A number of articles — notably this one from Don Reisinger of ArsTechnica — have recently suggested that Apple could gain significant OS market share by licensing to third-party suppliers. That idea probably gives Steve Jobs nightmares. Here are 5 reasons why Apple should not do it.

Reason 1. Apple is a successful hardware company. Yes, it is also a software company, and its users do go on about its ease-of-use and cleverness. But most of Apple’s hardcore customer base is as much in love with the look and feel of the product as the software on it. And this is where their profit base lies.

Reason 2. Apple is not a strong enough software company to compete with everyone. The software world is hugely competitive, with the really big players, Microsoft, Google, and to some extent Adobe, locked in battle. Mac’s only potential killer app is the OS, which may be threatened in the foreseeable future by a combination of e.g. Ubuntu and Chrome (see Reason 5). Competing with everybody – Adobe (Flash, Macromedia etc.), Google (iGoogle, Google Apps, Chrome, Android etc.), Sun (OpenOffice etc.), Mozilla (Firefox etc.), not to mention MS itself, is not a viable option. Partnership is the word.

Reason 3. Apple can’t beat Microsoft. The reason Microsoft can maintain sufficient stamina on all these fronts (Office, IE, SQLServer, .net, Silverlight…) is vast revenues from licensing for consumer and business OSs. Not only is Windows on the majority of PCs shipped, but the Office suite, too. That also gives Microsoft a lot of leverage in the market, and a lot of power over distributors and partners. When Michael Dell said he was keen on getting the Mac OS on Dell PCs, was he thinking about really big increases in sales, or just enough to pressurize Microsoft into a better deal? He is not, after all, known as a friend to Apple.

Reason 4. Been there, done that, nearly went out of business. Apple tried it in the mid-90’s with Power Computing, Motorola and others. Where Microsoft has cash, Mac has huge brand loyalty, and that it what kept the company afloat. Buying a cloned Mac looked like getting a second-rate product, and in a way that was true (not always, though — some of the Macs of the time were fairly poor). Certainly, Mac users are likely to think of a Mac clone as second rate, which will put pressure on the price — and users who are bargain-hunting are not likely to appreciate the Mac’s smaller and more expensive range of available software. But the big danger is that it dilutes the brand.

Reason 5. Apple can play the same niche in different market segments. Apple customers are consciously buying a premium product with a cool design. Long-term, Android could power a far larger market share than iPhone apps. And a stylish, user-friendly laptop running Ubuntu — perhaps with Chrome offering great ease of use and finally delivering the promise of Google Apps — could significantly affect sales of MacBooks. But the niche, and the hard core of Mac fans will remain, because of the styling, the ‘vision’, and the sense of exclusivity. If anything it is probably better to think of Mac as an electronic communication and lifestyle company, as clearly implied in the ‘Your Life, To Go” tag. Getting embroiled in software wars detracts from this message.

Perhaps the best way to summarize the argument is to say that Apple’s whole strategy has been built around being the ‘better alternative’. They have almost written the book on how to be a successful number two in the marketplace — take a developing market, work in stealth to provide features that the other manufacturers aren’t quite delivering, go in high with undeniably cool products and then build market share. As long as networkable consumer products exist, Apple should be able to find these niches. But not as a software company.

It can’t be said too often that PR for high-tech needs to switch now to mainly an interactive process, rather than making announcements to the world. To do it successfully, you have to know who you need to interact with, what they are saying and what will interest them. Here are a few tips:

1. Decide your aim. What you need to find out depends on whether you are looking at reputation management (i.e. what people are saying about you), positioning yourself as an expert (who is talking about the stuff you do), or something more oblique, such as raising the profile of your market niche in general, where the crucial conversations might be about the market, or the advantages, disadvantages and future of your technology etc.

2. Decide your search terms. Brainstorm to get items you think will appear reasonably often – your name, that of competitors, some key technologies, something specific to your market… For example, if your company produces audio codecs, search terms could also include professional associations (AES, for example), platforms that might use them, the standards (AAC, MP3…) and so on. Don’t worry about having too many at first – you can narrow them down when you start filtering your results.

