End-to-End Experiences

The Guardian writes: “In a marketplace that offers a bewildering array of hardware, software and services, the company that prioritises ease of use stands a chance of winning.”

According to Ted Schadler, an industry analyst and vice-president of US-based Forrester Research, that’s the new trend. “Consumers hate complex things,” he says. “They want to be handed a working solution.”

Last December, Forrester published a research note: “Sell digital experiences, not products.” It points out that consumers buy products but often don’t buy the content and accessories they need to get all the benefits. For example, half the US consumers with high-definition TV sets don’t subscribe to HDTV programming. The conclusion: “Digital industries must stop selling standalone devices and start delivering digital experiences – products and services integrated end-to-end under the control of a single application.”

Marketing Process

Seth Godin provides some ideas:

1. Dont run out of money. It always takes longer and costs more than you expect to spread your idea. You can budget for it or you can fail.

2. You wont get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it.

3. Convenient choices are not often the best choices. Just because an agency, an asset or a bizdev deal are easy to do doesnt mean that they are your best choice.

4. Irrational, strongly held beliefs of close advisors should be ignored. It doesnt matter if they dont like your logo.

6. Focusing obsessively on one niche, one feature and one market is almost always a better idea than trying to satisfy everyone.

Beyond Search

Dave Winer writes:

Many years ago, when the Internet was still the domain of geeks, researchers and college students, the smart folks often said that the opportunities for new software companies were over, it simply required too much scale to compete in an industry dominated by Lotus, Microsoft and Ashton-Tate. Now it’s clear how ridiculous that was, even though it was correct. The next layer comes on not by building on the old layer (a trick, the guy you’re building on will eat your lunch), or re-doing what they did (what the naysayers correctly say you can’t do), but by starting from a different place and building something new, and so different that the old guys don’t understand it and don’t feel threatened by it.

At first, the Internet, the market dominated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon (and others) was about the web, a publishing environment, then it became two-way, and search developed as a core but adjunct feature, much as the OS of a personal computer is part of the package, but the spreadsheet, word processor and other productivity apps are really what it was about. There will be new technology enterprises that make the search engine as humdrum as the desktop OS is today. Bet on it and win. Think that all innovation must come in the form of applications of search and you’ll be left in the dust.

MySpace to Facebook to

Washington Post writes:

Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they’re over MySpace.

“I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now,” said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.
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Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle. Within several months’ time, a site can garner tens of millions of users who, just as quickly, might flock to the next place, making it hard for corporate America to make lasting investments in whatever’s hot now.

TECH TALK: Good Books: The Go Point (Part 2)

Knowledge@Wharton interviewed Michael Useem, the author of The Go Point. Here are some excerpts:

We all make decisions all the time and most of them are highly personal — [such as] what we put on this morning when we got up and got out of the house. A small subset of our decisions, though, has ramifications for people around us, and sometimes those are people we are responsible for. They work for us, we command them, and they may be in our community in some way.

There is a strain of thinking that is probably summed up with the psychologists’ clinical term “decidophobia”; some people,[in considering] even what color clothing to put on in the morning, just simply balk at that decision. If it’s highly personal, that’s OK. The consequence is you don’t get out of the house on time. But when it affects other people, you cannot suffer from that particular clinical syndrome, because you are going to ultimately cause others around you distress, maybe even harm.

Decision making and leadership can be difficult, but it can be learned. And I think the basic premise that underlies the book — I think it just underlies reality — is that decision making as a skill is learned really by making decisions. Critically though, [it means] looking back on those decisions, to make certain we don’t make the same mistake twice, that you have some sense for what went right as well.

By way of example: I interviewed the chief executive of Lenovo — which is of course China’s big PC maker — on this very topic for a couple of hours recently, and I put the question in summary this way (his name is Liu): “Mr. Liu, you came out of a state owned and operated research center. The government of China funded you, that was where your budget was from, but 22 years back you broke off with a couple of friends to create what is now the world’s third-largest PC maker. How did you learn to make decisions along the way — the decisions being how to market, how to brand, how to price, how to hire — when you were doing none of those, making none of those decisions before?”

The answer really has stuck with me. At the end of every week, going back now more than 20 years, on Friday afternoon, he sits down with his direct reports, his top team, the five or six people he’s closest to. They take time to review everything they’ve done that week — what decisions were good, which ones were terrible. He has no MBA degree, no formal training in decision making, leadership, or management.

I say all that by way of coming back to the main point, which is decision making is a learned skill. You’ve got to make decisions and look back on them.
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But in addition to that, becoming more self-conscious about getting the right data, having the right timing, talking to people who you know will not provide a biased read or filter through which they’re going to pass their advice — these are among what I would end up calling in the book the tools of leadership. So on the one hand, intuition is very important.

On the other hand, a set of tools is quite important also for helping all of us make good decisions. And just to come back to the main point: they’re all learned.

The book can be especially good reading for entrepreneurs. I have faced (and continue to face) go points all the time. One has to make decisions and live with them. For an early-stage company, a single wrong decision can make things very difficult. Hopefully, Useems book will help us decide right.

