Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Digital experiences & functionalism

    This post on digital experiences sprang out of my going through images on Flickr. I was looking at pictures that I had taken of products designed by Dieter Rams like the Vitsœ 606 shelving system and his work at Braun on the service. Rams’ approach to industrial design was part of the functionalism movement where the look of a product is dictated by what the object does. In architecture this was used as an excuse to build rough-looking buildings with little aesthetic appeal.  This partly explains by a number of the leading thinkers in modern architecture have taken a ‘user’ hostile approach to their designs, washing their hands of  having to think about form in their process at all.
    Braun SK1 radio

    The Braun SK1 radio designed by Dieter Rams

    Rams approach to design had quality very much at the centre of it, so his work has as much to do with the ethics and principles of traditional Japanese design as it had with a modern movement. I got into this chain of thought because digital largely fails to mirror the good design that Rams has done in the analogue age. Rams in an interview for the documentary Objectified says that Apple seems to be only modern company that subscribes to his principles of good design, or takes design as seriously as he did.
    Braun desk fan from the early 1960s

    So why are digital experiences failing to match the best analogue examples of product design? I have some ideas, but I wouldn’t pretend to think that they are definitive answer to the question.

    Horizontal industry structure affects design thinking

    When geeks wore ties, polyester shirts and pocket protectors technology companies used to make the hardware and the software and digital experiences that went with them. Economies of scale and standardisation brought about a business computing environment based on Microsoft operating systems and Intel X86 processors. The exceptions to this being a small amount of powerful UNIX workstations and Apple’s range of Macintosh computers. In web services it splits up via hosting and APIs at the very least. This tends to be very different to many manufacturing processes and leaves designers with a sense that they have comparatively little control over their devices. It also means that the point of interface between designs: like how to interact with the software is dictated by the software partner, not the device manufacturer. In digital services, the terms of service of the API limit the power and design choices made.

    Design isn’t taken seriously

    In hardware manufacturing businesses work with manufacturers like Foxconn Technology Group. These manufacturers have moved up the value chain doing more and more of the work around the product including design now. There are few manufacturers that keep much of that work in-house. Reference designs make tooling easier, give component manufacturers more power and allow the client get to market faster. But they are going to market with a commoditised offering. This isn’t a new phenomena: JVC used to make VHS video recorders for Ferguson under the Videostar name with only the branding changing some 3o years ago.

    Outsourcing design implies that the process isn’t core to the value proposition of the business, and that’s a shame.

    Focus on the ingredients rather than the cake

    If you look at the marketing of mobile and computing devices the adverts often read like a parts list rather than a marketing brochure. How many car magazines publish articles showing the components that make up the engine, who they are manufactured by and how much the car would have cost? How would really care about which brand of air filter the engine used? Yet tear-downs are an important part of consumer electronics coverage now. The focus on the ingredients probably started as a way for manufacturers to take some control of their own product as part of the horizontal industry eco-system; but now it has become a fetish. A great micro-processor is often not enough to make a phone great when consumers choose on all-up experience.

    It isn’t only hardware manufacturers who do this. When I worked in-house for Yahoo!; the company launched lots of different search products to try and get feature parity with Google’s offerings. They were good products but the consumers still stayed away in droves; mainly because it wasn’t enough to be just like Google. If the company had carved its own path the future may have been very different.

    Quality is relative

    If you think about buying a new car or a fridge-freezer being told that you could use it, but it wasn’t fully finished and would be subject to considerable change – you would be very worried  and I wouldn’t blame you. However software and services change, sometimes quite dramatically. It means that quality means something very different in the digital world, compared to the world that you and I live in. There is no ‘getting things right first time’ and there is a mentality of impermanence, the idea that anything can be fixed.

    The user case is malleable

    The malleable nature of digital services and applications mean that the user case may not have even been dreamt up at the design stage. Thinking for a moment about Twitter, it has morphed into an extremely dynamic system of interactions:

    • The hashtag accompanies events acting as a public ‘back channel’ where previously the technologically savvy would have used IRC (internet relay chat)  and the rest of us probably were oblivious to it all
    • It has raised money for charities, and has been directly responsible for helping Dell to sell refurbished computers
    • It has been the rallying point for political action
    • It is history in the making as the Library of Congress has been archiving tweets

    Given those vast differences it is understandable why it’s hard to design for use cases and hard to get great digital experiences.

