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

Eric Schmidt, ex CEO of Google speaking to Forbes named Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google as the four horsemen in the tech leaders pack (he used the accounting firm Big 4 metaphor). I do not have the gall to challenge Schmidt (except that the world of tech is a funny one and while this true now and in the short term, the medium term could throw up surprises. And in world of high tech the only other thing more foolish in predicting the long term is actually believing it). So we go with Schmidt’s assessment and look at the four knights in their shining armor. Facebook is a platform company – its monolithic, multi-purpose, multi-tenanted social platform is its strength. It is hugely sticky, quickly scalable and does not have to bother about content because the users are filling that bit up in a frenzied pace. Apple has long ceased to be a technology or a software company. Many argue – and with merit – that Apple is a hardware company raking in big bucks from selling super elegant, easy to use, irrationally priced hardware. Peel that layer back and the effort at owning content is apparent. Apple has been at it for a while to create a good ecosystem that allows content creators connect with content consumers. Its Achilles heel however has been that it is as yet a distributor platform for the content – it does not quite own it (and neither have been very successful in binding mass content creators into economically sound contracts. The movie studios’ refusal to play ball with Jobs was one reason why Apple TV never quite took off). Turning to Amazon we find ecommerce being a dominant source of its current revenue yet a perceptible change towards content. It is signing book deals to beef up its ebook content (content that it owns and not merely distributes) and some of the 70% of enterprise value that Amazon has from ecommerce is around content that it has closer ownership of (like Kindle Direct Publishing platform). So where does that leave Google?

In a bit of a fix, I would argue. Google’s key strength has been taking truckloads of content – not its own – indexing them and creating smart algorithms that bubble up the most relevant when you are looking for something. Searching someone else’s content, that is. There is a whiff of change though at Google in terms of understanding the power of content. Google Finance was an early example where the firm applied software skills on publicly available content or content provided by data vendors. Google Public Data Explorer is another example of the same approach – take reams of content (mostly abundant content from the public domain) and add value to it by applying a smart software layer. An adjacent approach has been to embed content in form of ecommerce via the Andriod Marketplace as embodied by the recently launched (and tepidly received) music service. But will Google ever try monetizing these in a manner different from how it relies on search for monetizing?

That is a multi-million dollar question and I would bet on that happening in the following manner. Google will go after content acquisition in areas where content is becoming commoditized and hence less valuable to the current owners. Google’s super smart engineers will then bring their technology and engineering competences to bear and create insights out of data in a manner that data owners cannot. It will allow that holy grail of content insight – commingling proprietary data with public to glean specific and localized insights. The firm has already trained its guns on primary sources of public data (the World Bank, OECD and such) and I suspect that momentum will continue and encompass primary sources that monetize their content (exchanges, central banks). It will not surprise me if Google at some point in time seriously takes a look at acquiring a pure-play content company

Content was once king – it perhaps still is but in an indirect manner. Consumers are not willing to pay for vanilla content. The value exchange point has shifted to either gleaning out intelligence out of the content at scale or delivering the content at precise workflow points to consumers. The obituary of content has been a touch premature as was celebrating its status as King early. Content is important but not in the form it is produced – a different entity needs to breathe life, and ergo economic value, into it

Google’s approach to product development has been a mixture of organic and inorganic development. Google unleashed its engineering expertise in the form of Labs onto assets, extending their capabilities. In that process it succumbed to the “UI is too important to be left to engineers” syndrome. The Gmail user interface looked very different from Google docs (which had inconsistent UIs amongst its own components as some of them came via acquisitions) and Google Reader had a different look, feel and navigation. So it was natural that Google stepped into an area not exactly its strength – designing UIs to make them consistent. It dealt itself either a weak hand or set for itself a low bar by defining the coverage of consistency to imply just the look

Google users were slowly pushed these UI updates with the login page to a Google service being the first. Then other services took over. Notice the first inconsistency in this consistency drive – the login page has a big blue button while other services have red. Users ignored such glitches up until Google brought out the new-look “Reader” – a service that allows RSS aggregation and sharing

My Twitter timeline was a first warning that things did not go as planned for Google. After a quick check, I can understand why. The first rule of UI refresh is not to apply lipstick on a pig. The user interaction on Google Reader was always dated – one reason why services like Flipboard and Zite pretty much took up the reading experience leave Google with just the menial task of fetching. And Google passed up an opportunity to redo the design to not just make the service consistent with its brothers but also more modern and egg the reader to stay on by making reading easier. Instead, other than changes in fonts (oversized ones in the main column – Jesus Chirst!) the only other thing I see is a shroud of white all around. Improving user experience to induce more reading (or more +1’ing if Google was after that) was surely not a design objective

