Opportunity Cost

You have to focus. Doing one thing really, really well is infinitely better than doing many things merely adequately. That means selectively choosing which activities to engage in. This is true whether it's a business or a private individual doing the choosing.

In business, doing everything ensures mediocrity. This rule seems to hold true regardless of the size of the business. As companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have found out, as they try to find new horizons to conquer it becomes difficult for them to maintain the compelling nature of their original offerings. Additionally, people have a hard time accepting the company as a business that exists outside of their original space. For example, most people view Microsoft as an operating system and office suite company, or at least a maker of desktop and server applications. Far fewer think of them for their online offerings, such as Office Live or MSN.

I hear a lot of ideas for Internet start-ups, and I see a lot of people making the mistake of trying to do everything. It's gotten to the point that when I hear a pitch for a business that contains a bundle of the currently hip buzzwords ("social networking" is the term du jour), I instinctively start to wonder if there's a real idea in there. It's just too easy to start building an Internet business without establishing the business part.

Sometimes this comes from start-ups comparing themselves to established businesses. They assume that they have to launch with all of Amazon's e-commerce features, all of Google's search capabilities and all of Facebook's social networking features. Not only is this a way to wrack up an enormous development bill, but it won't particularly serve the start-up in the marketplace. The Internet rewards great new ideas, or at least ideas done in a great new way.

So the secret is to not do everything. Strategically choose features not to implement, business areas in which not to engage. If your core idea is good then you'll have a foundation on which to build, and if it's not then all those additional features won't save you anyway.

Distributed Art

Once upon a time I had a rock band called Blue Shift. We made music, loudly, in smoke-filled bars (remember those?) in the 90's in Toronto, wishing we had enough money to be able to afford to record more of our stuff. I like to think that we were ahead of our time. As you may have noticed, you've never heard of us.

A little while ago I was suddenly struck with a revelation - a lot of the problems I had back in those days, stuff that held us back, had simply packed up and left in the night. I could now afford recording equipment, due to both my increased income (from, you know, zero) and by the fact that digital recording technology had made professional recordings so much cheaper than they used to be. There were many channels to digital distribution open on the Internet.

I had been sitting around thinking about trying to scrape together yet another band from craigslist when suddenly it struck me - why not just go and get the old band? The fact that we don't live in the same city doesn't matter.

So now I'm looking at four words I never, ever, thought I would see: "New Blue Shift Album". We're all sitting on our own project studios, as it turns out. The project will basically work like this:

• We'll agree what songs to record. We'll establish song structure and tempos.
• I'll record a scratch vocal and guitar track to be a guide.
• Our bass player will be doing drum programming - he'll create bed tracks (drum and bass).
• We will lay down our overdubs (guitar, vocals, keys etc).

Any one of us are allowed to mix at any time. Someone doesn't like my mix? Fine - make your own. We continue to lay down tracks and make mixes as we go along.

Eventually we agree on approving mixes to be the "official version". We get enough tracks like that - and that's the new album.

I am quite inspired by this - this is a way in which the Internet has personally changed my life - something that simply was impossible before is now in reach. I'll probably throw up a side blog to talk about this project as it progresses.

Mobile phones and the Internet

Earlier this week Google announced it was seeing 50 times as much activity from iPhone users as any other mobile handset.

Yes, 50X. "We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again," Google's head of mobile is quoted as saying.

The article goes on to discuss Google's plan for expanding mobile services, but that's not the real news here. It's more about how iPhone users view and use the device, which is unlike any other cell phone.

1. The iPhone renders full web pages. No other phone does this or even comes close. It's so easy to use, and so attractive, that iPhone users (like me) don't seek alternatives, like using SMS to contact Google or buying standalone GPS devices.
2. The iPhone has wifi. A few other smart phones are getting into this, but they're still restricted to mobile-web renderings and all the scroll-wheel-and-chiclet-clicking activity that they imply.
3. The combination of the above two features turns the iPhone into a pocket-size computer. Which means that someone with an iPhone finds it easy to jump online on a whim, and use it in ways other phone (and laptop) owners do not.

This is where the iPhone is shifting paradigms. It's not just about the touch-screen UI; it's about the immediacy it provides.

I can be sitting on my couch, watching TV, become curious about something a broadcaster says, and in seconds google the information with the gadget in my pocket and my wireless network. No reaching for the laptop, waking it up, sitting properly; no fiddling with a typical smart phone's menus and cell towers.

After a while this becomes second nature, which increases the frequency of use and creates the snowball effect Google is seeing from iPhone searches. More and more consumers will move in this direction as the rest of the mobile device industry catches on.