Sad Day for Tech

Posted on 06 October 2011

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Who are we to comment on the passing of one of our industry’s giants?

Others will produce better comments, so we’re going to let Steve speak for himself in one of our favourite quotes of his, coupled to some ancient wisdom.

’No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited.’ - Steve Jobs 2003.

And from an older source of wisdom:

’Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom’, and,

’Behold, I make all things new’

 

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Summer Reflection

Posted on 15 September 2011

Interesting times....

Normal summers are quiet and the news wires resort to ‘silly season’ reporting in the UK. This summer has been different. Phone hacking scandals, an awful massacre in Norway, riots in English cities, England top of the world cricket rankings - these are not normal events. Then you add in the economic headlines - slow growth, sovereign debt crises, unemployment rising...

So how should you run your business in uncertain times like these? The temptation is to batten down the hatches and wait for the storms to blow over. Unfortunately, by the time this happens, different challenges will have surfaced.

 It is entirely possible to grow a business dramatically during difficult times. Taking an example from our locality, William Morris grew his car manufacturing business through the great depression of the 1930’s (sovereign debt crises, rising unemployment, etc - sounds familiar doesn’t it) into one of Europe’s largest businesses. What was it that he did that we could learn from?

Many of the things he did you’ll find in the text book. Rapid product innovation, process improvement, cost control, smart marketing, brand differentiation (Morris = value, MG = sporting, Wolseley = luxury), international expansion. All of these are investing in the future. The future is always uncertain - to quote the George Michael lyric ‘you gotta to have faith’.

Do you have sufficient faith in your product to take the bold actions required to grow your business? William Morris’s made a big breakthrough  in the early 1920’s when car sales stagnated and the ‘experts’ were saying the market was saturated and ex-growth. He brought a whole new group of buyers to the market by the bold action of dramatically adjusting the price of his low end model.  As an even older source of wisdom once described it when talking about the effect of faith on business ‘ To him who has, will more be given. But to him who has not, even what he has will be taken away’.

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Norway

Posted on 28 July 2011

Just to express our solidarity and sympathy to all our Norwegian friends and acquaintances after last week’s tragic events.

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iPad or Paper Pad?

Posted on 20 May 2011

Distribution matters

Fascinating piece of research shared by Seven (www.seven.co.uk) at the recent Digital Media Europe (#DME) event on who iPad owners are and what they actually do with the devices.

Three things struck me particularly:

High earners over 45 form the majority of owners, the most common use time is 7-9 in the evening and its most common uses are accessing the web and emailing.

Why did I find these significant? Because they point in the opposite direction to a lot of the hype surrounding the device. It is not the salvation for all content creators that some had hoped, but a great opportunity to reach a very defined niche.

All of which reinforces one of the things we believe is very important - the need to match your distribution channel to your target customer. It’s just as true whether you wish to distribute digital content, enterprise software, clean tech hardware or sliced bread.

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Numbers Matter - Part 2

Posted on 07 April 2011

If 4-4-2 doesn't work, try 5-3-1...

We are big fans of David Oliver (www.insight-marketing.com) and the mathematics of selling. Basically, if you want a certain number of new customers and have a particular closure rate at each stage of the sales process, you can work backwards to how many cold calls to prospects you need to make.

This holds true in any B2B market you care to mention but how can you be sure the conversion rates you have in your home market will be a good guide for your performance in the UK (or other new market)?

Not surprisingly, there is only one way to find out - try selling and see what happens. What is most important about the proposition testing phase of market entry is not the conversions you achieve but analysing your losses effectively. If your conversion rates are different, what is causing it? Are you addressing the correct decision makers?  is the problem you can solve high enough up the buyers agenda?  have you correctly mapped the buyers view of what he needs with your usps? And so on.

It’s at this point that really need an input from a native in-market specialist. As well as having to filter out the salesman’s instinctive beliefs as to why they lost the sale (some version of ‘the price wasn’t right’) you need to understand the nuances of what was said in the meeting. English is a very rich language and the British, who can be somewhat understated and indirect, will make full use of the richness of the language to keep the unwary in ignorance. Phrases like ‘that’s interesting’ and ‘I need to think about it, then I’ll get back to you’ should not be assumed to mean what the literal translation would imply!

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Numbers Matter

Posted on 22 March 2011

It's as simple as 1,2,3 (or even 4-4-2)

As the football season moves towards its climax, you will from time to time hear a manager or player say something like ‘at the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie, we simply haven’t got enough points’. Football is a simple game, the more points you score the higher up the league table you will be.  

