kerray - business feed

Engaging with criticism

2012-02-22T10:03:00Z

If you need to find out how your audience is receiving your work, it's worth considering how you've structured the interactions around criticism. Sometimes a customer has a one-off problem, a situation that is unique and a concern that has to be extinguished on the spot. More often, though, that feedback you're getting represents the way a hundred or a thousand other customers are also judging you.

Some random ideas:

If you defend yourself to the customer, quickly explaining precisely why the policy is the way it is, why the product is the way it is, you are pushing the criticizer away because you're telling them they're wrong about their opinion. And they might indeed be wrong, but it's certainly not going to encourage more feedback.
If your front line people restate the criticism in their own words and are grateful to the customer for sharing it, everyone will benefit. You can always choose to ignore the input later.
If there's no way for your staff to easily send the criticism up the hierarchy, it dies before it reaches someone who can do something about it.
If senior people follow up with the customer with specific acknowledgment and thanks, you multiply the benefits.

Not every company needs to do this right to succeed (Apple succeeds and does not do any of these things--and as far as I know, Bob Dylan is in the same camp), but if you believe you can benefit from a cycle of feedback, it's worth a try.

Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die

2012-02-14T10:13:52Z

How many meetings did you have today? This week? This month?

Now ask yourself how many of those meetings were worthwhile, versus the work that you could have accomplished in that same time.

This might lead one to wonder why we even have meetings at all.

At GitHub we don't have meetings. We don't have set work hours or even work days. We don't keep track of vacation or sick days. We don't have managers or an org chart. We don't have a dress code. We don't have expense account audits or an HR department.

Now, I'm sure Tom was being facetious when he said that GitHub doesn't have meetings, because I sure as heck saw meeting rooms when I recently visited their offices to give a talk. Who knows, maybe they use them to store all the extra forks.

Although some meetings are inevitable, even necessary, the principle he's advocating here is an important one. Meetings should be viewed skeptically from the outset, as risks to productivity. We have meetings because we think we need them, but all too often, meetings are where work ends up going to die. I have a handful of principles that I employ to keep my meetings useful:

No meeting should ever be more than an hour, under penalty of death.

The first and most important constraint on any meeting is the most precious imaginable resource at any company: time. If you can't fit your meeting in about an hour, there is something deeply wrong with it, and you should fix that first. Either it involves too many people, the scope of the meeting is too broad, or there's a general lack of focus necessary to keep the meeting on track. I challenge anyone to remember anything that happens in a multi-hour meeting. When all else fails, please keep it short!
Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement.

What's the mission statement of your meeting? Can you define the purpose of your meeting in a single succinct sentence? I hesitate to recommend having an "agenda" and "agenda items" because the word agenda implies a giant, tedious bulleted list of things to cover. Just make sure the purpose of the meeting is clear to everyone; the rest will take care of itself.
Do your homework before the meeting.

Since your meeting has a clearly defined mission statement, everyone attending the meeting knows in advance what they need to talk about and share, and has it ready to go before they walk into the room. Right? That's how we can keep the meeting down to an hour. If you haven't done your homework, you shouldn't be in the meeting. If nobody has done their homework, the meeting should be cancelled.
Make it optional.

"Mandatory" meetings are a cop-out. Everyone in the meeting should be there because they want to be there, or they need to be there. One sure way to keep yourself accountable for a meeting is to make everyone optional. Imagine holding a meeting that people actually wanted to attend, because it was … useful. Or interesting. Or entertaining. Now make it happen!
Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting.

If your meeting never happened, what would the consequences be? If the honest answer to that is almost nothing, then perhaps your meeting has no reason to exist. Any truly productive meeting causes stuff to happen as a direct result of the decisions made in that meeting. You, as a responsible meeting participant, are responsible for keeping track of what you need to do – and everyone in the room can prove it by summarizing their to-do list for everyone's benefit before they leave the meeting.

It's not that we shouldn't have meetings, but rather, we need to recognize the inherent risks of meetings and strive to make the (hopefully) few meetings we do have productive ones. Let's work fast, minimize BS, and get to the point.

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"It's always been this way"

2011-12-29T10:57:00Z

The only standard is impermanence.

It's very easy to believe that the world we live in has always been this way.

Your ethnic group has always had a similar standing.

Technology has always permitted certain kinds of interactions and is always improving.

Real estate values always rise from decade to decade. (Until they don't).

A job has always been the standard way to make a living.

Your chosen religion has always been practiced the way you practice it.

People in positions of authority and leverage have always had degrees from famous colleges.

Information has always been widely available.

As soon as you accept that just about everything in our created world is only a few generations old, it makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that the assumptions we make about the future are generally wrong, and that the stress we have over change is completely wasted.

A hundred little things

2011-12-28T10:12:00Z

One of my favorite restaurants is a little Mexican place in Utah called El Chubasco. I've often eaten there twice in a day, and once (it's true) ate there three times.

It's always crowded. Sometimes people wait outside, in the cold, even though there are plenty of alternatives within walking distance. So, what's the secret? Why is it worth a drive and a wait?

No specific reason. The energy of owners Jill and Craig is certainly part of it, but most customers never encounter them. I think it's the hand-fitted gestalt of thousands of little decisions made by caring management out to make a difference. Usually, when a business like this gets bigger or turns into a chain, marketers make what feel like smart compromises. The MBAs collide with the mystical, and the place gets boring. "Why do we need 14 free salsas when we can get away with six?" or "Perhaps we ought to stop handing out huge tumblers of water for free--our bottled water sales will go up."

This turns out to be the secret of just about every really successful enterprise. Sure, you can copy one or two or even three of their competitive advantages and unique remarkable attributes, but no, it's going to be really difficult to recreate the magic of countless little decisions. The scarcity happens because so many businesses don't care enough or are too scared to invest the energy in so many seemingly meaningless little bits of being extraordinary.

