Tag: google

Does revenue solve all problems?

Do profitable businesses have no problems?

According to Eric Schmit, Google’s Executive Chairman, “Revenue solves all problems.” Is that really so?

The truth is it doesn’t. Revenue can solve some problems, while creating others and having plenty of cash coming in may even cover over existing issues that can be ignored while times are good.

Plenty of governments have found themselves unsuck after rich revenues allowed them to ignore problems in their own society, the Dutch Disease – where a country’s income rises rapidly because one industry booms and crowds the others out – is one example of revenue causing problems. Local Chinese governments are currently dealing with problems bought around by their massive income from selling land.

In business, owners and managers sometimes find themselves in trouble because they can’t manage the demand that comes with the revenue a growing enterprise attracts.

Sometimes, the revenue’s fine but there’s no profit. I can earn a lot of money selling bottles of beer for ten cents when everyone else is charging two dollars, but the fact the wholesale price is one dollar means I’m going to grow broke quickly unless I can impress a dumb corporation with my massive customer growth and get them to buy me out.

The group buying model tends to combine two of the above problems – participating businesses struggle with the demand they generate while the discounts they are giving almost certainly guarantees they are not making a profit on the deal.

So revenue doesn’t solve all problems, even the most profitable business – legal or not – has its own unique set of problems.

Life’s easier when your business is profitable, but problems will never go away. Even the good life has problems; deal with it.

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Is the social media business model dying?

Have the social media companies reached their peak?

Is the social media business model dead?

The frenzied rush to release new features such as Facebook’s latest changes, along with Google’s updates to their Plus platform, may be the first indication the big social media business model is broken.

Driving the adoption of social media services has been the value they add to people’s lives; MySpace was a great place to share interests like bands and music, Facebook’s is to hear what was happening with their families and friends, LinkedIn is for displaying our professional background and Twitter keeps track on what’s happening in the world.

Now the social media services want to be something else, Facebook wants to become “a platform for human storytelling” where you’ll share your story with friends and friends of friends (not to mention the friends of your mad cousin in Milwaukee) while Google+ wants to become an “identity service”.

The fundamental problem for social media services is their sky high valuations require them squeezing more information and value out of time poor users by adding the features on other platforms; so Facebook tries to become Twitter while Google+ desperately tries to ape Facebook and Quora.

Adopting other services’ features is not necessarily what the users want or need; you may be happy to follow a Reuters or New York Times journalist on Twitter for breaking news but you, and them, are probably not particularly keen on being Facebook friends or professionally associated on LinkedIn.

If it turns out we don’t want to share a timeline of our lives with the entire world but just know how our relatives or old school friends in another city are doing, then the underpinnings of the social media giants value may not be worth the billions of dollars we currently believe.

This isn’t to say social media services themselves aren’t going away, it could just be that the grandiose dreams of the online tycoons where they become an identity service or a mini-Internet are just a classic case of overreach.

For Google and Salesforce, whose core businesses aren’t in social media, this could be merely an expensive distraction, but for those businesses like Facebook it could be that Myspace’s failure was the indicator that making money out of people’s friendships isn’t quite the money maker some people think.

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Losing sight of what matters

Are we losing focus of what matters in our business?

Last Night Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt testified before a US Senate antitrust committee on the search engine company’s market power.

In opening his testimony, Schmidt alluded to Microsoft, saying “twenty years ago, a large technology firm was setting the world on fire. Its software was

on nearly every computer. Its name was synonymous with innovation.

“But that company lost sight of what mattered. Then Washington stepped in.

It’s an interesting and probably accurate perspective given how Microsoft has effectively lost its way for the last decade – although given Google’s urge to become an identity service and its buying a mobile phone manufacturer doesn’t auger well for their focus on the core search business.

Losing of focus of what matters is a problem for all business owners. We’re busy, it’s hard winning orders, getting paid and keeping customers happy so we lose track of the reason we went into business.