Some points totals are more significant than others:

Once you have amassed 12 points you lose the tag ‘worst ever Premiership side’ - that honour belongs to Derby who only managed 11 in a whole season. 41 points is the magic number to avoid relegation, and if you want to win the title you will need at least 75.

So here is something that strikes me as curious.

The original iPad shipped around 15 million units worldwide. That’s about the number of PCs shipped in the UK in the same period.  iPad2 is expected to ship 35 million units world wide. In the time that iPad2 ships its 35 million units, unglamorous Nokia, despite an end of life operating system, will ship 150 million smart phones.

So why have so many businesses got iPad apps at the top of their digital strategy wish list?

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End of an EPOC

Posted on 18 February 2011

Timing is everything...

I guess the ‘big thing’ at this year’s MWC was the pre-show announcement by Nokia and Microsoft. Is it the right answer to Nokia’s market share slide? Can two elephants dance? Whatever your view on this, I was left with the distinct impression that the decision was made fairly close to the actual announcement.

As a result of the proximity of the announcement to the show, Nokia definitely missed a number of tricks. At the trivial level both companies presence at the event could have been aligned more effectively. Of greater importance was the fact that neither companies’ developer communities were effectively mobilized to support the announcement. One suspects because the haste of the announcement the roadmap has still to be worked out leaving Nokia developers feeling out in the cold and Microsoft’s machine-like ability to mobilize hundreds of developers to their cause not yet in gear.

Lacking a roadmap, and acting in haste, Nokia also missed the lesson from history. Psion spun out their OS. Developing a world class OS can be costly and Psion were struggling to compete with other, more commodity, hand held devices and control of the OS gave them no advantage at the high end. Substitute ‘hand held devices’ with mobile phones and the picture is remarkably similar.

So rather than making the in-house development team redundant, why not spin them off as a separate business under separate ownership and OEM back the OS? This clearly apportions costs, and, as the OS developers are no longer sheltered (or stifled) by being in a large bureaucracy they may become extremely competitive. This would keep Microsoft on its toes by giving Nokia an ‘each way’ bet at no cost.

It will be interesting to see how Nokia and Microsoft are doing by the time next year’s MWC comes around, but what is clear is that they both have a lot of hard work to do to even start catching up with Android.

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Welcome to Britain

Posted on 09 February 2011

Open for business?

In Stockholm again to see potential clients and to re-engage with old friends. As a result attended a Swedish Chamber of Commerce (www.scc.org.uk) event on ‘Welcome to Britain’. Fascinating to see how we portray ourselves abroad.

Leaving the ‘official’ view of UK plc to one side, those who are familiar with football clichés will recognise ‘it’s a game of two halves’ when trying to do business in the UK at the moment. If your ‘sweet spot’ is public sector (or quasi public sector) or the consumer market things are just a little bit challenging at the moment (OK, I’m British - understatement is the natural form of communication). However, the corporate world has relatively strong balance sheets and is investing in the future so if that sector is ‘sweet’ to you then the opportunities are there for the taking: provided, of course, you have a clear proposition that gives the recipient measureable competitive advantage.

So, to use another football cliché: are you up for it?

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Keep on taking the tablets...

Posted on 10 January 2011

Reflections on CES2011

Been looking at the new product at this year’s CES. Tablets abound (over 30 announced) and while Android may be the most frequently used operating system there seems to be an explosion in terms of the number of different screen sizes. The big consumer brands (LG, Samsung, Panasonic et al) are showcasing their convergent TVs (yet another set of screen formats). Even the auto manufacturers are in on the act with the connected car - and, yes. the screen size will vary in this sector as well.

So how is the content going to be displayed on these devices? Talk to the major corporations and their initial answer is apps - 100 new ones every 24 hours for Windows Phone 7 alone, according to Steve Balmer. The logic is at first sight reasonable - namely consumers will want a high quality, easy to use experience. However, I suspect they have arrived at this conclusion because the decision makers work for large corporates and their views will be informed by talking to similar executives in big media - which are also large corporate organisations.

There are two unfortunate problems with this apps based strategy. The first is that the plethora of device types will mean the content owners will have to spend a lot of money writing and maintaining basically very similar bits of code to ensure they are not locked out of a device. The second is that with all these devices able to access the Internet, you can guarantee that pretty soon a lot of the content accessed will be ‘off portal’ (or should I say ‘off app’?). While big media might be able to afford the software development overhead of keeping apps up to date for the latest screen size, most content owners can’t.

So what’s the way forward for a content owner? The more elegant solution is to work with a mobile Internet enablement company, such as Mobiletech, to ensure that you only have to publish your content once and then allow the software to work its magic and render the content to the screen/browser/operating system combination.