The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms

2011-12-27T11:37:32Z

Many years ago (we're talking about the late 1980s) I spent a year and a half as a shop manager. Well, that and a retail pharmacist running a pharmacy: but in addition to dispensing prescriptions, a chunk of retail management came into the picture. (The 24-year-old Charlie really sucked as a retail manager. I would not hire him. Luckily both stores were parts of small local chains with competent management backup—even if one of them was owned outright by a very happy junkie—and in any event made up most of their turnover via prescriptions. At which I merely sucked somewhat.)

Walking around various British cities over the past couple of years I've noticed an increasing number of vacant shop fronts (some in prime retail situations). I've also noticed a disturbing loss of diversity in our high streets, as quirky local shops give way to cookie-cutter national chains. I have, like most people, had the frustrating experience of trying to work out whether my mobile phone contract or the airline flight I'm been booking is actually the cheapest one that meets my needs, or whether I'm being gouged by a computer somewhere. And so I'm trying to put the pieces of the jigsaw together because I'm interested in guessing what our retail experience is going to look like in 10 years' time—the traditional "if this goes on ..." exercise beloved of science fiction writers.

Which leads me via the following chain of logic to a hypothesis about the future of retail. Starting in this blog entry with some abstract propositions about the forces that are going to shape retail over the next decade. (In the next blog entry: what this means for your retail environment.)

1. The internet is a communication tool that tends to disintermediate supply and demand.

—That is, it makes it easy for consumers to find whatever they're looking for.

2. Search tools exist that permit direct comparisons between competing offerings.

—First-generation search/comparison tools look for numerical data to base comparisons on. Price is the most accessible numerical data. So price is what gets presented to consumers first.

—Available evidence suggests that the majority of consumers consider price to be the most important aspect of any buying decision (if the goods on offer are equivalent[1], or there is economic stress). Note for example the 23% drop in organic food sales since 2008 in the UK, corresponding to the banking crisis and subsequent recession.

—More recently we've seen comparison sites with customer ratings to supply metadata about, for example, supplier reliability: but these tread dangerously close to defamation in some cases: see for example the class action lawsuit against Yelp (alleging extortion: dismissed, but shows the shape of things to come). Price comparisons are relatively safe.

3. It follows that, in the long term, the internet tends to induce pure price-driven competition between rival suppliers.

—This reduces profit margins both to intermediaries (the supply chain) and to producers.

4. Price fixing cartels (and government-mandated fixed prices) are illegal, and this prohibition has been globalized via international treaty law.

—So suppliers are trapped in a race to the bottom, unless (a) they can find some clear value-added proposition to attract consumers other than low price, or (b) they can work out a way to reduce price transparency in order to impair the accuracy of consumers' pricing decisions.

—luxury goods and designer brands adopt strategy (a). Some other well-known organizations go this way, too: Apple is an obvious example in the consumer electronics sector. (Underlying Apple's value proposition is simplicity: a simple, easy to understand product range, pared-back industrial design, "easy to use". Also underlying their success is "easy to fix": if it goes wrong you take it to the Genius Bar and it will be fixed. Or, for a fee, they'll uplift it and fix it for you.) But what about strategy (b)?

5. Algorithmic pricing of airline tickets has been around for decades. Flights are scheduled up to a year in advance, between known end-points, with a well-known number of seats in each class. So why are there so many airline ticket types, and why do prices for a given ticket type on a given route vary depending on when you book them? The answer is that airlines have an incentive to ensure that there is a paying fare in every seat, but they also have an incentive to not discount seats if they can possibly sell them at a higher fare. So they've developed complex pricing algorithms that balance supply and demand internally and offer potential customers the highest spot price that the airline thinks the market will bear. More recently, mobile phone companies, cable TV companies, and other service suppliers offer us the "freedom" to build our own package of services, but the underlying pricing information is highly opaque.

—For example: cell tariffs include a set number of minutes per month to certain other types of phone. Non-inclusive minutes and text messages, and internet data are charged at a rate that varies depending on the price of the tariff selected, so that to identify which tariff is cheapest for a given customer it is necessary to work out their average inclusive and non-inclusive usage pattern and then use a spreadsheet. And comparisons between different cellcos are even harder because the basic components of a package may be defined differently.

—Alternatively, cable TV packages usually contain a mixture of channels that cut horizontally across different specialities, so that if you have a specific interest you will need to pay for the most expensive package on offer if you want to see all the channels covering that area.

—Because of the difficulty of navigating such complex pricing schemes, the majority of customers end up over-paying for services such as phone tariffs, airline tickets, and utilities.

6. Because of price competition, internet shopping is eating into the retail sector. High street retailers need to maintain expensive high street retail outlets; internet suppliers do not. In general the cost of delivery/fulfilment can be outsourced to the customer, or offset against the (higher) cost of operating retail premises. (Tesco et al wouldn't offer internet shopping and delivery services if it wasn't profitable to do so.)

—Price competition in retail is therefore an incentive for retailers to look for other means of sustaining profits.

7. How far can algorithmic pricing be pushed into the retail sector?

—Use of loyalty cards gives retailers huge volumes of data about individual customer purchasing habits. And CPU cycles are cheap. The bait on the hook is discounts on some products, or special offers available only to cardholders. These offers aren't free: if you use a loyalty card, the offers are your payment for surrendering a chunk of your privacy.

—Of course, online retailers like amazon get this information by default. (And compliance with local data protection laws often leads to a privacy "race to the bottom" in consequence.)

