To all the dads out there…

… from all your sons and daughters.

Thanks!

Update to yesterday’s post and also an earlier one about Apple’s new version of Safari for Windows.

Why would Apple develop a product for Windows? Aren’t they arch rivals and bitter enemies? Gossip is flying that Apply did it just for the (gasp!) money. Can it be true? What would the shareholders say?

Apple isn’t talking, but others are. Get the dish here.

From a marketing standpoint, the interesting question is: How can something that’s free (Web browsers) make money for the people who created them and give them away?

Answer: When Firefox users use the Google search field in the Firefox toolbar (instead of going to Google’s home page), Google shares a piece of the financial action. It’s a tiny share (if I know Google) but Mozilla’s CEO admits it adds up to “tens of millions of dollars” a year for the open source developers.

Gee, why would Apple wants a piece of that? Only Steve Jobs knows for sure — but maybe the Fake Steve Jobs will spill the beans.

FWIW, Safari currently has around 5 percent of the browser market share, compared to Internet Explorer’s 78 percent and 15 percent for Firefox.

Safari for Windows is supposed to be faster than either Microsoft’s IE or open-source Firefox. Steve Jobs says it’s faster, so it must be true, right?

But that certainly wasn’t my experience. I found it much slower to boot and to load pages. (See the original post here.) And now Wired has run some comparative speed tests that confirm Firefox really is faster (although not by much).

Whew. Thought I was losing it.

Want a sure-fire strategy for building a successful Web business? Line up customers first, then create a business to serve them.

It’s an approach that’s working for the UK’s David Carter, says Business 2.0. Carter identifies a business niche or a hot growth area like commercial real estate. Then he buys domain names around the topic. He saves money by shunning pricey domains for URLs with hyphens, such as commercial-property.co.uk/.

He builds the sites, adds content, and waits for customers. When inquiries come in, Carter steers them to an acquaintance or a local business he’s partnering with. In many cases, Carter simply becomes the middleman, using the Web to attract willing buyers that he hands off to others for a fee.

To satisfy a flood of eager customers, Carter turned his original AsbestosSurveys.com site into an actual business, called AsbestosServices.com. He took a half-week course, got certified, and teamed up with a friend. Today, once or twice a week — essentially whenever he feels like getting out of the house — Carter surveys a property, armed with a digital camera and notepad. He claims the effort will net the pair about $350,000 this year.

Not too shabby for a guy who knew absolutely nothing about asbestos when he started.

Carter’s way, in brief:

1. Identify an overlooked need for services kicked up by, for instance, relatively obscure regulatory changes.
2. Construct a first-rate website with a generic domain name that will draw in prospective customers.
3. With clients in hand, create the business, providing the service yourself or subcontracting to established players.

Apple has just released a Windows version of their Safari browser. It’s supposed to be twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Tain’t so, based on my (admittedly limited) testing. I downloaded it. Installed it. Launched it. The default Apple home page took almost 20 seconds to load. Yikes!

Yahoo News loaded much more slowly than with FireFox. The New York Times opened a bit faster, but that was included as a default bookmark, so it may have started loading even before my click, like FireFox’s pre-fetching capability.

On many pages the type (Verdana) looked muddy and smeared, like I’d forgotten to put on my glasses. But the strangest thing of all? I’d forgotten how crowded, flashy and distracting the Web can be when you don’t have AdBlock Plus filtering out the crap. Until Safari has ABP, I’m sticking with the ‘Fox. (And probably even then.)

But hey, Apple — I still love my iPod…

What’s in a logo? What should a graphical representation of your brand or company really say?

There’s a lot of buzz right now because London’s Olympic committee spent almost $800,000 (and a year’s work) on a controversial new logo for the 2102 Olympic games. And as anyone can tell, it’s crappy. Choppy and misshapen, it looks like some pieces of paper cut out and slapped together by a kindergarten kid.

A good logo is an empty vessel, a clean, simple abstract image. It should have no intrinsic meaning until you bring meaning to it. For example, the swoop of the Nike logo meant nothing until the company filled it with meaning by infusing it with their values.

If your company needs a logo, hire a graphic designer to create a simple, abstract image. Add your company name is nice letterforms. Don’t worry if it doesn’t “say” much, if anything, yet. As Seth observed, later you’ll add meaning — i.e., the values your company represents to your customers.

Do that and you’ll save about $798,000 on your logo. And you won’t have 50,000 people signing a petition to ditch it.

Who’s your perfect customer? You don’t need to be an FBI profiler to pin down the kind of customer you want.

Now consider: What kind does your marketing actually attract? If there’s a disconnect between the two, you have a serious marketing problem. As Seth put it:

“Many of the products and services we use are now about our identity. Many small businesses, for example, won’t hire a coach or a consultant because, ‘that’s not the kind of organization we are.’ Wineries understand that the pricing of a bottle of wine is more important than its label or the wine inside. Price is the first thing that most people consider when they order or shop for wine. Not because of perceived value, but because of identity.”

One of the most fundamental jobs of your marketing communications is to identify and attract the right kind of customers, i.e., the ones who can relate and identify with what you offer.

If your marketing consistently attracts the “wrong” kind of customers, it’s past time for a marketing makeover.