For most of us it was because we had a great business idea or a belief we could have a better life being our own bosses.

That latter objective is often the first one lost, usually we find ourselves working harder, taking fewer holidays and seeing the family less than if we’d stayed in a comparatively safe job with BigCorp.

Great ideas can also be our undoing – if you’re constantly having brainwaves, you find you have lots of ideas but no time to execute on any of them.

Similarly, one great idea that turns out to be dog can be bad news as well. Often, we’re loath to admit we’re wrong and hold onto a failing business idea long after it’s shown not to be viable.

Probably worst of all is when we violate our own values; many of us went into business because we didn’t like the values of the corporation we worked for.

Then one day we find we’re screwing subcontractors, that we’re leasing an expensive car the business can’t afford while cutting staff benefits and we’re tying up customers in legalistic contracts in attempt not to deliver the services we promised.

Just like the big company we swore we’d never become.

If you’re a big company with a lucrative business niche – like Google or Microsoft – you can get along quite nicely with the rivers of gold flowing subsidising your indulgences and distractions, most of though we don’t have that revenue buffer protecting our assets.

The cost of losing focus is a killer; even if it doesn’t kill our businesses, it will destroy our souls.

Are you keeping focus on why you went into business?

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ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

How the Internet’s name wars can affect you

The online empires want our names and identities, are the real costs of social media now being exposed? Our September ABC Nightlife spot on September 22 from 10pm looked at these issues and more.

Paul and Tony discussed how Google’s “Name Wars” or “nymwars” came about, why social media sites like Facebook and search engines want you to use to use your real names.

The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, more details of Tony’s programs can be found there as well.

Is this a good thing or are there costs we should consider before handing over our intimate details to a social media or free cloud computing service?

Some of the topics we covered included;

  • What are the “name wars’?
  • Why do companies like Google and Facebook want us to use our ‘real’ identities?
  • How can they use the information they gather?
  • What problems does that cause for Internet users?
  • Can these problems spill into real life?
  • Are all web services doing this?
  • What are the risks to businesses using social media?
  • Is this the real cost of social media?

Some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

The cost of lunch: Google and Information Revenue
Google’s real names policy explained
Google’s Eric Schmidt on being an “identity service”, not a social network
Google’s company philosophy (note item two)
Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is

We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 20 October and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

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Cloud computing and Small Business September Digital Day

How can online tools help grow your business?

As part of the NSW state government’s Small Business September Digital Day for Startups and Growth Businesses, we’ll be looking at exactly what cloud computing is and how it can help businesses.

Some of the services we discuss in the presentation are listed in the Netsmart’s web post on the 5 essential cloud computing tools for business. Although there’s many more we’ll mention that can help organisations of all sizes.

Given the time constraints and the event’s focus is on the specific social media and cloud computing tools available to small business, much of the background information to the Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business session is available in the previous series of posts about cloud computing previously done for the 2011 City of Sydney Let’s Talk Business series.

Detailed information from that presentation can be found on the following pages;

The networked business Part 1: What is cloud computing?
The networked business Part 2: The benefits of cloud computing
The networked business Part 3: Managing risk in the cloud
The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

All of the tools discussed in the Small Business September presentations are available in our ebook, Online Business Essentials which is available for all subscribers to our newsletter.

If you’d like to see the presentations themselves, both The Networked Business and Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business are available through the Slideshare service.

Seats are still available for both of the Digital Day presentations at the Telstra Experience Centre, Level 4, 300 George Street, Sydney. The Start Up session begins at 8.00am and the presentations for growth businesses begins at 1.00pm.

Come along if you’d like to learn how social media and cloud computing can help your business improve productivity while building an online brand.

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How Google’s identity obsession hurts

How the search engine giant is damaging business and its own reputation

Imagine giving a presentation at a conference where you fire up a live demonstration of a product you’ve been urging the audience to use and the audience start giggling.