—I note that many personal computers are solid on a build-to-order basis: retail stores only supply a basic range (retail floor space is expensive) but offer the option of choosing accessories and spec on a machine that will then be delivered direct to the customer, or for collection. (This is similar to the way automobiles are traditionally sold, but pushes down the price floor for such a system by 1-2 orders of magnitude.)

—Cost of laptops may be dependent on the spot price of various components purchased in bulk (for example, RAM, hard disk, screen). Is it reasonable for consumer electronics vendors to therefore offer algorithmic pricing on their products? (For example, "the spot price of wholesale DRAM is trending down this week, so if you order your new laptop before Friday we'll give you a £7.52 credit towards the optional 4Gb memory upgrade! Hurry now! Offer ends Friday!")

—Other physical goods' cost of production may vary with other dependencies, e.g. fuel costs, plagues affecting crops, civil unrest/industrial action, floods hitting industrial parks in Thailand, etc.

8. I expect that we're probably going to see algorithmic pricing extended down the retail chain to include products that would normally only see that kind of trading on futures markets. Is it reasonable for a supermarket to offer customers futures deals? "We notice you bought 76Kg of potatoes last year. Currently potatoes cost £1/Kg, but the cost of fuel may cause this to rise, or there might be a famine. Would you like to pay us £80 by direct debit at 80p/week instead for a guarantee of up to 80Kg of potatoes with nothing extra to pay for the next year? For an extra 20p/week, we'll insure you against a potato famine driving prices up to £3/Kg for the next 100Kg you buy!"

—We've already seen some signs of this on amazon.com (with prices on offer to different customers varying for the same product, presumably on the basis of the customer's willingness to pay more for goods in prior transactions)

—Legal justification from the retailers would be "we're simply making an offer to sell at a unique price to this particular customer—what's your problem with it?" (The difference being that by putting a price sign on a rack of oranges in a supermarket, the supermarket is making the same offer to sell to everyone who walks past the rack.)

—The flip side is: it'd mean the end of transparent retail pricing, and a whole raft of new predatory practices coming in. (If you earn 50% more than average you can expect your grocery prices to begin creeping up, because your suppliers can infer what's in your wallet).

—How far can algorithmic pricing be extended? And what are the long-term implications if, in 10 years' time, the only way you can check the price of an item in a store is to point your camerphone at it—and the price will be tailored specifically to you and not available to anyone else?

(Part two of this prognostication will follow, when I feel like writing it up.)

[1] Obviously not all "goods" are equivalent. Books, for example, aren't always substitutable; a novel by Hannu Rajaniemi or Karl Schroeder might be an acceptable substitute for one by C. Stross, but a novel by Nora Roberts or a cookbook by Mrs Beeton most certainly isn't. And some superficially different goods may be substitutable depending on context; a return flight from EDI-AMS for a business meeting isn't substitutable for a return ticket EDI-CDG, but if the goal is a weekend vacation in a European capital city with tourist attractions it might be.

On buying something for the first time

2011-12-16T10:47:00Z

There are only three kinds of sales:

Buying a refill, another unit of a service or product you've already purchased before
Switching to a new model/brand/style
Buying something for the first time

Here's an overlooked truth: until quite recently, buying something for the first time was a very rare and almost revolutionary act. In fact, more than a billion people on Earth don't do this as a matter of course. The standard is to only purchase the seeds, fuel or shelter that your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did. That's the way it's always been.

Take a minute to think about what it means for someone in poverty (which until recently was almost everyone) to buy something for the first time. The combination of risk and initiative can be paralyzing. One of the little-known transitions of the industrial revolution was the notion that companies and individuals could set out to discover and buy stuff that they didn't know about until just recently.

You see a box or a store window or a product on the web and you start imagining how cool it would be to open the box, own the product, use it, engage with it and benefit from it. A product you've never purchased before. That's new behavior. Until a hundred years ago, that sort of imagining was rare indeed, just about anywhere in the world.

If you are trying to grow your coaching practice or b2b saas business or widget shop, understand that you are almost certainly pushing against a significant barrier: most people hesitate before buying something for the first time. If you're trying to develop trade in the underprivileged world, understand that teaching people to buy anything for the first time is a revolutionary concept.

Campbell's soup is almost never bought for the first time. It is a replacement purchase. No one switches to Campbell's either. They buy it because their mom did.

The first iPhone, on the other hand, was a first time product for just about everyone who bought it... most of the people on line that first day were buying their first smartphone. Worth noting that a few years later, many millions have made the switch--we don't make first-time purchases lightly.

And most of what gets sold to us each day at work or at home are switching products. "Ours is just like the one you already use, but cheaper/better/faster/cooler."

The potent mix of fear of loss, desire for gain and curiousity fuel the appeal of buying for the first time. But it's magic, it's not science, and it doesn't often happen on schedule.

Here's a six-minute video presentation I did on this for the Acumen Fund. Sorry about the video glitch near the beginning--part of the magic of being on stage is that I wasn't even aware of being projected upon...

Mercury, Retrograde

2011-12-08T09:48:23Z

No, I haven't turned to astrology; but it's handy to have a term for those periods of life that are dominated by Murphy's Law, and the past week has been one of them. Hence the paucity of blogging.

Let's leave aside — for now — the decision to ditch the first 26,000 words (or around 80 pages) of a new novel and re-do from start; this stuff happens. From time to time you dive into a project only to realize you'd started in the deep end and/or the pool was drained for maintenance. You learn to suck it up: part of being a pro is being able to recognize your mistakes and learn from them, rather than blindly pushing on.

Let's also set aside the short-notice turnaround I'm meant to be giving the copy edits on the manuscript of "The Apocalypse Codex" — shockingly, my US publisher is ahead of schedule and so I am expected to return the checked CEM before they close for the last two weeks of December. (This means I can't blame them for my tendency to work over December 25th, which I do every year on a point of principle.)

