Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Coffee machines, the Big Blue W and the barriers to new technology

    Coffee machines, the Big Blue W and the barriers to new technology

    Last week my wife bought a new coffee maker, an impressive, all singing and dancing device that’s a vast improvement on the decade old machine it replaces.

    Despite drinking three or four cups of coffee a day, for three days after the new machine arrived I didn’t make one long black or cappuccino. The reason was I didn’t have time to figure out how to use it or the high tech coffee grinder that it came it.

    Being time poor is one of the greatest barriers in adopting new technologies as business owners, managers and staff often don’t have the time to learn another way of doing things.

    The coffee machine reminded me of something I learned with a business I was involved in the early 2000s. We were trying to sell Linux systems into small and medium businesses.

    We had some success selling into small service businesses like real estate agents and event managers where the owners could see the benefits of open source software and, in many cases, had a deep suspicion or resentment towards Microsoft’s almost monopoly on small business software.

    Despite the success in selling the systems, the business though came undone because many of the clients’ staff members refused to use the Linux machines, as one lady put it to our frustrated tech “I want to click on the Big Blue W when I want to type a letter.”

    That Big Blue W was Microsoft Word and no amount of cajoling could convince the lady to use any of the open source alternatives — she knew what worked in Word and she had neither the time or inclination to learn any thing different.

    Eventually that customer gave up trying to convince their staff to use non-Microsoft systems and the computers were reformatted with Windows, Office and all the other standard small business applications installed.

    This happened at almost every customer’s office and eventually the business folded.

    For those of us involved in the business the lesson was clear, that time poor users who are content with their existing way of working need a compelling reason to switch to a new service.

    In many ways this is the problem for legacy businesses — the sunk costs of software are more than just the purchase price, there’s the time and effort in migrating away from existing products and training staff.

    When we’re selling new technologies, be it cloud computing services, linux desktops or fancy new coffee machines, we have to understand those costs and the fears of users or customers who’ve become accustomed to an established way of doing things.

    In the eyes of many workers new ways of doing business are scary, challenging and often turn out to be more complex and expensive than the salesperson promised. In an age where marketers tend to over promise, that’s an understandable view.

    For those selling the new products, the key is to make them as easy to use and migrate across to. The less friction when making a change means the easier it is to adopt a new technology.

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  • Dealing with the corporate digital divide

    Dealing with the corporate digital divide

    It’s fashionable when talking about the ways different generations use computers to split users into two groups – the digital natives and digital immigrants.

    Born after 1990, digital natives are believed to have an intuitive understanding of digital technologies born from never having known a world without computers.

    Digital immigrants on the other hand are from an era where computers were not common outside big corporations and government departments, so most people born before 1990 had to learn to use computers.

    like many similar demographic divides, the line between digital immigrants and natives is contentious and probably more unhelpful than useful.

    A fascinating question though is whether corporations can be digital natives and immigrants.

    One of the challenges for older corporations, the corporate digital immigrants, are the legacy business systems that have their roots in the pre-digital era. A good example of this is United Airlines which struggles under inflexible management and old aircraft which can’t provide the levels of service and reliability expected by modern customers.

    A similar problem faces retailers who’ve haven’t invested in modern logistics, point of sale and online commerce systems – these businesses simply cannot compete with those who have up to date technology.

    Part of this problem comes from the difficulties in upgrading both technology and management systems in complex organisations, it’s not an easy task and the cost of failure is high so it’s understandable that many businesses don’t attempt it.

    In the meantime there’s the corporate digital immigrants, the more recently founded businesses that aren’t weighed down by legacy management and technology.

    The problem for the legacy businesses is the digitally native companies are able to take advantage of cheap and powerful tools that older organisations struggle to integrate into their operations.

    So the digital native-immigrant divide could be actually a business problem rather than one of how different generations discovered computers.

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  • Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

    Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

    One of the phenomenon of Silicon Valley’s development has been the rise of the ‘Google Buses’ – the private services run by the big tech companies to shuttle their workers between home and their workplaces.

    The Bay Area’s private bus shuttles are a real time illustration of how regions evolve around industries and economies and how cities and communities are in many ways dynamic, living creatures themselves.

    An effect of the Google Buses is that San Fransisco is experiencing a ‘reverse sprawl’ notes Eric Rodenbeck in his Wired Magazine story Mapping Silicon Valley’s Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes

    It’s about more than gentrification as we’ve experienced it thus far: It’s about an entirely reconfigured relationship between density and sprawl, and it’s going to need new maps to help us navigate this landscape.

    Driving those buses is instructive as well and Buzzfeed has an interview with an anonymous driver employed by one of the bus companies.  The driver’s tale shows the scale of the phenomenon.

    This bus holds 52 people and that is 52 cars that are not on the road in one trip, and we have 70 routes in our system. That’s thousands of cars everyday.

    Driving cars is fundamental to the American – and Australian – lifestyle. The modern American city developed around the motor car and that mobility is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century.

    So maybe the Google Buses are an early part of the redefinition of our cities to meet the the needs of the 21st Century and cars are not the driving factor.

    In this vein, Jarrett’s Walker’s Human Transit blog teases out some of the issues behind these developments.

