“The Business” vs technology

One of the abiding complaints that I hear all over the publishing industry is that “technology” just don’t understand “the business”. It has always struck me as odd that these monolithic and unhelpful descriptions have been so enduring; it’s not as if technology, in all its guises, hasn’t be central to our success as an industry for at least the past 15 years. And it is hardly the case that the various functions that make up “the business” always see eye to eye, either.

Recently, however, I have seen a shift. And it has happened because we’ve started hiring Product Managers. By that I don’t me IT Product Managers (in my view a title which has contributed rather more confusion than clarity - they should really be business analysts or delivery managers). I mean *real* Product Managers - people whose job it is to define what goes into our products. 

Now, at last, I’m hearing debates about the appropriate roles for Product, Sales, Marketing and Technology in bringing new products to market. And I’m hearing much less discussion about “technology” vs “The Business”. It feels we are maturing as an industry as a result. 

China internet revisited

I published this post on another (now defunct) blog two years ago at about the time Google fell out with the Chinese government. I'm not sure I would now agree with my prediction that indigenous innovation would suffer, but certainly the climate for internet services doesn't seem very much better.
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I was in Shanghai last week when the disagreement between Google and the Chinese Government stepped up a gear and Google pointed local traffic to unsensored results in Hong Kong. The immediate effect was very erratic services for many Google services as the Chinese Government worked out what to do. Google has started providing its own update of the state of its various services and you can see the continuing fall out.
Facebook and Twitter were also blocked last week - but that is now normal.
Some commentators are arguing that Google should reconsider and get back into the market in mainland China as the market is too big and fast-growing to ignore. Whatever the merits of that argument, the current policy the Chinese Government is pursuing is more likely to hurt China than help it, I think.
True, there are now very vibrant Chinese companies serving the same functions as the global giants - Baidu for search for instance, or Qzone for social networking - but without competition from global players innovation is likely to stagnate. And a China cut off from the network effects of the global internet economy will be a poorer place in the long run.

Will Apple miss the next big thing?

Will Apple be smart enough to capitalise on the next big opportunity in personal computing - turning the smart phone into the CPU for computing anywhere?

I remember back to the time when there was a huge debate about "convergence" - the big question about whether consumers would accept one multi-functional mobile device (the Swiss Army Knife approach) or would want a series of specialized devices such as a phone, camera, GPS. MP3 player and so on. The iPhone settled that debate completely with hardware and software (apps) which cater for just about every need. It now seems incredible that anyone even argued the point.

Well, we are fast approaching a re-run of that debate. Why have a computer and a smartphone when you could use a phone as your CPU, operating system and file store and simply link via Bluetooth to a screen, keyboard and mouse? Any why not make that screen your TV?

Apple is actually very well placed to make this move. It is already converging its operating systems - OS X looks increasingly like IOS especially after Mountain Lion. And they produce a superb range of Bluetooth-enabled peripherals and brilliant screens.

But this is a big leap for a company which makes so much money from computer hardware - $6.3bn in the last quarter of 2011. Risking that is a big bet for any company, let alone one that is riding the wave with its iconic highly designed and desirable computers.

If not Apple, then maybe Android? Already there have been Android phones launched with full versions of Ubuntu Linux loaded on them.  And Android's makers Google doesn't have a hardware business to cannibalise. In fact, it would make massive sense for Google to back a move like this - it is trying to push an alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite (Google Apps) and what better Trojan Horse than consumers determined to carry their computing device with them wherever they go?

Even Microsoft may be better placed to capitalise on this trend than Apple. Microsoft doesn't actually make computers (although their OEM partners clearly do) so although there would be much painful disruption if Windows 8 became the operating system on choice on the mobile portable computing device of the future, the company could but only profit in the long run.

I may be wrong, but I bet we will see this trend play out; it remains to be seen who will ride the wave.

Community from spam

Sometime last week I started to get spam email from a Middle Eastern site called GulfMalayaly. I just deleted as I mostly do with this kind of spam as I have found in the past that the "unsubscribe" options is only partially effective and, anyway,  I've got better things to do with my time.

Pretty soon though I started to get emails from people who were in a similar boat asking to be unsubscribed, while later others emailed (again the whole list) to ask fellow victims not to reply as they were beginning to escalate into spam session.

Then two interesting things happened. Firstly, someone suggested that instead of spamming each other perhaps we should create a LinkedIn group and find out more about each other to see what we all had in common. The group is called  Unified by Spam - The Social Experiment and on it you can see a growing band of people joining and talking to each other, and even a poll which identifies which industries/parts of the world the participants come from etc.

Secondly, a sub-set of the original recipients have ignored both the initial advice to desist from trying to message back to the original perpetrator and the invitation to join the social experiment. They are busy still spamming in an increasingly irate and profane way - the result of which is that I am getting a notification every few minutes that a message is being quarantined by the Exchange Profanity Filter. There is nothing I can now do about these messages.

I was struck by how neatly this episode summarises the two basic types of participants in web discussions everywhere.

What is Innovation?

What is innovation? The Oxford English Dictionarydefines it, somewhat unhelpfully, as: “the action or process of innovating”; but, then elaborates: “a new method, idea, product, etc.”  It then goes on to note: “innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organization.”

