In the late 1990s, I thought I could do something better than System Commander. As a result, a boot manager called Power Boot was born, developed by yours truly and sold by BlueSky Innovations LLC.

I did not try to sell through retail channels with a boxed product. I didn’t have enough capital or resources to do that. Instead, I worked through folks like Digital River and BMT Micro to provide download services and credit card processing.

There was some level of viral marketing, thanks to very enthusiastic OS/2 fans. I did an interview with some of them. There was no instant messaging as we know it at that time. It was all IRC!

For everything else, there was banner advertising on websites.

There were a lot of problems with banner advertising:

a. Low click-through rates

b. Lousy targeting

c. Expensive

Click-through rates were in the order or one to two percent. So when your goal was driving up sales, it was a very poor ROI, especially when you considered the cost per impression.

The targeting was also hard to do. I advertised in websites that targeted the more technical folks (Anandtech, Tom’s Hardware, Linux.org etc). But there was no control as to when the banner would appear e.g. a webpage with a hardware review would be inappropriate to advertise a software product.

When Google AdWords came up, I thought that it was an excellent idea.

First of all, it is fair. You paid for banner ads per impression, even if no one clicked on the ads. With AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad. It is perfect for entrepreneurs.

Secondly, ads are served only when certain criteria were met e.g. when someone searched for System Commander in Google, an ad for Power Boot would appear. This streamlines the targeting process in many ways that the old banner ads could not.

So last Monday, when David Fischer, a Google VP, visited  the Creativity & Innovation in Marketing class, I was quick to point out that I thought Google’s success was primary due to its accurate and fair way of serving and charging for ads.

He grimaced in response and said that sometimes banner ads made sense. For example, when the goal of advertising was to promote brand awareness. Duh! He also admitted that if you were more interested in obtaining a transaction, then AdWords was more useful.

A couple of days later I read about the EU approving Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and something else clicked.

With DoubleClick, Google is now able to serve beyond simple targeted ads with its properties and via AdSense.

Looking from a marketeer’s perspective, Google is now able to cater to every kind of online marketing campaign. For example, for broad market brand awareness, one would use DoubleClick banner ads. AdWords is good for targeted advertising or driving transactions. For multimedia, TV-derived or viral campaigns, marketeers can turn to YouTube.

Do you want metrics? Google Analytics can help you measure the effectiveness of any online campaign.

I don’t know if this was planned or accidental: it looks like Google is driving towards a one-stop shop for online marketeers.

Note: I have just set up AdSense on this blog. So keep on clicking, folks…

We had Tom Kelley of IDEO drop by for a talk and Q&A session a couple of Mondays ago where he talked a lot about the role of the anthropologist in IDEO. Earlier in the evening, a real-life anthropologist from Intel was at hand when some students present their results of an anthropology project: “Mundane Happiness”.

It is interesting to know that observing people and how they use things can lead to product ideas and improvements.

One of my observations is the the following:

When a notebook computer user wants to use her notebook, one of the first things she does, even before turning on the computer, is to take out the AC adaptor and look for a power outlet.

You can see that at the airport, Starbucks, school and even during the Tom Kelley talk.

Think of it. The Tom Kelley talk was scheduled to last 45 minutes. This is a lot less time than the average battery life of a medium size notebook. So why would you need to plug in an AC adaptor?

Is this something we have been brought up on: this “compulsive” need to plug in and charge our notebooks?

I suspect that PC manufacturers have also observed this phenomena and are actually doing something about it: like providing 3-cell batteries as the default in many of their notebooks models, in particular, the lower cost ones.

When the majority of users have their notebooks plugged in 90% of the time, there is absolutely no need for 9-cell or 12-cell batteries. These users place more importance on  price,  memory and hard disk size when trying to decide which notebook to buy. With today’s processor labeling (e.g. TL-60 or 7200), even the processor speed is not longer important:  you can no longer easily figure out the speed from the processor model name.

The result is that PC manufacturers can then price their notebooks less and therefore be more competitive. At the same time, they benefit financially from the additional sales of large capacity batteries to users who do actually need to use their computers without access to AC power.