Monthly Archives: March 2008

I want to believe

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I fall for every April Fool’s joke, including today’s post by Tim Ferriss, later retracted, that he’s been outsourcing his blog writing for a year.

It made me reconsider my long-standing conviction that you can always tell a hired gun from the real thing. For a while I thought, Tim has sounded authentic for the past year, so perhaps you can outsource your own writing and still remain authentic; and yes, perhaps you can, but we’ll have to wait for another example.

True, the idea sounds ridiculous from the get-go. Having someone write your personal observations of the world around you? But then, we’ve grown accustomed to companies hiring anonymous grunts who could care less to write their friggin’ mission statements, mantras, press releases, announcements; and this is perhaps why I haven’t paused for a second. It’s so believable.

Good for Tim he was joking. If only the rest of the serious corporate world wasn’t.

The things we take for granted…

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If there is one thing blogging pundits have in common, it’s that we love to look in the face of the future and guess what expression it will make. However wonderful the 2.0 world might be, though, it’s easy to forget there are people out there who don’t even live in the 1.0 world yet. Sad but true: some places are slow to move on from 0.0:

President Raul Castro announced today that the Cuban government will allow unrestricted use of mobile telephones by all Cubans for the first time. Cuba currently has the lowest rate of cellular telephone use in Latin America.

A few Cubans have mobile phone service through foreigners or in their work places. Now the masses will be able to place a phone in their individual names’. According to the Communist Party newspaper Granma, the Cuban telecommunications monopoly ETECSA will begin mobile service for the general public in the next few days. “ – via MobileCrunch

Ponder that for a moment. And consider yourself lucky if you can see the irony of that press release.

How to sell a used car

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How to compete in an over-crowded field? If your field is occupied by dishonest bullies and has no reputation whatsoever, consider yourself lucky: you can win cheap – by just being nice.

I got a real bargain yesterday when I bought a low-mileage Chrysler Sebring. It was a run-down, shotgun kind of place with a couple dozen rides of questionable quality. Among them, a sleek blue 300M that I had originally gone for.

But there was another buyer, albeit with an expired reservation, and the air had a certain pre-storm feeling. I prepped for a fist-fight.

Luckily, the shop owner produced the Sebring that had half the miles and was 2 years younger. Both me and the other guy drove away happy.

What was so surreal about my experience was the stark contrast between the place (really, really low) and the three guys than ran it (really, really nice). Used car salesmen usually leave you feeling like you crawled through the mud, and these couldn’t be more different.

In an industry infamous for its sleazy practices, every experience that’s just normal or good enough is actually a strong differentiator. If your competitors are a bunch of jerks, first make sure you are not acting as a jerk, too (you might be), then make a big point of surprising your customers by how nice a guy you are.

Running a software consultancy? Lawyering? Selling insurance? Here’s your chance to change the world.

Quote of the day

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Adriana Lukas writing about the usefulness of wikis (and social software in general) in the enterprise:

  1. The autonomy employees experience when driving not only the content but also the structure of a collaborative working place. The sense of ownership and ability to have impact – social software tools are almost exclusively under the control of the individual as they are build around the user (the good ones anyway) and this brings an unheard of degree of user-centricity to inflexible process-driven environments.
  2. The first hand knowledge of the tool, the experience of its capabilities and limitations. The value there is those same employees will introduce the wiki they use regularly in one areas of work into other areas and projects. I’d argue that this is the most significant and long-term value of social media and social software tools at this stage of their use in enterprise. If anyone tells me they can put metrics on that, I’ll just call them a consultant (not a nice thing in my book!). [emphasis mine]

Terrific, and I would add one more thing: the ability to collaborate in a truly open (as opposed to hierarchical) is liberating to the mind and leads to better ideas, ideas not constrained by workflows & business rules & general expectations, ones that should give the enterprise a little kick in the butt, so to speak. Maybe you can’t put metrics on that in the beginning, but I would argue these things are, in the end, measurable. You can’t not notice a flow of good ideas and things that are suddenly happening.

Small is the new… small

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When it comes to innovation, it pays to be small. Or does it?

I think sometimes programmers forget how much work it is to create software at large companies. What may seem like a no-brainer five line code change to us on the outside is perhaps five man-weeks of work once you factor in all the required process overhead. – Jeff Atwood

And the same goes for any other ideas; those who are represented by a programming code, and all the others. If you run a one-man shop, you only have to convince yourself to do such-and-such. If you have five bosses, you have to convince them and their bosses and a dozen more stakeholders, etc. So, how come big companies are still able to innovate at all?

Maybe it’s got something to do with the millions of dollars and man-days.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to a man with a vision. And the guts to make his vision a reality. Some of these men, despite the popular misconception, work at big companies. And somehow, somehow, they disrupt the existing order and by-pass the processes, regulations, compliance, and make shit happen.

