Core group

Googlehubris

Salvador Baille — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:22:47 +0000

A few weeks ago there was much ado about Google+ and the figures concerning the growth of this service that the CEO of the company, Larry Page, delivered under an earnings conference call on January 19. After delivering a row of figures that, intentionally or not, were confusing for most of the audience, it is now clear that Google+ had at that time 90 million registered users. The point is precisely the word registered. Page did´t give concrete figures around the engagement of the users of Google+ and mixed the engagement of all Google services in one big pot.

For those like me that have been following Google for a while, this is not good news for Google+. The company has historically been a real magician when it comes to PR stunts and is not shy of delivering blast figures that underline its undeniable success.

The fact is that not even Google can ignore the laws of First Mover´s Advantage, a über-used concept in business development but ill-defined most of the times. This brings us to the core of the issue: What is a First Mover Advantage and why is its effect so powerful that not even Google has been able of stealing a significant market share of active users from Facebook, the man to beat? (By the way, Facebook has now 800 mllion active users and growing)

There are only three types of First Mover´s Advantages: Either the First Mover has a proprietary superior technology, or the company has secured preferential access to resources (including customers or partners) thereby blocking competitors, or it enables a switching cost for the customer or the user once acquired.

Shall we play the check box game?

Has Facebook a superior proprietary technology? Not really, but neither has Google+ (Features are not technologies and they are easily copied, like the circles feature of Google+)

Has Facebook preferential access to resources vs Google? The answer is probably yes. As the number of active users grow, due to network effects they do it exponentially, securing access to an ever-increasing wealth of the most valuable resource for a social network: The number of active users. However, Google has many different services and hundreds of millions of users engage with Google actively in search every day.

Does Facebook enable a switching cost for the user once acquired? And here, the answer is a clear yes and this makes the whole difference.

In the very moment I have all my friends in Facebook and I communicate with them via Facebook and I KNOW that they are active and waiting for me on Facebook, I, as a user, have a tremendous switching cost when considering walking away from Facebook. By doing so I walk away from the place my friends are and I have to start building my social network from scratch again. In addition, if I walk away I have to bear the risk of not knowing whether my friends, that I know are active on Facebook, will be active on Google+ too. (or on any other newcomer)

In order to successfully compete with Facebook, Google has probably to start offering such a compelling additional benefit so intimate bundled with the Google+ service that it forces Facebook users to migrate. That´s why Google is now bundling Google+ with any other service they offer.

Whether this strategy will yield significant results is though highly uncertain. It depends on how Google will be able able of providing enough additional value through this bundling and whether Google will be able to erecting switching costs of its own through that. The laws of the First Mover´s Advantage are difficult to break.

Opplag- og lesertall i fritt fall: Nye utfordringer – samme medisin?

Hanne Sorteberg — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:56:18 +0000

Scrabble koster 325 kroner i butikken. Det originale spillet er elsket av mange, selv om brikkene ble borte, Lillesøster tullet med beregning av poeng og Onkel Fridtjof alltid prøvde seg med ord på siden av ordboksdefinisjonen, en kilde til eviglange diskusjoner og enda lenger surmuling.

Wordfeud lar deg spille hvor som helst, med hvem som helst, regner ut poengene for deg, er diktatorisk på hva som er lov og ikke lov (selv om vi ofte undres) og kan spilles på mange språk. Du kan chatte med den du spiller med, og har dermed et sosialt element, som vi ser konkurrerer mot oppmerksomheten til venner og familie i fysisk nærhet.

Og det er gratis. Blir du lei reklamen, koster det 21 kroner.

Mediebransjens skvis er at der leserne tidligere aksepterte å betale for noe som åpenbart koster penger; papir, trykk og avisbud, har de vent seg til å ikke betale for noe det ikke koster å produsere et eksemplar til av, selv om investeringskosten for innhold på den digitale plattformen er vel så høy.

Telekombransjen har den samme utfordringen som mediene. Forbrukere forstår at de må betale for en fysisk kabel og monteringen av den til sin fasttelefon. De har blitt vant til å betale et beløp for et “tellerskritt” og en SMS. De er ikke vant til å betale for epost og chat-meldinger, det er ingen produksjonskost for å sende en epost til, eller en Skype-samtale til. Vår analyse av norske telekombedrifter viser at dette vil få store konsekvenser for, og mulig endre hele strukturen i bransjen.

I dag skriver Aftenposten at Schibsted varsler betalingsmurer på sine regionsaviser. Dette segmentet ser vi fra leser- og opplagstallene er særlig utsatt med et fall på over 6%. Fædrelandsvennen skal forsøke å ta samme pris på det digitale produktet som på papir, ved å kreve abonnement for sine digitale lesere. Det er ingen reduksjon i prisen hvis du velger kun å lese avisen digitalt, og du får neppe slippe reklamen.

Schibsted kaller dette en freemium-modell ved at du får digitalt innhold gratis ved å kjøpe papiret. Chris Anderson definerer freemium-modellen som noe annet; at kjerneproduktet er gratis, men hvis du ønsker enda mer verdi må du betale litt for det, slik som Wordfeud. Han peker på dette som en bærekraftig forretningsmodell for digitalt innhold.

Da er spørsmålet til Fædrelandsvennen om leserne aksepterer å betale like mye for noe de vet ikke koster noe å produsere et eksemplar til, noe de er vant med ikke koster penger. Er det på tide å finne en ny medisin til nye problemstillinger?

