Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Google’s Missed Revolution

    Google’s Missed Revolution

    The slow demise of Google Plus has been painful to watch as the service is slowly wound back ahead of its inevitable quiet burial.

    Mashable’s Seth Fiegerman has a deep look at what went wrong for Google’s nascent social media platform.

    Adding to the company’s distress, early Google+ adopter and advocate Thomas Hawk posted on Facebook his requiem for the service citing how the organisation seemed to lose interest in the product and the departure of Vic Gundotra sealed its fate.

    Google’s Corporate ADD

    Hawk is particularly scathing about Google’s prospects of being trusted again by developers and the marketplace. “By quitting early, Google lost what little goodwill they might have to seed something in the future,” he says. “Who will ever take Google serious with social again?”

    Once again we see the effects of Google’s corporate Attention Deficit Disorder and the message to developers and evangelists is clear – be very careful in devoting too many resources to any new product from the company.

    Google Plus’ decline though signals something far more serious for the company however – it may well have missed some of the most serious shifts in its marketplace.

    The SoLoMo opportunity

    Four years ago when the service was launched with great fanfare SoLoMo was one of the key buzzwords and it was understandable for Google to want a slice of it. Unfortunately the company found that even an business as big as Google can’t force change by management diktat.

    SoLoMo – Social, Local and Mobile – were seen as the big market growth areas and Google’s footprint in all of those spaces was poor. Although Google Places was leading the local search market at the time.

    Google+ was intended to solve at least the social problem with the added advantage of overlaying personal information onto the already comprehensive ‘knowledge graph’ it’s gathered on users.

    Four years later it’s clear Google Plus is a failure and much of that is due to the project being driven from the top down. From its launch the project was about meeting management imperatives and it’s notable in the company’s announcements about the service how little mention users get.

    Google’s price of failure

    The problem now for Google is they have wasted four years on the failed product at a time when Facebook have become the dominant social media platform and have successfully adapted the service to the mobile world.

    Even in Local search, Facebook are making strong inroads into local business advertising, an area Google had the advantage by tying together maps and local search but lost because of inaction and bureaucracy.

    A costly distraction

    The Google+ distraction means the company has missed the entire SoLoMo opportunity and squandered the one area where they had a massive head start.

    Google now face a future where their key advantage is stranded on the desktop without serious integration into social media. At the same time their ambitions to run a payments service seems stalled as well.

    Whether Google+ turns out to be as strategic a mistake for the search engine giant as Windows Vista was for Microsoft remains to be seen but the similarity between the two companies stuck with declining desktop based business models in a world of mobile consumers is striking.

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  • The need for an IoT manifesto

    The need for an IoT manifesto

    Last May at the ThingsCon conference in Berlin a group of European designers came together to form the IoT Manifesto.

    Now vendors have the ability to put a chip into almost anything companies and designers are tempted to add connectivity simply for the sake of doing so.

    In many cases this is opens up a range of security risks ranging from the screaming baby monitor to the hackable jeep.

    Coupled with the security risks of your intimate devices being hacked there’s the related privacy risks as millions of devices collect data ranging from how hard you press your car’s brake pedal through to last time you burned your breakfast toast.

    In an era where governments and businesses are seeking to amass even more information about us, there are genuine concerns about what that data is going to be used for and why it is being collected in the first place.

    The IoT manifesto looks to manage these problems facing the sector through ten guiding design principles;

    1. Don’t believe the hype around the IoT
    2. Only design useful things
    3. Deliver benefits to all stakeholders
    4. Keep everything secure
    5. Promote a culture of privacy
    6. Gather only a minimal amount of data
    7. Be transparent about who that data will be shared with
    8. Give users control over their data
    9. Design durable products
    10. Use the IoT and its design to help people

    All of the principles are laudable and it’s not hard to think that meeting the guidelines would make devices and services that aren’t just useful and safe but also simpler, cheaper and more effective.

    There’s many ethical, business and safety issues facing the Internet of Things as connected devices rollout across almost every industry. The IoT Manifesto may well be a good framework in which to design them and the cloud services they’ll depend upon.

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  • What should we call the sharing economy

    What should we call the sharing economy

    Stop calling it the sharing economy, cries marketer Olivier Blanchard in a blog post describing how the label is inappropriate and doesn’t accurately describe the imbalances in the relationships between providers, users and the online platforms that facilitate them.

    The question is what do we call the business model of companies like Uber, AirBnB and the myriad other services that take providers’ time and resources – cars in the case of Uber, homes or spare rooms for AirBnB – then make them available to people who can use them, taking a commission in the process of course.

