Election Pollsters Making the Wrong Phone Call

A long time ago, I had a teacher who sometimes asked us to compose newspaper headlines for logic problems. His point was that one way to solve problems is by looking at them through the lens of a different paradigm.

The professor and his headlines exercise came back to me this morning as I pondered the 2008 election polls showing a close race between McCain and Obama -- so contrary to everything I see around me. (Admittedly, I live in California. But despite the notion that California exists in an alternate universe, it's also the state that elected Ronald Reagan to his first political office.)

These days I don't hear anybody -- even people I know will probably vote for him -- expressing any positive interest in McCain. But everybody is talking about Obama, including people who've probably never pulled the lever for a Democrat but are Obama supporters. 

Yet poll numbers show voters almost evenly divided between the McCain and Obama. But let's turn the problem on its head and, instead of the end point -- the answers to polling questions -- look at the process for getting to that end point. Then another explanation for the result percolates up.

Election polls reflect the pre-Internet -- or, rather  pre-Internets -- communication perspective of middle-aged political pundits and pollsters. One that assumes that everybody has a wired "home phone" on the PSTN. That's the Aha! here: Pollsters are only calling people who answer listed phone numbers supplied by the "phone company."

Do any of these pollsters and pundits have children? Or friends under 35? 

A lot of people aren't reachable on "home phones" anymore. Like my 17 year-old, they use cell phones almost exclusively. Many don't have wired phones at all. For a growing number, the "home phone" is an VoIP phone service. None of these services are listed in the "white pages."

I'm betting on lots of egg-on-pundit-faces in November. 

Yahoo! and Jajah: Match Made in Heaven or Been There Done That?

This week's announcements about Yahoo! marrying Jajah – maybe they're just cohabitating – and AIM Open Voice APIs have everyone going gaga, racing to be first in the blogosphere with the news, and singing the industry-disruption Hallelujah Chorus.

Pardon me for being the one suggesting the emperor just might not be wearing pants.

If you think I'm being missing the boat here (and I'm fair enough to admit that's possible), take a walk with me down memory lane: Yahoo! buys Dialpad. AOL announces VoIP rollout. eBay buys Skype. Google buys GrandCentral. All of them earthshaking news at the time, or so it seemed from the laudatory tone the press took:

"Skype chief executive Niklas Zennstrom, who will join eBay's senior management team, said the deal would help 'revolutionise the ease with which people can communicate through the internet'." -- BBC News September 12, 2005

"Google's buy of the small Unified Communications (UC) tech company GrandCentral is a sign that voice communications will soon become a big part of Gmail." – PC World, July 3, 2007

"We're very excited that we'll be scaling our IP-based technology for the benefit of millions of Yahoo users," he [Dialpad CEO Vincent Paquet] said. "It will bring the ability to bring IP-to-PSTN connectivity for current and future Yahoo services." – InternetNews.com June 5, 2005

And the industry-disrupting results were…?

I'm waiting.

When was the last time you made a phone call with AIM? Or Google Talk? Or clicked-to-Skype an eBay seller to ask if those hot red Steve Madden pumps were new or worn?

And even if you did those things, making a phone call isn't exactly industry disruption – we've been doing it for 100 years.

While I'll 'fess up to a cat-like contrarian streak -- I'm still not much impressed by anything about the iPhone except its design – I think there's a serious question here: Why can't Internet companies do anything much with voice? It's not like they haven't had time or resources.

It's not a technical problem – if it were, Silicon Valley's bright boys and girls would have solved it. No, it's a paradigm problem.

Internet companies are all about helping people do things on the…Internet. They're about clicking, not calling. They're more about searching than finding.

Looking up "Italian restaurant" on Google gives you 5,730,000 search results, including Luigi's in Spokane, WA, Orlando's in Lubbock, TX and House of Kebabs in Sunnyvale, CA.

ATT, on the other hand, gives you the Yellow Pages -- with a list of under 100 close-by Italian restaurants and their phone numbers.

Local online search tools just add more steps to something that's pretty simple with a phone book. For example, Google Maps gives me 45,827 results for "Italian restaurant near Santa Clara, CA."

So I'm not going to start having hot flashes over Yahoo! and Jajah until I see something that's actually new. They might start by putting click-to-order-a-pizza in the search results.

carolyn schuk