All posts by Jim Muttram

Internet Economy

Lingering is bad for business

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The FT ran an article last month which resonated considerably with me. The thrust of the piece was that lengthy goodbyes are not good for business.

What is the point of these lengthy handovers? Once your departure is announced, your authority leaves with it. Your mind, however hard you try, is surely turning to what you do next.

It went on to cite three examples: Angela Ahrendts who is leaving Burberry, Steve Ballmer who is stepping down as chief executive of Microsoft and Sir Nicholas Hytner who is retiring as director of Britain’s National Theatre.

In each case there is a lengthy gap – up to 18 months – before the departees actually depart.

My recent experience of retiring after 30 years at RBI has taught me that the less time between the announcement and the departure the better. In my case we informed the company at the end of September and my actual agreed leaving date was today – quite a short period, it seems, in senior business circles.

Even so, I could see the problems of an extended stay. The process of announcing your departure follows a pretty set pattern. The announcement goes out and there are (hopefully) general expressions of shock and dismay. Shortly afterwards, though, people’s attention turns to what and who comes next. Then the emails get less frequent and there are slightly fewer meetings. You can see the calculation in people’s minds as they work out whether you are going to be around for the conclusion of whatever project you are being asked to validate or comment on. Quite quickly the organisation heals around your future absence. So the faster you get out the better for everybody.

This reaction is entirely healthy: companies exist for what they can do in the present and the future and not what they have done in the past. Once a departure date has been announced you become part of the past – better to acknowledge it and move along gracefully. I agree with the FT: no good can come of the lengthy goodbyes.

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Climate change stories

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There was an interesting juxtaposition of articles in the Observer this morning. The leader set the tone with a strong call for action in the face of the IPCC report. 

Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its fifth assessment report on the physical science of global warming and made it clear that the continued burning of fossil fuels to run our cars, factories and electricity plants is now virtually certain to induce serious alterations to our climate. 

Then there was the piece by David King and Richard Layard calling for a world sunpower programme:

The goal would be by 2025 to deliver solar electricity at scale to the grid at a cost below the cost of fossil fuel. All countries would be invited to participate. Those who did would commit, in their own countries, to major new programmes of research, internationally co-ordinated, and to share their findings for the benefit of the world.

 In contrast, however, were two of the (very few) articles in the New York Times Observer supplement, presumably hand picked from the raft of stories which the NYT covers. The first focussed on the economic difficulties faced by Germany’s green energy policies.

German families are being hit by rapidly increasing electricity rates, to the point where growing numbers of them can no longer afford to pay the bill. Businesses are more and more worried that their energy costs will put them at a disadvantage to competitors in nations with lower energy costs, and some energy-intensive industries have begun to shun the country because they fear steeper costs ahead.

The second was a piece explaining the potential of unlocking frozen hydrates as a potential new (carbon) fuel source. 

If they can be tapped safely and economically, they could be an abundant source of fuel, especially for countries like Japan that have few energy reserves of their own.

There in the Observer (and supplements) this morning the complexity of the climate change issue was laid out. 

  1. We have a serious problem with CO2; 
  2. We know that we have to reduce hydrocarbons in favour of renewables; 
  3. But the infrastructure and economics of the oil and gas industries have the advantage and the momentum; 
  4. Renewables are costly and going it alone is fraught with perils (see Germany);
  5. A “moonshot” is therefore required.

What are the chances of this happening? The Observer leader I started with sums it up: 

What Britain urgently needs is an unambiguous statement from our government that it recognises very serious changes are now affecting our planet; that we have the will to tackle a growing global catastrophe; and that we are prepared to address difficult, unpopular truths. To date, we have heard nothing. 

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Has Apple lost its innovation mojo?

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Has Apple has lost its innovation mojo? Yes, according to many pundits who weighed in immediately following last Tuesday’s announcements of the iPhone 5S and 5C. 