3. Set up your RSS feeds for your keyword searches on boards, blogs and social networks in particular. A few useful places: Technorati, Digg, IceRocket, Google blogsearch, Bloglines, MSN Spaces and Boardreader.

4. Group and filter your searches using e.g. Google alerts and Filtrbox, and use these to refine your search. A good tool for a quick analysis of content is TagCrowd.

5. See who is who. You can gauge the following and the influence of a blog using Bloginfluence and Socialmeter. To find out the background of a blogger, BetterWhois is useful.

6. Follow your leads. If you find someone with an interesting or attractive point of view, follow them up to see if you want to make contact. This is not like stalking, because you’re looking at their public profile only. So it’s more like joining a group and then making contact with someone that interests you. To do this, follow bloggers at their social media profiles. Ask to be their friend, and follow their conversations. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship!

When we do this for clients, we take a lot of care over search terms, search tools and the filtering tools. Then we have to keep fine-tuning it till it’s working exactly right, and then automating it so it works with minimal effort. So we can’t give a comprehensive list, just a starter. Your best course of action is something that may apply only to you – but even a starter like this could get you well on the way. Of course, the next steps are to respond the right way, and to monitor the effect of your responses, but that’s for another day…

I’m between two halves of a holiday - the first week in the UK and next week in Ticino - so I thought I’d share a few thoughts about what my experience of the British Museum.

When you’re a forty-something, pretty well everything that was familiar to you in your youth has changed, and you get grumpy about how they ruined yet another good thing. The British Museum is close to University College, London, where I was a student, and I loved going there. It was big, rather academic, and rather peaceful. The exhibits were arranged and looked after with great care, and you felt you could spend years in there, learning about cultural history the world over. What made it particularly unusual in the ’80s was that it was not commercial in any way at all, while virtually every other piece of London’s cultural history was having to transform itself to earn a living. But it, too, was transformed in 2000, with the rebuilding of the reading room and the Great Court, designed by Norman Foster, and is now, with 6 million visitors, the most popular cultural centre in the UK.

What feels completely different now - apart from the visual transformation - is the world-famous exhibitions around the year, and that the place is packed with people - and, of course, shops. All of which is good, as far as I’m concerned. I am normally a bit allergic to gift shops, but found a lot of really interesting books and reprints. I love the transformation of the courtyard, which is sensitive to the original Georgian architecture of the surrounding building but creates a bright, interesting space within it and brings the various exhibition rooms into a coherent whole. But what I enjoyed most of all was that so many people were clearly enjoying the experience of a collection not in any way dumbed down or repackaged, but just opened up.

The museum’s history as a custodian of so many cultural treasures of the world is controversial; but doing it so carefully and creatively has made the Museum - for me anyway - a world treasure. This was brought home by the voices and faces of groups as I walked around the courtyard, surrounded by cultural artifacts from all regions and periods of global history. Hearing so many languages, and seeing so many faces whose features resembled one or other of these artifacts showed better than any advert how the museum affirms our common human history. I can’t remember another experience that has done so quite so vividly as walking among these visitors.

When Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, was published a couple of years ago, the idea swept through the world of online PR that you have to be authentic. It has grown stronger through the influence of wikipedia and social networks, which mean, in effect, any attempt to dress yourself up can be ruthlessly reported on, and you’ll end up looking dishonest and stupid. That’s the first reason you need to be authentic. The behaviour of the social group on the web is to be very open and communicative. If you join the group (and this means any level of real public engagement on the web) you have to play ball. If you don’t join the group, the web won’t do very much marketing for you.

That’s actually a very good thing - and it’s pretty deliberate. The Open Source movement is very influential, for example - think of Netscape (or, now, Mozilla) and Apache. Of course, the web’s straight-talking ethos is also enshrined in the W3C guidelines. Without strong checks you can say more, of course; and the more powerful you are, the more you can say. Which means the powerful end up manipulating the medium and damage the integrity of the web. Clearly it’s in the common interest that everyone can get at the truth, but on the web, uniquely, it’s easy for people who passinately uphold this idea to actively fight misinformation with every weapon they have, fair or otherwise. And that’s why companies have to be extra careful.