You turn around to find a bright red message at the top of the screen stating your account has been suspended. It wasn’t there the night before and you certainly didn’t receive an email warning you this had happened.

Embarrassing or what?

That happened to me with Google Local earlier this and the many stories like it illustrates a serious management problem within the world’s biggest search engine company.

Local search – where businesses can be found online based on their location – is one of the main web battlefields with Google and Facebook, along with outliers like News Limited and Microsoft, are competing to get business of all sizes to sign up.

Recently though Google seems to be going out of its way to squander the massive opportunity they have in this sector despite the CEO, Larry Page, identifying local services as one of their priorities.

Despite Google’s intention to promote Places – as their, and Facebook’s, local search platforms are called – many businesses are finding the company’s arbitrary and often incorrect application of its own rules and Terms of Service difficult to understand and use.

“I have found that with the ‘moving target’ Google is presenting to businesses” said Bob, a commenter on one of my blogs, “is paralyzing them from doing exactly what Google wants, which is updating and providing fresh content on their listings pages.”

In many ways, this is a small front on the “nymwars” that has broken out since Google introduced their Plus social media service and started enforcing their “rules” on “real names”.

Unfortunately their real names “policy” – and I use inverted commas deliberately – is vague and arbitrary with users finding their accounts suspended despite signing up with “the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you” as required by Google.

Account suspensions are wide and varied; some people, quite legally, have a name without a surname, others have a combination of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, while others have simply fallen foul of the computer and Google’s secretive bureaucratic culture.

This secretive bureaucracy would be funny if it wasn’t so downright hypocritical. Any correspondence with Google about account suspensions either on Places or Plus is signed off by an anonymous functionary from “no-reply” email address. So it appears real identities, and accountability, don’t extend to the company itself.

Last week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, announced Plus is not a social media platform, but an “identity service”. Good luck with that, Eric as your staff’s arbitrary and often incorrect interpretation of the company’s own rules doesn’t engender confidence in any identity verified by Google.

That announcement by Google’s chairman should worry investors, as this is a company that is first and foremost an advertising company powered by the best web search technology.

Management distractions such as becoming an “identity service” or buying a handset manufacturer distract focus from the core business and result in the mess we’re seeing around business and private accounts.

For the moment, Google Places remains a service that businesses must list on given the visibility the results have when customers search the web for local services and products.

If you aren’t already on Google Places, do sign up but make sure you get your listing right first time as editing your profile once it’s up risks your account being suspended or cast into “pending” purgatory.

Should you have already an account, leave it alone as any change risks coming the attention of Google’s anonymous bureaucrats.

Hopefully, this madness will pass and Google will clarify their policies, ground them in the real world then enforce their terms fairly and consistently. Until then, you can’t afford to rely on your personal and business Google accounts.

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Be careful with your Google Places listing

Be careful when making changes to your business Google Places account

Google Places is a service that every business should sign up to, however Google’s policies at the moment mean you have to take care with how you use the listing.

At present Google are enforcing their listing rules in unpredictable ways and we’re hearing businesses are having their accounts suspended for what appears to a misreading on Google’s part of their own policies.

More importantly, there are stories of businesses who have updated their details and found their listing goes into “pending” status and their page is pulled from local search results until their revisions are reviewed by a Google staffer.

Often when the review is done, the listing is denied as being in breach of the rules which effectively bans the business from Google Places until the error is fixed.

Fixing the problem is difficult as the Google rejection emails are cryptic and, unfortunately in this era of the social business, come from a “no-reply” account with no sign off name, so there’s no way to find out exactly where the problem lies.

Given the uncertainty around Google’s policies in this space, it’s best not to make any changes to your Google Places account unless it’s absolutely necessary to update essential information.

If you haven’t already listed your business on Google Places, we’d still urge you to do so. Just make sure you get all of your details correct and pictures uploaded before you submit the entry.

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