subsidies) in order to steal sales from it.

However, I don’t believe that Microsoft is going into this game without a game plan. I think they have a strategy to try and ensure that there is still a PC market and a tablet market for Windows, and that these markets behave distinctly, ideally with a minimal amount of “cross-cannibalism”.

Android tablets have been criticized for many things, but like the HP TouchPad, a chief complaint has been price. Windows OEMs have complained before about the cost of both Windows licenses and Intel processors. By supporting Windows on ARM, Microsoft made some of that expense disappear (the cost of the Intel processor and any additional required components), and provided a platform that focuses on delivering battery life over performance, likely saving money on cooling and battery components as well.

But what about the Windows desktop? I think it may not be on ARM tablets. I probably sound conflicted here, as less than two months ago I said:

 I strongly believe the Windows desktop (or as errantly referred to, “the desktop app”) will remain.

The Windows desktop is the Windows experience. It has been for over 20 years, and though it is “over there” (imagine me pointing to your right, where the desktop now lives – stage left from the Start page) it isn’t going away on x86/x64 desktops (or possibly x86 tablets) anytime soon.

However, if Microsoft were to hide not include the Windows desktop on Windows 8 for ARM (Win32 is still semantically there, but minimalist), it could offer OEM partners a way to cut costs there as well, by charging less for the license (which would in turn reinforce my belief that Windows 8 for ARM will be OEM only).

However, by not including the desktop, Microsoft does something further. It creates a psychological boundary. It creates the boundary that Windows 8 ARM slates are, in fact, lesser cousins to Windows 8 x86/x64 PCs. While you will be able to run your WinRT apps on either platform, and even seamlessly authenticate on both, and sync documents and settings over Windows Live between them, the ARM slate clearly becomes something you need in addition to a Windows PC if you need to continue to run Windows desktop apps. You’ll need a Windows 8 ARM slate plus a PC. All of a sudden that whole PC Plus* mantra makes sense.

Another interesting angle is that it actually doesn’t pit ARM against x86, at least not directly. ARM systems will likely wind up at the low end of the cost spectrum, and Win32 compatible and performance-focused x86/x64 desktops and laptops at the opposite end. Depending on the price points that Intel (and perhaps AMD) are able to hit with certain tablets, it could still pit x86 against ARM, but the latter needs to prove that it has the energy efficiency to go head-to-head against ARM tablets on very low-cost, lightweight devices.

Whether most customers will take Microsoft up on purchasing both an ARM tablet and an x86 PC in the short term until the WinRT platform is proven is a question, as well as whether most “touchless” desktop users will truly take advantage of Metro apps and the Start page. Regardless, if executed as such, it could come back to agree with Sebastien’s (and Gartner’s) belief that the Win8 ARM sales would be additive to the existing PC sales projections – unless too many consumers find that WinRT-based apps are good enough for all of their needs, which is a possibility, in which case ARM-based Windows 8 tablets could nibble away at the bottom of the PC market, as netbooks (and possibly the iPad itself) have done in the recent past.

This also means that I also believe the next version of Office will continue to be Win32 – needed for desktop/mobile power users, but we may well see a Metro-based version of Office that, like Windows on ARM, could cost less, be touch-focused and, like Microsoft Works used to be, much more constrained to casual productivity tasks instead of trying to shift (and shove) all of Office over to the Metro user interface, which I believe would be a mistake.

*Intriguingly, while searching for references, I ran across this article in which Bill actually coins the term “PC-Plus” back in 1999 during a similar era when analysts were questioning the PC’s future.

This shouldn’t need to be said – but everything in this post is pure conjecture on my part, and it is my personal opinion. I do not have enough information to form the factual finding that I do at my normal job in my daily writing. But I believe it is important to get this thesis out there for discussion. I hope you found it interesting.

I’ve mentioned before how much time I spend investigating spam. It’s allowed me to observe some pretty interesting, sometimes amusing, often annoying, criminal behavior. I also enjoy analyzing Twitter spam as well, and have built a pretty interesting collection of spammer examples. One of the most common things I see on Twitter, though, is spammers using shortlinks to try and pull off their crime.

Shortlinks (goo.gl, bit.ly, etc) have made sharing links handy, especially on character limited communication mediums such as Twitter. Though you don’t see them as often in e-mail spam, shortlinks are also a critical component of Twitter spam, and often on Facebook as well, as they provide a way to not only fit the text limitations, but a URL like (http://bit.ly/kiZs18) appears much more benign than a URL such as (http://www.somelamedomainyouveneverseen.info).

While they can be useful, shortlinks can also be incredibly evil. Yeah, I know, you’ve heard you should always be careful what you click on (most people aren’t), and perhaps you run anti-malware that investigates what you click before you navigate to it (most people don’t). Personally, I question the efficacy of most software that purports to do this). But personally I believe the worst kind of malicious shortlink is a smart malicious shortlink.

All shortlinks work the exact same way – simplistically, when you request their URL, they provide another URL back as the location that your browser needs to redirect to (they actually tell the browser that the document you have requested has moved).

So what do I mean by a smart shortlink? Most smartlinks are simple – you request navigation with the short URL, and one, perhaps 2 levels of indirection later, you’re at the actual document you want. So when you click (http://bit.ly/kiZs18), it navigates through Google’s Feedburner (feedproxy.google.com – this is another problem I’ll talk about another day) and finally to www.wired.com. But smart shortlinks, which are inherently malicious, lie to you if you get too close while you’re investigating them.

