Google Glass has been very big on the news since 2012 and recently we've even seen venture capitalists claiming that its advent would create a new space for investment in start-ups. It's worth hearing how Sergey Brin presents that initiative and then consider things carefully from the standpoint of human behavior, not technology.
I found this very interesting quote today:
So, for good and for bad, I believe Blackberry is attached at the hip to Exchange. As Microsoft loses share to Google in the enterprise, something I believe is bound to happen, Blackberry will lose share to Android as well. Wil and I are cases in point.avc.com, A VC, Jan 2010
Aside from the fact that it does make a very valid point on the tight coupling between Exchange Server and Blackberry technologies, therefore about the likely evolution of RIM's market share as Google increases its share of the smartphone and mail server markets, this post reminded me of a thought I've had a number of times over the past few weeks. It deals with collateral damage. Collateral damage in technology products and their adoption that is.
In 2009 I decided to try Chrome as a browser. Initially it was just this: a trial. The point of fact is that 9 or 10 months later, I'm still browing the web on Chrome. For some reason, Google's browser was "sticky" enough for me to make it my main browser, even though for the first couple of weeks I missed some of the functionality provided by Firefox add-ons like Zotero, WiseStamp for HTML signatures with my email on Google Apps, ColorZilla, add-ons with web developer tools, enhanced analytics via a GreaseMonkey based add-on... and a couple of others. These add-ons are what I call collateral damage, because my intention was not to stop using them, but because they were tightly coupled with a platform product that I ditched for a better one, they went down the drain too and I adopted other ways of doing the things that these add-ons were designed to do. Collateral damage.
In practical terms, if you're in a role of product manager / product owner, this means that:
Exciting times! And by the way, do read all of Fred Wilson's post.
PS: I just love the way the Zemanta editor generates in-text links obviously doing some seriously good work in analyzing my babble. What I dislike is that Zemanta does not allow me to define the title of the post on my blog and does not support my defining categories for the re-blogging I'm doing.
Just read a piece about where Google might be in ten years and considering the success of Gmail between 2004 and now, the author might just be right even though his forecasts may seem wild at times (e.g. Android prevailing in the mobile OS wars). That gives me an opportunity to comment and discuss a bit further Google's amazing ability to execute beautifully a bold strategy of massive innovation to deliver on an audacious vision to organize the world's information.
Interestingly Devinda Hardawar (@devindra on Twitter), the post's author, reminds us that Gmail was launched only in 2004. Few people can argue it's gaining traction in the segment of people who use predominantly email in SaaS mode and even making inroads into the segment of more traditional users who are stuck with legacy solutions like Outlook Express. Gmail grew 43% in 2008 and took #3 spot in August leaving AOL behind. It's gaining momentum and is probably a good indication of what Google can do in terms of winning market share with a patient approach that it can afford thanks to its advertising revenues.
Furthermore Devindra makes a couple of very powerful statements regarding Google Wave, stating his belief that it's much more important than it may seem on the surface and could well revolutionize the way knowledge work gets done. In keeping with a recent post on this blog, I very much agree with him and do intend to spend more time testing Wave, not dismiss it as Scoble has done, foolishly in my opinion.
Google ability to consistently pursue specific targets is an amazing characteristic of the company. They've been able to roll out a number of major services over the past decade accomplishing key strategic targets with each of them:
Arguably, there's more and there are other ways of viewing what Google is doing, but in every case you'll find great consistency and clarity of purpose in strategy execution.
Looking at the string of their acquisitions over the past decade (another way to assess strategy execution), the consistency of purpose is obvious and their ability to integrate acquired companies and technologies is impressive. Some people tend to focus too much on plays that did not turn out to be successful and fail to see the bigger picture: Google successfully embeds 80% of its acquisitions in the Google system, when the market average is much much lower (I'd say 20% based on the business news I've followed for the past 20 years).
