Goodbye Knol

On 23rd November, 2011 – day before that is – Google announced it will close down Knol. A few days after its launch in 2008, I had ranted about Knol being a rip-off on Squidoo. Seth Godin – pretty much the insider at Squidoo – explains how they dealt with it.

Plagiarized products do not work, even if you throw in weight and technology behind it.

Simply Steve

“Aha, Mr. Steven Jobs. Welcome Sir. I daresay the world has gone into a mourning with your untimely death. And we are trying to understand why”. St. Peter’s at the Pearly Gates was both anxious and curious as he welcomed the technology magician
“Quite Simple”, said Jobs. “Let me show you” – and he unslung his backpack and took out a handful of Apple products and laid them out
“That’s it?”
“Yeh, that’s it. Sorry if you were expecting more but I guess you have to wait for some more while for that. Not until Bill shows up”, Jobs chuckled as he took a dig at his favorite punching bag

I woke up the news that Steve Jobs is no more. Pages of flowing eulogy has already gotten written by authors who are better and people who were lucky to have had personal run-ins with the great man. So I will, like Jobs’ product portfolio, keep this a short affair.

And Simple

If there is one lesson Jobs taught us businessmen it was simplicity. Simplicity in business models, simplicity in portfolios, simplicity in design and simplicity in commercial models. The world is already far too complex and evolution isn’t exactly an accelerated science – which means people in this world have far more deconstructions to handle than expect to have to do the same with technology. Technology whose calling card promised to make life simple in the first place. Jobs’ business played purely to that feeling. In world where everyone was designing with the SUV Syndrome, Steve Jobs discarded layer after layer of complexity to finally reach the core. And then he drew as few concentric circles as he could. Doing less is not a sin, doing more – and spectacularly complicating things, is.

With this knowledge, what would you do to your product? To your business? And to your life?

PS: This post is my tribute to Steve Jobs. I wrote in on Pages on my i-pad 1 and posted using the WordPress app. Thank you, Steve. I know it’s tough, but try to get some rest Sir.

The Seven Thens

With a starting point in a situation, one can choose their turns. There is a way to go backwards in time, which is what quality assurers and detectives do – and call it root cause. They ask the question – “why?” (Toyota wanted that to be repeated five times. That many layers of reason hide the truth that each subsequent “why” pulls back). There is another turn however that leads to insights about the future. We will come to it but just a spot of background building

Organizations and decision makers have depended on analytics – or analysis – for making better, fact-based decisions. With an explosion of data, available both publicly and within organizational confines, coupled with sophistication of computational technology creating analytics is not as onerous as it once was. The great thing about analytics is that they are never dead-ends. They are not what I refer to as “terminal” (this is where a lot of data vendors have a problem because they have always seen – and called – their offerings as “terminals”). In order to glean true insights from analytics one must further the analysis. Furtherance happens either by extension (“this is fine, but how about a further analysis of all our lost businesses”) or collaboration (“hey Steve, I think there is something funny with our sales trend. Can we take a look at it together and try make sense of it?”). Thus, analytics almost always casts an eye to the future. When we stand at the cross roads of a situation and we want to take the turn towards understanding the future, what question do we ask?

“Then”?

“Then” sets us out on a path of inquiry that hurls us into the future. “Then, once I have the current price of a security, I look up what the price trend has been in the past”. “Then?”. “Then I try to figure out if there is a price level from where it has bounced back so I could buy at that price”. “Then?”. “Then I place an order with my broker to buy at that price”. Theoretically we can go on but you get the drift. If you are building a product or service that has to do with user workflows, the word “then” is the best friend you can hope to have. Leave the “Why?” to the policemen.

Post Script 1: Of particular interest will be for interaction designers is this “then?” concept. Anyone has examples in action will post in comments, no?

Post Script 2: Someday a management consultant or an Ops Research person will work out the optimum number of “Then?”s required to capture most of forward workflows – till then let’s call this “The Seven Thens”. It lils nicely on the tongue

Picture courtesy: Deposit Photos

Bird-Tweeting-Revolution-Creating Fuss

“Sir, we have come up with this new innovative idea and wanted to run it past you. This is something we have moonlighted on for the past six months”. The group of youngsters looked visibly excited and their leader, in a striped shirt and chinos, held a laptop that obviously had some demo version of the “innovative idea”

“Nice”, the boss looked up, setting aside his Blackberry. “Give me an elevator pitch – I have a hard stop in 15 mins”

“Sir, this is something that will revolutionize the way people communicate”

“Hold it just there. We are an ERP company. What’s communication got to do with our business?”