Authenticity is not just for the web, of course. A couple of decades ago, I worked for a growing chain of bicycle shops. We felt we were doing well, and wanted to present an upmarket image. We had the glossiest bike ads in London, maybe in the UK, for a few months. I don’t think they sold a single bike for us. What in fact customers loved about us was that we were down-to-earth (many bike shops talk down to customers, most of whom, understandably, don’t know how it all works or what all the bits are called). We also gave good advice and service, explained how things worked, and gave our honest opinions. The reason the business grew was that our customers recommended us. And when we identified the secret of successful customer interactions and multiplied it through relationship marketing, business grew fast. So the second reason you have to be authentic is, it works everywhere.

Web 2.0 - the social web - actually does resemble real society in many ways. The reason is straightforward - if it resembles what we know, we will adopt it faster and know how to use it. So what works for word-of-mouth will normally work on the web. The key is finding out what makes your best customer relationships work, and reflecting that in your web presence - best of all through interactive tools.

The title is a great line from David Meerman Scott, in The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Arguments about who Shakespeare really was will probably never die out, but it doesn’t matter too much. What promotes him is what he published. That’s what makes people watch the plays, quote lines and phrases from them (normally unknowingly), and watch Hollywood adaptations. So what’s more important for your public, who you are or what you publish?

Up to now, probably who you are - the way people learnt about products was marketing collateral and websites. Now, though, they are just as likely to find out about them through users and reviewers online. And that’s not just consumer products - there are forums and blogs on the web for the most technical of subjects and, sometimes, the more technical the better. So telling people who you are is starting to look inauthentic. It’s not exactly a new thing either - look at the trend in films and TV for real-life content, from ‘reality TV’ to Michael Moore’s documentaries.

The way to respond to the challenge is to give what people want to read, which probably isn’t all about you! An insight is the analogy of being at a party where you don’t know many people. As you drift around, you hear people talking about something you know about. You smile, catch someone’s eye, find an entry, introduce yourself and talk a little. But most of all, you keep listening. If you can, say something interesting and useful on the subject.

Same on the Web. Listen, join in, find out what people need to know. Publish something useful and try to build an audience that will enjoy, critique and share your content. You can’t afford to drop conventional marketing and PR, not now or in the foreseeable future, but your main interface with prospects and even customers in the future will likely be the audience you are building now with these online activities. So now is a good time.

First practical step is, list all the online information resources, including blogs, that are important to you, your customers and - perhaps even more important - your customers’ customers. Second step, think and observe. What can you bring to the discussion? What interests people? Third step, communicate. Blog comment, blog, forum post, for now, later maybe articles and ebooks. Just publish - don’t sit and plan too long - it’s time to start!

The mystery behind the media bloggers association that defended Rogers Cadenhead of The Drudge Retort to AP is clearing. But if anything it shows AP in an even worse light than before. Wanting to be sure I had not overlooked something when writing yesterday about them, I visited the Media Bloggers Association site. Three things were quickly apparent, and explain why I’m not posting a link to the site.

1. The site offers legal advice to bloggers that join, but the proprietor says he is not a lawyer, and in various posts he ridicules those who say he claims to represent bloggers as a whole. Mmmm, very strange.

2. Roger Cox, the proprietor, does not come across like a blogger. In responding to Gawker’s piece about him he expressed a level of rudeness and arrogance you rarely see in the blogosphere. But, on the other hand, Gawker’s piece, ‘Is the Media Bloggers Association a Scam?‘ had done a pretty good exposé on him! He also does not do the usual thing of citing and linking in a friendly way to other blogs, but seems to only talk about himself. And though he mentions how other blogs talk about him, he does not often link to the stories. I was pretty amazed why this would make any blogger want him as their representative.

3. His sympathies appear to be all with the traditional news media. He says nicer things about AP than about other blogs.