    Blanchard wonders if much of the success of these companies is because America’s cash strapped middle classes are desperately trying to find additional source of income and there is very much a strong argument for that.

    More importantly, is what do we actually call these businesses? While they are potentially are as exploitative as the free labour models that have evolved in the media with businesses like Huffington Post, at least they provide some type of income even if for Uber drivers the net returns may be marginal at best.

    Blanchard himself suggests the Microtransaction Economy however that’s not a satisfactory label as the transactions – which may be many thousands of dollars for some AirBnB rentals – are not always small.

    Maybe we should call it the downtime economy, where we’re using the time we’re not busy or when we’re not using our homes, cars or others assets to earn income. That too though doesn’t strike me as satisfactory although it does seem to address the underlying idea these services are really only intended to supplement somebody’s earnings, not be their primary livelihood.

    None of these labels though are satisfactory and maybe we have to ditch the economy moniker. It’s time to start thinking about what we really should call these businesses.

    Your thoughts.

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  • A tale of two social media networks

    A tale of two social media networks

    This week showed the disparate

    At the time of its IPO in February 2012, Facebook claimed to have 845 million active monthly users. Eighteen months later at the time of their stock market float, Twitter boasted a more modest 232 million.

    This week Facebook reported 1.19 billion monthly active users while Twitter still languishes at 300 million, a number that disappointed the market and saw the smaller company’s shares drop 11% after their quarterly earnings announcement.

    Even more worrying for Twitter, and competing networks like Google, is Facebook’s success in mobile services with 874 million people accessing the service through their smartphones every day last quarter.

    So successful is Facebook in engaging roaming users that some pundits are predicting the company’s Instagram product may well overtake both Twitter and Google in mobile advertising revenues over the next few years.

    More concerning for Twitter is the company is still not profitable – of the business’ $957 million gross profit, an astonishing $854 million was eaten up in administration and sales costs which indicates their overheads are in need of some dramatic pruning.

    What is clear that Facebook and Twitter have very different user behaviour and, as a consequence, the revenue models are not the same. Twitter is never going to be Facebook.

    So the question for Twitter is what does it want to be? Certainly the current quest to drive up revenues seems doomed. Perhaps it’s time to accept the company is a smaller operation and start to plan accordingly.

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  • Businesses and the Windows 10 upgrade

    Businesses and the Windows 10 upgrade

    Last night Microsoft formally launched Windows 10, the company’s latest desktop operating system.

    A decade ago a new Microsoft operating system would have had people queuing at computer shops all night but today, in a world of cloud computing, what software runs on a computer has become less important to users.

    To entice users onto the new operating system, Microsoft are making the upgrade to Windows 10 free for the next year to those using the earlier versions 8 and 7 and many will have noticed the messages appearing on their computers over the past few weeks.

    Windows 10 is a good system, Microsoft has learned from the user unfriendly missteps of Windows 8 and added features that make the system smoother and takes advantage of the desktop computers’ power.

    Microsoft have also continued with their philosophy of providing a system that works on all sizes of devices from smartphones to large monitor PCs and Windows 10 adapts to the needs and use patterns of the different screens.

    That Windows 10 works on smartphones is less of a pressing matter given Microsoft’s attempts to crack the mobile market have been unsuccessfully and Windows phones languish with a tiny market share.

    For business users, the question is whether to take advantage of the upgrade. The short answer is maybe if use cloud based services in your company and wait if you have desktop applications that rely on Windows.

    Should you have applications that run on desktops and servers in your office then it’s essential to wait and see if your software runs properly on Windows 10. You’ll need to talk to the program’s supplier and your IT support person. Generally the advice is to wait a few months to iron out any bugs.

    If you’re using cloud services then the operating system running on your computer is largely irrelevant as long as you have a modern web browser. Microsoft’s new Edge web browser that’s built into Windows 10 so far appears to be a fast and capable piece of software that’s an improvement on the much maligned Internet Explorer that still lurks on the system for backwards compatibly reasons.

    Upgrading though isn’t without its risks, sometimes things go wrong and even the best planned transition doesn’t always work out and generally most cautious IT advisors will take the attitude “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

    One other potential trap is in hardware. It may be that some printers, cameras and other hardware doesn’t have the right drivers for the new system so while the software upgrade is free, you may end up having to stump up a few hundred dollars for new peripherals.

    For businesses users, if things ain’t broke and the existing computers are working well then the upgrade to Windows 10 is adding unnecessary complexity to the office and it’s probably best to hold off the transition until new computers are needed.

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