Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: web

  • Are executives out of touch with IT trends?

    Are executives out of touch with IT trends?

    Yesterday was media briefing day with a number of vendor events, including a very nice lunch with IBM, on the state of the technology industry.

    One thing that was particularly striking with IBM Truth Behind The Trends survey was just how out of touch many of the executives quoted in the report seem to be with responses on topics like malware and Bring Your Own Device being firmly behind the curve.

    This was borne out at the earlier media roundtable with online security company Websense where they described some of the challenges facing Chief Information Officers in making company boards and senior managers aware of technology security risks.

    What surprised most of the journalists in the earlier briefing was just how clueless many of the executives seem to be about online business risks, those who went along to the following IBM briefing realised why – managers genuinely don’t understand how the internet and business technology is evolving.

    That should worry investors as markets are changing rapidly and managers who don’t recognise, let alone understand, the shifts happening are jeopardizing the their business’ futures.

    Why exactly business leaders are so out of touch is something we look at tomorrow where we examine the background of Australia’s CEOs.

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  • 57 million websites and nothing on

    57 million websites and nothing on

    Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang about TV having 57 channels and nothing on.

    While little has changed on TV, today the web has 57 million websites* offering little beyond click bait and a quick rewrite of someone else’s work.

    At the moment that model works for the kings and queens of the digital manor who pocket a few pennies for each of the ten stories their overworked interns pump out in a day but it’s hard to see how that form of publishing adds value to the audience.

    The 1990s television stations and cable networks got away with no adding value – and still do today – because they are in industries that are tough for new entrants to enter.

    But on the web there are far fewer barriers to new entrants which means offering 57 channels with nothing on, or 57 million websites with no real content, isn’t a long term path to success.

    *a wild guess

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  • Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

    As US bookseller Barnes and Noble shrinks its store network, Mark Athitakis has a tribute to the once ubiquitous chain in The New Republic.

    Barnes and Noble was never popular among US independent booksellers because of the perception, probably true, that the chain drove locally owned stores out of business.

    What it offered though was a safe, comfortable place for booklovers to gather in suburban shopping malls. As Mark points out, it created a community.

    Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children’s story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision—more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it—but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them.

    In recent years that community moved to coffee shops, in the United States B&N’s role was taken by Starbucks, at the same time our reading habits changed and the business of selling books and magazines became tougher.

    Now that community is changing again, as the online societies like blogs, Facebook and Twitter become important, the coffee shops have responded with free wi-fi which is a perfect example of how the online and offline world come together.

    That need to create communities, either physically or online, is a driving human urge.

    Online that role is being catered to with social media platforms and sites like food, mommy or tech blogs where like minded people can gather.

    Down at the mall, Barnes and Noble catered for that need in the 1980s and Starbucks in the 1990s. What will follow them may be the next big success in the retail or hospitality industry.

    Image courtesy of Brenda76 on SXC

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  • Can Yahoo! disrupt the disruptors?

    Can Yahoo! disrupt the disruptors?

    Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer packed out the room for her interview at the World Economic Forum this week where she spoke about some of the challenges her and the company face.

    One of the areas she sees for Yahoo! is in collaborating with other tech industry giants.

    Mayer also is making a point of collaborating with companies such as Apple Inc., Google and Facebook, instead of competing.

    “It ultimately means there’s really an opportunity for strong partnerships,” she said.

    The problem for Yahoo! is that it doesn’t have a lot to offer companies like Apple, Google or Facebook – they are steaming along on their own and have moved ahead of the areas which Yahoo! dominated a decade ago.

    Generally in the tech industry partnerships are more the result of the sector’s also-ran coming together in the hope that their combined might will overcome the leader’s advantages.

    It’s the same philosophy that thinks tying the third and fourth placed runners legs together will make them faster than the winner.

    A good example of this is Microsoft’s tie up with Nokia over the Windows Phone. If anything, the net effect has put Windows Phone and Nokia even further behind Apple and Google in the handset market.

    Even when two tech companies have united to exploit their individual strengths, the results usually end in tears. Probably the best example of this was the IBM and Microsoft joint venture to develop the OS/2 operating system which eventually sank under IBM’s bureaucrat incompetence and Microsoft’s disingenuous management.

    Those two examples show how partnerships only work when each party has something valuable to contribute and all sides are committed to the venture.

    Marissa Mayer’s task is to find Yahoo!’s strengths and build on them, then she’ll be in a position to enter partnerships on an equal basis.

    Whether its worth entering into partnerships with the big players though is another question. It may well be that Yahoo! has more to offer smaller businesses and disruptive startups.

    Entering into a desperate alliance with Apple or Facebook could possibly be the worst thing Yahoo! could do, the company is no longer a leader and now needs to be a challenger or a disruptor.

    Facebook’s locking competitors out of data feeds is an example of how complacent the big four internet giants are becoming, Yahoo! are in the position to upset that comfortable club.

    The value of partnerships is that we all have weaknesses and strengths, a properly thought out venture builds on the various parties’ strengths and covers their weak spots. Right now Yahoo! has more weaknesses than strengths.

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  • PayPal struggles with the Soviet customer service model

    PayPal struggles with the Soviet customer service model

    CNN reports that internet payment giant PayPal is looking at an “aggressive changes” to its fraud detection systems which see thousands of customers accounts frozen every year.

    PayPal’s announcement follows last year’s promise by CEO David Marcus to institute a “culture change” at the company,

    Our intention has always been to protect our customers. Not to mess around with our merchants.
    I want to share two things with all of you:

    #1 — there’s a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.

    #2 — you have my commitment to make this company GREAT again. We’re reinventing how we work, our products, our platforms, our APIs, and our policies. This WILL change, and we won’t rest until you all see it. The first installments are due very soon. So stay tuned…

    Screwing around merchants and buyers has become synonymous with PayPal and their parent company eBay who together are the poster children for the Silicon Valley Soviet Customer Service Model.

    Reader comments to the CNN article cited at the beginning of this post give a taste of just how bad the problem is at PayPal.

    Once your business attracts the attention of PayPal’s algorithms, you’re locked into a Kafkaesque maze of dead ends and arbitrary, made up rules.

    To be fair to PayPal and eBay this problem isn’t just theirs, it’s shared by Google, Amazon and almost every major online company. Their view of customer service is to shoot first and ask no questions, they certainly won’t answer anything from their victim beyond a trite passive-aggressive corporate statement.

    Part of the current Silicon Valley mania around web and app based services is that, along with providing free content, users will provide support for each other and that customer service is an unnecessary overhead which should be kept to a minimum.

    In this respect, many of these new businesses are little different from the legacy airlines, telcos and declining department stores who have spent the last thirty years stripping away customer service with the result of locking them into shrinking commodity markets.

    That failure to value customer service is the biggest weakness for companies like eBay, Amazon and Google. The very forces that favour them, the reduction of the entry barriers, also makes it easier for more customer orientated businesses to grab market share.

    Just as Silicon Valley’s new businesses has challenged a whole range of incumbent operators, they too are at risk from upstarts who value their customers. This is something PayPal’s management can’t afford to forget.

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