“Umm, sir, we see your point. But if you just for one moment look outside, you will see how social tools like Instant Messaging, Skype, Facebook – for that matter RSS feeds – are changing the way we communicate and build networks. So yes, this is not to do with ERP, but we daresay just as interesting”, the young leader looked a little flustered but he gamely held on to the conversation

“Okay, proceed”, the boss man said, not sounding either entirely convinced or terribly interested

“This is like a communication paradigm where you can send instant updates that can be seen, essentially, by anyone with an Internet connection. So it is like an ocean where everyone pours in their bits of communication. But most interestingly it is possible for a user to create a list – a group if you may – of people who he is most interested in and he will get their updates instantly without having to search them out”

“Oh, that is like a chatroom combined with IM. That problem is already solved”, boss said, “and what’s wrong with email to multiple recipients?”

“But sir, in this you don’t need to know the email ID of people you are updating. They choose to get updates from you. In fact the analogy we have is that of a bird tweeting in the morning. When it tweets it never knows all who might listen to its tweet”

“Have you considered privacy? I may not like someone- let’s say the VP of Product Engineering at a competitor firm to see my updates”

“Great point Sir. So you can stop specific people from receiving your updates”

“Won’t work. They could take you to court because you just said that all updates are available for everyone. And look son, if I want to get someone’s updates I will just connect with him on Facebook. You are solving a problem that does not exist”

“That is exactly why this product is revolutionary, Sir. It creates an Open Facebook. A Facebook where everyone can follow everyone. At will. And similarly one could block access to whoever they don’t want to send updates to. And there is an immediacy of these updates because they must be less than 140 characters”

“What? What do you think you can communicate within 140 characters? Won’t work”

“But sir this could be the novel touch – forcing brevity on the world and..”

The boss interjected impatiently. “Like the world wants brevity. Have you asked, for example, our marketing guys about whether they want to send short messages to our clients?”

“Umm, we did Sir. The response, I am afraid was not very positive. They said they already have a Facebook page and that is where they connect with clients. And they were apprehensive that an open thing like this could be disastrous if there are too many negative things said about our products”

“See, those are my sentiments exactly. Look, the matter of communications is over-solved by the industry. We do not need another channel. My prognosis is that, if anything, there will be consolidation as people will want lesser channels to communicate, not more”

“Research done by sociologists however point that…”, the young leader, quite pushed to the brink made an attempt to recover

“Now look, as I said, I have a hard stop. But I would strongly advice you to not bother with Bachelor of Arts subjects like Sociology and Psychology and rather concentrate on core ERP technology. This bird tweeting in the morning thing is all hogwash”

“Sir, we – and all of us here – understand that while this is a new concept, it could revolutionalize…”

Visibly impatient, the boss curtly cut off the leader. “Revolutionize? Like what – start revolutions? People will start using this platform and start political movements”, he thundered, sarcasm oozing from his words. “I recommend you please go and focus on your core work., young men. Please don’t make me scrutinize your time-sheets for the past six months when you were building this bird-tweeting-revolution-creating product of yours”

This conversation never happened. But it could very well have. This is possibly how Twitter would have been killed if born within the precincts of a large technology company

PS: There could very well be a counter argument to this fictional anecdote. Is there a way this idea could have been pitched – to the same protagonists – to yield different (positive) results?

So long, Flip, and thanks for all the videos

Single use products are always living a dangerous life. They are precariously placed at the bottom of the food chain risking being devoured by stronger participants in the ecosystem that can do more – and better – than that one thing that single use products do. Actually, it is the more that counts first and the better always follows – we will keep this hypothesis for a later post 

Cisco, the owners of Flip cameras had bought the asset paying $590 million in 2009. Yesterday, they shut down the product. The act has attracted emotions ranging from sadness of parting (Kara Swisher of All Things D did a Zuckerberg interview with it once) to sagaciousness of inevitability (Felix Salmon said it wasn’t Cisco that killed Flip. It was Apple). The death of Flip brings to the forefront the narrow focus versus cast-the-net-wider approach of managing products.

The narrow approach is great so long as it fulfills a well defined market/human need in the most optimal manner (take products like bicycles, television sets etc.). Adjacencies – what strategists define as the immediate user-need neighborhood to existing propositions – are few in these cases (yes, one could attach a motor to the bicycle but that serves a totally different need where the physical exercise is taken out). Flip had not only multiple adjacencies but strong players in those adjacencies. And to Flip’s discredit, they did not do much to either explore those adjacencies or build strong ecosystems in the portable-movie-making device business. Anyone that could slap HD recording, AV signal out to a mobile-phone like device could eat Flip’s lunch. And they did (Felix is correct – i-phone killed Flip much before Cisco did).