No. The real pain in the neck has been the Revolt of the Machines ...

First, my iPhone. It's out of warranty and it has developed an amusing little foible; the microphone works fine for all apps, except the phone app. To which it delivers the sound of silence. (Yes, I power cycled it. Yes, I reinstalled the firmware. Yes, I put it into DFU mode and reinstalled the baseband firmware too. Yes, I cleaned the noise cancellation mike port. It works with a wired headset's mike; pull the headset cable and it works for a couple of seconds, then stops, suggesting something wrong with the noise cancellation circuit.) Anyway, the next step is to take it to an Apple Store with a Genius Bar. My nearest one is in Glasgow; two hours away from door-to-door. So I would have done that, but for an intervening overnight trip (to a city even further away from an Apple Store — they're not common in British cities with populations under a million).

I arrived home yesterday, fully intending to spend today on a trip to Glasgow, despite a wee spot of weather; I was going to dash across in the morning and be home before the full force of Hurricane Bawbag struck. But while I was away, the other machines decided to come out on strike in sympathy. Specifically the Virgin Media V+ box (a rather brain-dead proprietary Tivo-like device) had crashed, hard. So hard, in fact, that aside from a brief flash from one indicator LED when switching it on, the thing was completely dead. And thereon hangs a tale of technical support anti-patterns.

One of the reasons I use Apple hardware is that, when something goes wrong (as inevitably happens if you use enough electronic devices for long enough) it's usually straightforward to get it fixed. First you check for fixes online in Apple's support knowledge-base or curated user forums, You either phone AppleCare (with credit card in hand if you're out of warranty) or you make an appointment and drag the gizmo to the nearest Apple Store. The Apple Store staff are specialists — they do one thing (after-sales support and service for Apple devices) and do it quite well. Apple go out of their collective way to make it easy to contact AppleCare by phone or, to make an appointment with a Genius Bar support tech (via phone, web, email, or dedicated iOS app).

Compare and contrast with Virgin Media, who have a UK-wide monopoly on cable TV ...

Virgin helpfully don't let you talk to them by email, snail mail, fax, twitter, or FaceBook. They operate sales kiosks in local shopping malls, but these kiosks are dedicated to acquiring customer leads, not serving existing customers. For existing customers, they provide a phone support system with the menu tree from hell.

First I spent ten minutes on the line, listening to canned messages about service interruptions outside my area, entering various details including my account number and region code, and being offered menu options for billing, account upgrades, various arse-scratching services, and finally to report a problem. Having done this, I got through to an exciting menu with no alternative options and no way back: "we're now going to put you through to an engineer — can you enter the first, third, and eighth letters or digits of your password?"

Guess what: I have no password. I'm a legacy customer, from back when they were Telewest, in the late nineties. I predate their password system by over a decade. I note that it is probably only a coincidence that you hit the "please enter your password" prompt after spending a subjective eternity listening to canned service status messages on a non-free (relatively pricey but not quite premium rate) phone call, with no warnings up-front about needing various bits of information to hand. After hanging up and swearing for a while I hit their website, flailed around in the TV listings for a bit before locating the obscure corner discussing support issues, and discovered that before you can talk to anyone, you're now supposed to register online and create a profile for your account. I did so, set a password, and after a while got to the Boss page that said, "we're sending you an activation email with a link to click to confirm that this email address belongs to you."

(Note that Virgin enforces insecure passwords by design. In order to ensure that you can enter your web account password on your telephone keypad, they helpfully restrict passwords to 6-10 characters, digits and alphabet only, the first character being an alphabet character. Given that off-the-shelf software running on cheap commodity GPUs can brute-force most 11 character UTF-8 passwords in seconds, and that the account password would give an attacker control over an account coupled to billing information, you can imagine my joy.)

An email from Virgin duly arrived. Guess what wasn't in it? Yes, it was a generic "welcome to Virgin!!!1!ELEVENTY!!!11We love you!!!" email without an "activate this account" link.

(Leaving aside the horror that is HTML email, I can only speculate that Virgin are trying to reduce support call-outs by inducing cerebrovascular haemorrhages in their customers.)

I hit the "send the confirmation email again" button. Waited. Hit it again. Slowly succumbed to the kind of existential despair that has hitherto been the rich legacy of dealing with bilingual Japanese corporate double taxation exemption certificates issued in error to the wrong category of taxpayer. Half an hour later, three "activate this account" emails arrived nose-to-tail like Number 19 buses in Wandsworth. Success at last! I activated the account, set the password, and dived back into the telephone menu system from hell.

... Which prompted me to enter my password and then put me on hold. And on hold some more. And on hold for around 20 minutes, condemned to listen to the kind of shitty brainless pablum that passes for pop music these days. Stuff that makes D:Ream sound inspirational and conceptually challenging. Stuff that probably oozed its way off the X Factor B-side list after being down-voted for being too down-market in its chirpy, schmaltzy, autotune-assisted sentimentality. Stuff that made me want to crawl down the telephone line and garotte whoever compiled a bouncy playlist of recent Radio One hits to cheer up grumpy middle aged men who are phoning to complain that their cable box has died 24 hours before a small arctic hurricane is due to make landfall.

Finally a human being came on the line. "How may I help you?"

I explained the situation. "All right sir, I'm just going to put you on hold for a couple of minutes while I test your V+ box from this end ..."

At which point the cordless handset beeped at me.

