But what they didn’t say in the email is that my bill is also going up.

That’s right — apparently there is a price hike effective December 22, 2011. Turns out that Performance Internet is going up in price from $59.95/month to $62.95/month. While Comcast was willing to send an email announcing the (not requested) feature improvement, the price hike was first mentioned on page 3 of my monthly bill.

What bugs me is that I pretty much never read Comcast monthly bills — and I’d bet many other people don’t do it either. I have “eco-bill” turned on, which means that an email is sent to me each month with a link to login instead of sending me a paper bill. The email doesn’t include any billing information (although it should!); and, after logging in, I have to download a PDF. That’s quite a lot more work than simply opening an envelope… And if I’ve made it this far, I still have to get to page 3 of the bill in order to learn that there is a price increase coming.

Like many others, I have “auto-pay” turned on, which makes me even less likely to want to login to check a bill that ostensibly is the same each month.

Seems like Comcast is being a little inconsistent here with when they decide to email customers…

 The other odd thing about my November Comcast bill is that it went up by $1 for no apparent reason. Last month, I was charged $44.95. This month, I’m being charged $45.95. The $1 increase seems to be coming out of a “service discount” — but no explanation is given on last or this month’s bills.

Seems like bad business to increase a bill by $1 with no notification/justification, and disclosing another $3 price increase only on page 3 of an eco-bill — all while proactively telling the customer that they are receiving “25% faster” internet.

Frankly, I’d rather pay $4 less and stay on the original plan (you know, the one I signed up on?). I don’t feel like the difference between 12 and 15 mbps will make a real impact (especially since we’re talking about “PowerBoost” temporary speeds), but now I’m paying $48 more per year.

To get started, I’m backing up my iPhone photos — 2049 mb apparently across iPhone 1 and iPhone 3 GS. Unhappily, it looks like it will take a bit over 4 hours on my Comcast cable modem; the upload is running at ~77kb/sec.

Also, it occurs to me that backing up on multiple cloud providers is going to be pretty expensive in terms of time. Let’s say I have something like 15 gb of photos (I’m not even sure how much I have, to be honest — stored across 3 different computers and an external NAS). That’s something like 32 hours of uploading per cloud provider if all goes well.

Since I don’t really trust either 1and1 hosting (horror stories) or box.net (giving out free 50 gb personal plans — look at prior competitors like AOL’s Xdrive, which gave out 5 gb free in ~2007 or 2008, but then shut down), the most prudent thing is for me to upload all files to both providers; doubling my time to upload at 64 hours now!

Three further problems encountered tonight:

• The uploads don’t go very smoothly. The box.net Java bulk uploader basically froze up about 1/5th through — and there was no way to “restart” the upload. I switched over to the AJAXy magic uploader on their normal website, which works better (it detects stalled uploads and asks the user if they want to restart); however, I’ve had two files stall, and the FF7 browser crash once (with many assorted tabs open, but I think viewing iCloud’s Find My iPhone did it in).  This means I’m manually babysitting the overall process (determining the last file uploaded and continuing it from there), and the 4 hours estimated time has now dragged on to 6 hours so far at only 2/3rds complete.

• Comcast limits to 250 gb per month combined upload & download. This isn’t great, since the last few months I’ve used between 50 gb to 100 gb per month; so far this month, I’ve hit 140 gb about halfway through the billing cycle. I don’t use BitTorrent or anything; I just constantly have streaming music running, watch Netflix HD a lot, and am an overall heavy internet user from morning ’till night. Now adding in another ~30+ gb of backups for the next few months, I should still be fine with Comcast, but it’s annoying to have to think about limits. Comcast state that the median user within the 99% segment of their users consumes approx 6 to 8 gb / month, which is pretty low given that a single HD movie on Netflix takes 2.3 gb per hour.