Comments from The Guardian were typical: “Once a company renowned for breaking new ground, Apple is turning into a typical American corporation” says the sub-head. 

treading water is what Apple has done ever since, sadly, it lost Jobs. Under the turtlenecked-one, we got the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, one after another. Since Cook took over as boss in 2011, there has been reiteration rather than innovation. The iPad, except smaller. Now with a sharper screen. In pink. Ho hum. 

Tech site CNET took a very similar line. The “5 disappointing things about hte iPhone 5S” are listed out: the screen remains the same; a faster processor – it’s only just a phone!; no improvement in battery life; still no 128GB model; a little catch up, no innovation.

The iPhone 5S has exactly what was expected: a faster processor and a better camera (one that merely catches up to the cameras in some other phones). Those features aren’t “wow” — they’re “meh.”

And news network CNN concurred. “Underwhelmed. That, in a word, was the response in many quarters to Apple’s rollout of two new iPhones on Tuesday,” its piece began. However, what followed was a more balanced round up of views. On the one hand: 

“Much-hyped iPhone announcements from the tech giant did little to stop (Apple’s) year-long descent into stagnation,” wrote Marcus Wohlsen in Wired, a CNN.com content partner. “Though the faster, sleeker, more powerful phone is unarguably cool, the steps forward are still incremental. And incremental isn’t what the world expects from Apple.”

One the other, however, 

“In most cases Apple does not walk on others’ paths,” she said. “They create their own and stick to it. This is not necessarily the easy way to do it in the short term, but assures that they remain in control.”,

quoting Carolina Milanesi, a tech analyst with Gartner Research.

And there were still others with a more subtle interpretation of innovation, such as the Innovation Excellence blog which wrote: 

I truly believe that the kinds of things that will come out of the BLE technology built into the new iPhone 5S in combination with the new fingerprint authentication will represent a quantum leap in the value we extract from our smartphones in much the same way that the AppStore that came along a year after the launch of the original iPhone.

And another Wired article with a more positive take:

The bottom line is that there’s a lot more to the iPhone switching to a 64-bit processor than hype. While the applications for it might be limited right now, Apple is paving the way for improvements that we’ll see trickle into the iPhone over the next few years. 

Forbes summed it up best for me with “7 reasons the new iPhones are starting to look good” (5 plays 7!). The bottom line for Forbes:

Innovation is unquestionably becoming less glitzy but that’s because Cook is updating Apple at the platform level. In place of Jobs’ charismatic feature, design and miniaturization-led innovation, he is giving his team space to build the boat: a device platform that is powerful enough to integrate many more services, gives developers more scope; allows the iPhone to interact with more devices around the body and in nearby locations. 

In the end this more subtle interpretation of the Apple strategy sounds to me more convincing. 

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The car as a new frontier for what’s left of Nokia?

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Microsoft’s headline-grabbing acquisition of (most of) Nokia’s handset division dominated the airwaves this morning but among all the coverage was a piece from Techcrunch on the bit that Nokia is left with.

That is, somewhat clumsily, called HERE and it is a software business building on top of the maps division. This business is focused on providing in-car navigation solutions for cars, but also, and most importantly, on developing the integration between cars and mobile platforms in a branded and white label fashion.

This just could be a very rich space. Despite the obvious moves from IOS and Android to move into the car space, the reality in most vehicles (my Mercedes being a case in point) lags very far behind.

Potentially HERE could carve out a very lucrative future in providing the fiddly bits that make slowly-evolving cars work seamlessly with  the fast-moving consumer electronics that we all want to integrate with them.

Update

Read more on the connected car and what it means for platform providers and the cellcos in this thought-piece from Rethink.

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ABC of metrics

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I loved this passage in a talk given by Stijn Debrouwere who works at The Guardian:

The metrics you’ll need will depend on your business, but as a starting point I like Dave McClure’s list of five startup metrics for pirates:

  1. acquisition: finding new users
  2. activation: getting users to give your product a try
  3. retention: making sure those users stick around
  4. referral: have your loyal users invite others
  5. revenue: hopefully you get to make some money from all this

Acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue, or, as an acronym: aarrr! Those are usually the big five things you have to worry about.