And with the advent of HTML5 a lot of the things that are perceived as making apps a cool experience will be available on the ‘ordinary’ web.

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Mobile Internet

Posted on 23 December 2010

Being a pundit is fun....

One of our clients, Vizrt (www.vizrt.com), have just acquired a company that uses computer graphics to enhance the action replays during televised sports events. The technology enables us all to try our hand at being the expert analyst of a particular key moment of the game. Guess what - the IT industry is no different. We all have our own views on the major issues of the day (the ‘game changers’) and we all enjoy listening to industry ‘experts’ expressing their views on the topic.

So, if we were in the pub winding down before Christmas, here’s what I’d say about the competitors for the domination of the mobile Internet: Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

Apple - what can you say? Steve Jobs has done it again. Cool technology and a challenger brand approach has seen Apple become the darling of the stock market. Apple II all over again. And just like Apple II (and its successor, the Mac) exactly the same mistakes. Apple have bet the ranch on out-innovating the competition but have not learnt the lesson that closed, proprietary systems never win because only the favoured few develop for them. Eventually, they are overwhelmed by the ubiquity of the competition.

Microsoft - the great survivor. Who says elephants can’t dance? Microsoft nearly called the Internet wrongly in ‘95 and then pursued the right strategy so vigorously they wound up in court for being a monopolist. Microsoft have been off the pace in mobile technology for a long time now - will Windows Phone 7 be their saviour or is it too little too late? It certainly provides a wonderful level of integration with the rest of the Microsoft estate and there are 700 million Microsoft users out there. Our view? The one true unique they have over Apple and Google as far as mobile operating systems is concerned is the X-Box community. If they adopt Phone 7 in serious numbers then the elephant is dancing again.

Apple and Microsoft have some things in common: they have both been around for quite a while. They also both compete on the basis of trying to develop the best product. Their more recent competitors for dominance are competing for the best algorithm.

Google - the indexers of everything.  We know where you live, we know where your children go to school, and a whole host of other things besides. And anything Microsoft can do we can do to (except at the moment X-Box): mail, docs, calendar etc etc. Already Android is the clear market leader in the smart phone OS race. So what might stop them?  Apple? - already consigned to number 2. Microsoft? - the tide has been running in Google’s direction for a while now.

Facebook - your digital identity. Who needs Second Life when you have given Facebook a clear digital description of yourself? You are your own avatar. Behaviours change slowly over time. Google’s paymasters can target you on the basis of what you are looking for. Facebook’s ambitions are far greater - to be the platform through which you interact with the internet. And interaction is easy, because they will know not just your behaviours but their algorithm can be more effective because you have defined not just yourself (personal data, likes etc.), but your community (i.e. your Facebook friends) as well. By having an ever closer integration into your mobile phone  you need  never wander far from Facebook and who cares what your phone’s OS is?

So there you have it. Who will win? The honest answer is I don’t know. Whenever something ‘new’ turns up in IT the market eventually boils things down to a number one, a number two and, what for want of a better description might be called the highly differentiated (or even the eccentrics).

 However, with four giants all spending large amounts of development (and marketing) dollars on trying to out-innovate the others, the amount of innovation that is going to happen in the next couple of years is going to be incredible.

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Words Matter (2)

Posted on 22 November 2010

Received Pronunciation

Just been to Sime Stockholm (www.sime.nu) for the first time. Excellent event with lots of food for thought. If you want to know more I suggest you have a look at the twitter feed at #Sime10.

Amusing debate on the twitter feed as to the pronunciation: is it  SIME (rhymes with dime) or SIME (rhymes with bean)?  Frankly it’s your choice. However, if you are internationalising into the UK, it rhymes with dime.

Oh, and,  if your selling a concept, make sure you it’s a great ‘idear’ not ‘idee’.

And for what it’s worth, my top highlight from the event has to be the world’s oldest Internet  search engine from  GÜÜGLE.

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Words Matter

Posted on 03 November 2010

It's good to talk (and write...)

Summarize the 300 page novel you have just read in three lines. Now there’s a good exercise in making every word count - as my son discovered on a recent homework assignment. 

Words matter.  

They shape ideas and form opinions. They convey nuance and provide context. They influence your Google ranking (as our web meisters at Labrow marketing will testify - www.labrow.com).

Here’s two other very concrete commercial reasons why this is important right now.

Firstly, attention spans have definitely shortened over the last couple of years which means your twenty second and sixty second pitches have got to be effective in delivering the intended payload to their target. This means that you need to make sure what you say is relevant to the person you’re speaking to and is honed to maximize the value of each word.

