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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
IIR's Mobile CRM, Bupadest, Dec 2008
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
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Game on
Joel Spolsky delivered a rather painful blow to Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman and other pushers of wishful thinking. He says:
[W]hat’ts been driving me crazy over the last year… an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it’s Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random gibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story.
Ouch.
Add to that the recent backlash against the Long Tail, and we’ve finally got a discussion going. And that’s great.
The last couple of years have been incredibly productive in terms of new thinking, experimenting with approaches to business problems, etc. - but we’ve perhaps got too carried away. As it happens when one is in a middle of a “creative rush”, the critical mind gets to stand by and wait for its moment.
I am as guilty as the next guy of milking analogies and anecdotes to examine trends and arrive at conclusions that were at the time of writing speculative at best. It’s the nature of punditry. Whether or not there’s an agenda involved is besides the point: pushing the envelope always includes holding your breath and hoping your assumptions work.
I believe in the need of advancing unproven ideas, and I don’t mind stretching it way too far; it just makes for a great topic for discussion. You’ll never get far enough if you just crunch numbers. Numbers are boring - by themselves.
But - but but but - at some point the discussion must get real. Call it reality check, it needs to happen. Not too soon and not a minute later.
There is not a better testing ground for ideas than the marketplace. The Long Tail is an idea that is going to be either proven or refuted in the marketplace. So is the “flat Earth”. So is “CRM 2.0″.
What the critics of the above-mentioned ideas are saying is that the marketplace has rejected them, or not proved them enough anyway. Good stories aside, these ideas either have enough merit to survive (and adapt, morph, etc.) or they will die a natural death. Hopefully not without a good fight.
Bring it.
Quote of the day
A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products. - Kontra
Certainly a well-pointed argument. I would think, though, that creating conceptual products is a way of having your engineers and designers release their frustrations from the innovation race where every victory is hard-fought yet short-lived.
What will Amazon stand for in 20 years?
What does the word Amazon evoke in your mind?
Could be the river in Brazil. That’s if you are a nomad who’s been traveling the jungles of South America for the past 15 years without having met a human being (except for those pesky cannibals).
Otherwise, it’s probably books.
Or, it could be the cloud computing platform Amazon provides; that’s if you are a software developer.
These two don’t seem to be complementary services you would expect from a large web retailer. Yet, as Nicholas Carr writes, Amazon Web Services have happened almost inevitably. As Amazon’s gross margins are quite low, the company has needed to build a very efficient and open computing platform. Which, in turn, turned out to be a new revenue opportunity on its own merits.
IBM used to sell typewriters; and I still remember the old IBM clocks telling time on Czech railway stations.
Nokia used to produce bike and car tires.
They didn’t cling to their business models when an opportunity arose. Great companies don’t; they grab the opportunity by the neck, go with it, and change along the way. And so it’s quite possible Amazon will be the undisupted leader in [fill in your computing fantasy here] in 2020; books long gone.
Take a look at your incumbent of choice: old Telcos, licensed software vendors, city councils. Which one seems to get it? Does Microsoft? Does your government?
Why “good enough” is good enough
Humans strive for perfection. Or do we? David Schatsky of Jupiter Research reviews the trend to towards cheaper and less-than-perfect goods and finds it interesting. I find it symptomatic of a well-known phenomenon - Moore’s Law.
Compact cassette was introduced in 1963 and hasn’t been end-of-lifed until early 00’s. Compact Disc is about 20 years younger, and is already on the verge of obsolesce. While MP3 is nowhere close to be unseated as the current format of choice, it will eventually meet the same end.
When standards change too quickly, it doesn’t make sense to invest too much in “getting it right” since we’ll have to be getting something else right very soon. Read more
Small is the new… small
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.
Shooting the duck blindfolded
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.
“Me, Inc.” revisited
What if all cubicles had a security camera streaming a live feed to YouTube? What if they do? What if the cubicle-dwellers are playing theatre as if they were, in fact, being broadcasted to unknown masses?
Via Johnnie Moore - “64 per cent [of Brits] said they in effect became somebody else as they reached their desk.” (Financial Times) As opposed to a third of the straight-talking Dutch, and I suppose the number doesn’t get any lower than that.
And come performance review time, there is no actual person in the room: only avatars.
I have just finished the Free Agent Nation, so count me biased. As much as I’d like to blame The Man, I can’t: we do it to ourselves voluntarily. Accepting the caste system (Junior Widget Cranker, Senior Widget Cranker, Vice President Of Widget Cranking), feeding on the corporate new-speak (team-player, goal-oriented, place-your-dash-separated-slogan-here), separating work (as in creating value to be exchanged for another value) from life itself; such is the unfortunate legacy of the Industrial Age. So yes, it’s only natural to play Kabuki theater while being “at work”. An actual human being wouldn’t survive there.
It will take a generation of free agents to change that.
Are Web 2.0 Companies Getting Serious?
Perhaps there wasn’t much to twitter about at SXSW08, but this is certainly a healthy development:
These days, many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are working hard to turn their visions into sustainable businesses, or they’re toiling away within the larger companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) that bought them out early on.
“Serious people” don’t take Web 2.0 seriously. And many times they are right to laugh at it. Nobody wants to ride into another Bubble.
What makes it different this time, though, is that big players are getting onboard. Web 2.0 might have started as an insurgency but it’s being co-opted by the establishment. Company-wide “Twitters” will be as common as company-wide IM.
Selling out to the enterprises is only one way to monetize but it sure could be a good way, given how enterprises like to throw money bags at buzzwords that have gained momentum.
(via Alan Patrick)
Sometimes, Coffee Is Just Coffee
… and rose is a rose is a … who gives a damn.
via Chris Carfi - Starbucks is now offering a $1 coffee. Say what? Shocking, yes, but not unwelcome. I crave rich experiences and am willing to pay extra for the atmosphere, etc., but there’s something to be said about $5 cup of java. I’ve been a regular of Coffee Heaven here in Prague (even better than Starbucks), and you can pay more for a latte and cheesecake there than you would for a whole lunch with espresso at a nearby restaurant. Starbucks may have started the coffee-awareness boom and it might have just realized it’s gone too far. I would certainly hope so.
To Quit or Not?
Seth Godin has a gift, a very American one I might add, of storytelling that makes holding his books and turning the pages a joy. Such is The Dip, a brief etude on when to quit (and when not to): a literary dessert.
It has 80-something pages but could easily be condensed to just one:
- Be #1 at whatever you are doing.
- To get there, you will, after the initial outburst of energy, get to a point where you will need to sacrifice your whole self to cross the line that separates masters from has-beens
- You have to know if you’ve got what it takes; if not, quit, and don’t be ashamed of it.
Anybody could tell you that, yet it’s one thing to absorb a bulleted list and another to give it 2 hours of reading and pondering. I suppose this is what separates true writers from people who have an opinion and can write; I, for one, can’t get myself to spend any more time on an idea I have already covered here, which could explain both the scarcity of content lately and the lack of continuity… but I digress.
The Dip is a motivational book, and I recommend reading it whenever you feel like giving up and going with the flow, not sticking your head high, taking the easy way. Time is the scarcest of resources, and it doesn’t make sense wasting it on being just 60% good, 40% happy, or 55% motivated.
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