• Given that uploads are a little flaky, I’m wondering if I should zip files up under heavy compression and possibly with a little encryption. Encryption is nice for peace of mind in the case that my login/password credentials are somehow compromised, but also makes it such that (1) the online backup isn’t really easily accessible from any location in a casual manner (e.g. I just log on and get what I need — instead I have to unencrypt, etc.), (2) I have to redownload the entire zip file to extract out a single file, (3) I don’t think there is an easy way to ensure the file upload was successful (no way to compare MD5 checksums or anything), and (4) I don’t have a great way to ensure that I can decrypt the files after substantial time passes (passwords are forgotten, keys are lost, etc.).

All of these issues existed years ago when Streamload and Xdrive were popularizing online backups originally. I think we’re all more comfortable with this practice now, but I’m not sure we’ve substantially changed anything for personal users. (For companies, we’re talking about completely different mechanics — higher bandwidth available, servers are always running so no worries about the girlfriend shutting the laptop lid, and it’s less of a “once in a while” user-driven behavior as much as an always running mandate to keep data replicated.).

I’m wondering if the best recommendation for home bulk-file backup is still to go with a NAS at home, plus periodically dropping off an external hard drive at a friend or relative’s house.

PS: I’m aware there are some 3rd party software solutions out there which can interface with Box.net and also do multiple-cloud redundant backup, but I simply don’t want to do that. The basic tools provided by the service should be good enough to handle my genuinely simple & common use case.

Update (10/21/11): A PM at Box.net posted in their support forums that free personal accounts are using SSL for file transfers, which is great! Other users seemed to be similarly confused about the state of SSL on Box.net, so I’m glad it is resolved now. More details

I still think it’s odd they don’t make a bigger deal about this on their website — it’s such an easy thing to say (Security is important to us. That’s why we always use SSL for file transfers, and have tons of great security features, etc.). Also, they could consider putting the whole website under SSL for added piece of mind. To me, online file storage can be of similar importance to banking — if the file weren’t important, I wouldn’t be backing it up. As a competitive note: the entire Google Docs and Dropbox websites are https.

I understand SSL isn’t the end-all of security, but since I’m on (private) wifi in a large apartment building, I like to think we’re at least making it a little harder to keep bad guys out.

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I’m not even sure what the name of the industry is these days: online file space, cloud storage, hosted backup, elastic storage…  but it’s free and it’s everywhere now. At work we rely on Google Docs (25 gb), with some limited Dropbox (2 gb) usage as well. I’m eligible for Apple’s 5 gb of iCloud, and through my webhost I have 50 gb. My personal Google account has a bit less than 8 gb space, and I’d guess that I have another handful of gigs through my alumni association.

All-in-all, tons of space, none of which do I really use for personal backup.

However, I saw a Slickdeals.net post for 50 gb free at box.net if you use the iPhone app, and signed up. To be honest, I thought the deal was for Dropbox, so I was pretty excited (and confused when my Dropbox credentials weren’t accepted — took me coming back a day later to realize it was a completely different service!).

Anyhow, I have 50 gb there now as well. However, the features page for box.net personal accounts seemed a little questionable: apparently, you only get SSL file transfers if you are on a business or enterprise plan. I don’t really understand — why does the personal plan on box.net not have secure file transfers?

256-bit SSL encryption for file transfers with Box Business. Enterprise accounts also include server-level encryption.

It’s actually baffling to me. I’m not an expert in this area, but isn’t using SSL considered a best practice for this kind of application?

Is there any cost to putting all file transfers behind SSL? Since each file is probably new/unique to box.net, I’d assume there are no caching implications, and I can’t imagine there is a huge CPU cost given that, well, it’s supported by default for business/enterprise users, and SSL is supported client-side with browsers and server-side with, well, all modern web servers (right?).

It seems to me that with pretty major hacking incidents reported on a daily basis, security should be baked in as a part of the infrastructure of any product — as opposed to used as a feature differentiator between billing plans. Why be reactive to some box.net hacking incident instead of proactively try to protect customers?

The oddest part about this is that Dropbox uses SSL for their basic (free) plan, so you’d think that box.net would do it too just to be on a level playing field with their competitor. Box.net must have justified (internally) some reason why it makes sense not to offer SSL for everyone. Weird.

