Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: cloud computing

  • 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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  • Democratising customer service

    Democratising customer service

    “Nobody got girls on the helpdesk” says Mikkel Svane, founder of online customer service company Zendesk.

    Mikkel hopes to make customer service sexy again as businesses find they have to focus on keeping clients happy.

    This is a reversal of management thinking of the 1980s where, as Mikkel says, “customer service is a cost centre, outsource it, don’t spend any time on it and don’t let customers steal any of your time.”

    Now the internet gives customers to tell the world about a company’s service, the days of outsourcing or disregarding support are over.

    Mikkel Svane and Michael Hansen of Zendesk
    Mikkel Svane and Michael Hansen of Zendesk

    Cloud technologies are changing how software is used in business, as Mikkel found when he and his partners started Zendesk.

    It became very obvious that building something that was easy to adopt, web based and integrated with email, websites. Something easy to use that didn’t clutter the customer service experience.

    Something that moved from managing the customer service experience to focusing on customer service.

    We built it, put it out there and customers starting coming.

    A lot of these companies thought they could never implement a customer service platform. Suddenly small companies found they could compete with bigger competitors.

    The appeal to investors

    Having customers signing up proved to be a big advantage in Silicon Valley, no-one knew anything about a Danish company, but with local customers starting coming on board US Venture Capital firms understood what the company does.

    That customer base proved powerful as Zendesk has to date raised $84 million dollars over four rounds of VC funding and is looking at a stock market float with an IPO in the next few years.

    “Silicon Valley has a great tradition of building businesses.” Says Mikkel, “coming to Silicon Valley was such a big step for Zendesk, in taking it from being some little startup to being a real company that could scale very quickly.”

    A question of scale

    Groupon is a good example, when Mikkel and his team first met the Groupon team the group buying service was a team of four guys in Detroit. Groupon founder Andrew Mason personally signed off on the initial Zendesk subscription.

    “What the hell is this company, we don’t get it.” Mikkel said at the time.

    Three years later Groupon was the fastest growing company in history with thousands of support agents on their systems supporting hundreds of thousands of products.

    Despite Groupon’s recent problems, Svane is proud of how Zendesk helped the group buying service with growth that no business had seen before.

    “With Zendesk they got not only a beautiful, elegant system they also got the scale and the trajectory. Imagine if they’d tried to do that with an Oracle database? You’d have never been able to grow so quickly.”

    On being a good internet citizen

    In the past we talked about platforms – the Oracle platform, the Microsoft plaftorm – today the Internet is the platform.

    “We are a good citizen on the Internet platform,” says Mikkel. “Shopify is a good citizen of the internet platform, these type of tools are easy to integrate. We are all good citizens of the Internet platform.”

    Having these open system is the great power of the cloud services, they way they integrate and work together adds value to customers and doesn’t lock them into one company’s way of doing things.

    The threat to incumbents

    Vendor lock in has been a curse for businesses buying software. The fortunes of companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM have been built holding customers captive as the costs of moving to a competitor were too great.

    Cloud services like Zendesk, Shopify and Xero turn this business model around which is one of the attractions to customers and it’s why huge amounts of money are moving from legacy solutions to cloud based services.

    Another reason for the drift to cloud services is the reduction in complexity, the incumbent software vendors made money from the training and consulting services required to use their products.

    Having simple, intuitive systems makes it easier for companies to adopt and use the new breed of cloud services.

    Focusing on the business

    Mikkel’s aim is to help businesses focus on their customers and products rather than worry about IT and infrastructure. In the long term it’s about helping organisations establish long term relations with their clients.

    “Companies today realise that it doesn’t matter how much it matters how much I can sell to you right now, it pales into in comparison of how much I can sell you over the lifetime of our relationship. This ties into the subscription economy. It’s much more important for companies to nurture the long term lifetime relationship.”

    Having a long term relationship with customers is going to be one of the keys for business success in today’s economy.

    The days of transaction based businesses making easy profits from skimming a few percent off each sale are over and companies have to work on building long term relationship with customers.

    Services like Zendesk, Xero and Salesforce are those helping new, fast growth companies grab these opportunities. For incumbent businesses, it’s not a time to be assuming markets are safe.

