Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Innovation

  • Does Google have corporate Attention Deficit Disorder?

    Does Google have corporate Attention Deficit Disorder?

    The news that Google were releasing a service called Keep designed to store things you find on the web for future reference received a hostile response yesterday.

    It seems the company’s dropping Google Reader into the deadpool proved the final straw for many of the tech early adopters who’d invested too much time building their feeds and other digital assets only to find services taken away from them.

    This isn’t just Google Reader, various other services are suffering; Google Alerts has become functionally useless while the Frommers guide book franchise is slowly dying after the company bought it from John Wileys.

    Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder

    Google are suffering corporate Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) where management find a bright shiny thing, play with it for a while then get bored and wander off.

    This is trait particularly common amongst cashed up tech companies. In the past Microsoft and Yahoo! were the best examples, but today Google is the clear leader in the Corporate ADD stakes.

    Corporate ADD requires a number of factors – the main thing is a big cash flow to fund acquisitions.

    In companies with this luxury, bored managers find themselves looking for things to do with all the money flowing through the door and when a hot new product or market sector appears those executives want to be part of it.

    So a company gets acquired or a project is set up and the advocate drives it relentlessesly within the corporation, usually with lots of PR and write ups in the industry press.

    Then something happens.

    Usually the advocate – the manager or founder who drives the project – gets bored, promoted or sacked and the project loses its driving force within the organisation.

    Without that driving force the service stagnates as we saw with Google Alerts or Reader and eventually company closes it down.

    This has unfortunate effects on the marketplace, users invest a lot of time in the company’s service while  innovators in the affected market struggle to get funding as the investors say “we can’t compete with Google’.

    A changed perspective

    What’s interesting now though is the sea-change in the attitude towards Google’s Keep announcement – rather than dozens of articles describing how competing services like Evernote are doomed in the face of the search engine giant entering their market, most are saying this validates the existing startups’ investment and vision.

    More importantly, most commentators are saying they are going to stick with the services they already use because they no longer trust Google to maintain the product.

    This is what happens when you lose the trust and confidence of the market place.

    One of the mantras of the startup community is “focus” – focus on your product and the problem you want it to fix. That large businesses lack that focus shows how far from being a lean startup they have become.

    Google’s real challenge is to regain that focus. Right now they have rivers of cash flowing through their doors but in an age of disruption, it may well be that they could dry up if no-one pays attention.

    Ritalin image courtesy of Adam on Wiki Images

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  • The high cost of new media experiments

    The high cost of new media experiments

    The BBC yesterday sold Lonely Planet to US media company NC2 Media. Their £80 million loss on the venture puts them in good company as established media struggle to find new online channels and revenue streams.

    While the losses aren’t trivial, they are not quite in the league of News Corporation $545 million loss on MySpace or Time Warner’s billion dollar adventure with AOL.

    All three stories show how tough it is for ‘old media’ adapting to a new landscape.

    The problem is there for ‘new media’ as well, most ventures struggle to make money and many of the success stories like Huffington Post rely on a combination of free content and a greater fool buying them.

    No-one has really figured out what the new media revenue models are; not the established publishers or the online upstarts.

    Lonely Planet’s online success was due to their forums which, like most web discussion boards, can feature discussions politely described as “robust”.

    This was always going to a problem for the BBC’s public service management culture and it resulted in the shutdown of the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forums over Christmas.

    So it’s not surprising that the BBC has decided to end its experiment and now the corporation’s management is dealing with the criticism of those losses.

    While it’s easy to criticise the BBC for the deal, at least the broadcaster was attempting something different online, doing nothing is probably a poorer strategy than buying MySpace or Lonely Planet.

    Over time, we’re going to see a lot more experiments and many will be public embarrassments like those the BBC and News Corporation have suffered, but there will be successes.

    Someone will crack the code and they will be the Randolph Hearsts of this century. It could one of the Murdoch heirs, it could be the owners of NC2 Media or it could be some young, hot shot developer working in a Rio favela or the slums of Kolkata.

    But it will be someone.

    It’s an exciting time to be in business.

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  • Will Google Deals be the next service to join the graveyard?

    Will Google Deals be the next service to join the graveyard?

    Google’s graveyard of discontinued services is getting crowded, with Google Reader being one of a dozen services to bite the dust in last week’s springclean.

    As Google ruthlessly cut services that don’t make the grade, the question is ‘which ones are next’?

    Towards the top of the list has to be Google Offers, the group buying service that was set up in a fit of pique after Groupon spurned the search engine giant’s $6 billion acquisition offer.