As he says, the most important thing to remember is to be really specific about what you are trying to achieve. We are all drowning in data, so it’s refreshing to get back to basics once in a while.   

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Advertising which goes with the flow

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I was reading through an AOP presentation (Digital Landscape Report vol. 54) this week when I came across one slide which quite startled me. It was talking about the growth of mobile advertising at Facebook and Twitter.

The fact that stood out for me was that fully 18% of Facebook’s ad revenue was now from mobile advertising, up from 0% in under a year. And the proportion was expected to grow to 40% this year. Twitter already has more revenue from mobile.

[The figures come from eMarketer but sadly I can’t share them as they are behind a pay wall and our corporate subscription seems to have expired.]
There was a lot of negative talk about the prospects for mobile advertising but the fact is that customers of both sites seem to have taken the ads in their stride. 
In both Facebook and Twitter the ads take the form of posts which are placed in the news stream. They are clearly labelled – as “promoted tweets” on Twitter and “suggested posts” on Facebook – but they slot easily into the stream and don’t disrupt the reading experience. 
I’ve no idea whether these new ads have a better response rate than conventional banners, buttons, overlays and the rest – maybe someone can supply the data?  But somehow this seems like a much better approach to getting the message across than the increasingly desperate ways of interrupting the flow of concentration which seem to be very much the norm now online. 
The user experience of browsing through a “river” of feeds on Facebook or Twitter is not jarred of broken by the arrival of promoted/suggested content – you can take it or leave it just as you can the posts themselves (although using Facebook’s precise targeting the chances of relevance should be high.) 
If the response rates are acceptable  (particularly if the relevance targeting gets better and better) advertisers and the sites themselves should resist the temptation to try to make them stand out in the bad old ways. Comfortable co-existence, which has never been the case online, is by far the best long term solution. And the figures certainly seem to support this. 
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Computer heal thyself

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I’ve just read a long, passionate post on Marc Scott’s Coding2Learn blog lamenting the fact that kids can’t use computers. The hypothesis, simply put, is that far from being “digital natives” most kids simply don’t know their way round a computer or, indeed, a smart phone. This is not to say they don’t use them – but that they don’t know what to do when anything – even something quite basic – goes wrong.

Instinctively I had quite a bit of sympathy with the argument; knowing how to troubleshoot a wireless connection or an external monitor, for example, seems to me pretty useful basic stuff.

However, as I thought about it some more I became convinced that this kind of lament is really a symptom of a technology in transition. I can imagine a similar post being written (if the medium had existed) in the 60s or 70s bemoaning the fact that car drivers simply don’t understand the mechanics of what they are driving anymore. Motoring was a do-it-yourself activity for a long time – I remember as late as the 80s doing quite a bit of tinkering with spark plugs and the like to keep my cheap, old and unreliable cars on the road. It is now decades since I’ve known what to do looking into the bonnet of a modern car.

I suspect computer technology is going through just such a transition. Marc Scott’s suggestion for fixing the dearth of computer knowledge is, among other things, to get kids to use Linux computers which need a lot of configuration (which means learning a fair bit about the operating system). But I think he hints at the change that’s coming when he talks about mobile:

This ones tricky. iOS is a lost cause, unless you jail-break, and Android isn’t much better. I use Ubuntu-Touch, and it has possibilities. At least you feel like the mobile phone is yours. Okay, so I can’t use 3G, it crashes when I try to make phone calls and the device runs so hot that when in my jacket pocket it seconds as an excellent nipple-warmer, but I can see the potential.

That, surely, is the point. Computers should fade into the background and “just work”. As he says:

Technology affects our lives more than ever before. Our computers give us access to the food we eat and the clothes we wear. Our computers enable us to work, socialise and entertain ourselves. Our computers give us access to our utilities, our banks and our politics. Our computers allow criminals to interact with us, stealing our data, our money, our identities. Our computers are now used by our governments, monitoring our communications, our behaviours, our secrets.