When Scrum fails

Niklas Bjørnerstedt — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:27:19 +0000

David Andersen used his Meetup talk i Oslo last week to describe a start-up’s journey from Scrum to a more Kanban based way of doing things. I seldom work with start-ups, but David’s talk resonated with my experiences in contexts that have little do do with start-ups. I summarized the insight in a tweet:
“The Meetup with @agilemanager yesterday reinforced my belief that Scrum works best when you are in a state that you should avoid being in”

I freely admit that as tweets go, this one is pretty cryptic. A lot of people did not understand what I meant. Others stumbled into false logic and thought I was implying that Scrum does not work in most contexts/states. No! That is not the point. Scrum works for a lot of people and in a lot of different contexts.

The point I was making is this: One of the core ideas with lean start-ups is that you have to get your product “out there” as soon as possible. The real feedback you get when you have real customers is invaluable. At the the other extreme, my experiences with large corporate replacement projects has taught me the same lesson. Get the new system in parallel production as soon as possible. A few years ago this led me to create a wiki that collected patterns and insights for how to do this. But once you have succeeded in getting real users for your product, things tend to get complicated. These users will demand that you fix problems quickly and address missing features as soon as possible. All of this can be handled in Scrum, but it gets progressively harder the bigger this pressure is. It is also easy to fall into one of the traps that can ensnare a well meaning scrum master:

The valiant gate keeper

A couple of years ago, I talked with an experienced Scrum master in a large project. He was very satisfied with the Scrum had helped him shield the team so that they were able to complete their sprints. The team was very satisfied with his work and they managed to deliver lots of features at the end of each sprint.

I recently met a woman that had been on the business side of the same project. She told me that this same team had not worked very well in terms of the project as a whole. The Scrum master’s insistence on shielding the team had lead to considerable problems elsewhere in the project.

I honestly believe that both the Scrum master and the businesswoman were truthful in their descriptions. The Scrum master had succeeded in helping his team deliver value but at the same time this had come at the cost of being too inflexible when unforeseen problems occurred.

Sprint fiction

Would things have been better if the Scrum master had been more flexible? I’m not sure. I recently coached a team that was having trouble adopting Scrum. After observing them for a while I realized that up to 50% of the work they were doing in a sprint was not foreseeable at the start of the sprint. When you also take into account that they worked in a highly specialized environment where tasks could not freely be reallocated to other team members you get a situation where sprints are bound to fail. So in this context, flexibility was helping the business as a whole, but it was making a mockery of the whole idea with sprints.

Now, a lot of people will read these descriptions and their heads will be bursting with ideas for how to have done things better. That is not the point! Of course you can do better! The fact that you can do better does not invalidate the observation that Scrum gets harder to implement the more chaotic and interdependent your environment is. I think Scrum can be great in some contexts and that you can handle these types of problems… up to a point. But once you pass that point you should seriously consider looking at a more Kanban based approach. (I am not going to tell you where that point is. That you must find out for yourself.)

Kodak – hvordan kunne det gå galt?

Trude Husjord — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:55:16 +0000

Med ordene “you press the button, we do the rest”, lanserte George Eastman sitt første kamera til konsumentmarkedet i 1888. Han forenklet en komplisert prosess, og gjorde det som tidligere hadde vært uoppnåelig for folk flest mulig, nemlig ta bilder selv. Kåre Valebrokks kommentar Mistet-sitt-Kodak-oyeblikk 9.januar 2012 beskriver historien godt, og Kodak er nå under konkursbeskyttelse i USA. Kodak har vært en internasjonal stjerne så lenge vi nålevende husker. De forbedret sine produkter kontinuelig, helt fra utviklingen av filmruller og fargefilm, og frem til begynnelsen av 1990 da de lanserte det første digitale kameraet. De har et merkevarenavn på nivå med de mest kjente i verden, og de begynte først å gå med underskudd i 2007. Hvordan kunne dagens eiere og ledelse la det skje?

For å forstå dette må vi nok en gang legge til grunn teorien om disrupsjon. I tillegg ble Kodak hardt presset på marginene i sitt eksisterende marked. Fujifilm utviklet seg særlig fra midten av 1980 som en av de argeste konkurrentene. Etter å ha lansert digitale kameraer med 1 og 2 megapixler fokuserte Kodak igjen på sin kjernevirksomhet i motsetning til Fujifilm som har hatt en diversifiseringstrategi. Det spekuleres sågar i at utviklingen av digitale kameraer primært var et miljøtiltak for å redusere kjemikaliebruken og giftstoffene som ble benyttet til fremkalling av bilder i “low end” markedet. Uansett, de kom bakpå i utviklingen av digitale kameraer.

De er kanskje et paradoks for dagens Kodak-ledelse å se i bakspeilet, og på hvordan beslutninger og vurderinger gjort for over 20 år siden i realiteten igangsatte Kodaks dødsdans. Hardere konkurranse i kjernemarkedet, digital disrupsjon, facebook som var mer opptatt av at bilder skulle deles enn printes og smartphone med sine mer og mer avanserte kameraer har ikke gjort livet enklere for Kodak. De var på høyden med lansering av digitalkamerat for 20 år siden, men tjente altså penger i 15 år etter. De har gjennomført betydelige kostnadsreduserende tiltak og slanket arbeidsstokken, men så ble det altså helt tomt i kassen ved årsskiftet.

Ledere og eiere i både media- og telekom-bransjen er utsatt for de samme kreftene. Marginene går ned, kostnader kuttes og sluttpakker utbetales. Mange tjener fortsatt penger, men er etter min oppfatning kommet langt inn i den samme 15 års-syklusen som Kodak har hatt. Det verste er at på slutten går det veldig raskt nedover. Dersom investeringsviljen og innovasjonstakten samtidig reduseres, kan man jo fortsette å leve en stund, men så er det plutselig stopp.