Significant and successful moves included:
Google is recorded as having purchased 59 companies for a total amount that is hard to assess but likely stands in the region of 15-18 billion USD. The track record of acquisitions can in no way be considered as bad. In fact I know only of one company that is better: Cisco. Both Google and Cisco are hugely analytical players, with extra smart employees on board, giving huge attention to recruitment and equally huge attention to acquisitions.
Another thing worth mentioning is Google's creation of an arm dedicated to early stage investments, which is called Google Ventures, a fund that started this year with 100 million USD. Google Ventures has made a couple of very smart bets in clean-tech with smart grid technology (Silver Spring Networks) and biotechnology (Adimab)...
The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.
However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.
This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough) is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say.
On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.
Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.
Today I spent some time going through the "WTF is social media - one year later" presentation, which I find excellent. It's embedded below for your convenience and below are some of my thoughts on the matter.
The WTF material is really good stuff full of common sense, good thinking and it provides a sobering view of what this thing called social media could be used for. Focusing on fundamentals of business and on phenomena we've been able to observe over the past few months and years, the authors actually help business people who are a bit lost with all the chatter about social media and collaborative workspace. Observations and statements of what "social media" (for lack of a better word) could be used for are excellent and it's a pitty there is only little content about concrete ways in which to leverage the different aspects of social media... but of course who wouldn't understand that the authors would gladly provide that as part of their services at Brand Infiltration ;)
Now the presentation is also excellent food for thought and here are a couple of those that emerged going through the slides:
So social media is probably an excellent phenomenon for specific businesses and for a whole range of purposes and not only marcoms as rightly pointed out by the authors of the presentation... But it's only a tool and as such it's only as good and relevant as the skill with which it's applied to the pursuit of coherent objectives by congruent organizations who will make more than half-hearted committments to the new world of open participation. And that may not be a world for everyone, so expect to see more established organizations die as their environment changes to the point of transforming some long established practices into deadly sins.
- people gladly engage when there's a worthy cause for which there could not possibly be the slightest suspicion of commercial manipulation or commercial
- the rejection of initiatives that seem to be "remote-controlled" by major brands is almost immediate in many cases
- when a space is new like for example the blogosphere a few years ago or Twitter a couple of months ago, the signal / noise ratio is good enough to derive value out of that space with spectacular returns on investment whereas things become much more difficult when more people bring more content and more potential interactions
- the possibility of interactions does not means that there will be interactions, let alone true conversations where people actually listen to other people and truly seek to understand what they mean by what they say, an effort that requires focus of attention and that can be tedious enough to require far more time than is allowed by the culture of the immediate, fast and short of social media
- interactions don't mean transactions let alone economically useful or even profitable transactions
Paul Isakson recently presented an updated version of his excellent "What's next in marketing and advertising" presentation. His content is embedded below for your convenience and my thoughts follow.
The presentation contains many excellent observations and assertions, broadly making the case fora radical shift in the way professionals of this industry see their work and the world. Points I particularly liked in Isakson's presentation:
Isakson accurately identifies some pretty important trends that do represent a change that may explain why this recession is particularly hard for advertising, with recent figures from the US market showing sustained fall in spending. In short the world is changing and as people, who now have a voice in the public space thanks to the web, become better educated about advertising and marketing tactics they are less likely to fall prey to mechanisms that used to work so well... Or in fact seemed to work so well because there was no real way to tell and everybody accepted a situation of waste of as much as 50% of money spent to convince consumers to trust specific brands and products. That bit about measuring the effects of initiatives and having more relevant petrics is missing from the presentation and I think it should be there because metrics is not just a minor operational aspect but rather a highly strategic one: if you derive knowledge from unstructured information and act on that knowledge you do have an edge that is likely to be worth multiples of what it cost you to create it.
Overall excellent food for thought again. Thank you Mr Isakson!