(click to see larger, clearer image)

And Google, for reasons they know best, chose to retain a list of keyboard shortcuts on the right panel, leaving the rest of the real estate – copious one – totally blank (adding to the already dominating whiteness of the page)

Ability to aggregate content from publishers that expose them via a common protocol was a tough problem to solve several years ago. No longer so, unfortunately. As Google bets big on its social gambit it has to understand somewhere that it is effortless usability much rather than astute engineering that greases the wheels of social interaction

A couple of years back I had written this as a note on Facebook. As is the nature with diseases, they have mutated into more virulent forms and have struck havoc with many personalities (like Lalit Modi & N Srinivasan for example). What I mean is this list might be old but most certainly not outdated

CCitis

The malaise that makes the sender of an e-mail add on more people to the CC list as a chain grows. Very soon recipients are unsure why they are receiving the mails (especially the new entrants who behave like someone who got the men’s and women’s rooms mixed up). Most people read the thread top-down, resulting in what is popularly called the “Memento Effect” – following a sequence of events in reverse chronological direction.

BCCia

The patient suffers from a virulent version of identity crisis. This is a typical psycho malaise in which the patient is reticent to disclose his friends to other friends. Is very prevalent in forwarding jokes and other irrelevant stuff. The disease spreads by multiplication where a BCC recipient might further fwd the same message using BCC and often to the people who were in the first BCC list. Added Complexity: Some patients – in more advanced stages of the disease – alter the content of a mail while forwarding to blind lists. The original perpetrator of the chain often gets back the same mail – in BCC, of course – and spends a lot of time in creating “diff-reports”

Attachmenesia

People who are getting closer to embracing Alzheimer’s display this property. The sender usually writes a long verbose e-mail body describing the contents of an alleged attachment. Excellent stuff, until it is found that the mail sent out did not contain the attachment. Typically followed by every recipient replying to all that the attachment was missing. They very soon form a very happy – but not necessarily small – family. Medical advancement: A few software developers have published utilities that detect missing attachments. The software essentially snoops your e-mail and fails miserably when you write “Ms. Jayalalitha did a poetic dance presentation when she was attached with the Karunanidhi foundation of Family Charity”. The software expects you to attach one Ms. Jayalalitha.

Send Anxiety

A mainly psycho-somatic affliction where the composer of an email hovers endlessly over the send button. Generally caused by the freezing of the right index finger over the left mouse button when the mouse pointer is poised over the Send button of any email application. Mathematically, the intensity of anxiety (A) is equal to the square of the sum of absolute cumulative difference of levels of all recipients (reference point = sender) about to receive the mail.

Delivery Anxiety

The patient suffers from extreme discomfort after sending email; this discomfort can only be relieved by actually talking to the recipient of the email and asking “did you get my email?” If the answer is in the negative, the patient feels compelled to spell out the contents of the email in detail thus combining the disadvantages of both synchronous and asynchronous communication

H0B2S Flu (a/k/a Have Zero Brains To Show)

The e-mail is about a specific person or persons and the sender (patient hereafter) wants to know more about them. Instead of consulting the corporate intranet, the patient includes them in the “To” or “CC” list and double clicks to check properties (MS Outlook workflow). Glowing in an aura of self congratulation, the patient forgets to remove these people from the recipient list when hitting the “send” button. Many people, about to be terminated, have actually benefited from this disease and with this as weapon have often got the patients terminated instead (close contender for Corporate Darwin Award for Gene Pool Consciousness – having cleaned up a gene pool by taking oneself out of it)

Post Script

A friend on Facebook had suggested two diseases I must consider for inclusion - Delivery Receiptitis Syndrome (DRS) and Message Recallus Anxiety (MRA). Please put comment if you have encountered others that we should be writing about

The first fallacy of creating a community is just this. The mindset of a hoarder. Gathering anything without a purpose places the cart in front of the horse – or, the business model in front of the raw material. People are the raw material in a Community. Just as a steel manufacturing business does not hoard up strawberries, a Community must eschew the lure of mindless “customer” acquisition at the cost of defining upfront who are being served and with what purpose

Hoarding impacts your community in two equally destructive ways. One, once the purpose of the community is established (post membership acquisition) members discover they do not have intersecting interests or expectations with the rest of the gang. There is no tribe to speak of. They quit. Secondly, a few acquired members are perhaps of the correct profile who would quickly discover there are a sprinkling of non-conforming audience engaged in community activity and will quickly disappear

What about multi-interest communities then? Yes, they do exist. If that is what you have in mind then it is better to think in terms of platforms. A Platform with different communities as tenants. It is perfectly possible – and correct – to design a handful of services as horizontals that each tenant feeds off. Then get onto community (tenant) specific services.