Secondly the UK is an open, but highly competitive market. So, for non-UK businesses, when you succeed in your initial pitch and get to present something to your potential customer ( for example a PDF flyer or PowerPoint) make sure the English you use appears to be from a native speaker.

No one would consider entering a new market without ensuring that the product and commercial contracts complied with local regulations. Native English in sales collateral is what the economists would describe as a hidden barrier to market entry.

On more than one occasion we have had to tell a client that their English is perfect but completely wrong - their choice of words and phrases immediately positioned them as a company that was not serious enough about the UK market to get their collateral right.

Or to put it in the words of one client’s target customer, ‘we definitely remember them - every time we need cheering up we pass their brochure round the office. It still gets a laugh’.

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Slow Growth

Posted on 21 October 2010

Not round here....

Slightly horrified to notice just how long it has been since I last wrote something for this blog. Have I got out of the habit, or have I not got anything to say? Well maybe the former is true but the reality is that since the end of the summer holiday season our clients (and consequently ourselves) have been busy. The sectors of the economy we are touching are distinctly active at the moment.

Normal blog frequency will be restored shortly...

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Ancient Wisdom

Posted on 01 September 2010

And other holiday reading....

September 1st and the holiday season is over for another year.

Like many others, I find holiday time is a good time to catch up on reading things I don’t otherwise have time to read.

Here’s a couple of things I found interesting:

Firstly, Tom ‘In Search of Excellence’ Peters (www.tompeters.com) latest thing is K=R=P or put more simply be kind to others and they are more likely to be kind back to you.  Secondly, Andrew McAfee’s book on Enterprise 2.0 ( www.andrewmcafee.org ) shows the value of making it easy to share things with your colleagues.

Could it be that both of these modern gurus have discovered empirically, that in the modern age, the ancient wisdom of ‘do to others what you wish they would do to you’ and ‘he who sows generously, reaps generously’ still holds true?

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Enterprise 2.0 Reboot

Posted on 12 August 2010

Nothing new under the sun or fresh challenges?

My first job after graduating was as a project engineer supporting a large machine shop. My longer serving colleagues had a habit of glorifying the old days. One such remark ran something like this: ‘We used to have much more skilled machinists in the old days. Old Fred - now he knew all the tricks. Use cigarette paper as a shim - that’s a tenth of a thou (thousandth of an inch); use the cardboard from a cigarette packet - that’s a thou. He knew ‘em all.’ What my colleague failed to appreciate was the problems this caused. Firstly, Fred might know how to machine some complex part, but what if the supervisor gave the same part to a different machinist to make - how do you ensure consistency given that Fred might not share his knowledge. Secondly, even if Fred did share his knowledge, it is probably not good for customer confidence to have management create process documentation listing such thinks as ‘how to use cigarette paper to do a better job’.

As a project engineer, I was helping deploy computer aided systems. These came with the promise that you could incorporate the skills of your best machinist into every repeat job. Was this an early example in the use of computers to help with understanding that has specific knowledge and allowing it to have wider use in the organisation?

These computer systems made substantial improvements in quality and efficiency. There was an unintended consequence, however. The machinists stopped thinking like machinists and became operators. They simply loaded the job into the machine and waited for it to finish. They stopped thinking about things like wear and tear on the cutter, was this machine performing correctly - in short they behaved in a dumbed down fashion. They suspended their critical faculties and did what the computer told them, even if something unexpected happened which could have disastrous consequences. Think sat-navs sending you the wrong way down a one way street and you get the picture.

The core philosophy behind Web 2.0 is peer review and approval of knowledge. So here’s the management challenge. When your organisation has got used to a Web 2.0 way of working, and has the best current knowledge and expertise merely a click away, how do you ensure your staff continue to think for themselves and don’t just follow their peer’s advice uncritically?

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It’s Grim up North

Posted on 21 July 2010

Slow growth - true or false?

Apparently the economy in the previous decade was nice - non-inflationary constant expansion, but our post bubble world is grim - growth really is modest.

While the economists can spot high level patterns (the shift of growth from west to east, for example) they are not so good at spotting the changes on the smaller scale. A good example of this was when the credit bubble became a credit crunch and recession threatened it was not obvious to most analysts which businesses would be hardest hit as many items of spend (particularly household spend) were simply not around at the previous major recession.

One of the big plusses of working in the technology sector is that there will always be new things of which some will grow extremely rapidly.

This is not going to change any time soon,  unless someone changes the basic design of homo sapiens.

