Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: google

Flunking the Local Search Market
At a breakfast last week a business owner told me about his struggle to counter negative reviews about his B&B on Tripadvisor.

There’s little doubt that sites like Tripadvisor and Urban Spoon are important to the hospitality industry, as customers check out reviews of establishments before they make a booking or set off for an evening’s entertainment.

Over the last two years most of us in the industry thought Facebook and Google’s Local Search services – both confusing called “Places” – would dominate the market for these services.

Google seemed to have the biggest advantage as the integration of local search and user reviews seemed to be a no-brainer for the search engine giant.

A combination of poor implementation and anal retentive policies left Google Places stranded. The distraction of trying to slap a “social layer” onto the search platform can’t have helped.

Facebook haven’t fared any better. Much of the problem for the dominant social network has been that users aren’t particularly interested in engaging with businesses unless there’s an incentive like a freebie or prize.

Just last week a US based social media expert was recommending local businesses offer incentives such as “a slice of apple pie” in return for favourable Facebook reviews and likes.

Business owners themselves are finding it too difficult with the demands of too many social networks overwhelming them. This isn’t helped by the services offering confusing products, arcane policies and requiring information being duplicated.

Most importantly though is customers just aren’t using these services. Increasingly it’s clear we want to use custom applications, particularly if we’re using smartphones where it’s difficult to navigate through a social media service’s multiple options.

It could well be that we don’t want to use all in one “portals” – this was the web model that companies like Yahoo! and MSN tried to impose upon us when it became clear that the walled gardens of AOL and The Microsoft Network didn’t work on the Internet.

One of the factors driving the tech wreck of the early 2000s was the failure of those portals as highly valued web real estate proved to be based on faulty assumptions and shaky maths.

The failure of specialised search engines and social networks to expand into mobile and local services indicates many of our assumptions today are flawed.

Could it be that the next popping of a tech bubble is a repeat of the mistaken assumptions we should have understood over a decade ago?

Similar posts:
April 28, 2012
Rivers of gold
Google’s announcement that their revenues have increased by 24% over the last year shows the search engine juggernaut keeps rolling on.

It’s tempting to think that Google is untouchable and that’s certainly how it appears when you’re on track to earn forty billion dollars a year and book close to 40% of that income as profits.

On the same day, Sony announced a massive restructure including with 10,000 redundancies and the company’s CEO, Kazuo Hirai, spoke of a sense of urgency to address the once dominant corporation’s drift into irrelevance.

Twenty years the thought of Sony – one of the world’s innovators in consumer electronics – would be wallowing in the wake of companies like Apple and unknown upstarts like Google was unthinkable.

Fortunes are won and quickly lost in a time of great change and this is something we should keep in mind about Google when we look at their rivers of gold.

“Rivers Of Gold” was a term coined to describe the advertising riches of the newspaper industry in the 1980’s. Google’s online advertising is partly responsible for destroying that business.

Today Google is a search engine business that makes its money from the advertising that deserted print media and went online.

It may be that manufacturing mobile phones, running “identity services” disguised as social media platforms or augmented reality spectacles are the future of Google but right now they it’s search and advertising that pays the bills and books the massive profits.

The challenge for Google is not to lose sight of its current core business while building the future rivers of gold.

If Google’s leaders can’t manage this, then they risk following the newspaper industry that they themselves disrupted.

Similar posts:
April 13, 2012
Bubble economics
You know you’re in an investment bubble when the pundits declare “we’re not in a bubble”.

A good example of this is Andy Baio’s defence of Facebook’s billion dollar purchase of Instagram.

Justifying the price, Andy compares the Facebook purchase with a number of notorious Silicon Valley buyouts using two metrics; cost per employee and cost per user.

Which proves the old saw of “lies, damn lies and statistics”.

The use of esoteric and barely relevant statistics is one of the characteristics of a bubble; all of a sudden the old metrics don’t apply and, because of the never ending blue sky ahead, valuations can only go up.

Andy’s statistics are good example of this and ignore the three things that really matter when a business is bought.

Current earnings

The simplest test of a business’ viability is how much money is it making? For the vast majority of businesses bought and sold in the world economy, this is the measure.

Whether you’re buying a local newsagency outright or shares in a multinational manufacturer, this is the simplest and most effective measure of a sensible investment.

Future earnings

More complex, but more important, are the prospects of future earnings. That local newsagency or multinational manufacturer might look like a good investment on today’s figures, but it may be in a declining market.

Similarly a business incurring losses at the moment may be profitable under better management. This was the basis of the buyout boom of the 1980s and much of the 1990s.

Most profitable of all is buying into a high growth business, if you can find the next Google or Apple you can retire to the coast. The hope of finding these is what drives much of the current venture capital gold rush.

Strategic reasons

For corporations, there may be good strategic reasons for buying out a business that on paper doesn’t appear to be a good investment.

There’s a whole host of reasons why an organisation would do that, one variation of the Silicon Valley business model is to buy in talented developers who are running their own startups. Google and Facebook have made many acquisitions of small software development companies for that reason.

Fear Of Missing Out

In the Silicon Valley model, the biggest strategic reason for paying over the odds for a business is FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out.

To be fair to the valley, this is true in any bubble – whether it’s for Dutch tulips in the 17th Century or Florida property in the 20th. If you don’t buy now, you’ll miss out on big profits.

When we look at Andy Baio’s charts in Wired, this is what leaps out. Most of the purchases were driven by managements’ fear they were going to miss The Next Big Thing.

