TechCrunch
Andrew Mason Releases Hokey Rock Album To Soundtrack Your Pivot (Review)
If you’re a tech exec who finds Nickelback a bit too edgy, Groupon’s former CEO Andrew Mason has just released an album for you. Now available on iTunes, ”Hardly Workin’” is 80′s alternative rock about how to run your startup. I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not but regardless it will make you laugh, either with or at Mason.
“I was climbing Machu Pichu / As I beheld the splendid view / An idea came for 100 million / Of shareholder value” is the kind of lyrical brilliance you’ll find on “Hardly Workin’”. Mason moans and croons over generic alternative rock — the kind that wouldn’t make the cut on a Huey Lewis and The News album.
Mason seems to have found some serious clairvoyance in the four months since he got the boot from Groupon. The first line of the album goes “If you’re seeking business wisdom / You don’t need no MBA / Look no further than the beauty / That surrounds us every day.” Mason’s sense of rhyme is basic, but you still have to hand it to him for being able to cram in so many insider-y tech references.
One clue that this all might be a gag is his reference to riding his GTS 300 to work. Is that some badass sports car or motorcycle? No, it’s his Vespa. But “Risin’ Above The Pack” and “K.I.S.S” are straight-up instruction manuals to getting promoted and avoiding design bloat.
Things get a bit creepy on “My Door Is Always Open”, a duet with a coquettish-sounding female vocalist. He sings “Now that you know that I want to listen please visit my office more”, and she sighs “I feel much more comfortable coming to you”. The sexual harassment innuendo hangs like a barnyard stench over the meandering country ballad.
At least it’s followed up by “Stretch” featuring Bishop Lamont from Dr. Dre’s Aftermath label. Glam diva vocals, a brooding nightclub bassline, and Mason singing through a robo-vocoder — it’s actually just a little cool. Then you realize it’s about setting stretch goals for your company’s quarterly review. “Quantify your best and then add twenty percent”. Uhh, just try to tune that out and nod you head.
You’re not going to bump Hardly Workin’, ever. But you might give it a spin for fun, and it’s worth that much. Maybe not $9.99 on iTunes, but if it ends up on Spotify you could endure an ad or two just to hear someone in tech do something truly silly. And if you are in fact a founder or tech exec, you might take the lessons to heart, even if they’d better delivered via PowerPoint.
We Were The (1000+). Goodbye, Google Reader
“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.” – Google, March 2013.
Today, Google Reader’s remaining users will “Mark All As Read” one last time. There are two schools of thought on Google’s decision to move on from its aging RSS aggregator, never adopted by the mainstream: one, that’s it’s pretty much the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. Ever! And two: who cares?
Even though I count myself as someone who falls into that earlier group, it’s hard to argue against Google’s thinking in the matter. Following websites using RSS feeds is just not something the “normals” do. So an RSS reader like Google’s remained in the hands of the tech elite, the domain of the I.T. crowd, the programmers, the researchers, the journalists.
The rest of the world merely surfs the web, and now they just tweet.
But Google Reader was special because it was one of the last remaining places on the Internet you could really call your own. In every other way, the nature of news reading on the web these days and the social services that now dominate your attention are crafted by others who dictate what you will read and when. Whether browsing through an editorially run news site, parsing your Twitter stream or reading your Facebook News Feed, the links before you are those that others have deemed important.
There’s value in this signal, of course – a sense of what’s trending in the larger world allows for serendipitous discovery. But it’s also a relinquishing of control. Oh sure, you can choose who to follow, but it’s not the same as choosing which news news sources’ feeds you will subscribe, why, and how often you will read them.
In Google Reader, I’ve gleefully stuffed websites into collections like “B-List” and “C-List” and “Can’t Miss” and “Panic Button,” instead of more proper names like “top tech sites” or “Apple bloggers.” It’s my decision which headline collections get scanned with a glance, and which writers will see me devouring their every word.
Meanwhile on Twitter, every missive is as important as the one that preceded it. A photo of your cat. News from the war. A beautiful sunset on Instagram. A government overthrown. It’s a real-time firehouse of information that you dip into as you can. There’s no unread count. You just refresh and refresh and refresh for more.
Days Until Cancellation: 0
Having never caught on as a social network in its own right outside of a niche group of users, Google Reader couldn’t rival something like Twitter. The writing was on the wall for its demise when Google ripped out the social features in the product back in October 2011 in order to make room for deeper integration with Google’s newer social network Google+.
The move, essentially a big @#$% you to Reader’s small but highly engaged audience of users, may have come as a surprise to some, but with the internal thinking at Google, perhaps it was a miracle that Reader was being given any sort of development attention at all.
In the definitive recounting of Google Reader’s history here on BuzzFeed, Brian Shih, who became Reader Product Manager in fall 2008, spoke of how the team had to fight internally for what, in terms of Google’s scale, was a really, really, really small project. “Someone hung a sign in the Reader offices that said “DAYS SINCE LAST THREAT OF CANCELLATION.” The number was almost always zero,” he said.
