Drop by Diagon Alley Whenever You Wish

I was considerably outside the target audience's age for the Harry Potter series of books, but I enjoyed them. Although I haven't yet seen the movies, it's now possible to use Google Street View to wander through Diagon Alley, home to the stores where wizards in training obtain their wands, robes, and such. Yes, such a place really does exist.

It's actually at the Warner Brothers studio in England and Google Street view allows you to wander the place at your own pace and to look carefully at the world the set builders created.

Diagon Alley at Warner Brothers Studio in London via Google Street View

You can use the link provided here, or type something like "Warner Brothers London studio tour" into the Google Maps search box. If you interested, the full address is Warner Brothers Studio Tour London, Studio Tour Drive, Leavesden, Hertfordshire WD25 7LS.

Besides wandering around, you can peek into the windows of the various stores such as the Slug & Jiggers apothecary or the Flourish and Blotts bookshop.

Also on the studio tour and available via the Google street view are locations such as the closet Harry lived in at the Dursleys' house on Privet Drive, Dumbledore's office, and even a scale model of Hogwarts Castle.

By the way, in case you haven't noticed it previously, "Diagon Alley" sounds a lot like "diagonally" when said in normal speech.

Apple Found Guilty of Antitrust Violations

A federal judge in New York has ruled that Apple was in violation of federal antitrust laws when it engaged in a conspiracy with 5 large publishers to fix the price of e-books. The judge said that Apple played a major role in the scheme that was designed to inflate the price of books.

Judge Denise Cote of US District Court in Manhattan said that Apple's participation in the "conspiracy" was instrumental in allowing it to succeed. Government lawyers filed suit about a year ago, charging Apple with collusion.

This is another black eye for Apple following revelations recently that the company legally, but with questionable ethics, hid billions of dollars to avoid taxes.

An Apple spokesperson, Tom Neumayr, denied that the company conspired to fix prices and said that the company will continue to battle what he termed "false accusations".

The publishers had settled previously with the federal government and an agreement between the publishers and the government forbids the publishers from setting restrictions on the price retailers can charge for books. As a result, e-book prices have generally declined.

During the trial, government lawyers produced various e-mail messages from Apple, including one written by Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple that the government argued showed intent by Apple for force Amazon to raise its prices.

In 2010, Jobs commented to a reporter who asked why anyone would buy electronic books from Apple when they could buy them for less from Amazon that eventually the prices would be the same.

This isn't the end, of course. Apple will almost certainly appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals.

Social Media: Business-Boosting Time Killer

You've probably already heard both sides: Some say you can't have a successful business without social media, while others respond that using social media is nothing more than a waste of time. Both venerated and vilified, social media can't be both, can it? As with most things, the truth probably lurks somewhere in the middle.

There's no question that businesses can put social media to good use. Most large companies use social media and some even have highly explicit guidelines on how employees may use social media, even on their own time and with their own equipment, when the topic involves the business. The power of the various social media is significant.

Large organizations have enough people, probably in either the marketing area or public relations area, to provide immediate responses to posts that concern the company. And they probably have an IT department with sufficient savvy to create an application that monitors the various social media and alert those who can respond when the organization is mentioned.

If you're running a 1-person business or any small business that doesn't have a marketing department, a PR department, and an IT department, the challenges are going to be more problematic. I have met business owners who feel that they must have a website and that they must be on Facebook and that they must be active on LinkedIn and that they must have a Twitter account. And somewhere along the way, they lose track of the fact that the goal of their business is to sell a product or a service and not to create a never-ending stream of Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates, and tweets.

And because they spend so much time posting updates, they forget to perform the very tasks that might make their business grow: Prospecting for new clients, taking care of existing clients, looking for ways to be more effective. They're so caught up in the need to communicate that they fail to communicate with existing prospects and clients.

This is no way to run a business. This is no way to grow a business. This is a good way to become irrelevant to the very people you hope will buy (or continue to buy) your product or service.

Consider this: You're flipping through a magazine and see an ad for a shiny new truck that gets great mileage and provides a larger capacity than competing trucks. So the next day, you rush into the office, call the local truck dealer, and arrange to have a new truck delivered that afternoon. Great, right? Not if your company specializes in providing pedicures for Pomeranian puppies.

Think of social media as a tool because that's what it is. Just as you would never buy a new truck if you didn't need one, it makes no sense to sign up for Facebook unless you have a need for what Facebook can do. How much time are you willing to waste on distractions that will have no positive effect on your business?

That's not to say that social media can't help your business, but you need to figure out how it can be made to work for you before you set aside large blocks of time on what will be essentially little more than a distraction.