Exploring and exploiting adjacencies should be a never ending process for a product strategist (ask your users the question – “what do you do three minutes before you start using our product and three minutes after you are done”). Adjacencies also consider ecosystems. People who used Flip were the ones that valued “immediate” over “control over filming”. What do people who prefer “immediate” generally do with their output? They mostly would want to circulate it within their networks, get it on their blogs, send to the newsroom and so on (silently add the word “immediate” before each comma in the last sentence and you get what I mean). Why was it that Flip never considered allowing these users to do that without having to transfer the media to another device first? And once wireless delivery was possible, how much time would have taken someone to realize that video calling was just a step away?

Cry not for Flip if you can. If you own a Flip (I do), keep it on your desk. Look at it each time you are thinking about product and business strategy

Big Fish. Small Fish.

Two species growing in a competitive environment usually results in the dominating specie pushing its traits down on the peripheral one. This is as true in nature as it is in mixed employment markets with labor mobility. Take the Bangalore IT/Software market for example

In this milieu, it is a no-brainer that the red bubble will dominate the blue when the two are fishing from the same end of the talent pool. This creates a conflict straight off the bat for the blue guys. Blue bubble guys want to run lean teams where the focus is on depth and not so much breadth. Their business success comes from having the best developers, best designers, best data-center optimizer, best customer service reps. The blue companies promote greater autonomy, greater flexibility and more horizontal career options. Jason Fried of 37Signals wrote a great piece in Inc on why he runs a flat company (impressed by his writing, I purchased and started reading his book “Rework”. Good work, Jason). In a strange sort of way the business success of the red bubble is quite the reverse of the blue. A services company creates fungibility in their resources so they can be deployed across projects and they want predictability over mavericks (imagine someone like Jason working for say CapGemeni). They also want to “make” their resources as senior as they can (within limits of reason, of course) because their billing to client is title driven in many cases. And it is imperative for these human resources to have people management skills – skills that do not focus on their domain as much as it does on managing people. The latter also leads the HR policies of the red bubble promote vertical career options aggressively.

This inherent business model conflict spills over to talent acquisition – and cultural fits – when these models co-exist in the same geographical area. And if that area happens to be in India, which is a rather hierarchical society, then the blue guys have the disadvantage of having to start with a poorly dealt hand. Companies in the product space in India face the challenge of employees looking at services companies and demanding an identical HR model – a square peg in a round hole essentially. Unfortunate as it is, the blue guys sometimes bring over senior management and HR specialists from these services companies, muddling even further the already muddy waters and worst, creating internal conflicts

It’s not all doom and gloom though. NASSCOM, the industry body in India, has been helping Product centric companies lately in making themselves, their differentiators and positioning more visible to the general audience. Niche consulting firms have been burning the midnight oil to ready the pitch and educate the industry in general. It may be early days to pass judgment whether things are reflecting the sought after change, but the effort surely is in place. Like all pioneers, the product centric companies that have braved the first – and inclement – winds have done exceptionally well in hanging on there – you have our respect.

PS: My colleague Mahesh Ramakrishnan, faced with this same challenge, had written this guest piece for the blog. Mahesh and I continue with our crusade.

Waving Good-bye

I had waxed eloquent praise on Google Wave as it was previewed to the world. Call that irrational exuberance. I was dead wrong – Google killed Wave today.

Steve Johnson, writing a guest post on CDI, pretty much had it nailed. When an engineering led company attempts at stuff that needed market understanding upfront, the results are often predictable. (Note to self: Will Buzz go the same way? Perhaps it will)

Google’s core strength is search and it does that damn well. The trouble is when it brings its search-grip on to a different ball game and expects that to work. It doesn’t always.

PS: This post comes after a long hiatus. Apologies. I was out in the markets, which if you have read the links would possibly pardon me doing.

The Facebook ID

Facebook announced today that it will allow its members to choose an user name. This may sound terribly trivial because that is the first thing that one does while opening up any account – like say an e-mail id. However social networks that base themselves on mutual trust necessarily has to accept members on a disclosed full name basis. That is the cornerstone of social relationships – we shake hands and pronounce our names to each other. There is a downside to this transparency model in network implementation. This model has to allow for duplicate names – there are four people on Facebook with the same name as I. In this scenario comes the Facebook ID.