Now, in the cathedral of advanced technology that is my home, the regular phone system is a dank smelly crypt connected to the land line that time forgot. It really only exists for the third-party ADSL provider to piggyback on, and for emergency service. (I sacked Virgin from providing phone and broadband a few years ago and haven't looked back.) I bought the cheapest cordless phones I could find when I moved in here; they're on on their second set of batteries, half the elements in the LCD on each handset have died, and the battery life is dropping again — they currently have a life measurable in milliseconds for n < 10⁶. I'd been here before with take-away orders and interminable family phone calls to elderly relatives; but this time what was at stake was the risk of having to go through the entire Virgin rigmarole again. So I legged it to the kitchen, and the sole wired landline in the house ... and managed to scoop up the Hello Kitty phone (oh, the ignominy!) about thirty seconds before the cordless handset died. Success! And then I got to listen to the hold music from hell for another couple of minutes.

Finally: "Sir, I'd like to schedule an engineer visit. Can someone be there to let the engineer in between noon and 4pm tomorrow?"

I groaned and mentally consigned myself to another day of no-working-iphone. Engineering visit slots with Virgin are like hen's teeth, and likely as not if I said no I'd be looking at a long weekend (not to mention a radge windstorm) without TV. "Okay," I said.

"Then if I can take your mobile phone number, so the engineer can call you to confirm the visit ..?"

And now to moralize:

Apple have a monopoly on technical support for Apple products.

Virgin Media have a monopoly on technical support for Virgin Media cable TV and related products.

Why does one of them provide a grade A service when you try to get in touch for after sales technical support, and the other a grade D- experience?

I can only conclude that it's because Virgin Media know they're a monopoly and discount the value of customer goodwill as a tool for revenue retention. If I want TV service that delivers certain channels I'm stuck with them — for legal reasons I can't erect a satellite dish, and there's no cable TV competition because Virgin Media is the rebranded spawn of the merger between Telewest and NTL, the former regional monopoly cablecos. To Virgin, technical support is not a profit centre — it's a constant grinding drain. Moreover, many faults are the result of transient glitches somewhere in their network. So if you can stall Joe Six-Pack for half an hour, four times out of five his problem will resolve itself. So they deliberately make it hard to get in touch, milk the customers for the interconnect fees when they call, outsource the call handling side of the operation to the lowest (overseas) bidder, and farm out the maintenance jobs at piece-work rates to small independent contractors (thus making them a monopsony, and driving down the cost of doing maintenance further, at the expense of said local contractors).

Apple don't behave as if they're a monopoly, because until very recently they weren't. Apple was primarily a computer company until 2003, and a struggling one at that. They nearly went bust in 1997, and the horror years of the early 1990s aren't out of institutional memory. When you're trying to build up from a 2% market share in a sector where customers replace their kit every 2-5 years, it's vital to avoid pissing them off sufficiently that they start looking at the competition (especially if you're selling your own goods at a premium price). AppleCare support in the early noughties was almost desperately eager to please. For example, there was the year when I burned out three keyboards on an iBook G3. I'd phone up AppleCare, give them my credit card number as a deposit, and they'd ship me a replacement keyboard by courier with next day delivery. (The deposit was waived if I shipped the old keyboard back in the box provided — uplift was free.) The third time I did this, the support guy asked why. "I'm an author," I said. "Oh, fine." And a new keyboard turned up on my doorstep the next morning. Even today, the general quality of after-sales technical support from Apple rivals the best in the personal computer business.

Final observation: today's monopoly status can be as lost as easily as it was gained. Virgin Media have a monopoly on cable TV in the UK ... but there are rivals; Sky for satellite TV (if you live in an area where satellite dishes are permitted), digital terrestrial TV, and BT have upgraded their phone network to the point where TV-over-ADSL services such as BT Vision become practical. The instant I can get the channels this household needs from some organization other than Virgin I will be out of that contract. And all because they stuck after-sales technical support in the wrong column of the balance sheet — as a liability, rather than an infrastructure investment.

Pre digital

2011-11-25T10:24:00Z

A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that's pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service of one doctor (and the need to get paid and not get sued). A 90-minute experience so we could see a doctor for ninety seconds.

Wasteful and even dangerous.

Imagine what this is like in a fully digital environment instead. Of course, they'd know everything about your medical history and payment ability from a quick ID scan at the entrance. And you'd know the doctor's availability before you even walked in, and you would have been shuttled to the urgent care center down the street if there was an uneven load this early in the morning. No questions to guess at the answer (last tetanus shot? Allergies to medications?) because the answers would be known. The drive to the pharmacy might be eliminated, or perhaps the waiting time would be shortened. If this accident or illness is trending, effecting more of the population, we'd know that right away and be able to prevent more of it... Triage would be more efficient as well. The entire process might take ten minutes, with a far better outcome.

School is pre-digital. Elections. Most of what you do in your job. Even shopping. The vestiges of a reliance on geography, lack of information, poor interpersonal connections and group connection (all hallmarks of the pre-digital age) are everywhere.

Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: "That place is pre-digital."

All a way of saying that this is just the beginning, the very beginning, of the transformation of our lives.

Questions for a new entrepreneur

2011-10-29T19:31:00Z

A few things came up over coffee the other day. His idea is good, his funding is solid, there are many choices. Some of the questions that don't usually get asked:

Are you aware of your cash flow? The thing about a fish in the stream is that it doesn't care if the water is six inches deep or a foot deep. As long as it never (ever) goes to zero, it's fine. What's your zero point? What are you doing to ensure you get to keep swimming?

Are you trying to build profit or equity? A business that builds a brand, a footprint, a standard and an audience might end up being worth millions (witness Tumblr, which has many millions of value but zero profitabilty). On the other hand, a business with no exit value at all might spin off plenty of profit (consider the local doctor's office). It would be great if you could simultaneously maximize both the value of your company and the profit it produces (in the short run), but that's unlikely.