  • Carol Bartz + Microsoft Excel

    Carol Bartz

    I started thinking about this post when I was reading Bob Cringely’s excellent analysis of Carol Bartz tenure at Yahoo!. I am not going to add my full analysis here but instead pull on a strand that highlights problems that exist at a number of internet companies and certainly existed at Yahoo! when I was there.
    Yahoo! star
    Part of the thought process that got me on the trail of this post was that it reminded me of the introduction to Cringely’s Accidental Empires book written in the 1991:

    … PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.

    Spreadsheets and the business models inside them can be extremely powerful business tools and also weapons of mass destruction.

    Powerful Business Tools

    Firstly about the power of spreadsheets and their models in an internet business. Whilst at Yahoo!, my former colleague Salim used to be able to take the first few months traffic figures for the search business and provide a pretty accurate forecast of what the rest of the year looked like. That could be further extrapolated into reasonable revenue projections based on average conversion rates and cost-per-click values. Pretty handy for a business that relied on the fickle general public.

    Weapons of Mass Destruction

    Efficiency and innovation

    Accounting models are often used to make cuts in terms of manpower. What they fail to do however is ensure that the cuts are sufficiently surgical. This is less of an issue in a conventional manufacturing setting where there is likely to be a degree of redundancy in skills due to process design. Business management theory and analytical tools came out of this industrial age. Software and web services follow much more of an artisan model – great coders like mathematicians can find elegant solutions to problems through intuitive leaps forward.

    Although there is a large amount of outsourcing to cheaper countries, many successful breakout products or features are developed by small teams or even individuals for example:

    • Andy Hertzfield – the MacOS QuickDraw 2D graphics library that has been used for over 25 years and is only now being phased out in the latest versions of OSX
    • Cal Henderson and Stewart Butterfield – Flickr and Glitch
    • Joshua Schachter – Delicious
    • Linus Torvalds – Linux kernel

    However spreadsheet models often don’t recognise who these rock-stars are.

    What this means is that in a time of cuts the very people who could drive the innovation that would fuel future growth are let go or choose to leave because their area has been hacked to pieces. A classic example of this under Carol Bartz was the Flickr team: George Oates was let go and others like Paul Hammond, Seth Fitzsimmons, and Matthew Rothenberg departed.

    Carol Bartz quite rightly once said that ‘you can’t cut yourself to growth‘, but you can’t outsource it in the longer term, you also need the tinkerers and the thinkers in the organisation creating the innovation seed corn to drive that future growth. There doesn’t seem to be a spreadsheet model that takes adequate account of this.

    Niches versus the mainstream

    Back when I worked at Yahoo! there was an inordinate amount of attention paid to the number of unique users that properties got. This is important for a service like search that is universal in its appeal, but a general purpose metric like unique users falls down flat for many other properties that have a specific context around it.

    Let’s look at three examples:

    • In the West, Yahoo! Answers has a substantial user base of unique users, but a quick look at Google Adplanner shows that this user base is skewed to lower socioeconomic groups who are time-rich, but cash poor. This means that it could be hard to sell advertising inventory to many brands and the corresponding cost of inventory is likely to be cheaper
    • Yahoo! image service Flickr, has far less pictures than Facebook; but it is a highly engaged community of people passionate about photography and the creative classes. Facebook is like the digital equivalent of Prontaprint – who used to publish their film envelopes in local newspapers and develop the general public’s holiday snaps. This means you could charge more for the service, which is why Flickr has a freemium offering and come up with creative marketing packages for advertisers
    • Social bookmarking pioneer Delicious was a slow growing property beloved of geeks and the creative classes. Attractive both because  of its audience’s demographics but also the level of insight available from the data that these people provide voluntarily. A creative marketing vehicle similar in nature to Twitter’s promoted tweets has the potential to be a premium-priced product for advertisers

    However using spreadsheet models with metrics that lack distinction Yahoo! Answers looks like a great product whilst Delicious and Flickr look marginal at best. It is no coincidence that Flickr had an outflow of talent under Carol Bartz and Delicious was sold after a protracted period of uncertainty about the service’s future.

    Ultimately tools that can create a flawed understanding can be more damaging than no tools at all. Carol Bartz was brought into cut a business that she didn’t understand that well (it wasn’t anything like her previous roles) and had analytical tools at her disposal that weren’t sufficiently finessed for a modern information economy-based company. You add this to Bartz dogged personality and you can see at least part of the reason by she was not able to turn the company around. More related content can be found here.

    More links

    How not to run Yahoo! – I, Cringely
    Yahoo! Announces Leadership Reorganization – Yahoo!’s official statement

  • The futility of QRcodes on tube

    Traveling on the London Underground ‘tube’ recently I have noticed that more and more adverts have a QRcode. But the trips also highlighted the futility of using a QRcode, particularly on many of the deep lines.