    Google Offers has only rolled out in 45 locations across the United States over the last two years and the deals in recent times have become increasingly desperate, here’s a recent New York deal.

    an example of how Google offers is dying

    Schmakery’s Cookies may well be fine products, but getting one free cookie isn’t exactly a jump out of your seat experience and it shows just how Google are struggling with this service.

    That Google are struggling with Offers isn’t surprising though, the daily deals business relies on sales teams working hard to acquire small business advertisers. Small business is a sector that Google struggles with and running people focused operations is the not the company’s strong point either.

    Google’s exit from the group buying market may be good for Groupon and other companies in the sector. The Economist makes the point that Google’s presence in these markets distorts the sector for other incumbents while scaring investors and innovators away.

    This is rarely permanent though as companies like Google and Microsoft often suffer a form of corporate Attention Deficit Disorder – Knol is a good example of this and Seth Godin describes what happens “when the 800 pound gorilla arrives”.

    Eventually the 800 pound gorilla finds there aren’t a lot of bananas, gets bored and wanders off.

    Which is what has happened with RSS feeds and Google reader. Now the little guys can get back to building new products on  open RSS platform while Google, along with Facebook and Twitter, try to lock their data away.

    For Groupon, the departure of Google from the deals business may not be good news as it could mean smart new competitors enter the field. Either way, there’s some challenges ahead for the owners of group buying services.

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  • Recruiting big data

    Recruiting big data

    One of the predictions for 2020 is that decade’s business successes will be those who use big data well.

    A good example of a big data tool is recruitment software Evolv that helps businesses predict not only the best person to hire but also who is likely to leave the organisation.

    For employee retention, Evolv looks at a range of variables which can include anything from gas prices and social media usage to local unemployment rates then pulls these together to predict which staff are most likely to leave.

    “It’s hard to understand why it’s radically predictive, but it’s radically predictive,” Venture Beat quotes Jim Meyerle, Evolv’s cofounder.

    There are some downsides in such software though – as some of the comments to the VentureBeat story point out – a blind faith in an alogrithm can destroy company morale and much more.

    Recruiters as an industry haven’t a good track record in using data well, while they’ve had candidate databases for two decades and stories abound of poor use of keyword searches carried out by lazy or incompetent headhunters. The same is now happening with agencies trawling LinkedIn for candidates.

    Using these tools and data correctly going to separate successful recruitment agencies and HR departments from the also-rans.

    It’s the same in most businesses – the tools are available and knowing them how to use them properly will be a key skill for this decade.

    Job classifieds image courtesy of Markinpool through SXC.HU

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  • Are Small Businesses becoming Digital Roadkill?

    Are Small Businesses becoming Digital Roadkill?

    Technology Spectator today discusses if fast broadband initiatives like the National Broadband Network will be good for all small businesses.

    Andrew Twaites of Melbourne consultancy The Strategy Canvas posits that many businesses aren’t equipped to compete against  global competitors.

    The additional competitive pressures that the NBN rollout is likely place on segments of the small business sector that have to date enjoyed a degree of natural protection as a result of their customers’ inability to access super-fast broadband.

    Once that natural protection falls away, many small businesses will for the first time be exposed to competition from interstate and overseas businesses

    This is a very good point; many small businesses are transaction based service providers who can be easily replaced by lower cost overseas companies, particularly now foreign suppliers are easily accessible through services like O-Desk and Freelancer.com.

    Every time I see Freelancer.com’s CEO Matt Barrie talk to a small business audience, I’m surprised the room doesn’t lynch him as he’s describing how their businesses are threatened species and many are living on borrowed time.

    One of the reasons why small businesses are threatened is because they are under-capitalised, many simply can’t invest in the technology or training they need to compete.

    There’s also a reluctance to embrace technology, that half of all small businesses – in the US, the UK or Australia – don’t have even a basic website.

    On a recent holiday in Northern NSW, I checked dozens of tourism businesses’ online presences. Few had a website and almost none had bothered filling in their Google Places profiles, let alone set up social media presences.

    Yet almost all of their new customers are looking for them on the web, increasingly through mobile devices or social media services where they are invisible.

    Not having a website, local listing or Facebook page are trivial things; but the fact that most businesses haven’t done the basics doesn’t bode well as the speed of commerce accelerates over the rest of this decade.

    That many small businesses will be put out of business by today’s changes isn’t unprecedented – blacksmiths were out of job shortly after the motor car rolled out and whale oil manufacturers by gas and then electric lighting.

    As Andrew points out, we assume ‘creative destruction’ just disrupts big incumbent corporation. In reality it’s the little guys who feel more pain than insulated executives of big business.

    Many of us little guys are going to have to start thinking about adapting to very changed times, the risks of being digital roadkill are real.

    Doll roadkill image courtesy of Pethrus through WikiMedia

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