Surely you can think of a location where the local police have established a constant patrol for speeders (a “speed trap”)? Say one where you’ve been by for months and months, and 50% or more of the time, there was a highway patrol car there? What do you do? You likely a) get ticketed or b) become conscious of your speed every time you drive by to avoid getting one. Grifters on the Internet are no different. They also like to avoid getting caught.

There aren’t speed traps on the Internet, sure. But there are services that “unshorten” URLs, such as unshort.me or unshorten.com so that you can see where you’re going to before you click that short URL. To the bad guys, these are speed traps. Many times, I have tested URLs through unshorteners, and saw the final URL returned as “google.com”, “youtube.com”, or similar generic, benign URLs (usually without any actual further path information such as a specific page, making it look even more suspect). But if I pasted that same URL into a browser (within a victim virtual machine), it would navigate to an actual hostile URL.

How does it work? Grifters put a teeny bit of logic into their redirection code, and if they recognize the source of the HTTP request as an unshortener (or I can only imagine, most anti-malware link checkers), they lie about the destination. If it comes from elsewhere, they assume it is someone to hit with their grift, and provide the hostile URL.

I don’t believe any URL unshortener can defeat this at the present time without developing pretty explicit countermeasures – once the bad guys spot a common source of destination URL sniffing, they’ll demarcate it in their redirection logic, and lie to it. The only safe solution is to use special software that sniffs the link from the client itself but doesn’t complete navigation (a special script or app), or navigate from an isolated VM/a machine you’re willing to potentially risk losing, or send all requests through Amazon EC2 or perhaps Windows Azure, which are so expansive it becomes hard for the bad guys to blockade completely without risking the potential effectiveness of their crime. Though Twitter’s t.co “unlinker” is supposed to help keep you safer, I’m not sure if, or how they have protected against this kind of explicit attack vector.

From when I joined Microsoft in 1997 until I left in 2004, and even since then (but especially during the heady days of the DOJ lawsuit), accusations flew fast and furious accusing Microsoft of misusing the word “innovation”, that Microsoft couldn’t innovate, or didn’t innovate.

To a large part, I don’t agree with that. Sure, you can say that Windows Phone 7 was a reaction to the iPhone and Android, but it wasn’t a clone, and it attempts to offer a unique usability value proposition versus iOS or Android. Even Windows 8 and the WinRT framework, while in some ways surely inspired by the iPad, it does so in a unique way as well, and will likely be seen in a diverse breadth of devices, versus the iPad’s “one size device fits all” strategy.

However, the past is littered with what I have sometimes referred to as “premature innovation”. Technologies created by Microsoft (or sometimes acquired by Microsoft) way ahead of their time. So far ahead, in fact that to many people, they don’t make sense – and as a result, either die on the vine or fail to sustain themselves in the market after release.

Voice (1995-Present) - TTS and SAPI. Do those mean anything to you? They do to me. Text To Speech and the Microsoft Speech API. Before I joined Microsoft in 1997, I built a PC for the first time. It had a sound card, a horrible microphone, and some speakers I had kept from an old Acer. At Slate, I helped build a custom audio version of Slate, generated using text to speech. It was shelved after I left since it sounded so robotic. Microsoft has been beating the speech and text recognition drums for decades, only to see Siri, a quirky, accent-fussy smart agent (there’s a term you probably haven’t seen in a while) steal any and all thunder that Microsoft had even thought of years before, but not in a mobile context. Speech is complicated. Speech recognition (hearing) and text to speech (speaking) are also two separate problems. Microsoft has moved these so far forward since 1997, it’s truly amazing. But frankly we’re still at a point where text to speech still results in inhuman vocalization (“Robby the Robot”, as Kinsley called it at Slate), and speech recognition is most usable for short form commands (Siri, or Sync), not reciting out a novel. SAPI was also used by the Microsoft Agent technology derived from Microsoft Bob (another conversation for another time), and is still used by Speech Server. The emphasis of Microsoft’s speech technology development appears to be on the server side today, but SAPI still works on client operating systems.

Killer? Not dead.What has held it back? Processing power, and the fact that computers interacting with speech is just a complicated problem.

WebTV (1997-~2002) – In 1997, Microsoft acquired WebTV for $425M. The idea of the Web on television surely appealed to many, and when combined with a DVR, conceptually made sense. But the fact that Web content for WebTV was custom, the amount of the Web actually available, and then how usable it actually was, given the state of televisions in the late 1990′s, led to low adoption. Today, the product is effectively dead. Yet here we are, 15 years later, and Google is still trying to resuscitate the idea, with multimedia content and apps intertwined. If Microsoft had run a different course with WebTV, it could have possibly gone further and might be something today. What’s left of WebTV? Well, in many ways, WebTV was the progenitor of UltimateTV and Mediaroom (the IPTV infrastructure solution licensed from Microsoft for BT, DT, AT&T U-verse, and several other telephony-based broadcast solutions. Not dead, but not mainstream, and most people wouldn’t ever associate Mediaroom with WebTV.

Killer? TV resolution, need for custom content, lack of broadband, lack of ubiquitous streaming video standard.

