Bloomberg quotes Thrivent analyst Nabil Elsheshai “It’s no coincidence that Google’s rise has coincided with Apple’s demise. Making money from services versus devices is growingly perceived as a better business model.”

Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but somebody has to make something for a service to actually be of any value at all.

You service your car; no car, no service.

You get information from the web about where to buy things; nothing to buy, no reason to search for info about it.

Crowd sourcing tells you which restaurant you want to eat in and Pandora streams music to your desktop, but the food had to be prepared and musicians had to create the music; everything, it seems to me, starts and finishes with things.

Right now, Google makes much of its revenue related to advertising. It’s genius really, all the ways they skim money from that business and what it’s done for them. For that Google should be commended. But to suggest that services are more valuable than devices seems crazy to me. On the plus side, Google makes money from the advertising of, well, anything. That’s, no question, a pretty big stream of money, but it’s literally pennies an ad. Margin per transaction is important for a business because each transaction, even with Gooogle’s efficiency, costs something.

Meanwhile, thing-makers, like the companies I usually work with, have to set aside some of their margins for advertising—money they’ll pay maybe to Google in order to get the word out about their new thing.That advertising dollar can never be greater than the money made from the thing in the first place though, can it? Google’s ultimate market, if unopposed and if they get every advertising dollar out there, is certainly large and, likely larger than Apple’s. Apple can make only so many different categories of iDevices after all. Except Apple, and all of us thing-makers (manufacturers) typically make quite a bit more money every time someone buys our object; even if we pay Google a little bit to help convince them. The broader suggestion, that services are more valuable than things is ludicrous.

It’s annoying because one thing may be true about this quote: perception. Small startups selling real live things you can touch and use have a hard time just competing for investor ear-time with thousands of software models based on some variation of ‘get a load of users for a service and then sell the users to advertisers.’ Usually this business model is called a service, but it’s driven by advertising, and there is only so much advertising revenue to go around. And it’s always going to be smaller than the revenue from selling actual objects.

In other words, without the nouns, there’s really no reason to bother describing them.

I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as a social media expert. I opt out of whole chunks of it and wonder what could possible motivate someone to share unutterably mundane comments and photos from life day after day, much less read about it from others. Then again, I do have my own blog, two of them, actually, but who’s counting, and I edit on a couple more. I have a photo stream on flickr, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, a nearly unused twitter feed, a Google+ account, not to mention profiles on Quora, Memrise, Foursquare, Yelp! and even Apple’s Ping! to name a few, but you get the idea. Do I really think I’m any less mundane? (More importantly, do you?)

Here are just a few reasons why Google+ is way better than Facebook but will fail anyway.

Circles are the mullets of social media and that’s a good thing.

• Business in the front, party in the back. Circles are intuitive and easy, and they reflect the real world in a way Facebook never thought of. Officially, you can wrangle Facebook’s groups into the same kind of functionality, but circles transparently enable you to share your drunken photos with your fellow partiers and your straight-laced business posts with your work colleagues. There are things your mom just doesn’t want to know about and Google+ understands this. The standard Facebook solution, meanwhile, is to create a another user account.

Google+ is better for businesses, which is better for users.

• A business has several opportunities to promote itself with Google+ including shared circles and search. In Google+, learning about what my friends are interested in gives me a chance to follow their interests without signing up to a new app that will clutter my feed with all manner of unwanted, unexpected posts. You build your reputation on social sites (like you do in the real world) by following things that are interesting and others find interesting too. Facebook mangles this with apps and likes and continues the nearly failed strategy of banner ads that users ignore or a search function that essentially reformats the user’s friend list and news feed. This is better for businesses because their advertising efforts are rewarded and better for users because we’re less distracted by junk we don’t care about anyway.

+1 is sticky, while “likes” fade

• “Likes” are more widespread to be sure, but unlike Google’s +1 likes fade away, buried underneath the weight of the social noise generated by Facebook’s users. +1 meanwhile is attached to search and appears anytime a user searches for similar things. Google knows search, and social search, creepy as it is, can be really powerful. Likes are about a user’s ego; +1 is about something more powerful, a user’s reputation.

Facebook users share, Google+ users curate.

• Facebook is designed around the concept that we want to share everything we do. It’s pretty clear that I’m wrong about this, based on its staggering popularity, but all this over-sharing destroys value. Perhaps because everyone who follows you isn’t necessarily your friend, Google+ users tend to curate what they post, using the simple circles functionality to ensure that the right content gets to the right people. You can see an example of this already in action. Compare Photobucket to flickr. Sure, some flickr users will upload a whole “roll” unedited, but where that’s practically the point of Photobucket, user curation results in amazing, captivating pictures on flickr. Browse the two sites even for a moment and see if you don’t agree.

Google+ is growing fast.

• I won’t bore you with statistics, but Google+ has over 100 million users and has built them up much more quickly than Facebook did.

Somehow, none of this matters. Two facts will slowly kill Google+.