What's your role? Do you want to be a freelancer, an entrepreneur or a business owner? A business owner is the boss, but it's a job, a place that is stable and profitable. An entrepreneur is an artist of sorts, throwing herself into impossible situations and seeking out problems that require heart and guts to solve. Both are fine, but choose.

Are you trying to build a team? Some business owners want to minimize cost and hassle. Others are trying to forge a culture, to train and connect and lead.

Which kind of risk is okay with you? There's financial risk, emotional risk and brand risk (among others). Are you willing to put your chips on the table daily? How about your personal reputation?

And finally, and most important, why? Why are you doing this at all?

If committees told the truth

2011-10-29T09:27:00Z

"Hi, we're here to take your project to places you didn't imagine.

With us on board, your project will now take three times as long.

It will cost five times as much.

And we will compromise the art and the vision out of it, we will make it reasonable and safe and boring."

Great work is never reasonable, safe or boring. Thanks anyway.

Arguing with success

2011-10-28T09:50:00Z

"You can't argue with success."

Of course you can.

Conventional wisdom says you shouldn't bother. But arguing with failure is dumb. Failure doesn't need to be argued with, it's already failed.

It takes guts to argue with success, guts and insight. And it's the best way to make things better.

Comic for October 16, 2011

2011-10-16T05:00:00Z

10 Questions to Ask in an Interview for Developers

2011-10-12T14:00:57Z

Editors note: This article assumes that you have some knowledge of software development.

The wonderful world of software development. I have now been a “professional” programmer for about 6 months now and have learned much more in that time than I did during most of my entire education at college.

Thanks college.

But, there are a few things that I have learned about the company that I work for, the people that I work with, and about programming in general that I wish I would have known when considering employment with any company. This isn’t because I don’t like my job (in fact, I Love my job); it’s because there are some things every developer should know before entering a new job in a new company.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 questions to ask in an interview for developers. If I missed something , add your questions in the comments below.

1. What tools does the team / company use?

We never learned about good testing frameworks or testing frameworks in general in school. Never learned what a good text/code editor was. And sure as hell didn’t hear what to use for source control.

These are some some good things to know about the company that you are applying to. What coding environment do you use? What type of source control tools? Are there any other specific tools I need to know before you join the team?

2. Are there some sort of coding standards?

What are big “no-nos” when it comes to coding style? Is there some sort of coding standard and style? If not, it doesn’t mean that they don’t know what they are doing, but it could mean that source code ends up being “spaghetti code” and tough to wrap your head around.

3. What type of storage technologies are used?

What ways do developers and the company store information? Is it a specific type of database technology or is it open ended? For example, do you have to use a standard, company-issued type of database technology like SQL Server or MySQL to get things done? Or can you use MongoDB on a whim?

4. What operating systems are used?

This should be somewhat apparent before your interview, but it’s always something good to ask. Plus it doesn’t hurt to passionately talk about your favorite OS, you geek. I can imagine that many companies use a wide-range of operating systems. Of course the most popular being Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

5. Is the team an Agile team? Do they follow Waterfall methodology (yikes!)?

What type of development style does the company / team subscribe to? Are they an Agile team? Waterfall? How closely do they follow the methodology?

Also, different teams within one company may have different types of methodologies they use. learning this allows you to see how you will work and what other teams use.

6. How much room do developers have to “take charge”?

Are customer software requirements locked and stringent or do developers have wiggle room to try and create things that customers would like better?

Do developers have the opportunity to create tools and systems during their day to help the team that they work on without having to create an entire formal project? Some companies encourage developers to take charge and make things on the side while others simply want you to do what you are told.

7. Are there any tool / software restrictions?

Is there any software that the company has “banned” from use? This is more along the lines of open source software or software that has weird licensing restrictions for commercial use.

Even after your interview, it’s probably a good idea not to install and use software that isn’t directly “approved” by the company, unless you are given free reign to do so.

8. Is telecommuting an option?

What type of working condition does the company have when it comes to working remotely? This can be a huge benefit to a future employee – the ability to work from home. If the company allows for remote working arrangements, It’s important to know what expectations are.

9. Does the team have code reviews? If so what are they like?

Ahh, code reviews. The one place that can make you feel like a genius or show you aren’t the hotshot that you thought you were. Does the company and team give code reviews on a regular basis? If so, what are they like? Hell on earth or generally helpful in learning what you are doing wrong and how to make it better?

I haven’t had the opportunity to sit through a killer code review, but I have heard horror stories. It’s good to know what you are getting into.

10. What type of experience is on the team that I will join?

How seasoned are the developers that you are about to join up with? What type of experiences and code have they been to exposed to? What are the weaknesses of the team and what can they improve on?

It’s a great thing to know when joining a new team; who can I ask for help if (and when) I need it?

Of course there are other important questions that you may want to ask in a developer interview, but these 10 will quickly give you an idea of what the team and company is like that you are interviewing for.

Like I said, I haven’t been in the software development field for too long, but feel that I now have a better understanding of what I would ask in my next interview. Are there any other questions that developers should ask during an interview? Post them below.

Form and function

2011-10-24T09:03:00Z

When the form changes, so does the underlying business model, which of course changes the function as well.

Mail ---> email

Books ---> ebooks

DVD ---> YouTube/Netflix

1040 ---> Online taxes

Visa ---> Paypal

Open outcry ---> Electronic trading

Voice call centers ---> forums and online chat

Direct mail ---> permission marketing

In each case, the original players in the legacy industry decided that the new form could be bolted onto their existing business model. And in each case they were wrong. Speed and marginal cost and ubiquity and a dozen other elements of digitalness changed the interaction itself, and so the function changes too.

The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, "How does this advance help our business?"

The correct question is, "how does this advance undermine our business model and require us/enable us to build a new one?"