I just read this excellent report on the status of innovation in the US (link kindly provided by the excellent Leeander) and I find it just amazing that the authors show a great deal of analytical rigor both in assessing the past and suggesting ways for the future in the form of a public private partnership. The article is long but very well worth your time.
With this kind of approach I see the US going back to the very top of innovation performance. It's time we did a similar assessment in Europe instead of just celebrating innovation and creativity in a very institutional manner.
This is not only a good panel discussion, but also one that has some good news. The time might be close when people can resume investing. Perhaps it's also time for Europe to realize that our economic situation is way better than the US for a number of reasons starting with the fact that we are nowhere near the level of debt that prevails in the US be it government or private debt. It's just so sad we don't have anyone to carry the torch of recovery on the political front. As someone told me recently, a recession can be a self-fulfilling prophecy whereas business & economic progress does not happen by mere wishful thinking.
I came across Vopium today and from what I read on their site and elsewhere online:
Anyway, I downloaded the software on my E61i. More in a few days.
Last Thursday BusinessQuests helped organize a conference on the financial situation. We had Prof. Bruno Colmant, who also happens to be the CEO of Euronext, and Prof. Philippe Defeyt on the panel and they presented a number of interesting developments to explain the causes and the dynamics of the current situation. Aside from the content, which is very much within my field of attention, the event has been a great opportunity for me to test the adoption of online tools by a predominantly tech-conservative audience. Results of my tests in a future post. This one is about the content of the conference.
Here are a few of their most noteworthy points:
Overall good stuff and an interesting evening although I doubt anyone got out of the room with clear answers. One of the reasons why we put totether a participative site on Ning to give attendees an opportunity to continue the discussion and access photos, video and notes from the event. I am curious to see whether people will start conversations and see the opportunity to take an active part in this crucial public debate...
For me this has been a great way to test how a more conservative audience of late adopters of technology reacts to the usage of tools like Amiando (excellent stuff) for setting-up the conference or Ning after the conference. Furthermore, we ran a survey on SurveyMonkey about the economic situation, its causes according to the audience and the assessment of the quality of information people got from the media and from banks. A vast majority of the people (we polled about 30% of the attendees) were really unhappy with the way banks handled the matters pertaining to the crisis. I'll publish some of the conclusions later this week.
Below is a mind map hosted at WiseMapping, but it's in French, the language of the conference.
What inspiration and fun Philippe Stark can be! There's more than meets the eye in what he says in this presentation...
Today is one of these days when I can express better than on most other days why I carefully remain on a spot that is common frontier to several seemingly different worlds: business, marketing, technology, psychology, software development, complex adaptive systems, social media... At the end of the day this is also what defines BusinessQuests: the often treacherous area defined by 'business + innovation + technology', where starting from what drives people is a fundamental starting point. BusinessQuests is where people's quests drive business value and where people's values resonate with quests in business.
What a good day this was! Started early, spent the day in two cities
while cooperating with people in 7 different areas of the world and
discovering refreshing perspectives... I met some pretty creative and passionate entrepreneurs, got exposure to beautiful artistic creations including some nice stuff with Philippe Stark (an awesome super-passionate creator) and had a speedy meeting with Nicolas Martignole a leading practitioner of agile practices in the field of software development.
What's the common thread? Several things:
Apologies for being philosophical on this one, but some things need to be approached from a different angle and make it necessary to use the perenial principle of beautiful creation: COUS, that is Combination of Opposites and Union of Similars... More on that in a future post :)
There's a very interesting analysis by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum on innovation called "Building an innovation nation". It shows how different regions stack-up on the global innovation map and the authors identify assets that are required to drive innovation. It's worth reading, and prompts me to make a couple of comments, some of which have to do with the random nature of our world...
My comments on the piece are in three areas:
Having spent the best part of the past twelve years operating on the treaterous frontier of progress defined by the combination 'business + innovation + technology' the phenomenon of stubbornly odd pursuits of generally accepted truths makes me wonder sometimes. It does seem to remain valid with each wave of innovation imposing fads as reality for as long as it takes for deception to sink in thus leaving room for people who actually deal with the nuts and bolts of new practices to create forms that can be adopted. In this article we'll identify what I consider to be the top 5 fallacious propositions in today's social media environment.