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  • Ending the era of the computer password

    Ending the era of the computer password

    Earlier this year, Wired Magazine writer Mat Honan had his entire digital identity stolen from him when hackers cracked his email password and then systemically took over all of his cloud and social media accounts.

    Matt writes of his experience on Wired and proposes it’s time to kill the password.

    The problem with Mat’s proposal is that he doesn’t suggest an alternative.

    The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place.

    Every alternative authentication method to passwords has flaws just as serious, if not worse. Many are plainly impractical.

    All of them, including passwords, have the common weakness that those holding the information can’t be trusted either – one of the greatest ways for passwords to get into the wild is when incompetents like Sony give them away.

    Security is evolving, in the meantime we need to keep in mind some basic rules.

    • Use different passwords for different accounts
    • Only access accounts from trusted and up-to-date computers
    • Create strong passwords for accounts that matter, like online banking and email
    • Strong passwords are multiword phrases
    • Use two-factor authentication if its available
    • Don’t link unnecessary social media and cloud accounts together
    • Be very careful

    We should also remember that a skilled, motivated hacker will probably break into your account regardless of your computer security. In this respect it’s no different to the physical world where a determined criminal will get you regardless of the locks and alarms on your house.

    It’s also important to remember that security is more than just evil hackers; data can be damaged or given away by a whole range of means and people breaking into systems is only one risk of many.

    Computer security is an evolving field and while it might be premature to declare the password dead, we’re going to see big changes as we try to lock down our valuable digital assets.

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  • Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

    Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

    As a follow up to last night’s ABC Nightlife computer spot where we looked at who owns our online data, there were a few questions which we’d get back to listeners on.

    The entire show can be listened to online through the ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy website and includes some of the issues we’d get back to listeners on, but first an apology.

    Bruce Willis never sued Apple

    One of the callers Mark mentioned the story of Bruce Willis suing Apple over ownership of iTunes tracks.

    It turns out this never happened as Charles Arthur of the Guardian explains.

    While Charles can be a cranky bugger, he’s right in this case that the media didn’t a very poor job in regurgitating an untrue story without ever checking its veracity. Luckily it’s not one that I cited in the program.

    Protecting your Twitter Account

    One of the topics we discussed was the threat of accounts being hijacked and Twitter is one service that is constantly being compromised because of poor policies. An important part of protecting a Twitter account from being taken over is to make sure an extra level of authentication is used by clicking the “Password Reset” option in the Twitter Account settings.

    Recording online

    Des asked about recording his own message for an audio Christmas card to his friends and relatives.

    On Windows computers, Sound Recorder is the long standing built-in app while on the Mac, Garage Band is the built in application.

    There is a free third party application available for both PCs and Macs called Audacity which also allows you to record and edit on your system.

    US customer service

    One interesting thing about the conversation was how many callers criticised the “US mentality” of providing lousy service. This probably isn’t true as most American businesses provide some of the best customer service in the world.

    The lousy service from online companies is more a function of the computer engineering and venture capital background of the entrepreneurs setting up cloud computing and social media services, while the majority of these companies are from the US it wouldn’t be fair to brand this as being an American cultural issue.

    Our next Nightlife spot is on December 13 at 10pm and we’ll be looking at Windows 8 and what type of computers should people be considering. Hope you can join us.

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  • ABC Nightlife computers – who owns your data?

    ABC Nightlife computers – who owns your data?

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For the November segment we look at the perils of digital rights management.

    If you missed the spot, the podcast is available from the ABC Nightlife website and the answers to listeners’ questions is available in the following post.

    We all value our collections of CDs, books and photos, but what happens when we completely lose the digital equivalents? Tonight on the Nightlife we look at who really owns e-books and computer programs.

    Last month a story appeared on the Internet where Linn, a Norwegian lady, lost her entire collection of eBooks from her Kindle reader when Amazon decided she had breached their conditions.

    • What happened to Linn and her ebook collection?
    • How did Amazon respond when she complained?
    • So who actually owns those ebooks?
    • Is this shutting down of accounts common?
    • At their big event a few weeks back Apple focused their iPads and iBooks on education, could this happen to schools?
    • It’s not just ebooks though, can this happen with other online services?
    • Is this a problem with cloud computing services?
    • What about the data you’ve saved, do you lose that if the account is shut down?
    • What about businesses and all the work they go to build a Facebook or Pinterest following, are those online friends the business’ property?

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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