    Finally, this joke is on the lords of Silicon Valley itself.  The industry that liberated millions from the tyranny of distance remains mired in its own desperately car-dependent world of corporate campuses, where being too-far-to-walk from a Caltrain station — and from anything else of interest — is almost a point of pride.  But meanwhile, top employees are rejecting the lifestyle that that location implies.

    While I don’t agree with Jarrett’s proposition that the geeks riding these buses want to mingle with strangers given the locations they live – I’d argue they’re attracted to those locations because their peers live there and downtown amenity to good restaurants and bars – he raises a very good point about the mismatch between where the workers and the jobs are.

    Jarrett’s point touches on land use zoning and its effects on the evolution of cities. An excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic tracked Silicon Valley’s iconic techonolgy sites, most of which have been demolished due to the pollution partly caused by zoning requirements for underground tanks.

    The issue of zoning is also raised by Rodenbeck who points out that zoning issues with carparks are what has made employee buses more attractive to the giant tech employees.

    Zoning different land uses makes sense on one level as no-one wants to live next door to a tannery, heavy metal waste dump or quarry, but there’s a risk with fixed ideas that our cities will become less responsive to economic developments, particularly in an era when people don’t want to, or can’t, dive across town to get to their jobs.

    What Silicon Valley’s corporate buses really show is that our cities are evolving around the needs of today, not yesterday. It’s something governments, businesses, investors and communities should keep in mind.

    Image of Google shuttle bus stop from David Orban through Flickr

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  • Collecting tolls on the information superhighway

    Collecting tolls on the information superhighway

    The news that internet services company Melbourne IT is looking at cutting management costs and returning cash to shareholders in the face of declining revenues doesn’t come as any surprise to observers of the firm.

    In many ways Melbourne IT is a historic relic, one of the last examples of the late 1990s dot com boom where management from those heady days survived unscathed by the realities of the 21st Century.

    Melbourne IT story illustrates the poor management and flaw investment strategies of the big dot com float and also illustrates the risk of under-investing in key areas, as anyone using the site or the services of its Web Central subsidiary will understand.

    Both companies feature clunky sites and extremely poor customer service. For resellers and customers using the Web Central command center, the experience and technology is straight out of the late 1990s.

    While overseas businesses like Rackspace, GoDaddy and Bluehost innovated and invested in their platforms, Web Central and Melbourne IT sat back and how expected their dominant position would guarantee them profits.

    Much of that management complacency was born out the founding of Melbourne IT when it was spun off from the University of Melbourne to exploit the then monopoly the university’s computer faculty had on granting Australia commercial domains.

    In 1998, as the dot com boom was entering its most heated phase, Melbourne IT was floated and immediately attracted anger and allegations of wrong doing – none of which was proved – as the stock debuted on the stock market at four times its listing prices which generated huge profits for the insiders who were fortunate to get shares allocated before the sale.

    Melbourne IT’s huge stock valuation was based on the belief the company would exploit its dominance of the critical domain market – it was similar to other technology floats of dominant players at the time such as accounting giant MYOB in 1999 and Telstra’s spin off of its small business Commander operation the following year.

    All of these stock market floats proved to be disastrous as each company’s management showed they were incapable of exploiting their privileged market positions.

    Of the three, Melbourne IT’s management survived longest partly because of the riches expected to flow into the company’s coffers through Top Level Domain sales as gullible government agencies and corporates being driven by a Fear Of Missing Out overpay for new online addresses.

    Now it appears ICANN’s top level domain river of gold isn’t going to flow, partly due to arrogance and management incompetence in that organisation, so Melbourne IT is now going to have to cull its executive ranks.

    Steadily, both Melbourne IT and Web Central have gone from being dominant to irrelevant and provide a good case study of how poor management and complacency can squander a dominant market position.

    The failure of Melbourne IT’s management proves that clipping tickets on the internet is not always the path to riches, particularly when you don’t invest or innovate.

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  • Coping with Generation LuXurY

    Coping with Generation LuXurY

    Speaking at the recent ADMA Global Summit in Sydney, Starwood Hotel’s Phil McAveety described Generation LuXury – the changing hospitality expectations of Gen X and Ys.

    McAveety sees the new generation of travellers as being more diverse, younger, female and increasingly from emerging economies making them very different from the middle aged Caucasian male from Europe or North America which seems to be the focus of most of the hospitality industry.

    The lessons from McAveety’s presentation weren’t just for hotels, much of his message applies as to almost every other business sector.

    3D printing featured heavily, with McAveetry seeing the technology as delivering the personalised experiences demanded by Generation LuXurY, as an example he cited a concierge being able to create a pair of running shoes for a guest in exactly the size and style required for a guest.

    Big Data played a role too with McAveety illustrating how hotel managers used to watch for important, valued guests with hidden windows letting them see who was checking into their establishment, a role that’s now carried out by Big Data and social media.

    McAveety though had a warning about social media in the risks of giving away business intelligence and intellectual property to the services.

    The big risk though is in technology itself – that hotels treat it as an end in itself instead of tools to deliver better experiences to guests.

    “It’s not about tech,” warns McAveety. “If so, we are going to lose.”

    That’s a lesson all industries need to heed, that technology is a means to the end of delivering better products to customers. Understanding what Generation LuXurY perceive as a better product is one of those uses for tech.

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