A couple of stories with 5 major and often iritating common points:
So what's are the common points in those stories:
I'm quite certain you have your own stories that resonate with the five points above. We need to speak some basic no-nonsense truths in this space, else bubbles inflate and explode in often painful way.
This interview on the future of work as shaped by modern infotech and social media is extremely interesting not only because of the implications for social infotech tools in business, but also because it suggests an evolution of business and the enterprise into more flexible and adaptive systems. Are we going towards a less deterministic way of running business? One combining chaos and order, considering the enterprise as a chaordic system... that would be much, much better than enterprise 2.0: should we call it enterprise x.0?
Actually it's quite interesting to see that in different fields the chaordic vision is emerging as the next generation way of doing things, which is one of the reasons why I try to remain involved in several areas where I see those patterns:
These are just such exciting times. We're in a world that is engaged in more than a mere transition or paradigm shift. This is complete mutation and our challenge as individuals is to become mutants firstly by way of introspection and change within because that's where the way of approaching the world changes. We need to abandon the child's illusion of power: each is powerless, yet completely necessary no matter how "small", for the entire system to morph itself into the most relevant shape given circumstances.
Some of the implications:
Late January at Digital Life Design in Munich, there was an interesting panel with Nasim Taleb (always insightful and full of common sense | his site) and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (always fascinating pioneer of psychology applied to finance and the economy | his Nobel profile ). Taleb has a realistic approach by saying that what he basically want is not to improve forecasts but rather to review the way the world is working in order to make it resistant to forecastign errors. Like Roubini he advocates the nationalization of banks. I suspect he means the "utility" part, not the "casino" part of the banking system (for a view of utility vs casino listen to the podcast at the end of this post). Kahneman shows how human psychology is a key driving force for understanding organizations, companies, the economy and markets because, as he very correctly points out, these entities do not exist in any other way than through human behavior.
Video and comments below.
Kahneman shares fascinating insights taken from experiement in
psychology showing how ill prepared we are by education to deal with
the unexpected and with uncharted territories.If you're interested in Kahneman's work, reading the Tsversky-Kahneman paper of 1974 on Judgment under Uncertainty.
In
that paper the authors discuss in a remarkable and most interesting
manner the importance of prejudice, pre-conceived truths, integration
of past-patterns and beliefs affect human judgment and decision making
regarding uncertain events. It's a most recommended read for anyone
active in a highly unstable environment although like all good
scientific papers it does not provide ready-made recipes: you'll have
to do your own introspection and adapt what you learn to your own
situation. In this discussion Kahneman makes a strong point showing how the mismatch between the time-scale of the individual and the time-scale of society is a key factor to take into account if there's any serious intent to reform the financial system. He also makes a great point about the fact that the situation we have now did not happen simply because of incompetent, arrogant, self-serving, greeding and dishonest financiers (and not all financiers are such animals; I have the privilege of knowing more than a few very decent and brilliant finance professionals who will be part of the solution). Kahneman rightly suggests that every participant in the economy has a share of responsibility because each one of them accepted the system, indulged into the benefits he or she could extract from the system regardless of the relevance or economic sense of gaining those benefits.
Taleb develops his views of the roots of the crisis, blasting the CFA and business schools for teaching portfolio theory in the process, what should be done now and why it's important to get down to what the exact situation is no matter how bleak so as to be able to resume work from a known starting point instead of being in a constant slump. Nasim Taleb has been focusing on how "ideas" and beliefs actually fool us. I'm currently reading Fooled by Randomness, which I recommend. Listening to Taleb in this video and reading his materials you will see why a deterministic approach to economics, finance and business management is simply an illusion, an abstract construct of the mind. The world is chaotic and the order we're trying to build in it is emergent as opposed to pre-determined. Taleb speaks of a complex world and highlights inconsistencies of economic agents who insure their cars but don't insure multi-million dollar portfolios because that would harm returns.