Mira (2002-2003) – One of my favorites, because I held out so much hope for it. You don’t remember Mira? Mira, also called a “Smart Display” as Mira was a code-name, was an attempt to create a tablet-style computer that you could use anywhere, but that featured the power of your Windows desktop. Using wireless connectivity, you can undock your “Smart Display” and take it with you around the house, using Windows Remote Desktop from the version of Windows CE built into the device. In many ways, Mira was cursed to begin with. Due to the state of technologies at the time (wireless, LCD displays, memory, CPUs), it was far too expensive in 8″, 10″, or 15″ models. It also couldn’t serve as your primary monitor because it was both too small, and when you disconnected it, nobody else could use the PC, since there was no monitor. Even if you had another monitor, because Windows client operating systems have only ever allowed one interactive user at a time (a rule that was bent for Media Center Extenders, which enabled more than one interactive user at a time, but in a very fixed function user interface), it was still limited to a single user at a time. Mira shipped, and you can even find used models around (that still cost too much, frankly). You could build Smart Displays today and, if packaged well, might even sell. But I’m not sure users today would want tablets that require a tether to a Windows PC in their home, as well as the difference between useful tablets (7″-11″) and home displays (generally 19″+).

Killer? Cost of components, lack of ubiquitous wireless home networking, windows single interactive user limitation, and frankly, a confusing use case.

Tablet PCs (2000-Present) - Mira was in many ways an early, and yet late, foray into tablets for Microsoft. Tablet PC Edition was, of course, the big coming-out party for Microsoft. Like Mira, Tablet PC was significantly more than a traditional laptop, yet often required a compromise in display size or performance. It also required significant buy-in from the user in pen-based input. Ink searchability has gotten significantly better over time, but like voice, pen/digital ink still isn’t a way to write voluminous amounts of text. Tablet PC predated the iPad by almost a decade. Yet Tablet PC sold at a trickle, while the iPad has established a distinct market niche. Why did it fail? The exclusive bet on ink, while not evangelizing a framework for tablet-centric apps (the opposite tact of what we see happening with WinRT, where the framework, not the device, is the most important aspect), but again, cost was a huge factor. Consumers wouldn’t choose a Tablet PC over a traditional laptop, and while IT pros might, it was often a hard argument to make in procurement, “I need to pay more for a computer so I can use a pen”. I experienced that one myself. Pen-based Tablet PCs are still around today, bought by users specifically looking for them, and sold into verticals such as the medical industry or into other industries with specific point-of-service needs.

In Louisiana, there is a bridge on Interstate 55 that crosses the Manchac Swamp. One of the world’s longest bridges, it’s over 22 miles long.

I mention that because I think it’s important that you be visualizing a very long bridge, because that is, in so many ways what Microsoft is building with Windows 8. Win8 on the legacy (x86/x64) architectures and Win8 on ARM are in many ways two different platforms, and WinRT is the (very long) bridge that Microsoft is trying to build between them to help Windows on ARM succeed.

When discussing the potential of Windows 8, especially the opportunity for developers, Microsoft touts numbers such as “450 million” or “500 million” as a potential market for Windows 8. But is the immediate potential really that large?

A key strength that has repeatedly sold Windows upgrades for more than two decades is application compatibility. That is the premise that last year’s (or last decade’s) applications will still run on next year’s version of Windows.

This has traditionally been especially important when discussing complex, custom-built line-of-busines applications. Enterprises expect to keep running the same applications with as little (as close to no) modification as possible on a new version of Windows. It is important to not dismiss application compatibility, because no version of Windows that didn’t have flawless application compatibility has ever been commercially successful, as I’ve said a couple of times before. The Intel Itanium architecture took a while to deliver the performance value proposition that was initially promised, and – very importantly – had a very, very bad Windows application compatibility story for existing applications throughout it’s entire life. Conversely, the AMD/Intel x64 architecture delivered exceptional performance relatively early on, at a marginal cost premium over x86, with almost no application compatibility cost. True, drivers were an issue, and led to Windows XP x64 having very little uptake, but Windows Vista largely resolved this, and Windows 7 all but removed any hurdles of running x64 Windows. Today you can buy an x64 system and, unless it has esoteric (or crappy) piece of hardware or software, ancient 16-bit applications, or VB 6 applications, you don’t pay a price to run Windows natively on x64 hardware.

Let’s look at a couple of facts about x86 PCs running 32-bit Windows 7:

1. You can run almost any legacy application, going back over 20 years.
2. You can use ancient hardware peripherals, as long as you have a relatively current driver.
3. You can use ancient utility or security software, as long as you have a relatively current driver.
4. The majority (almost all) applications available to you today are not optimized for touch, or even for stylus-based input.
5. The majority (almost all) are either a desktop PC or a laptop. Very few are tablets.
6. The processors in the system are designed with an emphasis of performance over efficiency.
7. The applications (especially legacy applications) on the system give very little consideration to power management, efficiency, or not running unnecessary, inefficient, or repetitive/looping background tasks.

In addition, the odds are that if you looked at almost any PC in use today, it also doesn’t have a digitizer – which means it doesn’t support touch or a stylus. Some do, it’s true. But the cost has left these devices to be an edge of the market, far from mainstream.

If you imagine the same x86 PC upgraded Windows 8, every single fact above remains true, though the new world of Metro applications begins to help by providing a touch-first, well-managed, power-sensitive application framework (but does so on a PC without touch in most cases).

Microsoft’s take is that every x86 PC that can run Windows 7 is an upgrade candidate to Windows 8. That’s absolutely true.

But let’s look at what would happen if you were to buy a brand new Windows 8 device with an ARM processor. How many of these facts still hold true?

