Double Journey

It is Mid-February and I just got my ATM card from Schwab.  I almost canceled my account. I was so frustrated that I had not received my card in over a month but the last time I called they agreed to FedEx me another card.  It finally came, almost two months after I opened my account.  I can’t fault Schwab’s customer service, every time I called they were quite helpful.  It just didn’t end up in good execution.

Found this on news.com.  It seems Microsoft changed the look of one of the people pictured on its website.  The controversy stems from the fact that on its Polish website, it overlaid a picture of a white man over a picture of a black man.

Now, I’m pretty sensitive about certain racial issues but I am not in this case.   In fact, I see pretty much nothing wrong with what Microsoft did.  This is advertisement.  It needs to appeal to the demographic you are after.  I know nothing about Poland but I am assuming that the demographic is nothing like it is in the U.S. and that there are not many people who are black.  To appeal to that demographic, Microsoft probably felt it need to make the people look more “Polish”.

While I would like to think everybody would be enlightened and not take race into consideration, I know better.  My company puts up several webpage.  We have one page in particular depicting a family.  This family looks very “American”.  It depicts a white couple with a cute young daughter in front of a big suburban house.  This page works great for our site, but it only works great in the United States.  In ever other country, it does much worse.  The page is rather simple, and it changes language depending on the country.  The only reason it would only work in the United States and not in other countries is because the family just looks American.

So I see no problem in Microsoft changing the picture to better match the target audience and have no idea why anybody would make a big deal about it.  What do you think?

Fox announced today that it would start to charge users for content on its Internet News sites.  Can Fox make this work?

I find this pretty hard to believe.  I’m a pretty avid internet user and the thought of paying for content really just does not sit with me.  For example.  I often visit ESPN and the Wall Street Journal.  Both these sites have sections for paid content.  Despite the fact that I often go there and I sometimes want to see the stories they have for paid subscribers, I honestly do not feel that compelled to pay for their sites.  Why?  Because there is so much other content available elsewhere that is often just as good.

In this day and age all I have to do is search on Google and I most likely will find another similar story for free.  At worse, I probably will find a blog somewhere that talks about the content of the story.  As I tend to be a skimmer of news anyway, that is all I want, so it works out for me.

We have a whole generation of people who cannot even imagine paying for content any more.  I am not saying that all content should be free.  Far from it.  I actually think it might have been better if content was never free.  But the genie was let out of the bottle a long time ago and it is going to be pretty hard to put back in.

Somehow Murdoch thinks if he does this, and can make money, it will force all media outlets to do the same, thus eliminating the problem of free content.  Yeah, fat chance of that happening.  I can pretty much promise you that if this even came close to reality, and it will not, there would be someone who finds a way to get users this content for free.  Look at what happens every time the music industry tries to shut down a sharing technology.  Another one takes its place.

Does anyone here actually pay for news content?