As innovation is so important, I thought I would unpack the idea a bit. Many people think that “true” innovation is the invention of genuinely novel things which have never before been seen in the world. However, this is a very high bar at which virtually everyone would fail. Humans have been around for over 200,000 years and there are billions of us, so most things, one way or another, have been thought of before.  In my view, this strict definition isn’t particularly helpful.

I think a more useful definition is something like this: “The recognition and implementation of an idea or combination of ideas which brings a unique utility not before seen or used which adds value by fulfilling a consumer need.”

I spent Christmas 2011 reading Steve Job’s biography by Walter Isaacson. I have always thought of Steve Jobs as intrinsically innovative; but, what was special about him was not that he came up with entirely new ideas – the graphical user interface on the Macintosh, for example, had been invented by Xerox Parc and there had been many MP3 players before the iPod – but, that he came up with unique combinations; which, taken together, added real, never-before-seen value to the consumer.

Take the iPod: As a music player, it was certainly very elegantly designed; but, its capacity was well below the best that was available--at the same price--on the market at the time. What Apple did was combine the player with the web (in the form of iTunes) in such a way as the combination was unique. Suddenly, tasks that were really difficult, or close to impossible to do on the player, could be done on the Mac, thus freeing the player to do what it did best: play music. And, by deconstructing the album into songs--and miraculously persuading the music industry to play ball--it created a huge new market for legal downloads. The rest, as they say, is history.

Or take the iPhone: There were smartphones before the iPhone; but, they weren’t very smart. The iPhone’s unique advantage, apart from the legendary great design, was the App Store. Suddenly, the phone could become whatever you wanted it to be; thus, the real revolution in smartphones that we are living through today was born.

Google provides another good example: Google’s revolutionary idea, apart from its blisteringly good search, was AdWords. But, Google didn’t invent key word advertising; that honour went to Idealab that spun-out GoTo.com which was later renamed Overture and was then bought by Yahoo!. However, it was Google who hit the jackpot with search advertising, and it did so by reinventing the model. Overture had ordered ads by whoever bid the most that quite often resulted in the top advertisement not being the most appropriate.  It was simply the one with the deepest pockets.

Google changed the rules. It ordered results partly by the bidding and partly by the success of the ad which was measured by how many people clicked on it and on the quality of the ultimate landing page. And, it also limited the power of those with the deepest pockets by charging only one cent above the amount of the second highest bidder. These innovations revolutionised the medium.

So my argument is innovation comes from  the real innovators who can be—and often are--those that take ideas already out there and reinvent and recombine them in ways which create real utility for the user. As Steve Jobs said, paraphrasing Picasso*: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

In the innovation process at RBI Data Solutions, we always try to think as broadly as we can about customer problems. Of course, we would love to invent some genuinely and completely novel services that the world has never seen; but, we are just as happy if we construct combinations of already-existing components, provided we produce an elegant solution in the end. We are not yet as good as Steve Jobs at this process, but we are working on it.

First published on the internal Reed Elsevier Innovation website, February 2012

Community vs functionality...and the winner is...

Community trumps functionality every time. I've just finished reading Steven Levy's book In the Plex which is a brilliant portrait of the rise of Google. It is staggering just how much change that one company has wrought in the world. But the book ends with Google facing the fact that the new "Google" is Facebook - young, iconoclastic and, crucially, in tune with social instincts.

One in every seven minutes online are spent on Facebook, a phenomenon which has convinced Google, belatedly, that it needs to be in this race - hence Google +.

The fact that community trumps functionality every time was brought home to me last Christmas. All three of my (nearly grown up) children wanted new mobile phones. The two boys were set on a new Android phone - the Samsung Galaxy S2 (actually they wanted the S3 but it isn't out yet) - but my daughter was adamant that she wanted a Blackberry.

This was painful to me as I have been a long-time Blackberry user who gave up when the iPhone demonstrated what a smartphone should really be like. I tried to talk her into getting another smart phone - an Android or even and iPhone - but she wasn't having it. So I bought what they each wanted.

On Christmas day the boys were delighted with their S2s - and I have to say they were impressive devices - large, clear screens and masses of power and functionality.

But my daughter was ecstatic with her Blackberry Bold. It wasn't as expensive as the boys' phones (and in my view it certainly wasn't as good)  but she loved it. And the reason? Blackberry's messenger app BBM. This is the killer app for her and her circle. Everyone, it seems, uses it and the volume of messages she now sends and receives has gone through the roof. I'm not sure this is entirely a good thing, but it has certainly proved a point to me.

The rise of Reddit

Somehow a big shift has happened over the past year without me being aware of it. The first clue was when my sons began to talk about things they had been reading on Reddit.
I remembered Reddit from a few years ago when it was an also-ran to Digg when at one time it looked like it was going to overtake the New York Times. Anyway, for interest I just checked out the recent histories of these two venerable internet brands and you can see what I saw. It seems over the past two years Reddit has been quietly (at least as far as I was concerned) well and truly knocked Digg off its perch.

Update: It seems like I'm not alone in my appreciation of the rise of Reddit!

Update: Another way to look at the change of fortunes...