The first one is that people sign up, (just look at those growth numbers) and quickly realize that nobody they know is there sharing anything (even anything uninteresting). Sure, they could follow famous people, but if they care about that, they’re already doing so with Twitter (nearly all of the features of Twitter, except, perhaps for its name, are duplicated in Google+).

The second problem is fatigue. Fatigue from users, radio and tv announcers, web designers, content creators, even businesses, who have add and manage yet another way to contact and hear from them. You’ve probably heard the phrase “check us out on Facebook, or follow us on twitter at….” over 100 times already today. Adding “+1 us on Google+” is just too much. It’s a big hurdle to get over and it means knocking at least one of those two addresses from its dominant position (Twitter, Google is looking at you!), although, up till now, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that this is Google’s strategy.

If I’m right, it should be, but, what do the pluserati think? Feel free to let us know in the comments section; or over at Google+

So that is why people like to predict the future. It’s because of the overwhelmingly smug satisfaction we get from being right! After all, we rarely highlight being wrong, so I get to claim an unblemished record for now.

Yesterday I made some predictions about the tech moment of the day: the Apple iPhone announcement. I predicted Apple wouldn’t change the form factor, that they’d upgrade the hardware making it faster and improving the camera, and that the presentation would focus on the new software, iOS 5 and its capabilities. I even mentioned that voice activation might be the surprise that steals the show.

I guess you could say I nailed it. But wasn’t it too easy this time? Frankly, I am not such a huge fan of the current form factor for the iPhone. The glass on the back of my phone is cracked, the phone is less comfortable to hold and more difficult to tactily find the front/top of than it used to be. Tech pundits didn’t want to solve any of these problems, they wanted a bigger screen, because, well, other phones have a bigger screen.

The iPhone has a fantastic screen. Probably the best screen out there. It’s not bigger, but it does display more pixels than almost any other, and I am quite surprised, actually, that folks really want to carry around even bigger phones. Isn’t miniaturization one of technology’s magic bullets?

Apple did exceed my expectations though. Check out what they’ve done with their acquisition of Siri for voice control. I am dubious about talking to my phone as I see people do on their Android phones. It goes like this: press a few buttons and load the application. Stare at the screen for a moment to ensure that it’s ready. Speak your phrase into the phone, slowly and carefully: “F i n d p e e t z a h” Wait. “F i n d p e e t z a h” Wait. “F e y e n d p e e e t z z a a a h”, go to the maps application and type pizza into the search field and continue on with your business. It barely works, not terribly convenient when it does, and it’s a bit odd and certainly unacceptable in a wide variety of situations to ask your phone for that sort of thing. I have “voice control” on my phone. I’ve used it, let me see, never.

With Siri, though, I started to have the same thought I had when Apple introduced the iPhone. Four years ago I saw the commercials of the way it scrolled and opened applications and above all how effective and useful the web was on it and thought “if it actually works that well, that’s really something I’d get.” At the time I had a Windows Mobile 5 phone that I’d learned was really just a large, blocky phone that got my e-mails. You could surf the web, but you really wouldn’t want to do that to yourself, just as you can use google voice, but it’s not really worth doing.

If, on the other hand, I find myself in an Apple store in front of an iPhone 4S and try out Siri and it really does work like that, well, maybe I’ll stop being such a luddite about this voice stuff. My contract’s got about another year. By then the iPhone 5 (or something really competitive) might be out. I can always talk to my phone in the car. There no one can hear my conversation about not having any friends because I smugly think I am right all the time.

Who is your customer? It’s not as obvious as it might seem. In many businesses, the real customer might not be the person your company is thinking about, but it should be. Simply put, regardless of who drives your business, you’re real customer is the entity who decides to pay you for your products and services. Let’s look at some examples:

Are you a Google customer? If you’re like the majority of us and you only use their services such as search, mail, and maps, then not really. Google’s customers are the people who buy AdWords, and search placements. Without you and me, Google might not have much of a business, but without advertisers, they’d have even less.

Are you looking for new opportunities with Monster’s job boards? Monster has to spend some of its resources making sure you find value in their site; but you’re a volunteer product, not the customer. This is true for all sorts of recruitment firms and the source of many a misunderstanding between recruiters and job seekers. ‘This guy doesn’t seem to be working for me…’ is a common complaint, but frankly, you shouldn’t expect them to. The job seeker typically doesn’t pay anything for the privilege of someone finding a job for her. Monster and other recruiters work for the businesses for whom they find candidates. They’re marketing message must reflect this.

During the start-up phase of a company developing a web-based application to optimize how we buy things, the company constantly had to remind itself who the real customers were (stores) and not be distracted by all the positive feedback they got from people who planned on using the application (individual users). Like many businesses today, exactly who your customer is might not be so obvious because you must get a group of people excited about your product and then leverage that interest and enthusiasm with someone who will pay you.

In an earlier article we discussed the importance of letting people know what you can do for them. Of course, it’s impossible to get the right message if you haven’t even identified who your customer is. Hopefully, you’re well ahead of this game, but given a little thought and you might even be surprised.