1. You can’t run any legacy applications. None. You might be able to modify them to run on ARM if Microsoft provides some level of tooling and libraries they depend upon are available, but as of right now, that doesn’t appear to be something Microsoft wants you to do. Visual Basic 6 applications, in particular, are forbidden under the terms of Windows 8 application certification.
2. You can’t use any hardware peripherals, unless a new driver (with driver signing) has been created (same problem originally faced by x64).
3. You can’t use any utility or security software, unless a new driver (with driver signing) has been created (same problem originally faced by x64).
4. All applications (unless Microsoft renegs and provides a Win32 application migration story) are Metro apps, provided through the Windows App Store. These are inherently optimized for touch, but work with pen. These can be frustrating to use with a mouse.
5. The majority are likely to be tablets, very few are likely to be desktop PCs or even conventional laptops or “Ultrabooks” until Windows on ARM has proven it’s viability.
6. The processors in the system are designed with an emphasis of efficiency over performance.
7. The applications must conform to the WinRT framework, and as a result are very constrained as to what they can do in the background (for better or worse), but are generally efficient, secure, and tightly managed.

Before I go any further, I’d like you to try 2 levels of Cut the Rope in Internet Explorer, or 2 levels of Angry Birds in Google Chrome; but I want you to do me a favor. If you have a stylus or a touch-enabled system, don’t use those. Use a mouse. Don’t cheat – just use the mouse, like most current PC users would have to. Ready? Go on, I’ll wait.

You’re back? Great. Now, if you’ve ever played Angry Birds or Cut the Rope on iOS or Android, I want you to think for a moment about the experience you just had.

Was it fun? Sure.
Was it novel? Meh – you’ve probably played these both on other platforms. That’s why Microsoft and Google paid to have them ported to the browser – it’s important that well-known titles like these be on their respective platforms to begin with.
Was it the best experience you’ve ever had with these games? Probably not. Besides some performance compromises to go from native compiled code to HTML/JS, both of these games compromise the gameplay because you need to use a mouse, not the more intuitive touch user interface that both apps succeeded because of.

Now, you might be saying, “But Windows 8 will be touch-based! People will have tablets!”

That is the plan – and this version of Cut The Rope will probably be a great experience on a touch-enabled Windows 8 tablet, regardless of CPU architecture. But reconsider that 450M-500M number mentioned earlier. Almost every x86 PC in existence included in that number does not have touch.

Any Windows 8 PC can run the Metro user interface. Absolutely. But I can tell you from my personal experience that Metro and the new Start page are very frustrating to use with a mouse instead of touch. Frankly, they’re rather difficult to use. Personally I’ve been contemplating whether Kinect for Windows could help here – it may. That aside, while consumers and enterprises may upgrade to Windows 8 in time, I have to think that there may be some initial hesitance to upgrade, especially on those exact “legacy” systems touted because the user interface is such a fundamental shift – even if existing Win32 applications “just work” on Windows 8 x86 systems as they did on Windows 7.

I worked on Windows XP. I saw enterprise customers become emotional – become angry about the new Start Menu in Windows XP. It had to have an option to disable it and turn theming off. People have become used to it, but the shift to the Start page and Metro are far more jarring than a new Start Menu or Windows theming were.

Now you might be thinking, “Well, fine. Consumers will buy new tablets, largely with ARM, but possibly with x86, processors, optimized for touch.”

But then we have the opposite problem. Early on in this post, I highlighted how significant of a role Windows legacy application compatibility plays in businesses deciding to upgrade to a new version of Windows. Windows 8 on x86 and x64 continue to offer this value proposition, thus indeed resulting in a potential for Windows 8 uptake on many existing systems (that don’t support touch). But honestly, x86-based tablets are a longshot to remove the iPad’s lead, due to the iPad’s name recognition, performance, value prop, battery life, weight, and low cost. Windows 8 on ARM, conversely, throws away the entire “legacy application” value proposition, but begins to counter the iPad (the key details then being the build quality, performance, weight, battery life, and cost of Windows 8 ARM-based tablets – all of which are completely unknown at this time).

Let me summarize:

1. Legacy PCs running Windows 8 will run legacy applications, but deliver a suboptimal experience when running touch-centric Metro/WinRT-based applications.
2. New x86 tablets running Windows 8 will run legacy applications, will deliver the optimal experience when running Metro/WinRT-based applications, but may compromise battery life and/or weight and/or cost over an ARM tablet. This isn’t a guarantee, but at this point, this is the way product offerings have panned out in the past.
3. New ARM tablets running Windows 8 will not run any legacy applications, but will deliver the optimal experience when running Metro/WinRT-based applications, and will quite likely deliver the best weight/efficiency/cost.

I’ve said before that Windows 8 will live two lives. It’s critical to understand this. Desktops/laptops running Win32 and some WinRT applications, and tablets, running mostly or all WinRT applications.

I’m not saying the quoted 450M/500M number is completely incorrect. I’m also not saying that Windows 8 won’t succeed. I hope it does.

I am saying that I believe it may be a false syllogism to link the current market entrenchment of Windows 7 and earlier on x86/x64 desktops and laptops running Win32 applications, to any guaranteed explosion of sales for Win8 tablets which require an entirely new generation of WinRT-based applications.

The notion that “Lots of people run Windows today, therefore Windows 8 will succeed on ARM tablets and outsell the iPad” or “Lots of people run Windows today, therefore Metro application authors are guaranteed to make money” are both false syllogisms to just assume at this point.The current – gigantic – installed base of Windows x86/x64 systems running Win32 applications does not, by definition, mean that you can assume an immediate, or definite, success for Windows 8 on ARM running WinRT applications. The iPad is young, and it’s anybody’s game.