That being so, we need technology that works when you switch it on, that monitors its own health and fixed itself when anything is awry, that protects us from crime and from being spied upon. We shouldn’t be expected to be able to dismantle computers or smart phones in order to make sure they are working properly.

It is faintly ridiculous that computers can develop glitches and then expect us to search the company’s knowledge bases for the solutions which we then need to manually implement. Why aren’t they self-diagnosing and self-healing using all that superfluous computing power? Partly, I guess, because there is still a lot of tinkerer’s pride and self-satisfaction finally solving these techno-riddles and hence not much consumer outrage at this situation. But this won’t wash for very much longer.

In the end, though it is fun (for some) to be able to tinker with their technology, much like old-car enthusiasts tinkering in their garages, these days are drawing to a close and ubiquitous computing that “just works”, monitors itself and corrects problems as they occur will become the standard, for better or worse.

 

 

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A tale of two service cultures

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In February I bought myself a Nexus 7, the 7-inch tablet made for Google by Asus. I bought it from Currys as, since the demise of Comet in November last year, this is just about the only electrical chain around.

My early experiences were good; I found the interface less polished than IOS (I’ve been an apple user now for at least seven years) but I liked the integration with Google’s product suite and some things, such as Google Now which predicts what you are going to need and gets it before you need it, were very impressive.

As far as the hardware goes, the build quality seemed good, but the battery life wasn’t a patch on my iPad 3 – that will go a week between charges with light usage; the Nexus seemed to need charging every two days.

And therein lay the problem. Sometime in the week of the 20th May the Nexus 7 ran out of power and when I came to recharge it nothing happened. It wouldn’t turn on at all. So on Saturday 25th I took it back to Currys expecting to get a free replacement. No such thing.

First off, I waited in line for a customer service rep to serve me. Despite the apparent abundance of staff in the Catford store, nobody seemed particularly keen on eye contact and I waited for 10 minutes before one of the staff reluctantly called me forward.

I was told they would need to send it back to Asus for repair. Fair enough. I filled in the form, left my telephone number and went home.

Three weeks later, getting a little concerned that I hadn’t heard anything, I called the number on the repair receipt only to be told that it could take up to six weeks to be returned.

A week later I received a call to say it had been returned to the shop and I duly collected it on June 18th. When I got it home I charged it up and set it up again (it had been returned to factory settings) and all seemed well, until a couple of days later it was again without charge. This time it would start up but then would promptly shut again with a message that I should connect the charger (which was in fact connected). Testing with another Android charger got the same result.

So back to Currys. And another wait in line for one of the numerous staff to decide they would have to serve me, which one eventually did. Now it has been sent off again (to Asus in Amsterdam, I’m informed) and I now face another up to six week delay before I get the device back again.  (Incidentally, while I was waiting there was a man returning a Dyson vacuum cleaner under a 30 day trial scheme advertised on Currys own website. He was told he couldn’t return it because it had been opened(!) Only when he showed them a print out of their own website offer was his money reluctantly refunded.)

I bought my Nexus in the first place to road-test Android as an alternative to IOS. So far the experiment isn’t going Android’s way.

Contrast this with my only real product problem with an Apple product. Three years ago my iPhone started to drop calls unexpectedly. I booked a Genius Bar appointment online and turned up at my allotted time in the Bluewater Apple store where my name flashed on the screen. I went up to the counter and explained the problem. The “genius” (as I suppose you call them) plugged the phone into some diagnostics and confirmed that was the problem and then promptly gave me a brand new replacement phone and offered to set it up for me. This, despite the fact that the phone was 18 months old at that stage and clearly out of warranty. I don’t know whether this is typical of Apple customer service but it left me impressed. And the contrast with my latest experience with Currys couldn’t be sharper.

Now there is effectively only one electrical superstore chain there is little incentive for things to change at Currys, but clearly there is an opening the market for a retailer to provide an offering based on knowledgable and service-oriented staff. One day maybe such competition will come.