The iPad is a great contemporary example of something new growing rapidly - zero to several million sales in a few months. It’s not the first hot product this decade and it won’t be the last.

Now,  it is no fun if what you have been offering is no longer wanted - consider the Lancashire handloom weavers of the 19^th century and their rapid replacement by the power loom. Yes, hand loom weavers disappeared in one generation, but the makers of the new power looms saw sales of 400,000 over the same period. Overall growth was modest in the UK in the 19^th Century (just over 1% per annum) but the innovation in how value was created was vast, with fortunes being made in the process.

As a society we are unlikely to be much wealthier by the end of the decade, so if you are selling commodity items in the UK (or most of the West for that matter) don’t expect much growth. However, if you have something innovative to offer don’t let the headlines of ‘slow growth forecast’ put you off achieving your full potential.

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Sporting Interlude

Posted on 05 July 2010

What can we learn from a sporting failure?

Tremendous summer for sport this year - could that explain the two week gap in posts?

England beat Australia in an ODI series, British drivers are challenging for the F1 championship, a British semi-finalist at Wimbledon, and, oh yes, the fly in the ointment - England’s performance in the World Cup.

So what has this to do with technology businesses?

Leaving aside the vast amount of technology used at the top level of sport today, and at risk of sounding like a football pundit, there are some significant things businesses can learn from England’s football fiasco.

Here are my top 4 suggestions - one for every goal conceded against Germany perhaps?

1.  Objectively benchmark your capabilities against the opposition . Your technology will have certain unique features and it is all too easy to believe that these are utterly compelling to your potential customers. You need to know how much your customers value your unique features and what measureable difference these will make to them. You may need outside help to do this if you, like England, are at risk of believing your own hype.

2. Play your own game - not the one your competitor wants you to play. England have been criticised for only being able to play high tempo football. This is a reasonable criticism for a side with aspirations to be world class. However, it is what England do best; and guess what? the only time they looked competitive was when they were playing high tempo football.

3. Avoid betting the business on one key staff member. England appeared to have only one game plan for scoring which was built around Wayne Rooney. He was off form for all four games and England had no plan B. Unless you are a two man start up, make sure you avoid this trap.

4. Make sure you have lots more innovative product developments in the pipeline and an effective process for delivering that pipeline. In 2000 England and Germany both performed badly at the Euro 2000 tournament. England changed their manager, Germany changed their entire youth strategy specifically to produce more high quality players. Germany wanted to win today and tomorrow and the day after. Successful technology businesses need to ensure their product out performs the competition for the full length of their product roadmap.

 

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Enterprise 2.0

Posted on 16 June 2010

First thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 conference

Currently attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Many interesting presentations so far and enough thought provoking stuff for the next couple of blog posts.

One to think about is the switch from assuming that as far as corporate information is concerned, everything is not accessible apart from what we choose to make accessible changes  to everything is available apart from what we choose to close off.

Sunlight as the best disinfectant, perhaps. Or to quote an older source of wisdom ‘what ever you do in secret will be shouted from the roof tops’.

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What’s the point

Posted on 04 June 2010

Make sure you remember why you are doing what you do

So the Great Paywall of Wapping is now in place.

Will the opinion polls be correct and 90% of Times Online readers disappear?

Is this the end of news as we know it?

Before suggesting an answer to these, it’s worth reflecting on the road travelled to this point.

The early corporate web sites (we’re talking 1995 ish) generally tended to be someone in IT playing with the latest technology and seeing what would happen, either because they loved technology or they saw it as the future. Slightly later (’97, ‘98) someone senior in marketing (or whichever department owned the corporate brand) got extremely agitated about how their brand was displayed on the web and demanded that IT hand over the responsibility for the web site to them.

Next up came the dot com boom and bust where the value of a web presence was grossly distorted by the amount of capital trying to invest in one. Once normality had returned the web site became the corporate’s principal means of distributing information about itself and in the case of news organisations distributing their output. As a communication tool it was seen as a means of engaging the consumers with the product and if their was product that was on sale, a means by which the consumer could buy it.

So the purpose of the web site has morphed twice:

From technical test bed to brand augmenter to a place of customer interaction (and hence revenue generation).

Multi-channel became the buzz word description of most consumer facing organisations around 2005. And not long after the numbers browsing newspaper web sites started to exceed the numbers buying papers.

To ensure you deliver value for your customers a key question that every organisation needs to answer for every activity is what is the point of doing this? or put more succinctly: why?

And if you are a commercial organisation, the answer will always be some variant of ‘serving our customers in order to make a profit’.