And when they do, they have resources that small-timers can only dream of. That’s why Silverlight was developed at Microsoft and not in someone’s garage. Having the money and/or the clout helps.

Small it beautiful. Small is also… small. It’s only those times when markets change, completely, when a single guy with an idea and determination can change the world on his own, such as Wozniak did with Apple. As much as it pains me, those times are far and few in between.

1 Reason Why Microsoft CRM 4.0 Is CRM 1.0

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The latest “Ah-ha!” moment was that Oracle “gets it”. Now, does Microsoft?

According to Paul Greenberg, Dennis Pombriant, and Brent Leary, it does not. All of them concluded, on record (episode 9 of PG‘s Experience on the Edge podcast), that Microsoft should have spoken about the social aspects of CRM, the blending of social and operational aspects of CRM, at their Convergence event, and that it did not.

It was the last guest on the show, Marshall Lager, who pointed to the elephant in the room. Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do; I haven’t seen the version 4 but up until the 3, comparing MS CRM to (pick Oracle, Salesforce, and even SugarCRM) was like comparing Windows Vista to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It seemed unfair.

Microsoft hasn’t got up to speed on the operational side of things; no wonder it’s got no time decorating their product with cool Web 2.0 gizmos.

But they will. They “get it”, and Mr Lager said as much when he mentioned his private talk with Steve Ballmer who supposedly “gets it”, and if the chairman of Microsoft gets it, the company does, too, no doubt about it. It will just take some time for us to see it.

The question is, of course, what the “Web 2.0″ will look like when Microsoft finally catches up. Whether, for example, integrating “social networks” (as in facebook, etc.) into CRM applications will still have any value at all, given that users come and go as they please, and off they go once a new “disruptor” commands their attention. (some say Twitter is stealing Facebook hotshots – is that true? who cares?)

I see no reason why I should end differently than with my take on Oracle: the establishment won’t take use into the dreamy 2.0 world. Why not? Because they are “catching up”.

Either you are leading or you are catching up, but you certainly can’t be doing both.

The road to Mobile 2.0

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An interesting presentation on “Mobile 2.0″ (and I suppose Retail 2.0, Private banking 2.0 are to follow – actually, they are) by Rudy de Waelle:

Too bad some of the slides aren’t legible when resized to the Slideshare format – it shows the weaknesses of Slideshare and proves the need to adapt your content for people to consume when the speaker isn’t in the room. Having said that, it’s information-packed and really useful if you are keen on watching the latest buzz in telco.

Word of the day

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Target Marketing’s annual survey of marketers revealed that direct mail delivers the strongest ROI for customer acquisition and second strongest ROI for customer retention (behind email).

My take: The direct mail-naysayers can take all the potshots they want — the marketing community has spoken. I would, however, like to see Target Marketing add WOM marketing and social media to their list of methods next year. Cumbaya marketing — the darling of some of you (you know who you are) — didn’t make the list this year, and hopefully never will.” – Ron Shevlin [emphasis mine]

Kumbaya marketing – hey, yeah, that’s me alright.

Tell you what, though: whoever purports to find “ROI” in direct-mail, of all things, in customer acquisition and retention is right in the sense that dead-tree mail is cheap and there are still people out there opening and reading all their mail instead of putting the spam-mail where it belongs, the waste basket. Fine with me. But is it really the method of reaching 21st century, educated, opinionated customers? Is it really?

Yes, the shock of seeing where the market is vs where it should be.

Shooting the duck blindfolded

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I’m reading Founders at Work, a rather chatty collection of interviews that Jessica Livingston made with 25 software startup founders. It will be an even more interesting read 5 years from now, given that not all companies covered are, uh, current heavyweights (Apple – sure, Excite – wwwwhoat?)

There’s an interesting thought in the chapter about Adobe. Charles Geschke (co-founder) explains Adobe’s continued success and market leadership by “shoot[ing] at where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is.” (p. 290).

Now, the story of Adobe’s success was that of 80′s and 90′s. Look at the market now: release cycles are no longer counted in years and perhaps not even in months anymore. Can you still bet real money on where the software market is going to be in, say, 5 years from now? My hunch is – not that much. Which could explain the amount of copycats in the Web 2.0 arena and not much real innovation in terms of truly new products, experiences, etc. Everyone’s waiting to see where the platforms will be, what business models will emerge, what kind of real value is there waiting to be created and distributed.

Which doesn’t invalidate Geschke’s notion, not by any measure; it just makes the shooting the duck even more difficult, as if the duck was going in several directions at once and you were blindfolded. Good luck with that.