His take is that the current financial crisis is largely due to the underestimation of extremely rare events by financial experts and the quants who built sophisticated financial models for funds. That's one part of the problem, the other being that:
Below is a podcast of a recent program of the BBC in which you can listen to former President Clinton's economic adviser discussing the current economic situation and sharing a way of looking at the financial system as being a "utility attached to a casino", the utility being the payments system and the lending system for individuals and companies. The utility is too serious a part of finance to be left in the hands of bankers. Taleb is 1000% correct when he says that the "utility" part should be controlled by government and the hedge funds should be left alone to do what they want and never be bailed out by government.
A few short months ago there were worries about marketing budgets being cut but most professionals were sounding reassuring in saying that the bulk of marketing budgets would be transferred to online and interactive initiatives. The theory went that brands would want to keep taking initiatives and would continue the same intensity of communication by shifting their marketing dollars to more affordable channels like the Internet.
Even then this thesis did not seem to hold against careful analysis and discussions with senior decision makers even back then. Recent news seem to confirm the pain to come for agencies and marketing professionals, irrespective of the nature of their business, with an exception that is not what most people seemed to think, but makes economic sense.
A recent survey carried out by the ANA (see clipping at the end of this post) shows a bleak outlook for big classes of marketing spending and therefore for agencies and professionals offering services in those fields. I think this is particularly relevant for the European market because it’s only a matter of time before we see a similar contraction in Europe and because, with just a few exceptions, European decision makers tend to be even more reluctant to any spending in hard times (it’s a sort of all-or-nothing approach to marketing budgets). More specifically here are a few points worth considering:
The main implications of the way things pan out are:
It does seem that the crazivity of the past couple of years is going to be out of question for some time…
What’s crazivity? It’s initiatives that are primarily crazy and yet presented as creative: in this business the crazier something is the more creative it’s called even though it’s not always so and that often comes at the expense of relevance of an initiative with respect to the brand’s goals.
Marketers are cutting costs, putting pressure on agencies to do more with less, and reducing budgets much more than they were six months ago
37% of respondents today plan to reduce budgets by more than 20%, up substantially from the 21% in the first survey.
- Departmental travel and expense restrictions (87% vs. 63% in the previous survey)
- Reducing advertising campaign media budgets (77% vs. 69%)
- Reducing advertising campaign production budgets (72% vs. 63%)
- Challenging agencies to reduce internal expenses and/or identify cost reductions (68% vs. 63%)
- Eliminating or delaying new projects (58% vs. 61%)
“In the current economic environment, there’s a need for brand building that’s right for the times - that acknowledges consumers’ financial circumstances
For some marketers, that will mean skewing their media mix toward promotional spending and direct marketing. For others it will mean framing a new, relevant and timely brand message.
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Here's an interesting take on the Geithner plan for shoring up the banks' financial situation. The article makes a compelling argument as to why the plan is not really a great deal for would-be investors and definitely a loosing proposition for taxpayers. So is the Treasury's plan destined to fail? Are the core causes of this mess addressed?
With my training in business management and finance I can see the validity of the issue raised here. In fact, I'd be in greater agreement with Nouriel Roubini's recent position that the banking system should be nationalized; with the understanding of course that only the payments and credit system for businesses and individuals would come under the government's fold.
All this makes me realize how wise the Belgian legislation is when it mandates that each company's and citizen's debt be centralized and monitored so as to remain within reasonable limits with respect to that entity's revenues. At the end of the day we should not forget that this whole mess comes because of:
These issues will not be addressed by the Treasury’s plan, but I hope we get down to tackling them rather sooner than later because doing more of the same will produce more of the kind of mess we’re seeing these days.
