Tag: strategy

Adam Rifkin:

Put another way, Google designing social apps is like Microsoft designing iPod packaging.

Anything social by Google has been an abject failure, in my view. They’re just terrible at doing anything that doesn’t make Google better as a company. For most people at Google, life is 98% work, 2% sleep, and they design products with that lifestyle in mind.

Kontra, in a scathing review of Google’s strategy in Buzz:

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search and user experience, says 60-80% of Google’s products may eventually fail. Unfortunately, the few that survive are neither all that inspiring nor market leaders. What Google lacks is not infrastructure, engineers, money, time or even great ideas. It’s the ability to delight users. What Google is missing, in other words, is strategic design.

I’ve been noticing similar things the last year or two, and seldom have I seen or heard much that would contradict it. Read the whole post. It’s spot-on.

PPK claims that by designing only for the iPhone, we’re setting up for another IE6-like event.

This article counters that:

When Koch damns developers for professional hypocrisy and incompetence, I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.

It’s still early on for the mobile web, and I think that gives us reason to push things a bit more than would be appropriate in a Y2K, IE6 world. If developers don’t accept the limitations of conventional mobile browsers right now, mobile manufacturers may well start moving things forward.

If we can get close to parity or unanimity in the mobile browser space, we’ve succeeded, and then need to start getting back to traditional principles of progressful degrahancement and the like.

Seriously:

It didn’t take long for that plan to backfire. Apple fans reportedly have hijacked #holidaywindows and are writing tweets such as “Get a Mac” and “Windows is lame.” And they’re showing up in the Big Apple.

How dense do you need to be to realize that putting up a live Twitter feed in a very public space is rarely going to yield great results?

Great little post about how pinball got a bit smarter in the mid-80s, accounting for different types and levels of players, and then how its new smarts ran up against a foe in video games:

Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games. Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty. Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy. This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder. By contrast, the physical nature of pinball, its main attraction to hardcore players, meant that there was no way to have it both ways.

Matt Thompson on an Omaha paper’s acquisition of WikiCity:

WikiCity in its current state strikes me as a textbook example of a site built by robots. Such sites tend, in my experience, to appeal mostly to other robots. Contrast it to Wikipedia, whose every page was built, word by work, link by link, on the actions of individual people. Or to Everyblock, whose pages run on powerful algorithms, lovingly engineered and hand-polished by a brilliant and careful team of makers. These are large sites built on millions of niches, but neither were built that way to start.

It’s certainly hard to scale up, but it’s true that it’s even harder to scale down. I don’t think it’s impossible, but the idea really has to be killer to work if it’s been designed for a large-scale from the start.

Not only are DVRs not killing TV advertising, but more folks are watching shows because of them, and many of those people are too lazy to skip commercials:

Almost across the board, the gains for playback are growing. The best preseason estimate for the current season, said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer for CBS, was about a 1 percent increase from playback over the live program for the networks combined. Instead, many are in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

Of course, as with almost all such things so far, digital media isn’t actually killing a business, just threatening one particular model, revealing another more profitable model.

Wired is in tough shape these days, with ad sales down 50%. Joel Johnson was brought in a few years ago to revamp the online side of the publication, with decent success. He’s writing for BoingBoing now, but decided to weigh in:

Wired makes a fantastic magazine. The “puzzle” edition last month was just brilliant, and I skimmed it from cover to cover. But for technology and pop science reporting, the market has moved on. Tech magazines, now matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made stationery.

I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can’t accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it’s online—and online only. Don’t skip the comments, as there are lots of Wired folks, present and former, who weigh in. Chris Anderson himself chimes in to blame Conde Nast’s decisions for the downfall and policies.

Gamasutra interviews Nicole Hamlett, community manager of MMO developer Cryptic Studios. On measuring results:

I’d like to say that it’s all very standardized; it’s just not. Benefits are still, largely, intangible. I would like to see more concrete methods used to gauge success, actually. My team uses a variety of metrics to determine ours. Some are based on forum comments, contest entries, traffic, outside influencers. We are working on getting a better system in place.

Lots of other gems. These are the types of folks we can learn boatloads from, and really start figuring out how to qualitatively measure our sites, rather than simply relying on the quantitative metrics.

Cringely on iTunes vs. Hulu:

Fox owns a big chunk of Hulu, yet American Idol performances are exclusively available on iTunes, not Hulu. Why is that? Because American Idol performances on iTunes make a lot of MONEY, that’s why. Adam Lambert downloads alone make more money every week — a LOT more money — than do ALL the shows on Hulu put together.

Bob suggests that Apple might spend their mammoth amount of cash on hand to commission programming only available on iTunes, a la HBO. That would be a very cool development.

A thoughtful and detailed analysis of the numbers behind Y Combinator’s seed funding program, as compared with a typical seed-stage angel investment:

YC argues their advice and connections are worth this premium. I respectfully disagree. Advice and connections for even idea-stage entrepreneurs are easy to find with a little initiative, and if you don’t have that, you’ll fail as an entrepreneur. YC’s connections, Demo Day, and brand are indeed value-added, but it’s hard to argue they’re worth ten times an angel and free advice and connections.

YC supporters say their teams are little more than first-time entrepreneurs with ideas. That’s generally true, but YC’s hackers are able to build most prototypes in 3 months anyway. Is it worth 3 months working by yourself to get 10x a better deal? I think so.

I can only assume that similar arguments exist with respect to our friends at LaunchBox Digital and TechStars.

In line with my recent post of the same nature about Twitter: A quick little list of instances of Google implementing “competitors’” product features shortly before or after the competitor’s announcement.

So what’s going on here? Greg’s reaction to this was that it was atypical of a market leader to be so reactive to “the competition” (if that’s what you call companies that have a minuscule share of the market). He’s right. Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop’s store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?

Compete on features with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other market leaders at your own peril. If it’s just features, your risks grow exponentially.

Matt Haughey doesn’t buy into the whole notion of “social media marketing”, and illustrates his skepticism in the context of buying a Rainbow swingset:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

Many of the companies I most respect seem to consider social media secondary at best, while some of my least favorite companies (think Comcast) are all about Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the fads. Would your favorite company use MagPie or PayPerPost, or reach out to bloggers?

A great (and lengthy) piece by Clay Shirky:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Don’t confuse the medium with the message. It’s the message that matters, and the medium is just a tool to help the message get where it needs to be.

Here’s the transcript of the Bruce Sterling talk I mentioned in my Ponzi Scheme post (that term is attributable to him):

Creative energies are liberated by oxymorons, by breakdowns in definitions. The Muse comes out when you look sidelong, over your shoulder.

and

Now, I wouldn’t want to claim that Web 2.0 is as frail as the financial system — the financial system that supported it and made it possible! But Web 2.0 is directly built on top of finance. Web 2.0 is supposed to be business. This isn’t a public utility or a public service, like the old model of an Information Superhighway established for the public good.

There’s a lot I don’t agree with in Sterling’s talk, and his delivery sure managed to piss a lot of people off, but the man had some beautiful words in there.