If the point of your web site is to raise brand awareness then having 37 million page impressions is a great success. If the point of your website is for consumers to buy your product then having 3 million page impressions from 200,000 paying customers shows that you are being successful.

So web site owners, what is the point of each aspect of your web presence?

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Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble....

Posted on 28 May 2010

The future of CleanTech?

Been looking at CleanTech stuff again this week and fell to wondering whether this might be the next bubble.

Having grey hair should, at least give you a slightly longer view on things, so here are a few pointers.

Firstly there is actually a real market here just as there was (and indeed still is) with sub-prime mortgages, Internet stocks, railways, trading with the South Seas and all the other bubbles there have been since the Dutch went a little wild over tulips in the 17th century.

Secondly, the availability of information to support decision making is both opaque and asymmetric. What this leads to is that conventional measures are not always seen as reliable indicators of what is going on - events are either moving too fast or extrapolating the graph into the future clearly gives the wrong answer. As a result, there is a scramble for new measures to try to manage what’s going on. So when you see companies valued on something other than revenue and profit  you know a bubble is underway.

Thirdly watch the growth of conferences, industry events and the trade press. At the height of the UK’s railway mania in 1848 there were 47 weekly publications on railways sold to the general public.

Clean Tech/Energy the next bubble? You read it here first!

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Cool Tech

Posted on 24 May 2010

Went to the All-Energy conference in Aberdeen. Lots of interesting clean tech on show. My favourite bit was the flying demo from Cyberhawk - a surveillance drone for looking at remote installations. 8 rotors, a gimble mounted camera and position controlled by an operator or GPS - neat!

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How big is my market?

Posted on 14 May 2010

Understanding your market

I had a couple of discussions with entrepreneurs this week that had a similar flavour.

Both entrepreneurs were, rightly, passionate about the merits of their technology. Both had identified a large need for what they offer. And both were surprised at why the market was being so slow in buying from them.

So why does this happen? There can be a variety of reasons: the timing may not be right, the price may be more than the value, a disruptive new entrant may be grabbing the buyers attention  and so on.

However, what was going on in both these cases was a technology entrepreneur being very logical about the market from their perspective. The part of the equation that was missing was how does the potential buyer view the world. Both entrepreneurs had not put themselves inside the buyers head and looked at the world from that point of view. Had they done so they would have seen that a lot of their potential market was unlikely to be addressable any time soon.

Market research is often more than just the hard numbers, it is also about understanding the view of what the buyer sees as value and what would motivate them to pursue that value.

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Success

Posted on 29 April 2010

Pleased to see Episerver notch up their 300th UK customer. Their success is well deserved.

So what, in our opinion, is the secret of their success?

Well, it’s partly in having great tech, it’s partly in having very good people work for them and, the bit that others often miss, having a clear view of who does what in the value chain as seen by the client, how that is rewarded and sticking to it.

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In Denial

Posted on 22 April 2010

I went to a charity breakfast a couple of days ago and heard a couple of guys who are working to bring relief to a community in South Africa that has a high incidence of hiv/aids.

The charity is doing some very courageous and compassionate things. 

 However, their largest problem is not the poverty of the area, but the fact that the community is in denial. To quote one of them: ‘you visit someone who is sick and you can tell straight away that they have the disease, but they will blame the symptoms on almost anything else’. There is a perceived stigma in admitting their problem. As a result, sufferers don’t access the available treatments or change their behaviours until it is far too late.

One of the biggest problems organisations face in making the changes necessary to be successful  is being in denial about what the evidence is telling you. There is often a perceived stigma in admitting that things are not all they could be.

It can happen in any size of organisation. In large organisations, the facts can gets lost in departmental politics; in small start-ups  the decision maker can fall in  love with a particular aspect of the technology.

Sometimes you just need someone outside of your situation to come alongside to remove the stigma, help you accept that things are the way they are, and help you take action to improve them.

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iPad, therefore iAM?

Posted on 09 April 2010

Is the iPad the future?

So the Guardian and Rupert Murdoch agree again. This time its an act of faith in Apple’s iPad.

The Guardian has launched an app for it and Mr. Murdoch has been quoted as saying that the iPad is very much the future.

It’s great to see both organisations seizing the opportunity a new channel to market provides for them.

However, a channel to market is all that it is.

And like any other channel to market it needs managing in a way that maximizes value to both the vendor and the buyer. In practice this means understanding where the value is, and doing the good old fashioned disciplines of product and channel management.

Apologies for the quality of the title pun and beginning a paragraph with and. They are two of the many reasons I’m not a journalist.

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Crowdsourcing Easter

Posted on 01 April 2010

Collective wisdom, or ....?