The Treasury Secretary announced his strategy for a better banking bailout. But subsidizing the purchase of bank assets and forcing mortgage writedowns is the wrong way to go.
The real problem in the housing market is the rampant job loss. Most Americans whose homes are worth less than their mortgages keep paying. The Boston Fed found that during the crushing downturn in Boston in the early 1990s, only 6% of the underwater homeowners defaulted.
Hence, the right plan should focus on crafting a break for people who've just lost their jobs, not the 85%-plus of Americans who keep paying even with negative equity.
The best formula for stemming foreclosures is a highly targeted plan to aid people who have lost their jobs. For this group, the moral hazard issue is less pronounced, since it's unlikely that Americans would risk unemployment to get a break on their mortgages.
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Nouriel Roubini’s (RGE – Wikipedia – Page at NYU Stern) interview on Bloomberg is something you ought to listen carefully (podcast at the end of this post) if you’re a business founder, a manager or an asset owner. It’s not exactly the sort of content that will boost your morale, but I don’t believe the Coué method is the right way to go because it’s much more than a mere crisis of confidence. On the other hand neither denial, nor pessimism are going to take us anywhere.
Rather a pragmatic take on the situation is an essential first step if you’re serious about adapting and being in a position to fully benefit from an eventually recovering economy. This is only one of the reasons why it’s worth getting down to some of the implications of this analysis for business. Today helping business people deal with anxiety and make sense of this chaos is part of my work in different industries, from commodities to tech-innovative sectors, in different areas of Europe. So what does a pragmatic analysis of the situation mean for business? Read on and listen to the podcast.
Economics have seldom been as crucial to business as today. That’s a fact across the board, from young industries enjoying the fat marging allowed by rapid innovation to older highly commoditized sectors. So it only makes sense to be listening to scholars and thought leaders – at least those who have been issuing alerts for the past decade or so: Roubini, Stiglitz, Krugman, Taleb, Bernstein, Bookstaber, Tobin, Thoma…
Roubini’s assertions – well documented, no doubt – that the top US banks are probably insolvent and that China is probably in recession, not merely “just” growing slowly, are causes for concern. His analysis during the interview with Bloomberg suggests the following:
The picture Roubini paints is pretty grim and scary, but factually speaking he’s probably right and we need to acknowledge and take stock of the situation as it is right not, not by discovering ugly bits and nasty pieces of the big picture in a seemingly unending stream of randomly chosen snapshots. Nothing is more damaging to business confidence than the constantly disproval of previously accepted opinions as to the scope and depth of the crisis.
With most economies in a state of frozen shock, difficult access to cash and several assets fast becoming almost illiquid, the degree of anxiety is high in business, for owners, managers and employees alike. The principal cause is not the crisis itself, but the uncertainty about its real nature, its consequences and its true extent as well as the often unspoken lack of confidence that governments know how to solve this one.
So considering the work I do with customers in Europe, the most important implications for business are as follows:
Despite government’s efforts to pump cash into the economy, banks seem completely upset, fearful and paralyzed to the point of actually failing to making funds available even to established and fundamentally healthy businesses. So, if you’re managing an established business, perhaps a family owned business that cannot rely on access to global money markets, you need to consider the following:
For more recent going concerns, the issues highlighted above for older and more established companies
are valid and should be considered although one may assume that in many
cases younger going concerns have better patterns of adoption of new
tools and methods. In your case, you need to be concerned with your
customer portfolio because unlike older more established companies you
are likelier to be more exposed to commercial and customer credit risk.
One of my customers is in this situation and we know full well that it
is crucial to keep close contact with all key customers and to go the
extra mile to share a bit of the burden of going through this storm.
Something that’s been possible in this case was to agree on a
schedule for payments such that the immediate pressure on key
customers’ cash situation is reduced by 10% to 15% and those customers
commit to a longer term supplier relationship with my client. Factors to be considered with special care include
Enjoy Roubini’s interview and visit his RGE site.