People do own PCs, and many are likely to continue to buy Windows 8 PCs or Ultrabooks. However without touch, they are, I personally believe, not the best candidates to run Metro. Conversely, consumers can buy Win8 Metro/touch-focused tablets when available, but then will abandon legacy Win32 apps.

We’ve yet to see what the stimuli are that lead consumers to prefer a Windows 8 tablet over an iPad (Apps? Form factors? Performance?). Microsoft may well have some secret sauce here that we’re not yet privy to, but as of this point, they are running silent and running deep, and not discussing Windows 8 go-to-market strategy at all.

Correction/clarification (1/18/2012, 11:00 AM) I have had several readers and followers on Twitter note that the 400M+ number specifically speaks to the current run rate of PCs continuing to sell as it has – not the installed base at all. Stupid on my part to incorrectly state that. However that actually only accentuates the issue above, as that run rate needs to continue or grow, while also including iPad competitive ARM and low-powered x86 tablets in the sales mix.

A few years ago, someone in Hollywood got scared. They started looking at the volume that DVD/Blu-Ray (“shiny media”) movies were selling at, versus the volume movies were selling to shiny media rental stores and Netflix. And that someone’s reaction? The most idiotic idea I’ve ever seen (I even think it was dumber than DIVX). The “28 56 Day Rental Window”.

I said it was stupid then, I’ll reaffirm it is stupid now. But just wait – it’s getting dumber. You see, almost two years ago, most of the major studios got together, and set up the idea that movies would be available for rent 28 days after they had released for sale. After gloating that they had movies for rent when Netflix and Redbox didn’t, even Blockbuster rescinded and agreed to the 28 day window a year ago – turns out that Blockbuster, amid hard financial times, was paying dearly for the privilege of 28 days of rental window that their competitors didn’t have.

Well, here we are just over a year later, and those economic powerhouses in Hollywood have decided that the artificial scarcity created by the 28 day rental window worked so well (actually, it hasn’t), they want to double that mofo.

You see, the idea here is that there are four windows when you can see a movie (in order):

1. In the theater (you buy a ticket)
2. In your home (you buy the movie)
3. In your home (you rent the movie)
4. In your home (it finally hits Netflix streaming)

Hollywood of course would love it if you did both #1 and #2, it never really liked #3, and it frankly hates #4.

Hollywood makes the most when you buy the movie, and of course theater tickets have the opportunity to make them an obscene profit. When a movie hits the theater, it has the optimal marketing buzz it will ever have. From the time it hits, it may crescendo and hold for a bit, but within a week for most movies, it’s a downward demand trend.

Now the idea is that when the movie hits the movie stores, say, 3-6 months later, that they can initiate a secondary marketing machine and induce sales by creating artificial scarcity. The thinking being, “customers can’t rent it, so they’ll buy it instead”.

No, you idiots. That’s not the way it works. We’re in a recession, bordering on a depression. Everything that isn’t food, water, or shelter, for most of us, is a discretionary purchase. Offering a DVD for $20-$50 and telling me I can’t rent it works like this:

1. I like a movie. I go see it in the theater. Sometimes I can’t make it, so I plan to watch it when it comes out on video.
2. I hear the movie is coming out. I consider renting it.
3. It’s available – I know, because you started marketing it again – I go to see if I can rent it at Redbox or Netflix (or gasp, even Blockbuster), but no. In 28 (60) days I can, or I can buy it now for, say $35.
4. I “walk out” of the movie store, not considering it again until months or years from now when it’s either on Netflix, Netflix streaming, or iTunes rentals. But if I decide to even ever view it, I likely do it by accident. Because there is no tertiary “It’s available for rental” window that really echoes like the first two marketing windows.

With the rental window, you’ve single-handedly killed the demand for rental for your partners who ARE willing to buy your movies with regularity. Stupid. You’re killing your partners.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret here, Hollywood, you can’t convert a renter into a buyer. Yup. It’s true:

• Someone who rents a Porsche isn’t really that likely to buy one.
• Someone who rents a weekend house at the beach isn’t really that likely to buy one.
• Someone who rents a movie for $1-$5 per night isn’t really that likely to buy one.

You can lie to yourselves all you want. But you are killing yourselves. If you put the window at 28, 56, 60, 120, 800 days… it doesn’t matter. You’re only cutting of your own nose to spite your face. You can’t create a sales market from rental customers, and every move you do that harms Netflix, Redbox, or even Blockbuster, hurts you far more than it hurts us. Your rental channel partners (and studio partners) are the best allies you can ever hope to have. But no, you’re killing your own channel. You’re killing partners who will pay you for your content. Fine, put yourselves out of business in the name of greed.

This is the same type of brilliant economic game that countless banks thought they could get away with by giving giant mortgages out to consumers who could never pay them off (and strikingly similar to what the music industry went through). It doesn’t work. Learn how your markets work, charge what customers are actually willing to pay, or you will fail, and you will die.

The ultimate irony is, the studios, failing at basic economics, funnel money into our government, to get ass-backwards, unnecessary laws like SOPA (or some less aggressive, but still unnecessary) law passed because they’re terrified of piracy. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, Hollywood. If you want people to buy movies, market well, and charge what the market will bear. If you create artificial scarcity, and you overcharge for your content, you’re knowingly encouraging piracy. Why, some might even say that by simultaneously backing SOPA, forcing our government to do their – incorrect – dirty work for them, and pushing for a 56-day rental window, Time Warner is doing just that. Simply evil – and it won’t work out well for them in the long run.