I’ve seen a number of interesting tools to help organisations understand and harness the views of their communities over the past 12 months.

I am, however, just a little worried that organisations are seeing ‘the collective wisdom’ as the answer to all their problems.

Don’t get me wrong - crowd sourcing is a great way of tapping into ideas and feedback that would otherwise remain hidden. However, the view that has surfaced in some organisations that it should be the primary decision support tool is, I think, a classic example of the sort of over exuberance that can happen when a set of tools are developed that make something that was previously difficult, relatively easy.

Tools are still tools, information gathering techniques still gather information and even perfect tools and information does not get rid of the need for management judgement to be applied to the information and knowledge acquired.

Events in the Middle East nearly 2000 years ago are a great illustration of this.

If you were in Jerusalem, would you take the  Palm Sunday crowd’s view that Jesus was the soon to be crowned King,  or do you go for Good Friday’s crowd which yells ‘Crucify Him’?

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Value for Money

Posted on 25 March 2010

Glad to see Northzone spending some of the money they raised earlier this year enabling Videoplaza to successfully close a sensibly size funding round. Having more than proved the business concept, hopefully Videoplaza will now be able to scale rapidly.

Also good to see Creandum involved in this one.

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Value for Money?

Posted on 22 March 2010

Two bits of news briefly caught my eye today.

Niklas Zennstrom investing $165m in disruptive b2c technologies. What grabbed me here was his urging of European entrepreneurs to think big. To quote an earlier technology guru (Henry Royce) ’without mass product and quality this country is finished’. Updating it for the software world would read something like ‘without global scale and a compelling product we can’t compete’. To a certain extent the answer is in Zennstrom’s own hands - will his fund give the entrepreneur enough funds to scale quickly or will they follow the classic (and unsuccessful) European model of investing enough to get to the next development stage?

The other item was Novell’s board rejecting Elliott’s offer. With $1bn in cash, and a lot of it not very accesible to US shareholders should you (a) look for innovative ways of returning it to shareholders or (b)  go on a global acquisition spree? (c) a mixture of both.

For what it’s worth if Novell were to use its market position to enable smaller aquisitions to scale globally, there are a number of good companies around Europe that could fit any sensibly drawn up acquisition criteria.

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Life...

Posted on 19 March 2010

Bit of a time lag since the last post - have spent the week experiencing the NHS with my son.

What can you say about the NHS?

Fantastic people and great that it’s free at the point of need.

And yes there is a but, which is: it is an object lesson on how you can spend billions on IT and still wind up with the customer having a fair bit to do in order to ensure the various parts all join up.

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Life is a Game

Posted on 12 March 2010

’Some Europeans think life is a game - to the English, cricket is a game’. A nice quote which begs the question - ‘how well are you playing?’

One of the keys to success was very well described by the great sprinter Michael Johnson. ‘You have to run your race’.

Not even a start up is a blank sheet of paper - it is a collection of individuals, each with a personality and character influenced by their experience. An established enterprise has a whole lot more historical baggage!

What matters is that your business works at being really good at what you are unique at. Competitive benchmarking and crowd sourcing are great sources of information and market intelligence, but they are not substitutes for the hard work of developing your proposition and delivering it to the market better than the other guys.

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Mind the Gap

Posted on 09 March 2010

Three working days without a post - that is probably too long.

To quote an ancient word of wisdom ‘it is not the beginning of any great matter, but the continuing of the same unto the end that yieldeth the true glory’.

Not that this blog is a great matter!!

 However, in building your value chain a critical success factor is not just what you do, but ensuring the timing of the execution is credible. A gap in the sequence of execution - like the gap in my posts - creates the wrong emotions in the stakeholders.

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Value Chains

Posted on 04 March 2010

Having focussed on printed media for most of the last few posts, it has been good to get out and about and talk to other companies about their value chain and the challenges they face.

How do you build a pan-European distribution network these days?

A good place to start is working out what you´re going to do and what you want your partners to do.  How much vendor touch will your customers want in order to accept you as serious about their particular territory?

Answers vary from company to company, and territory to territory, but first base is still deciding what you can do best before you find others to augment your value proposition.

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Last word on newspapers (for now)

Posted on 03 March 2010

From the editor of Zeit.de at Cebit today -

’The omnibus package, where everyone gets something, is a difficult business model today’

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Grappling with the Future

Posted on 02 March 2010

Heard Andy Mulholland´s talk at Cebit (CTO Cap Gemini).