The most notorious of all in Andy’s chart is News Corp’s 580 million dollar purchase of MySpace, although there were good strategic reasons for the transaction which Rupert Murdoch’s management team were unable to realise.

eBay’s $2.6 billion acquisition of Skype is probably the best example of Fear Of Missing Out, particularly given they sold it back to the original founders who promptly flicked it to Microsoft. eBay redeems itself though with the strategic purchase of PayPal.

Probably the worst track record goes to Yahoo! who have six of the thirty purchases listed on Andy’s list and not one of them has delivered for Yahoo!’s long suffering shareholders.

The term “greater fools” probably doesn’t come close to describe Yahoo!’s management over the last decade or so.

While Andy Baio’s article seeks to disprove the idea of a Silicon Valley bubble, what he shows is the bubble is alive, big and growing.

One of the exciting things about bubbles is they have a habit of growing bigger than most rational outsiders expect before they burst spectacularly.

We live in exciting times.

Similar posts:
April 11, 2012
The tough world of smartphones
Dell’s announcement they are going to exit the Smartphone business – for the second or possibly even third time – comes on the same day Nielsen release a survey showing smartphones are now the bulk of US mobile phone purchases.

For Dell this shows the problem they have in being locked into the commodity PC business, what was once a lucrative business is now suffering softening margins and slowing sales. In desperation they are looking to other product lines but struggle to differentiate themselves in other markets.

The difficulties of doing this in the smartphone sector is shown in Nielsen’s analysis of what phones are selling.

Of those sold in the last three months, a whopping 43% were Apple products while 48% were Google Android devices.

Even more frightening in those Nielsen figures is Blackberry’s collapse where the Canadian product has 12% of the market but only 5% of sales in recent months. It’s little wonder Blackberry’s owner RIM is laying off senior managers.

For Microsoft, that only 4% of phones were “other” than Android, Apple or RIM show just how tough the task of selling Windows Phone is going to be, something that won’t be helped with dumb marketing stunts.

Google’s apparent success in mobile isn’t all that it seems either; while the Android platform has nearly half the smartphone market it doesn’t appear to be particularly profitable.

The Guardian’s Charles Arthur looked at a number of legal cases involving Google’s mobile patents and extrapolated the claimed damages to get an estimate of how much Google earns from Android.

Arthur estimates Android has earned Google $543 million dollars between 2008 and 2011 which, given Google’s mobile revenues last year were claimed to be $2.5 billion last year, indicates Google makes more money from Apple devices than it does from its own products.

While Arthur’s estimates are debatable, they show how Apple’s profits dominate the smartphone market. Google, like Dell in computers, are locked into the commodity, low margin end of the market.

Just as Dell have learned that entering new markets doesn’t guarantee success, Google may have to learn the same lesson.

To be fair to Google, at least management are aware of being too dependent upon one major source of revenue.

Whether mobile services built around the Android platform can provide an alternative cashflow of similar size to their web advertising services remains to be seen.

Similar posts:
March 30, 2012
You hold us harmless
Social media site Pinterest was recently caught in one of the ongoing quandaries of social media – the ownership of content.

The subject is tricky; social media sites rely on a vibrant community of users posting news and interesting things for their online friends.

Unfortunately many of things social media users post are someone else’s property, so almost every service has a boilerplate legal indemnity term like Pinterest’s.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms.

Facebook have similar terms (clause 15.1) as do LinkedIn (clause 2.E) and Tumblr (clause 15). Interestingly, Google’s master terms of service only holds businesses liable for the company’s legal costs, not individuals.

Boilerplate terms like these are necessary to provide at least an illusion of legal protections for investors – those venture capital investors, greater fool buyers or punters jumping into the latest hot technology stock offering need a fig leaf that covers the real risk of being sued for copyright infringement by one of their users.

The risk in these terms shouldn’t be understated; by agreeing to them a user assumes the liability of any costs the service incurs from the user’s posts. Those costs don’t have to be a successful lawsuit against the service, it could be something as minor as responding to a lawyer’s nastygram or DMCA takedown notice.

Of course, none of the major social media platforms have any intention of using these indemnity terms; they know that the first time they go after a user all trust in the service will evaporate and their business collapse.

Somewhere among the thousands of social media services though there is going to be one that will pull this stunt. Strapped for cash and slapped with an outrageous claim for copyright damages, the company’s board will settle then send out their own demands to the users responsible.

Those “responsible” users – probably white, middle class folk sitting in somewhere in the US Midwest, South East England or North Island of New Zealand – will be baffled by the legal demand that requires them to file a defense somewhere obscure in California or Texas and will go to their lawyer friends.

When the lawyers tell them what it means their next step will be to their local news outlet.

The moment the story of a middle class person facing losing all their assets hits the wires is the moment the entire social media business model starts to wobble.

In many ways what the social media sites are trying to do is offset risk.

Risk though is like toothpaste. Squeeze the tube in one place and the pressure moves elsewhere.

By laying off a real risk by using legal terms the social media sites create new, even bigger risks elsewhere in their business.

The dumb thing is these terms really don’t protect the services anyway – it’s unlikely the typical social media user will have anything like the assets to cover the costs of a major copyright action by a rich, determined plaintiff.

It’s going to be interesting to see how many services still have these indemnity clauses in 12 months.

For the industry’s sake, the big players will need to have ditched these terms before that first dumb attempt to claim damages from users hits the wires.

Similar posts:
March 25, 2012