But for now, they’ll grease the right palms to get SOPA passed. They’ll keep issuing takedowns. They’ll keep trying to charge more than the market will bear for content, in an ever-flailing vicious circle.

On January 2, 2012, Apple accidentally released an app called “Game Store” to the iOS App Store. I saw this early in the day, so thought I would check it out. Turned out it was only in the German App Store – and that it wasn’t really that exciting. In the end, it didn’t even show up in my search results. But what did show up in the search caught my eye. Take a look.

See all those “Maker” apps in there? For some reason, those struck me as odd. So I clicked one. I know that my kids have enjoyed playing with a few of apps where you can “make” a cupcake, etc by overlaying certain images on top of others – but most of those are free, and review well as a result. My kids also also like waffles – so I clicked  the “A Waffle Maker” app.

First of all, all of these apps were $.99. The quality of these apps is such that even $.99 is overcharging. It’s obvious that most or all of these images are ripped straight off of the Web. See the cast iron waffle iron in the second picture? Now go do a  Google search for the same waffle iron (a waffle iron that, amusingly, I own).

The rating (2.5 stars – pretty much all of these apps) and even the review on this app (actually, on all of them also) are pretty harsh. I don’t have a current copy of the App Store dev guidelines, but looking at an older copy, this pretty likely violates at least the spirit of 2.12 (Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected). But something else smelled funny. Did you notice the name of the “Seller”? Yes, that’s right, it’s App Maker Flick Creator Booth Builder & Tap More LLC (links to App Store listing of all of their apps). That’s insane. Do you see it? It’s SEO keyword stuffing, but using the name of the company to do it. Almost all of those words occur in the name of several popular apps – and searching the App Store for those terms returns results where this company’s apps will almost always show up in the initial or “all apps” searches. Hence, my search for Game Store, or shockingly even just the term “store” turns up these lovely apps.

At this point, I’m trying to figure out, is this someone who is maliciously trying to game the App Store and trawl in customers who don’t know to read reviews to buy these (almost universally 1 star reviewed) apps and regret it later? So I found their support link on iTunes, and clicked it. Up came this little gem:

Now, you didn’t see it, but the initial domain that we traveled to before being redirected was actually www.appmakerflickcreator.info. But that quickly redirected to the (rather lame) placeholder site above, which was created in iWeb. Yes, that’s it. No actual support info, nothing about the apps that they provide, and only a lowly Gmail address to get support from.

I decided to check the .info domain name to see who had registered it, and where. At this point I would have placed a bet that it was an anonymously registered domain on GoDaddy (this combination is the primary MO of cybercriminals that I’ve observed).

Sure enough, it was registered last July, with a DomainsByProxy registration through GoDaddy, and a ping to the server hosting the site (www.connect3tv.com, registered in September of 2010) returned an IP of 184.168.218.243, which ARIN said belonged to GoDaddy as well. At this point, I still think there’s something fishy going on here.

I simply Googled “connected3tv.com”, and some quite interesting results turned up. Not one, not two, but what appeared to be 5 additional companies, all obtusely named, hosted on that same domain:

• App Maker Flick Creator Booth Builder & Tap More LLC
• Hot talking booth apps and more
• The Pro Gun and Guns App Builder Club LLC
• APPS. L DUB LLC
• Jump Birds and Friends (AKA “Mega Friends Jump Rope over the Tiny Fruit Birds who are Talking Sex LLC”) – I think someone got in trouble with Apple for the name, and changed it.
• More Tiny Talking Wars & Doodle Maker Games

Surveying the App Store, there are over 132 apps, all $.99 exist across these 6 “companies”, most of which were released in 2011, quite a few of which were updated right before the holiday App Store lockdown. I didn’t look at every single one, but every one I did look at was universally panned.

During my search process, the person (yes, one person) principally responsible for this stack of apps also showed up in the search. Personally I’m a big fan of Hanlon’s Razor; and frankly, I really do like to err on the side of saying something someone did was probably ignorance or stupidity, not malice. But setting up 6 companies, keyword stuffing their names, and filling the App Store with over a hundred apps that are all poor quality, Flash-based, nearly identical “take a photo and move UI elements around on it”, using images that appear to be largely stolen off of the Web, and having the gall to sell them to impulse buying consumers for $.99? This person made me flip from believing it was ignorance to believing it was just plain old greed. I’m not naming their name here. You can Google it if you’d like.

But this wasn’t enough. No, they also performed the cardinal sin in the App Store – they submitted a glowing review of their own apps, when everyone else was giving it a 1 star, thumbs down. Look at this:

See that? The reviewer, “Sunlittiger” only has 5 reviews under their belt. Sure, one is Scrabble. You want to make yourself look somewhat legit, right? But the other 4 reviews? They’re split among two of the companies above, and they’re positively glowing.

Now, this person behind these 6 (or more?) “companies” isn’t alone, I ran across several other organizations using keyword stuffing in their name, and quite a few other $.99 app purveyors with almost universally panned apps. That’s incredibly disappointing, and not the kind of apps Apple should allow/keep in the store, but, that’s their call.

To make things worse, the person behind all these apps has also created ripoffs of Pocket Frogs, a popular (FREE) iPhone/iPod Touch game with their own iPhone version (Pocket Frog 2) which has already confused consumers (see the reviews of the ripoff) and an iPad version, Pocket Frog.