Tomorrow: Winning Decisions

Continue reading TECH TALK: Good Books: The Go Point (Part 2)

Future for Search Startups

Bill Burnham writes:

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at TIECon on the Search Industry. Peter Norvig, Googles Director of Research, made one comment in particular that stood out in my mind at the time. In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead. Not because search isnt a great place to be or because they cant create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
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One can imagine a world in the not to distant future in which an application designer can easily leverage the billions of dollars being spent by Google, Yahoo et. al., by having programmatic access to what is essentially a custom crawl list and a highly filtered index. In this way search engines, in some respects, may become an infrastructure layer not too dissimilar from the telecommunications networks and internet standards that they themselves are built upon.

Tim O’Reilly adds:

In my talks on Web 2.0, I always end with the point that “a platform beats an application every time.” We’re entering the platform phase of Web 2.0, in which first generation applications are going to turn into platforms, followed by a stage in which the leaders use that platform strength to outperform their application rivals, eventually closing them out of the market. And that platform is not enforced by control over proprietary APIs, as it was in the Windows era, but by the operational infrastructure, and perhaps even more importantly, by the massive databases (with network effects creating increasing returns for the database leaders) that are at the heart of Web 2.0 platforms.

Gladwell on Neural Networks

The New Yorker has an article by Malcolm Gladwell on “the formula” to figure out which films become hits:

The way the neural network thinks is not that different from the way a Hollywood executive thinks: if you pitch a movie to a studio, the executive uses an ad-hoc algorithmperfected through years of trial and errorto put a value on all the components in the story. Neural networks, though, can handle problems that have a great many variables, and they never play favoriteswhich means (at least in theory) that as long as you can give the neural network the same range of information that a human decision-maker has, it ought to come out ahead. Thats what the University of Arizona computer scientist Hsinchun Chen demonstrated ten years ago, when he built a neural network to predict winners at the dog track. Chen used the ten variables that greyhound experts told him they used in making their betslike fastest time and winning percentage and results for the past seven racesand trained his system with the results of two hundred races. Then he went to the greyhound track in Tucson and challenged three dog-racing handicappers to a contest. Everyone picked winners in a hundred races, at a modest two dollars a bet. The experts lost $71.40, $61.20, and $70.20, respectively. Chen won $124.80. It wasnt close, and one of the main reasons was the special interest the neural network showed in something called race grade: greyhounds are moved up and down through a number of divisions, according to their ability, and dogs have a big edge when theyve just been bumped down a level and a big handicap when theyve just been bumped up. The experts know race grade exists, but they dont weight it sufficiently, Chen said. They are all looking at win percentage, place percentage, or thinking about the dogs times.

Motorola and the Internet of Things

John Jordan writes:

Getting Motorola, which had lost prestige and shed thousands of jobs, to accept risk-taking has been a core aspect of Zanders mission. As a result of the companys focus, patent holdings, and coherent product footprint and market positioning, its hard to see a head-on competitor. Cisco has more wireline clout and a bigger set-top box presence after acquiring Scientific Atlanta but no WiMax or cellular business, much less consumer design expertise of the sort embodied in the RAZR. Tag manufacturers including Texas Instruments, middleware companies such as BEA, or identity managers like Sun or maybe Microsoft may well play important roles as components in the cloud from sensors through computing to people, but its hard to see any of these companies taking a leadership position. Many, many piece-parts will be required for anything resembling the science fiction vision to come to fruition, but given that personal communications and computing platforms, a variety of broadband networks, and sensors in many shapes and sizes will be involved, in the near term Motorola appears to have rebounded and assumed a leadership position in a market it is helping to invent.

FT on Danah Boyd

Financial Times calls Danah Boyd “the high priestess of Internet friendship.”

Through her observations, Boyd has become one of the chief thinkers of the MySpace age. Her work tells us about the people who inhabit this new world, what they do there, and why. Boyd says online social networks have become a vital space for young people to express themselves and build their personal identities. While adults worry about the culture and dangers their children are exposed to on the internet, she says that what parents think children do online and what they are actually doing is very different. She defends a technology that has repercussions far beyond teenagers and could change the way all of us order our world, interact with each other, get information and do business.

Goal-Free Living

Tom Peters has an interview with Steve Shapiro about his book published earlier in the year:

Goal-Free Living is the antidote to our achievement-oriented society. Basically since birth, we’ve been taught that we should be setting and achieving goals, and working hard toward goals. And for some people, that works. Some people enjoy a goal-oriented life. But for many people, all that does is create stress and dissatisfaction.

I’ve done a number of surveys on the relationship between people’s goals and their happiness. What I’ve found is that most people keep sacrificing “today” for “tomorrow.” They’ll set a goal, plan it out, work hard, achieve the goal, and then say, “Okay, that was great; what’s next?” They’re constantly striving to achieve these goals in the belief that life’s going to get better.

Goal-Free Living, quite simply, is having a powerful future that is a context for how you live your life today. That is, you get satisfaction today instead of achieving it in the future.