Tag: business

When margins collapse

Giving away your once most profitable product is a sure sign your industry is in trouble

Two of the key indicators that your business model, and industry, is being threatened is declining sales and margins.

A good example of this is the story Microsoft are urging their Chinese resellers to use Office 365 as a loss leader to get their foot in the door with customers.

Not so long ago Microsoft Office was a huge cash generator for the business; now it’s a loss leader.

If anything this shows how the margins in the software business are being eroded by cloud computing. Businesses like Microsoft and its resellers that have grown fat on big margins now have to evolve to a very different marketplace.

This means a very different way of doing business, a different way of delivering products and much more streamlined operation that doesn’t need battalions of highly paid salespeople and managers. In fact those managers and salespeople become a very expensive legacy item in a cloud computing world.

Microsoft are by no means the only company to find themselves giving away once profitable products in order to maintain their market position but when that starts happening it’s clear the time has arrived to find a new line of business.

In Microsoft’s case that’s been a pivot to the cloud, however the company will never find things as lucrative as the good old days when software was sold in boxes or licensed out with impossible to read agreements.

Funnily, the same thing is happening in the telcommunications world. It’s an interesting time to be in business.

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Klout and marketing’s holy grail – an interview with Joe Fernandez

For three months in 2007 Joe Fernandez had his jaw wired shut following surgery and found himself relying on social media for news and companionship.

Over that three months of sitting on the net Fernandez found he had become a social media influencer and the idea for Klout was born.

In many respects Klout is the classic startup in that Fernandez started with a series of spreadsheets with the algorithm being an Excel formula, something he now calls a ‘Minimal Minimum Viable Product’.

“It was super minimal,” Fernandez remembers. “When people would register for Klout, it would send me an email and I would manually download their social media data into Excel and run the algorithm and then I’d manually update their page.”

Today Klout processes fifteen billion accounts every day with data pulled from four hundred data points including 15 social media services.

Like all tools, Klout does have some limitations and Fernandez admits he gets frustrated with businesses giving priority to users with high scores, another area that concerns him is marketers who don’t examine the relevance of individuals to the business before making judgments on that person’s influence.

One of the key things that Fernandez is proud of is how Klout is spawning its own alumni in a similar way to the PayPal mafia that developed out of the payment service at the beginning of the Century.

“It’s really awesome to see people go on and take on big challenges and do different things.”

As social media develops, tools like Klout are going to become more important for businesses trying to understand how

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On being a digital anthropologist — brian solis on technology disrupting buiness

Innovating within a business can be hard work says Brian Solis

“Technology is part of the solution, but it’s also part of the problem,” says Brian Solis, the

Brian Solis describes himself as a digital anthropologist who looks for how businesses are being disrupted. We talk about digital darwinism, how businesses can approach change and the role of individual changemakers within organisations.

“My primary responsibility is to study disruptive technology and its impacts on business,” says Solis. “I look at emerging technology and try to determine which one is going to become disruptive.”

To identify what technologies are likely to disrupt businesses it’s necessary to understand the human factors, Solis believes.

One of the problems Solis sees is the magnitude of change required within organisations and particularly the load this puts on individuals, citing the story of one pharmaceutical worker who tried to change her employer.

“Her mistake was thinking this was a short race, she thought everyone could see the opportunity inherent in innovation and change when in fact it was a marathon. She burned herself out”

“What that means is to bring about change you really have to dig yourself in because you’re ready to do your part. You can’t do it alone, you have to do change in small portions and win over the right people.”

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Conglomerates fall out of fashion

It’s worth remembering that conglomerates come in and out of fashion in the business world, right now seems to be a bad time.

After the announcement earlier this week that HP will split into two, now Bloomberg reports Symantec is considering splitting, this comes after the news that PayPal is being carved off eBay and that Yum foods is looking at divesting some  of its Chinese assets.

It looks like we’re moving into a period where conglomorates are out of fashion; that’s good news for lawyers and consultants advising the companies however it will be worth watching to see what this means for customers, employees and shareholders.

That HP is reportedly shedding 55,000 jobs says some of these conglomerates were chronically overstaffed so it might be good news for the stockholders of the split companies.

Either way, it’s always worth remembering that conglomerates come in and out of fashion in the business world.

 

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Employee engagement in small business

Blogging helps small business tell their story and improves staff morale

Earlier this week I was asked what tools small business could use to increase employee engagement.

My reply was a simple one; start a company blog and let staff contribute to it. Letting workers tell stories of why they enjoy their work not only gives them a feeling of being recognised as part of the team but also shows the human face of the business.

That latter part is an important point as too many small businesses try to sound like Exxon-Mobil when they present their company face when in actual fact most customers are after the human touch.

It’s a simple thing, but showing your business’ human face is not only good for staff morale but also good as a marketing tool as well.

 

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This is not toy time

A podcast with Profitable Hospitality’s Ken Burgin on payments and the hospitality industry

We’re past the time where business owners can dismiss new technologies as toys says Profitable Hospitality’s Ken Burgin.

Ken’s Profitable Hospitality website is a must read for anybody in the industry and I was lucky enough to be the the guest of his 99th podcast where we discussed payment systems, marketing and the challenges facing restaurant and cafe operators in a changing marketplace.

In the podcast we discuss PayPal’s plans for the retail sector along with how startups like Stripe look to disrupt the sector and what Apple’s announcements last week will mean to the payments industry.

The key message from the podcast is the entire sector is facing massive changes both from technology and changing consumer behaviour.

Like many other industries, the successful restaurant and cafe businesses over the next decade will be those who have the flexibility to adapt to a very different world.

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The business or your sanity

Minecraft founder Markus Persson gives other tech leaders a lesson in humility

Yesterday Microsoft confirmed the rumours that it would buy Minecraft developer Mojang for 2.5 billion dollars.

Following the announcement, Mojang founder Markus Persson — aka Notch — wrote a touching blog post on his leaving the company he founded.

The business had become too big and the demands of Minecraft’s legion of fans were taking their toll; it was time for Persson to move on to keep his sanity.

“If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”

For all the hubris we hear from technology company founders and CEOs, it’s those like Persson who probably will end up making the most difference to the world.

 

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