At Google, senior execs only cared about absolute user numbers, not on growth or market share.
But even though Google Reader could never compete in numbers with Gmail or other Google products, it wiped out the market of RSS competitors, while letting its 800-pound gorilla sit and rot.
Today, Google is too busy trying to change the world with self-driving cars and face computers, search engines that think for you and a balloon-powered Internet to care about Google Reader. It’s thinking of how to dominate mobile and connect the next 5 billion users to the web – lofty goals that leave no time for a silly little product from Web 2.0′s early days.
At least by shutting down Reader, Google is admitting that its stewardship in this area has failed.
Google can’t – and no longer wants to – do it all.
We’ve seen evidence of that already in the systematic shutdowns of other dated, stagnant services through Google’s “Spring Cleanings.” Google Reader was not the first, nor will it be the last that fails to survive these cuts. Google Alerts and Feedburner are other prime candidates at this point.
We’re retiring Reader on July 1. We know many of you will be sad to see it go. Thanks for 8 great years! http://t.co/0jtSqBnORp
— Google Reader (@googlereader) March 13, 2013
Ever since Google’s announcement this spring, many new services have stepped up to help fill the void Google Reader leaves behind, but none will ever fill its shoes. None of those that now vie to become the new incumbent even have search built in, for example. A few promise “yeah, it’s coming” but too many startups begging for a second look think that merely supporting RSS feeds makes them a Google Reader clone.
Google Reader wasn’t a list of things to read. It wasn’t a collection of RSS feeds.
It was your own, personal Google. A search engine built on top of the sites you cared about. A Google News with the stories you wanted to see. A taxonomy where you chose the labels, and drove the SEO. Google Reader was your web, your slice of the Internet.
Social media, now, is theirs.
Reader’s death isn’t the end of a product, it’s the end of an era. We have protested, bargained, begged, and cried. Now we have to accept and adapt.
Google Reader, thank you for eight great years.
Goodbye.
shift-a
OK kids, it's time. Throw this on in one tab http://t.co/Mj3njMeWZn open "All Items" in @GoogleReader & "Mark all as read" One. Last. Time.
— Jason Shellen (@shellen) July 1, 2013
Zynga Missed The Pivot To Mobile, So Can A Veteran Console Exec Revive It?
Although shares jumped by 10.4 percent today on news that Microsoft’s Don Mattrick is taking over Zynga as CEO, the most important audience the company needs to address for a real, long-term turnaround is not investors.
It’s the game developer community.
Because here are the new economics of hit mobile games:
Finland’s Supercell: 100 people. $179 million in revenue in the first quarter, with $104 million in profit.
Japan’s Gung-Ho: 20 employees servicing the hit game Puzzle & Dragons. That game alone had an estimated $113 million in revenue in April. Those figures are just from Japan, and they have about 300 employees.
Compare that to Zynga, which has 2,400 employees, and made just $4 million in profit on $264 million in revenue in the first three months of this year.
It doesn’t matter if you’re publicly traded. Or an “Internet treasure,” which is how founder and former CEO Mark Pincus likes to refer to his company. Or that the company has close to $1.7 billion in cash and short-term and long-term investments on its balance sheet.
The companies that are succeeding on Android and iOS, which is where Zynga wants to diversify, are incredibly lean and operate with a great deal of internal freedom.
So what you need is a person with the charisma and social capital to attract the best game designers, artists and producers in the world.
Unfortunately, Zynga has hemorrhaged so much of its original talent over the last two years, that it is unclear if it can recover. There are simply too many other profitable, privately-held companies for good talent to go to. On top of that, the early stories about equity clawbacks and then recent layoffs have also damaged the company’s reputation as a place to work.
At the same time, the kind of talent that made Zynga successful in the beginning — the people who gave it the number-crunching, aggressive edge to succeed where older gaming talent didn’t — aren’t necessarily right either in this new era. Production values keep going up and other competitors have learned from Zynga’s data-obsessed, detail-oriented approach.
Mattrick needs to turn around Zynga’s reputation as an employer. There are definitely some points in his favor: he was a highly-respected executive at EA and then went on to run the Xbox division at Microsoft. And it does help that he’s overseen the creation of content for dozens and dozens of different platforms over his three-decade career. But consoles are not where the high-growth opportunities are anymore.
While his network might provide world-class console talent, it’s not always clear that they transition well into games-as-a-service or games on other platforms.
There is also the potentially politically sticky issue of reporting: notice how Pincus as chief product officer, will have to report to Mattrick as CEO, who will then report back to Pincus again as chairman of the board.
So while Mattrick has the big company, operational experience that may appease investors, it’s not clear yet whether he’ll send the right signals to reverse the outward flow of talent on platforms that really matter for Zynga’s future.
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