There are projects that are possible with ebooks or Kickstarter or email that could never have worked in an analog universe. Most of the money made in the stock market today is via trading approaches that didn't even exist thirty years ago.

When a change in form comes to your industry, the first thing to discover is how it will change the function.

The Submarine

2011-10-17T11:07:52Z

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. [1]

Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications. And we weren't the only ones they did great things for. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. Why call an auction site "eBay"?

Symbiosis

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper.

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times. [3]

The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity. You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought of themselves.

Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.

This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.

Reporters like definitive statements. For example, many of the stories about Jeremy Jaynes's conviction say that he was one of the 10 worst spammers. This "fact" originated in Spamhaus's ROKSO list, which I think even Spamhaus would admit is a rough guess at the top spammers. The first stories about Jaynes cited this source, but now it's simply repeated as if it were part of the indictment. [4]

All you can say with certainty about Jaynes is that he was a fairly big spammer. But reporters don't want to print vague stuff like "fairly big." They want statements with punch, like "top ten." And PR firms give them what they want. Wearing suits, we're told, will make us 3.6 percent more productive.

Buzz

Where the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is in the generation of "buzz." They usually feed the same story to several different publications at once. And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is some important trend afoot. Which is exactly what they're supposed to think.

When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside stores at midnight to buy the first copies. None of them would have been there without PR firms, who generated such a buzz in the news media that it became self-reinforcing, like a nuclear chain reaction.

I doubt PR firms realize it yet, but the Web makes it possible to track them at work. If you search for the obvious phrases, you turn up several efforts over the years to place stories about the return of the suit. For example, the Reuters article that got picked up by USA Today in September 2004. "The suit is back," it begins.

Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. [5] When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.

Not surprising, considering The Men's Wearhouse was at that moment running ads saying "The Suit is Back." Talk about a successful press hit-- a wire service article whose first sentence is your own ad copy.

The secret to finding other press hits from a given pitch is to realize that they all started from the same document back at the PR firm. Search for a few key phrases and the names of the clients and the experts, and you'll turn up other variants of this story.

Casual fridays are out and dress codes are in writes Diane E. Lewis in The Boston Globe. In a remarkable coincidence, Ms. Lewis's industry contacts also include the creative director of GQ.

Ripped jeans and T-shirts are out, writes Mary Kathleen Flynn in US News & World Report. And she too knows the creative director of GQ.

Men's suits are back writes Nicole Ford in Sexbuzz.Com ("the ultimate men's entertainment magazine").

Dressing down loses appeal as men suit up at the office writes Tenisha Mercer of The Detroit News.

Now that so many news articles are online, I suspect you could find a similar pattern for most trend stories placed by PR firms. I propose we call this new sport "PR diving," and I'm sure there are far more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories.

Online

After spending years chasing them, it's now second nature to me to recognize press hits for what they are. But before we hired a PR firm I had no idea where articles in the mainstream media came from. I could tell a lot of them were crap, but I didn't realize why.

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

I was talking recently to a friend who works for a big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They think the decline is cyclic," he said. "Actually it's structural."

In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not coming back.

Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest. Imagine how incongruous the New York Times article about suits would sound if you read it in a blog:

The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve-- is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace.

The problem with this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm. The whole tone is bogus. This is the tone of someone writing down to their audience.

Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think.

I didn't realize, till there was an alternative, just how artificial most of the writing in the mainstream media was. I'm not saying I used to believe what I read in Time and Newsweek. Since high school, at least, I've thought of magazines like that more as guides to what ordinary people were being told to think than as sources of information. But I didn't realize till the last few years that writing for publication didn't have to mean writing that way. I didn't realize you could write as candidly and informally as you would if you were writing to a friend.

Readers aren't the only ones who've noticed the change. The PR industry has too. A hilarious article on the site of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the matter:

Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is the reason they began blogging in the first place.

PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

Notes

[1] PR has at least one beneficial feature: it favors small companies. If PR didn't work, the only alternative would be to advertise, and only big companies can afford that.

[2] Advertisers pay less for ads in free publications, because they assume readers ignore something they get for free. This is why so many trade publications nominally have a cover price and yet give away free subscriptions with such abandon.

[3] Different sections of the Times vary so much in their standards that they're practically different papers. Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have been sent packing by the regular news reporters.

[4] The most striking example I know of this type is the "fact" that the Internet worm of 1988 infected 6000 computers. I was there when it was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them.

Actually no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because the remedy was to reboot them, and this destroyed all traces. But people like numbers. And so this one is now replicated all over the Internet, like a little worm of its own.

[5] Not all were necessarily supplied by the PR firm. Reporters sometimes call a few additional sources on their own, like someone adding a few fresh vegetables to a can of soup.

Thanks to Ingrid Basset, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and Aaron Swartz (who also found the PRSA article) for reading drafts of this.

Correction: Earlier versions used a recent Business Week article mentioning del.icio.us as an example of a press hit, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was spontaneous.

Skinnier

2011-10-14T09:00:00Z

So many things that would have been money losers then can be profitable today.

When you run your own concert, selling tickets online and renting the theatre out yourself, you might be able to keep 85 cents of every dollar your audience spends on a ticket. In the system we grew up with, by the time the box office, Ticketmaster, the stagehands, the promoters and everyone else takes a cut, you might end up with literally nothing.

Or consider a hardcover book that costs $20. By the time the bookstore keeps half, the publisher keeps a share for the risk she takes, and don't forget shipping and returns... there might only be $2 left for the author. With an ebook, the author might keep as much as $14 a copy... More if he hosts the store and sells it as a PDF.

A hairdresser with direct relationships with customers can give up the storefront location and make more money by charging less and cutting the hair in her home.

A newspaper can happily support a few reporters and an ad guy if it gives up the paper, the offices and the rest of the trappings.