Facebook ID essentially introduces a smart version of what database designers call “perm id”s – an unique identifier for each member. The current identifier (note the profile.php.id indicator on your address bar as a profile loads up in Facebook) is numeric and non-intuitive. Allowing members to choose their IDs will allow members to treat their Facebook presence as good as a web profile. So you can just let your friends know that they can find you at http://facebook.com/first.last, first.last being your Facebook ID.

It is also interesting to see how the lines between social networking and professional networking are disappearing – albeit slowly. Professional networking site LinkedIn has been allowing people to choose what they call a “public profile”. LinkedIn displays an URL where you can modify the last component – essentially creating your ID. Some months back LinkedIn started the “What are you working on” status updates that look pretty much like the Facebook “What’s in your mind”. Anyone who has used both Facebook and LinkedIn will know how similar they have started to look in terms of widgets, applications, social clustering etc. Interestingly, even as they converge, they fundamentally remain walled gardens.

Anthropologists intrigued about the difference of human interactions in a social context and workplace (or professional) context would do well to study the differences that remain between Facebook and LinkedIn at different points in time. That will be a nice time-study in the metamorphosis – and possible convergence – of social interactions in worlds that were earlier considered rather kosher.

Hitting your Shipment Date?

I don’t like Microsoft Project. Allow explanation.

MS-Project is great when one starts planning for an initiative. Especially if it is a large and complex one. The software allows a lot of control on task planning, resource allocation, levelling etc. Moreover, your boss possibly wouldn’t sign off until he has actually seen a MS-Project. Boss agrees, champagne’s popped, Pizza sauce stains boss’s $125.95 Lilly-white shirt. Much happiness flows. Then things start turning bad.

After a few months into the project, boss asks how likely are we to ship the software on the 25th of December? Umm…see…of the ninety four tasks, eight are in red and there were a couple of unplanned activities that came by, Jeff ate a really bad Turkey on Thanksgiving and couldn’t check himself (leave alone his code) in for a good week…so. The trouble is, you still don’t have a number – like “Chief, we are shipping on 25th December with a 19% probability”. And that is why MS-Project is useless other than to clip-board carriers who come at status meetings.

You want a statistical estimate of shipping probability? Simple, just ask the Product Managers and Engineers to bet money on their dates. I am serious. Convert the money pools into odds and that is the best estimate you will ever get.

To Farm or Not To Farm

Human beings started domesticating wild plants and animals sometime around 8,000 B.C. That started the shift from a hunter-gatherer existence to domestication and settled farming. Hunting-gathering is an okay way of subsistence so long as there are more lucky days than ones when not much turns up. On the contrary a settled-farming society can expect (a) more predictability of food, (b) predictable – perhaps lesser – work schedules, (c) greater attention to family and raising children and (d) greater longevity.

This shift took millenniums to achieve, but most importantly the early humans realized that their end goal of species propagation cannot be sustained through an erratic hunt-gather way of life. While the start and end of this metamorphosis is well understood, for a moment think how it must have been towards the middle – or around the 25^th percentile. Undoubtedly there were rival groups supporting either forms of existence. And they would have had their cogent reasoning. All said, hunting-gathering was proven and yielded results. The settled farming camp had it tougher, I am sure. They had to sell a concept, perhaps build a prototype of a farm and wait for a drought or famine to come about that would conclusively prove their argument.

I view the start-up, adrenalin pumping way of life versus the “large company” process driven existence as symptomatically similar to the example above. Just as a small tribe that has existential needs of only a handful can be profligate in their ways to not farm and only hunt and gather, a start-up company often exists in a similar bent of mind. A more process driven, settled existence is derided – mostly with the argument of slower turnaround (our early ancestors also had to deal with it, I am sure. “Today I can just go out and kill a boar and eat it. But in your way we’ll have to wait till it becomes big enough for it to be food”). It takes a phenomenal amount of evangelization before the change can be brought about. The problem becomes compounded when a start-up is bought out by a large company and the matter assumes tinges of cultural conflict.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet but the metamorphosis need not (a) take as much times as it did in human evolution (b) simply subsume into a bureaucratic maze that masquerades as settled existence. The hunter-gatherer culture depends on rock-star performers and the start-up equivalence is also somewhat similar. And once these individuals buy into the settled existence idea, it spreads like a virus. Like our ancestors, prototyping the concept may help and it is important that both forms of existence be allowed to continue just so the experiment has a control sample to refer back to.

Many equalize a settled existence with a sloth existence. The reality is far from it. A settled existence merely allocates human enterprise and intellect to initiatives that result in maximum return rather than spreading them thin over fragmented activities.