I can’t summarize the things that I think this person is doing that may be questionable, unethical, possibly against Apple’s developer terms of service – but I can tell you, I have a problem with apps like this in the App Store – it gives a horrible representation of the iOS platform, and disappoints/irritates new, non-technical users – and worst of all, often children who will impulse buy this junk, only to be disappointed (and out a dollar), as this person makes enough money to financially justify the chaotic “business strategy” above.

I’m really concerned that apps like all of these make it into the system in this kind of volume. Is there a different quality bar for Flash-based apps? Does just anything just make it in? If so, I can see why Apple wanted to scrap Flash apps – a lot of them are junk. But if these apps were missed, and the overarching pattern of abuse here was missed or ignored, I’m even more concerned. Is the screening process really strong enough to catch potential flaws (or apps with embedded trojan code) in native iOS applications?

I have provided a link to this post to the only Apple contact that I have. I’ll update it if I receive any comment.

Last night, a follower on Twitter asked me the following:

Hey @getwired, how does someone become a Microsoft analyst?

January 4, 2012 12:16 am via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@robertmclaws

Robert McLaws

For those who don’t know, my day job is as a research analyst at Directions on Microsoft (DoM). Unlike most analysis firms that focus horizontally across various vendors in various markets, we focus exclusively on Microsoft (which DoM has done for 20 years this year). This single vendor approach has enabled us to dive deep and lets us answer questions about Microsoft’s software, services, hardware, and even complex licensing agreements at a level few other organizations can (sometimes even including Microsoft itself).

Like so many things, there isn’t really a “formula” to how I, or any of my analyst peers, arrived here. While almost all of us are EXMSFT, all of us have significant experience in some combination of the following:

• working at Microsoft itself
• writing about Microsoft
• advising, managing, or deploying Microsoft software in the enterprise

For me, I’ve had a series of fortunate events that have led to a career path that has been quite a fun ride. I’ve worked with Windows for 20 years this year as well, and worked on Windows itself (primarily XP and early on during Longhorn) for almost 5 years.

As I mentioned, there is no magic formula.  The most important parts are  an interest in Microsoft and general curiosity in the  enterprise (and increasingly, consumer) software  technology spaces, and a desire to help customers/readers understand it.

Last Friday I posted this on Twitter:

Netflix/Quickster, GoDaddy, Verizon… fascinating to watch an Internet beat-down cause a business decision to be reversed.

2011 should go down on record as the year that companies – some of them, anyway, experienced resonance to the point that they were forced to reverse a key business decision. I refer to resonance as the innate amplification of topics across the Internet as they reverberate from user to user that agrees with the sentiment. Amusing topics that catch people’s interest spread fast. Topics that agitate people or make them angry? Much, much faster. This is how Twitter works – it’s a sentiment amplifier. Sites like Reddit and Digg are not that different, though sentiment there spreads and amplifies differently.

While it is possible that Twitter isn’t solely responsible for this effect, I believe that the half-life of tweets on Twitter demonstrates that topics that don’t just “die out” organically in a relatively quick manner can turn into a pretty steaming pile pretty quickly. Become a trending topic on Twitter, and you’re likely to wind up on mainstream news outlets as the latest company getting “Tweeted in effigy” by angry consumers.

Sure, United, FedEx, and numerous other companies have experienced resonance at the hands of indivual employees. That’s unfortunate. But it’s also a different problem, since it is those individuals acting on their own and making bad decisions that leads to the problem.

But this is different – Netflix, GoDaddy, and Verizon experienced resonance made exponentially more impactful because they made decisions that, if thought about beforehand, could have been avoided completely. When making a decision that impacts public policy (GoDaddy), will take away features from your product or service (Netflix) or cost your customers more (Netflix and Verizon) especially while adding no net value for your customers, you need to ask yourself, as an executive at a business, “is this decision something that is going to either take away perceived value from our customers, or could it agitate people who don’t see eye to eye with our political viewpoint?” If it is, you probably want to know the answers to:

1. Why you are doing it?
2. What’s the cost of not doing it?
3. What is your worst case scenario if it resonates?

If you can’t answer those points, you should probably duck and cover, and hope for the best.

Businesses made decisions every day. I’m not saying that you can’t, or that you shouldn’t move forward as a business. But in an age of Twitter resonance, businesses need to be aware of just how fast the bad word can spread, and how damaging it can be to their brand. Be proactive on social media. Understand the emotions of your consumers. Be prepared to message your decision in a positive light, but understand that your consumers may not see it that way, and you need to prepare for the worst. For goodness sake, test it among a sample of customers before you do it if it will take away perceived value from your product or service. Don’t just shoot first. Because otherwise there will be way more questions later than you are comfortable with.

As a child, my favorite treat was a cheeseburger. Not just any, but a Burger King cheeseburger “minus mustard”. Years later, a cashier pointed out that BK cheeseburgers didn’t have mustard on them, but nobody had ever corrected me. Have it your way indeed. I’ve had innumerable meals out. I’ve eaten too much fast food, candy, sodas, and junk food. A few years ago, while we lived in Austin, my wife and I somehow began to contemplate eating healthier. I don’t know if it was the arrival of our second child, or what happened – but one of us started to consider the origin of our food, and it pretty much threw everything asunder. We started really trying to eat organic. Now, when I say try to eat organic, I really mean that. It is an ordeal for an American to truly eat organic, and it’s getting harder.

If you’re unfamiliar with organic food, this Wikipedia entry on organic food may familiarize you with it. By and large, the idea behind organic is that the “inputs” (seed/feed/and pest/weed controls) to create a food are not synthetic. So the use of chemical fertilizers, radiation, or genetic modification are all forbidden.