Irrespective of tenancy plurality, member acquisition should not broadbrush to pixalate the specific community picture. The rule of member acquisition remains unchanged

The days I play my favorite songs driving back home are the days I had a truly enjoyable work-day. And invariably those are days when someone recognized something good I did at work – and said so. Positive reinforcement – the official organizational psychology term – as an instrument of motivation has been long understood but sadly less implemented. Let me rephrase that – improperly implemented I should say.

Over the course of our employment we end up doing a gigantic stream of good work (and some stupid stuff as well but since societies have made evolutionary progress, I am assuming the algebraic sum of smart and stupid work is positive). These bits of work all go on to make something substantial in both volume as well as the impact it has on our employers (and ourselves). Many of these accomplishments are recognized – and that is where the problem begins

The problem is not in the recognition per-se but in the manner in which recognition happens, gets recorded, accumulated, propagated and associated. A bulk of the recognition takes the form of a verbal – “great job” or a short e-mail of thanks. Some employers have systems of physical rewards & recognition, which gives an employee a physical object – a trophy sometimes – that reminds her of her good work each time she looks at it. In most cases however these micro-recognitions fail in getting associated by either the employer (manager) or the employee to their performance goals, reducing the evaluative impact of the bits and pieces of work that go to stitch up an year’s work. Does it then surprise you that year end performance evaluations are usually an evaluation of the last assignment or worse, a totally subjective discussion of perceptions?

Happy employees make great workplaces. And great workplaces make great businesses. Happiness is a steady stream but has its ebbs and flows. Organizations rely more on point-in-time appreciation of positive employee efforts but have failed to put their employees bang in the middle of this river of happiness. The failure is perhaps not due to lack of intent but more attributable to absence of a solution that addresses this issue

Image courtesy: baobabinc.com

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 answer to the choice lies in aspirations. A newbie firm wants to test the waters and looks at the path of least resistance. A social business, they might argue, has got to mostly do with people. So why not gravitate to where most people are? The trouble with this is that the answer is correct but the question is wrong. The fabric of a social business is not the people per-se but what those people do within the sandbox. A social sandbox is like a society – and people get enamoured by reciprocating behavior as much as they put off by actions that seem incongruent to that sandbox-society. Example, notice how many times your eyes roll-over when you notice someone posted that “my cat’s just rolled over” type update on LinkedIn?

The sandbox you choose has got to answer a very important question. If you were given the choice of asking the entire population of your intended audience live inside a gated community what would that community look like? If that looks like Planet Facebook, please go ahead and play in that sandbox. But please ask yourself this question before you make the choice

PS: LinkedIn was a poor example perhaps – it had critical mass – and a different sandbox already as Facebook started its own growth. But you get the drift. Branchout is a better example and they made a choice of playing in Facebook’s sandbox
]]> http://subrataalpha.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/playing-in-a-sandbox/feed/ 1 subrataalpha sandbox http://subrataalpha.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/the-core/ http://subrataalpha.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/the-core/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:22:58 +0000 Subrata Majumdar http://subrataalpha.wordpress.com/?p=693 ]]> There can be serious and irrevocable implications of poor decisions. Take outsourcing for example. Bad outsourcing was based on costs. For every engineer in a “high cost” location we can get three in a “low-cost” venue. And development resource expenses are a big chunk of our direct costs, which means we shall see immediate margin expansion if we did this. Great – set targets and get on with this plan. “Hey, what if we managed to find four developers at the price of one? Won’t that help the company’s cause even more?” – the first seed of poor implementation has set in

Some years later you have built up a huge organization on the principle but the sign on the building still says “COST”. And in the meanwhile you have realized the added burden of handling complexity, communication and controlling quality coming out of a cost-optimized factory. Then someone throws up their hands and says – “you know what, we should have planned it better”

Both yes and no. No because it is likely that your firm did in fact plan all this – just that they chose the wrong core ideas to build their plans on (and perhaps did not think the thing through). Yes, because without a good plan it is likely that you will never understand what you are after. The idea behind planning is to start with a core and build concentric circles around it. The concentric circles are steps to fructify that core. And each outward circle has to be evaluated if it adds to or subtracts from the core (retain if former, discard if latter) In this example, the core could well have been “optimize costs” but it is likely that many concentric circles were allowed even when it was evident they were diluting the core. All plans get a reality check when they hit the asphalt making it even more important to keep a close watch on those concentric circles

The core is equally important when unwinding a bad decision just so one does not wipe out an accretive circle in the process

Sadly, in my experience, especially in outsourcing and breaking ground with new products or setting up businesses in virgin territories I have seen far too many plans with poorly thought out cores. Your experience could well be different. It will be a breath of fresh air to hear about them.