You can catch up with some of the talks below or for twitterers the tag is #cgc10.

http://www.cebit.de/cgc_program

One of the key points was the problem the digital editors were grappling with (see post below). Specifically people will use search, filtering and social media technologies to customize the services they buy. And what is news media if it isnt a service?

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Not Wishing to Change

Posted on 01 March 2010

Spent some time with a group of digital editors from the regional press. As you would expect one of the issues they were grappling with was how to make money from their web activities.

Clearly this is generating a lot of interest expecially as it can be dressed up as a Rusbridger vs Mudoch argument.

Can I be controversial and suggest that actually they agree?

I also suspect that both of them are wrong.

Here’s why.

If I understand them correctly, in the red corner we have the Guardian wishing to be free and in the blue corner we have News International wishing to charge for its output. Both are behaving as though the bundle of items that currently go to make up a newspaper (both online and offline) is theirs and that what is in the bundle is for them to decide.

That view swims against the tide of the Internet.

In industry after industry the Internet is a powerful aggregator (and dis-aggregator) that enables the consumer to create the bundle they desire. Think Dell PCs, think low cost airlines, think itunes. Twenty years ago you would buy the package decided by someone else - not any more.

So given that a level of news is free from the public sector broadcasting service the debate needs to move on to how can newspapers monetise all the ancilliary content (including editorial and comment) that they produce.

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Semantic Web

Posted on 24 February 2010

Saw a Semantic Web tool from Kinomi yesterday.

It’s fascinating how often IT throws up a concept like Semantic Web that when you articulate it is logical and the place where we would like the industry to get to - think Convergence for perhaps the biggest example.

For a while the concept becomes the next big thing and some early tools are developed. Yet, because we have to do today’s job and we have work rounds for the deficiencies that the concept overcomes, the tools lack a ‘must have’ dimension to them; and so the our progress to the place the concept describes goes slowly....

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Changing the Game

Posted on 24 February 2010

Spent the day at Publishing Scotland’s annual conference.

A lot of the keynotes were on the changing world of book publishing. It’s a classic example of the value chain changing (think iTunes) and an industry being stranded somewhere it does not wish to be.

The trap is there in every industry - you produce a good or service; you take a pride in what you have created; it is bought in large amounts; then in your busy-ness you lose sight of what the customer is actually buying and confuse the good or service with the benefit the customer is paying for.

To give an obvious example: no one buys 6mm drill bits. They buy the ability to make 6mm holes.

Books are just another distribution channel for content - not necessarily an end in themselves.

There is a value to the content - however distributed, and, there is a value to the experience of reading a book. To make money publishers need to work out what they are selling and to whom - and price according to the customers perception of value. And yes, they can publish in many more ways than ink on paper!

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Old News

Posted on 22 February 2010

Had an enjoyable time discussing the market for archive newspapers this afternoon with Zissor. Interesting to compare the evolving strategies of various content owners and the different national libraries.

I’m reminded of a discussion with Chris Batt earlier in the year about how you might value something and the differences between market value (i.e. something you can clearly put a price on) and public value (i.e. something that should be accessible to all).

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Keeping Innovation Going

Posted on 20 February 2010

Good to hear that Northzone successfully closed a €90m round for a new fund.  No doubt they can add to their war chest when Episerver IPOs later this year.

That’s it for the first week on the blog. Have a good weekend - back on Monday.

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Warmer Technology

Posted on 19 February 2010

Had a day out in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. Good conversations with clients and also took the chance to have a look at Microsoft’s Phone 7.

The general market reception was less than rapturous, but I guess some of that is down to the fact that the code is pre-beta, so more of a preview that a launch.

Some nice features, such as the back button, the integration with Office etc. Will it give the iPhone a serious run for its money?

I guess that depends on two factors - will it ship at or near the promised date  and can they mobilise their partner network to write lots of great apps for it.  Do both of those, and it will be game on.

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First Post

Posted on 17 February 2010

Carl Savage blogging - hmm. As a fully paid up member of the ‘reading and writing are for emergencies only’ way of working this is a bit of a surprise. So I dedicate this blog to the guys who know me well and have been encouraging me to write. I hope they (and you) find something here worth reading!

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Cool Technology

Posted on 17 February 2010

Spent part of last week in Northern Sweden giving a seminar on ‘How to enter the UK market’. Fortunately remembered my hat and gloves as the temperature was minus 17. The companies had some interesting stuff including a CAMT app for dentists and an out of the box solution for those who run high tech incubators.

Also enjoyed catching up with Episerver founder Mikael Runhem - and swapping building project stories - after attending the Swedish Chamber of Commerce’s Welcome to the UK event in Stockholm.

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