In fact, Making Light has taken a pretty close look at Cox’s background and turned up some rather unpleasant facts, including Cox doctoring his wikipedia entry by claiming credit for someone else’s story, being behind right-wing sites attacking every liberal blog in election campaigns, spamming blogs that give him negative coverage, and, worst of all, having existing business links to AP…

In a way, I ended up almost respecting Cox’s chutzpah, except that I think it looks more like bullying - or joining the bullies in this case. The many news outlets taking the AP / Media Bloggers Association negotiation at face value are starting to look out of their depth as this story refuses to die. AP certainly seems to be trying to kill it, and leaving the Drudge Retort well alone, but I have the feeling there is more to come…

Another case of shooting yourself in the foot by antagonizing bloggers has made big news over the past few days. Craigslist is a classifieds service, originally for the Bay area and now other parts of West Coast US, listing jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events. It has generally been seen as a cool company with a somewhat hippy-like culture. Tim White, a fan, was happily hosting a blog about what was new the site www.craigslistblog.org. Then Craigslist decided they wanted to start their own blog. So they thought they would push him off his one, sending him a threatening email, making big news.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said that White’s URL ‘craigslistblog.org’ was ‘infringing’ and that its name was ‘needlessly confusing to members of the media and the general public, and must be changed.’ He also wanted White to stop using the domain and give it to Craigslist. Rather than complying, White posted the e-mail on his blog. Buckmaster sent a second e-mail threatening the blogger with law firm, Perkins Cole, which ‘also does intellectual property work for Google.’

When bloggers are threatened, news travels fast. In no time, this turned into a lot of negative publicity for Craigslist, giving plenty of opportunity to repeat negative news stories about the company, for example where it was advertising prostitution services.

In the end, Buckmaster was forced to give a humiliating - but still rather half-hearted - reply: ‘We have no interest in shutting down blogs about craigslist, critical or otherwise, and have never tried to do so. But in the strange world of trademarks and copyright, it’s poor practice to allow a confusingly similar domain or business name to go unchallenged. Given all the inquiries we’d gotten from reporters thinking this blogger was associated with craigslist, taken together with the deceptive textads and disrespect for our trademark and terms of use, we felt we had to act. But there was no need for me to act like a jerk, provoked or not.’

It’s still not clear where this is going, but ‘nowhere at all’ would be the best guess. So Tim White now has a huge - though mostly temporary - readership. Potentially a real opportunity for him - though if he uses the current site commercially, Craigslist actually would have a trademark infringement case.

For Craigslist, I should think something of a PR disaster. Not only really embarrassing for the CEO - and probably permanently so. But as much for his naivety than for his bullying attitude. A few fundamental PR errors:

1. If you are starting a blog, you are trying to create a positive impression. Don’t attack other bloggers - it will backfire.
2. If you screw up, don’t wait for the whole world to tell you about it. Put it right straight away. The second, threatening email was a big mistake. Even the later response was far too half-hearted.
3. If someone friendly to you is giving you free publicity, don’t antagonize them - make friends and see what you can do to help!

This time the biter is being bitten. Sony BMG is being sued now to the tune of €300,000 (a little over $475,000) for using unlicensed copy of software from French company PointDev (apparently a trial version used beyond its expiry with a pirated access code). A subsequent search of the company’s servers resulted in an estimate that 47% of software there was unauthorised. This is being gleefully reported around the world, as Sony is known for its aggressive stance on copyright issues (e.g. in relation to Baidu and Yahoo), and still widely disliked over the rootkit/DRM fiasco of 2005. PointDev’s stance is that it is not about the money, but of principle.

Of course, Sony BMG could point at probably thousands of other companies and say that they are doing exactly the same thing - who knows how much of the software used around the world is actually authorized? But isn’t that what everyone else says about music-, video- and file-sharing? Not much room for that stance, then.

So what better opportunity, now the spotlight is on them, to do a real turnaround and become an opinion leader on IP and DRM? It might look hypocritical to some, but if the move is genuine, could be great PR. A no-prejudice €300,000 payment could be a good long-term investment. Somehow, though, I doubt their lawyers - or top management - will agree.