Day: 19 April 2012

“Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work” ⇥

Horace Dediu works his magic on Apple’s retail numbers. My favourite part is the top chart.

The title comes from this oft-mocked 2001 Business Week piece:

“I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,”

Obviously, the Apple of 2001 was in a different position than they are today. Hindsight is incredibly revealing. But these naysayers were prevalent at the time, and they persist today, as John Moltz notes:

It was pretty conventional to bet against Apple back in 2001. And, based on the previous 10 years, it was a decent bet. What amazes me is that people are still doing it without consideration. Sure, Apple may screw something big up in the near term, but the odds of that happening are pretty slim.

Tumblr to Launch Ads Starting May 2 ⇥

Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica:

In 2010, [CEO David Kamp] famously said, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, that the company was “pretty opposed to advertising. It really turns our stomachs.” […]

“[Kamp] was scheduled to talk for a half hour, but I think the whole thing lasted 7 minutes,” he continued. “He cited some growth numbers, mentioned how much he appreciates the creativity within the advertising community, and then broke the news that Tumblr would be opening up that spot to advertisers.”

One of the strangest elements, Sorgatz said, was how Kamp ended the presentation: “He flashed his email address on the screens, took no questions, and then zipped out the building.”

Seems like even the CEO is not happy with this decision.

The Biting Reality of RSS ⇥

Speaking of RSS, William Vambenepe mourns:

The disappearance of RSS is pretty much the topic of every comment on the two MacWorld articles (for Mail and Safari). That’s heartening. It’s going to take a lot of agitation to reverse the trend for RSS.

The Mountain Lion setback, assuming it’s not reversed before the OS ships, is just the last of many blows to RSS.

Aside: in a bout of irony, I opened this article from my RSS reader.

FeedBurner Uglies Up Clean URLs ⇥

FeedBurner likes to put a bunch of analytics garbage at the end of perfectly clean URLs. For example, this post from The Loop has the following added when opened from the RSS feed:

?utm_source=loopinsight.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+loopinsight%2FKqJb+%28The+Loop%29

Shawn Blanc has a good workaround for FeedBurner feed owners. For users, try Alexander Kirk’s Clean URLs Safari extension. It removes YouTube and partner tracking crap from URLs, including FeedBurner-related parameters. Very clever.