Too often, we look at the new thing and demand to know how it supports the old thing. Perhaps, though, the question is, how does the new thing allow us to think skinnier.

Open conversations (or close them)

2011-10-11T09:39:00Z

A guy walks into a shop that sells ties. He's opened the conversation by walking in.

Salesman says, "can I help you?"

The conversation is now closed. The prospect can politely say, "no thanks, just looking."

Consider the alternative: "That's a [insert adjective here] tie you're wearing, sir. Where did you buy it?"

Conversation is now open. Attention has been paid, a rapport can be built. They can talk about ties. And good taste.

Or consider a patron at a fancy restaurant. He was served an old piece of fish, something hardly worth the place's reputation. On the way out, he says to the chef,

"It must be hard to get great fish on Mondays. I'm afraid the filet I was served had turned."

If the chef says, "I'm sorry you didn't enjoy your meal..." then the conversation is over. The patron has been rebuffed, the feedback considered merely whining and a matter of personal perspective.

What if the chef said instead, "what kind of fish was it?" What if the chef invited the patron back into the kitchen to take a look at the process and was asked for feedback?

Open conversations generate loyalty, sales and most of all, learning... for both sides.

What I Learned From Steve Jobs

2011-10-08T18:10:48Z

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

Experts are clueless.

Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.
Customers cannot tell you what they need.
“Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.
Jump to the next curve.
Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories, and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?
The biggest challenges beget best work.

I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. Changing the world was a big challenge. I, and Apple employees before me and after me, did their best work because we had to do our best work to meet the big challenges.
Design counts.
Steve drove people nuts with his design demands—some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist—a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome—and lo and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.
You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.
Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is sixty points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is eight points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy..don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?
Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.
When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to “there’s an app for that.”
“Value” is different from “price.”

Woe unto you if you decide everything based on price. Even more woe unto you if you compete solely on price. Price is not all that matters—what is important, at least to some people, is value. And value takes into account training, support, and the intrinsic joy of using the best tool that’s made. It’s pretty safe to say that no one buys Apple products because of their low price.
A players hire A+ players.

Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.
Real CEOs demo.

Steve Jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it’s to show that there’s a team effort in play. Maybe. It’s more likely that the CEO doesn’t understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?
Real CEOs ship.

For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasn’t perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasn’t tinkering for the sake of tinkering—he had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. Apple is an engineering-centric company, not a research-centric one. Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?
Marketing boils down to providing unique value. Think of a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis measures how your product differs from the competition. The horizontal axis measures the value of your product. Bottom right: valuable but not unique—you’ll have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuable—you’ll own a market that doesn’t exist. Bottom left: not unique and not value—you’re a bozo. Top right: unique and valuable—this is where you make margin, money, and history. For example, the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels.

Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen. When you are jumping curves, defying/ignoring the experts, facing off against big challenges, obsessing about design, and focusing on unique value, you will need to convince people to believe in what you are doing in order to see your efforts come to fruition. People needed to believe in Macintosh to see it become real. Ditto for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Not everyone will believe—that’s okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve.

The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

2011-09-29T09:03:00Z

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There's plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiencies are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It's a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping... in the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing--it's impromptu, it's based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people--and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expectations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it's better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing...

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

Drama ohledne TechCrunch

2011-09-10T01:26:16Z

Sleduji drama ohledne TechCrunch a snad nejvice se mne libi tohle shrnuti:

You sold your startup to a big, stupid corporation. You were very happy to take the money. But the way these things work is that when you take money from a big, stupid corporation, you have to do what the idiots inside the big, stupid corporation tell you. That’s the downside. The upside, of course, is the money. You took the money. What part of this do you not understand?

Lepe to shrnout asi nejde. Je v tom lekce i pro me, kdyz jsem premyslel nad tim vzit do vlastni firmy investory. Jo tohle je presne rozdil kdyz si to clovek dela podle sebe nebo kdyz necha stejna rozhodnuti delat nekoho jineho. Dostane ty penize, ale take k tomu nekoho kdo mu rika jak ma co delat.

I ja sam delam v mem podnikani chyby. Tak jako kazdy jiny. Ale asi tim, ze jsem tu firmu vybudoval od zacatku tak jsem venoval tisice hodin premysleni nad kazdym detailem. To co se externim lidem zda, ze delame spatne je treba zrovna to co nas dela uspesne. A ono se neda o spouste rozhodnuti nejak argumentovat. Delaji se treba podle citu. Kazdy muze mit uplne jinaci nazor na to co je spravne.

Me treba dneska jeden z investoru napsal, ze bysme meli vsem nasim uzivatelum prodavat neco dalsiho. Ze nam v tom unika spousta prilezitosti. Proste tezte nejak z databaze a prodavajte. No a to je zrovna neco co bych nedelal. Sam nesnasim, kdyz se mi vecne nekdo snazi neco prodat. Takze i kdybych na tom mohl vice vydelat tak uzivatelum na Shipito nic dalsiho vnucovat nechci. I za cenu, ze vydelam mene.

Mike Arrington dostal penize za prodej TechCrunch. A ted resi takoveto voloviny, protoze nekdo vidi problemy v necem co jeste nedavno zadny velky problem nebylo (ze investuje do firem o kterych pise). Dostat penize je dobra vec, ale to co s nimi prijde neni vzdy uplne idealni.

P.S. Loni jsem takto malem penize vzal. Byl jsem spokojeny s valuaci, ale vadili me nektere podminky. Treba to, ze investori budou rozhodovat o strategickych rozhodnutich (treba kde budeme mit dalsi sklad). Uprimne jsem si to nedovedl predstavit jak by byl nekdo mimo firmu schopen toto kvalifikovane rozhodnout. Takze se to rozpadlo.