Focus on the potential return on investment (ROI). How can you determine the value of social media to your business? The first thing to do is to ignore the social media consultants who claim that they will triple your business in a year by using social media. The absurdity should be obvious and it requires only a bit of skepticism and critical thinking.

And you need to know the costs.

What will it cost to train your staff in the use of social media? What will be the cost of their time spent away from normal duties? Will you have to purchase content or pay to have audio or video produced? What about research to determine both a baseline for where you are now and where you will be in a month or six months or a year?

Will you have to outsource any function? What hardware or software will you need to acquire?

Social media doesn't work in a vacuum. Will you need to buy advertising to pull people to your site, your Facebook page, or your Twitter stream? What modifications will be needed to any existing online content? Will you need to change e-mail templates or direct-mail campaigns?

Time can be a significant cost. You'll need to learn how to use tools and procedures and then develop the discipline to keep it up. Bear in mind that any time you or your employees spend on social media is time that they can't spend working on core business functions.

If you're thinking about using social media, I'm not trying to be discouraging or to dissuade you from doing so. But it is important to set reasonable and measurable expectations, and to understand the many and varied costs.

Short Circuits

PC Sales Continue Dropping, But at a Slower Pace

The good news is that the decline in PC sales has stopped accelerating. The bad news is that PC shipments declined for the 5th consecutive quarter and that's the longest decline the industry has ever seen according to the 2 big industry analysts, International Data Corporation and Gartner.

Gartner says total worldwide PC shipments declined nearly 11% to 76 million in the second quarter. IDC's numbers were similar. All the major manufacturers had lower sales compared to the same period last year and HP is no longer the largest seller of PCs worldwide, but did hold on to the top position in the United States.

Both Gartner and IDC said HP shipped 4 million PCs, down about 4%. Dell's sales were down almost 6% to a little under 4 million units. Apple was in third place with sales of slightly under 2 million and a decline of about half of one percent (Gartner's numbers for Apple showed a slightly larger decline.) Lenovo's sales increased nearly 20% to about 1.5 million units.

Tablet sales increased nearly 70% during the quarter, but that's to be expected. Until recently, tablets have been a small part of the market and this does seem to be the year of the tablet.

Windows 8.1 Goes to OEM's before September

Microsoft says the release-to-manufacturing version of Windows 8.1 will be ready before the end of August. The preview version was released to the general public recently, but I recommend avoiding it and waiting for the official update.

Those who install the preview version over an existing Windows 8 installation will lose all of their apps and, when they install the official Windows 8.1 release, they'll lose their apps again and all installed desktop applications. This can be avoided by setting up a dual-boot system or by running Windows 8.1 in a virtual machine (VM). Considering I think that Windows 8 is not clunky or fatally flawed, I'm not particularly excited about any of those preview options.

Windows 8.1 will install without harm* over a standard Windows 8 installation.
*Any operating system upgrade must be preceded by a full and complete backup in case something bad happens.

Microsoft has not yet announced a date for "general availability", which is when the update will be available in stores or for download.

Google Researcher Reports Microsoft Bug Publicly and Hackers Soon Follow

The one thing security researchers are supposed to do when they find a flaw is to report that flaw to the software publisher first. Instead, when Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy found a bug in Windows, he wrote publicly about it on his blog and included a significant amount of detail. Microsoft says hackers have exploited the flaw and Google has gone to great lengths to point out that Ormandy was posting on his own and not as a representative of Google.

Ormandy reported the flaw about 2 months ago. Microsoft hasn't provided details about how the exploit was used, but did use the term "targeted attacks" in its description of the problem. Security experts often use that term to characterize espionage and sabotage attacks aimed at government or corporate targets.

Ormandy was criticized at the time for posting technical descriptions of the flaw publicly because doing so can allow crooks to exploit the flaw before the software publisher has time to assess the scope of the problem and mitigate it. That seems to be exactly what happened. This week, as part of the regular monthly patch release, Microsoft issued a fix for six critical flaws, including the kernel driver vulnerability that Ormandy revealed. It affected Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008 (including the R2 patch version), Windows 7 and 8, Server 2012, and the RT version.

Whether Ormandy was posting on behalf of Google or not, his posts reflect badly on Google because of his association with the company. Google's legal and public relations teams will now probably create a new training program and possibly some new rules around how employees can use social media.

A Belated Happy 7th Birthday to the Podcast

After being on WTVN for something like 16 years, Technology Corner became TechByter Worldwide and moved to the Web. Last month was the beginning of the 8th year as a podcast. Thanks for being part of the process!