Here’s to having another year of good health.

Also, working in a different state for 2 months isn’t considered a “life event” either, so I’m pretty sure my work won’t let me change insurance provider. I think this situation might be some sort of insurance loophole that needs addressing.

A quick Google search didn’t really turn up much.

My question is thus: is Google best served by trimming expenses and trying new types of monetization *now* or *later*? I’d actually suggest there is a good argument for doing this all later.

Trimming expenses and making more money “now” is basically too late. The economy is already sucky. It would have been nice perhaps to get lean before the market started tanking, in order to keep one’s stock price up as others’ went down with the indices (which might not have worked, besides). But since everyone’s already down so far, presumably this means that we all missed the opportunity. With all the bad news everywhere, my naive assessment is that it is “ok” to have an earnings miss now — everyone more or less expects earnings misses, and that’s priced in to everyone’s stock already. If a company makes or beats estimates — would their stock really go up that much? Everyone expects everything to get worse before it gets better, so I could imagine that beating estimates has little impact — why invest now when things probably haven’t bottomed out yet?

On the other hand, what if Google had a really or sorta poor quarter right now, but then aggressively started making more money “later”? We’d be deeper into the recession at that point, and perhaps Google would start to look like a real star compared to all the other lackluster companies that would still be slumping. Google can afford to wait out the economy for a while, especially seeing as all the original Google gang are already quite rich, and the company has something like $14 billion in cash available — so convert some of the employee compensation from stock to salary (temporarily) to keep morale up and just wait it out.

The reason I’m making this argument is because advertising without true innovation (i.e. new markets or a paradigm shift) really only has one way to go — getting worse over time. Putting “more ads” on a page doesn’t necessarily make “more money” even though the user experience deteriorates very rapidly. Advertising tends to get more invasive, more in your face… and while that might have short term boost to revenue, it certainly won’t last forever.  (Look at Yahoo search, which has 14 ads served for a search on “basket” even with only 10 results given; no wonder the company is dying)

So once Google goes down the path of, “hey quick guys, let’s monetize by putting ads where there weren’t ads before!” — you can’t really do that trick again later. It sounds like Google is choosing to do this now (Q4); it’s too bad they didn’t decide to wait and do these same actions some time “later”. That could have been a lot more impressive.

I wonder if anyone in the textbook industry has read last week’s news that Yahoo! Music is shutting down, just about bringing to a close the era of DRM for music. DRM tends to fail for numerous reasons, as well documented on the web — technological problems, customers’ skepticism, etc. At the end of the day, it’s hard to argue that DRM actually helps consumers at all — why should I buy something with DRM when it’s likely to not work on my iPod or successfully transfer onto my next computer?

But just because DRM failed for music, we shouldn’t immediately assume DRM will fail for textbooks. They are dramatically different industries, so let’s look at some of the factors behind the business decision of entering the digital delivery area for textbooks.

Context for textbook publishing:

• Textbooks are required for most high school and college classes, and the industry enjoys semi-captive, semi-monopolistic audiences.
• There are clear leaders for textbooks — Kandel’s Principles of Neural Science textbook is better than all the other competitors, in my opinion, and frankly I’d pay basically any price for Kandel’s book. It’s used by both Stanford and Yale medical schools, for instance.
• Publishers seek to print new editions frequently since the used book market does not funnel any money back to them after the initial purchase.
• Publishers are increasingly trying to come up with “added value” services like online course websites or DVD/CDs with quizzes, etc. to complement the printed textbook.
• Publishers aren’t putting enough effort into making good added valued services — although a physical CD may be attached, there isn’t any real incentive for anyone to care since the production values are so low.
• More and more content is available outside of printed form; truly cutting edge science classes often work only off of academic journal articles, for instance.
• Online coursework websites are helping professors coordinate digital delivery of PDFs of academic journal articles or PDF photocopies.