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The post-scarcity world

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The number of articles which are now talking about the problem of work are increasing. Techcrunch cites many of them in a recent article  pointing out the productivity conundrum in the US; the economy is slowly bouncing back, but the jobs just aren’t coming back with growth as they usually do.

Henry Blodget points out “Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades.” The New York Times observes “The jobless rate remains far higher than it typically would be this far into a recovery,” quoting a factory owner: “Because it is automated, we won’t have to add a lot of employees with the upturn in the construction industry.”

There is a lot of doom and gloom around as I’ve written here centred on the rise of technology and its replacement of increasing numbers of jobs.

Even lawyers, financiers, and surgeons aren’t safe. The Economist observes “Intelligent machines have reached a new social frontier: knowledge workers are now in the eye of the storm … teachers, researchers and writers are next.” And in the City of London, arguably the world’s primary nexus of finance, “analysts expect [banking] job losses to keep on coming, as technology replaces jobs that people once did.”

The Techcrunch article is the first I’ve read, though, that points out the potential of all this automation.

..technology may be destroying jobs, but it’s also creating wealth; and as I’ve argued before, the endgame of all this wealth creation, some generations hence, isn’t a world of full employment. Instead it’s a post-scarcity world of no employment, as we understand the word. Fewer and fewer jobs coexisting with more and more wealth is exactly what you would expect on the road to that outcome. 

However, the conclusion isn’t the only one imaginable:

So the good news is, if you lose your job some years from now, with any luck the same technological advances that devour it will also have generated enough wealth that the government will pay you and your family a basic income while you’re unemployed. The bad news is that you’re not likely to get another long-term job–ever–and that basic income will probably be only just enough to scrape by on.

If we learn to adjust to less work maybe we will spread out what is there more evenly (though there isn’t much evidence of this happening yet) and eventually wean ourselves off work as we know it altogether. The utopian world of The Culture could yet come to pass.

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MOOC road test

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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was quoted on the BBC today saying that traditional bricks and mortar universities would lose out if they didn’t find a convincing way to respond to the new wave of online courses (sometimes called MOOCs – massive online open courses).

“The really interesting challenge for big-brand universities is whether they are going to move into that space. If we thought of universities as normal businesses we would say, ‘Will they be able to adapt to the PC revolution?’ It’s that kind of question. Will Harvard or MIT, Oxford or Cambridge, be able to adapt? Or will Microsoft come out of nowhere? “It’s going to be really fascinating to see it unfold.”

 I must say I have been having very similar thoughts. A few weeks ago I signed up for an MOOC being hosted by Coursera and organised by Dan Ariely of Duke University. The course, on behavioural economics, is a real eye opener. It is six weeks long (I’m just entering the sixth and final week) and involves video lectures, in-video quizzes, recommended and compulsory reading assignments, reading quizzes and a writing assignment. There are also guest lecturer appearances on video (with some lecturers from some pretty impressive institutions) and a comprehensive set of forums where the thousands of participants can ask questions and offer mutual support. 

Flickr picture courtesy missy and the universe


Other innovations which I thought really interesting were the weekly session with Dan Ariely (one hour long video q&a) where he answered questions submitted by the students, and the chance to participate in behavioural experiments – either through questionnaires  or in one case an interactive online person to person version of the Ultimatum Game where I was matched at random with another fellow student.

So far, I have found it extremely rich and rewarding. It isn’t the same as a university experience, obviously, and the one clear disadvantage of MOOCs is their lack of ability to award credible qualifications which would (currently?) be acceptable to employers. However, this may change and in the future employers may actually be more impressed by self-motivated self-learners who accumulate credits from this kind of offering, perhaps even valuing them more than qualifications from at least some more conventional universities – who knows. 

However, I agree with Jimmy Wales that, based on my limited experience, the universities are going to have to adopt at least some of these techniques if they are not to be challenged by new players with much more powerful and relevant learning experiences.