Unfortunately, as organic food has become mainstream, as books,  documentaries, and films such as Food Inc. (book/DVD), Foodmatters, King Corn, Super Size Me, Tomatoland, and even Fast Food Nation have changed how many consumers view their own “inputs”, many of the multinational corporations that sell us food have realized what an important revenue source organic food could be for them, and grabbed hold of one organic company after another. What happens then? This:  How “natural” claims deceive consumers and undermine the organic label. Most likely in order to reduce costs, reduce price, maximize market and maximize profit, organic ingredients are slowly removed from “formerly organic” products, resulting in products that were organic now being largely or entirely conventional. I found it sad walking the aisles at a grocery the other day, just to check them, and indeed a few Annie’s products said, “made with organic pasta” but of course there was a grab bag of conventional ingredients in there, possibly even including GMO ingredients.

So as we watch the US organic food market get consumed by the big industrial packaged goods manufacturers, and slowly shed most or all of its organic ingredients, what happens next? Stores like our local co-op, PCC, and Whole Foods, and anyone else trying to still offer organic foods to those of us trying to avoid eating GMO or other conventionally processed foods have to reach farther and farther away to find organic foodstuffs. Recently, I’ve started aggressively checking labels on our organic food. If you eat organic and watch closely, you’ll see more and more of your food being imported, because it’s cheaper, easier, or both, for manufacturers to source abroad instead of the US. So you get organic canned fruit from Asia. Frozen organic peas from China (yes, China). Organic honey from India, jelly from Italy… It seems like it gets farther and farther away all the time.

For me, this means a couple of things. 1) I need to start buying local organic, in season, and store it. 2) I need to learn how to jar and possibly can my own foods and jellies. 3) I need to find more locally sourced food direct from farmers.

I’ve been learning to make my own yogurt and cheeses, initially for fun, but as I do it, I’m starting to realize there may be a financial upside to it as well, in addition to the fact that I know all of the ingredients that went into it.

All that aside, it concerns me how organic is getting shoved farther and farther out of the limelight. It shocks me what some people will put into their body and call “food”. Yet the big industrial food concerns in the US control the message, they control the packaging, and they control labeling and government. Until we replace our current crop of politicians (outside of a few) with those who are more concerned with the health and well-being of citizens, not the whims of agribusiness, this won’t change. Until we overhaul the USDA and FDA to be organizations there to be citizen-focused first, and be averse to the desires of these corporations, this won’t change.

It shouldn’t be hard to buy sustainable, affordable, organic products in the United States. But I feel like it’s getting harder and harder.

Who doesn’t love a free lunch?

C’mon now – you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Yet why do countless people fall for “the inbox hustle“? I’ve been working on whitelisting technology for over a decade, and my sojourn has taken me far from where it started on Windows to the Internet at large, and to the base psychology at play when a typical person gets gamed by crap in their inbox, on Twitter, or on the Facebook wall of a friend (2 Free Southwest Airlines tickets. I know you’ve seen that recently – we all have), or even some of the more obnoxious ads you see crawling around the Internet. I’ll be blogging even more about this in the coming months – but I wanted to pass along a little of what I have learned when it comes t0 the most fundamental components of every Internet scam. In fact, it’s probably the foundation of every scam on the Internet. It is… The seven deadly sins. Regardless of any theological ideology you may follow, the basic premises of the 7 ideas expressed in the list underlie a few basic psychological drivers of humans.

There are countless  iterations of the seven deadly sins around – but at their heart, they’re almost identical. What are they?

• Lust
• Greed
• Gluttony
• Discouragement
• Wrath
• Envy
• Pride

In many ways, I’ve probably just told you a key secret to marketing. But with Internet scams, it is the key. If you can hit one of these chords, you’ll probably succeed. There are deeper tricks at play in most spam, and I’ll get to those in time. But if you step back and watch the email spam you receive over a week, the Twitter bots or Facebook linkbait you see your friends get sideswiped by, I can all but guarantee it will match one of those 7. In fact, most of it will match just the first two.

I’m a little strange. I collect spam. Most people delete it. I collect it. I analyze many aspects of it. Below, I’d like to share an example of each sin, in the form of an actual spam subject line I’ve received over the past year. I like to refer to the spam subject line as “The hook”. The job of the hook is to catch your eye. It’s the shiny object designed to distract your prefrontal cortex for a second, and trick your mind into thinking the risk/benefit of performing the action you’re about to do is actually in your best interest. Thus, the 7 deadly sins.

• Lust: View pics of singles in your area
• Greed: Lock in Low Rates with LendingTree before it’s too late!
• Gluttony: Enjoy A Week Of Subway Subs
• Discouragement: Weird Tip of a Flat Belly
• Wrath: News Alert about Avandia!  Has anyone in your household taken Avandia? You need to read this
• Envy: Search our list of foreclosed homes.
• Pride: 10+6^2=?? How Smart are you

Much like my recent post about the desire path, the reality is that it is practically human nature to want something for nothing – or want something we can’t have. The reality is that if everyone took a second to think before they clicked on every link to ask themselves, “is this too good to be true?“, nobody would ever get bitten by phish or malware. Luckily for criminals, many computer users will click first, and ask questions later. Feed them a link based upon the 7 deadly sins, and you can all but guarantee it, if the net is cast wide enough. Just look at the Love Letter virus, or so many other recent attacks. So many begin with simple social engineering to click a link or download an infected file. But the hook is, more often than not, a basic play on very primitive human desires.