My observations/beliefs about student behavior:

• Students tend to prefer to buy used books since there is essentially no difference between a brand new book and a book that’s only been read once.
• Students know they are likely to resell their book back to the bookstore after using it, so students are less likely to highlight or underline text so they can get a better price back later.
• Students are on a budget and have little-to-no income, so paying $300-400 every three months is seriously shocking and horrifying each quarter.
• Students know that publishers aren’t making substantive changes when they up-rev a book to a new edition; quite literally, students compare the old and new edition and simply don’t see much or any differences.
• Students don’t get any value out of online textbook “companion” websites — the real companion to a textbook is the professor and class they are attending, not a website. I only logged in to an online textbook website once and was sorely disappointed — why even bother charging for it?
• Students don’t get any value out of attached CD/DVD content, even for programming classes. Seriously, why wouldn’t I get that type of content online from somewhere else anyhow?
• Students are mad enough about textbook prices that the topic gets significant amounts of coverage in college newspapers, and have tried to create small marketplaces or businesses to facilitate used book sharing/selling. According to the NYT article sited above, students are even scanning whole textbooks and illegally sharing them using BitTorrent! (That is a huge amount of effort!)
• Professors are increasingly sensitive to textbook prices and turning to PDFs of journal articles for the latest content.

Given this landscape, I understand why textbook publishers want to try DRM and digital delivery. Their revenue model is presumably not growing as quickly as it used to since the digital world is offering alternatives (PDFs and journal articles), used book reselling is ubiquitous, and their customers — students and professors — are cognizant of the tricks publishers use to make money (new editions that aren’t any better than the previous copy, CDs and DVDs that nobody looks at, and companion websites that don’t lead to any meaningful learning).

The problem with DRM for textbooks boils down to a single question: “How does DRM help the customer?” Frankly, it does not — the student no longer can resell the book to recover some of their temporary investment, and the cost to buy a book is really going to skyrocket.

The NYT article quotes several prices for an O-Chem textbook by John McMurry:

• New: $209.95
• Discounted (through Amazon?): $150
• Used: $110 and up
• Digital with DRM: $109.99

The above doesn’t paint the whole picture, however. A used textbook will cost me $110 to buy, but then I can resell it back for $75 or so I’d guess. So, the overall outlay is only $35 for the quarter. That means that the digital DRM version costs $75 more for me without adding any extra value for me!! In fact, I’m paying $75 more for something that is likely to stop working at some point when the digital license service dies or expires!

So my initial thought is that DRM for textbooks is a terrible idea that hurts students and doesn’t give the customer any added benefit. And that means DRM is likely to not succeed as an idea in its current incarnation.

I think there is still a big opportunity here, however, but it would require a rethinking of how publishers make money. The publishers could try to decimate the used book market by offering DRM copies at an actually competitive price.

What if DRM textbooks cost $25 only? I’d end up choosing the $25 DRM copy instead of the net $35 cost for a used textbook… maybe. The publisher doesn’t have to maintain huge infrastructure for printing and distributing books, they don’t need to print new editions every 2 years and go through the hassle of creating new content, and they capture 100% of the revenue every year instead of just 100% the first year only.

There’s something to be said for a print copy — there is a huge difference between a print copy vs. a digital copy, as compared to a MP3 vs. CD that performs the same for your ears. The music still comes out of the same headphones, whereas the text hits your eyes in different ways.

Nonetheless, I’ll venture that DRM textbooks at a price point of $25 are seriously competitive and potentially a big win-win situation for both publishers and students. Now that’s the definition of satisfying the needs of your customers, not simply profiting off of them!

PS: I think there might be an interesting opportunity for academic presses to step up, or a new non-profit to step up now, and promote the express goal of facilitating learning through the dissemination of knowledge without seeking to hit revenue growth metrics. Is this all just a byproduct of public companies seeking to grow at 20% a year and now finally finding a saturated and unhappy market? What if that academic press or non-profit did offer DRM textbooks for only $20 each? That would be pretty amazing.