    I am not too sure if tube QRcode is a recent phenomena or that I have been paying more attention as a number of the projects that I’ve been recently looking at are about the ‘web of no web‘: the interface between the web and the real world. I am a big fan of progressive approaches to marketing, however, the more I thought about the phenomena, the greater the waste of time that it seemed to be:

    • Londoners often joke about the tube being like cattle trucks; in reality European Union regulations wouldn’t allow livestock to travel on a train with the conditions of the tube on a hot summers day. A combination of overcrowding together with the lack of air conditioning  means that some of the lines can be as hot as a walk in the desert. The over-crowding also means that would be hard to take a picture of a QR code. So whilst the advert may have a large reach, the realistic reach of the QR code call to action is a lot smaller
    • So you happen to be lucky in terms of where the crush places you and try to snap the QR code with your phone. You probably won’t be successful, tube lines aren’t known for the smooth ride of say the Paris Métro, so you will be trying to hold your camera still whilst the train carriage rocks and sways in front of your smartphone. Your phone won’t be able to focus and take a clear image of the QR code. That’s one of the reason’s why there isn’t a tube advert shown here to illustrate this post, despite at least three attempts over the past week to snap a picture of an appropriate advert
    • Unlike other mass transit systems in the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong, huge high-traffic sections of the lines are underground or in such a deep cutting that they are inaccessible to mobile phone networks so QR code won’t take the audience through to an appropriate web page, but instead prompt a ‘network unavailable’ message

    The futility of QRcodes on the tube shows that the media buyers, marketers and or designers don’t pay much attention to the context of their advertisement art work, which could artificially skew campaign objectives and measurement adversely. In order to combat ‘the futility’, we need to go beyond TGI data and media packs. We can start this process by keeping our eyes open to the world around us.

  • London through a tourist’s eyes

    My friend Tomoko was in London the other week and it was interesting seeing what excited her about London, as Tomoko’s London is very different from my own.

    Firstly ‘knowing London’ means knowing central and Northwest London rather than central and East London. Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Soho aren’t attractive; St Johns Wood and Mayfair are – big learning curve for me here, as I have assiduously avoided anything west of Soho during my 13 or so years in London.

    Whilst we may think that London has everything to offer with contemporary clubs like Cargo and the East Village, it was Whisky Mist that Tomoko went to. With a clientele drawn from or aspiring to be in a P.G. Wodehouse adaption styled by Jack Wills; that you would only find me in under duress, but was what she wanted to do. Tradition and the class system trappings is a huge selling point for the UK – in terms of experience it beats Cool Britannia of modern UK life into a cocked hat. We had a drink and a catch-up late one evening in the Rockcliff Bar in The Trafalgar Hotel which I felt was a reasonable compromise.

    One thing that she was surprised at was how early in general London closes its bars and restaurants on a week-day; its not as swinging as the reputation would have others believe and certainly not up to the standard of Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai or Singapore.

    Fifteen or twenty years ago, the UK had a reputation as the worst cooks in Europe. Tomoko’s trip was as much about being a gastronomic journey. She learned how to prepare a proper English afternoon tea (the rest of the world thinks that we don’t go to Pret-a-Manger and Starbucks apparently) and we had a taster menu lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restaurant (more on this in another post).

    There was an interesting take on shopping:

    • Mitsukoshi for convenience – not having to fight your way through Mayfair, along Regent Street or up Oxford Street to Selfridges
    • Jermyn Street for male family presents; Covent Garden antiques market for souvenirs and bringing presnts to female family presents
    • Old and New Bond Street were of interest for window shopping

    Which makes me think that a lot of central London retail space is looking seriously over-priced and that high footfall – long the measure of a desirable retail space can be as lethal for a shop as a branch of the Sue Ryder charity opening up next door.

    All of this made think about what what my current home city means to people around the world. I have met people within my industry where having worked in London agency life carried a lot of kudos, the popularity of modern dance music elsewhere in the world was spearheaded by the middle-aged UK DJs who were involved in the late 80s acid house scene. Modern design with a twist of irreverence from James Dyson and Paul Smith to Jonathan Ives at Apple are the product of a forward-looking country. But that doesn’t seem to have translated into a brand identity for London that is less Daniel Craig and more David Niven.

    Asian countries like Korea, Japan and China have managed to forge identities that are modern, yet are complementary to the centuries of culture and history that they have. On the other had, Egypt (at least as a tourist destination) is all about the ancient Egyptian society that flourished and declined 2,000 years ago. I would prefer to see London being able to balance a modern identity with a nod to the history rather than be trapped by it. Perhaps the best place to start would be through the creative destruction of the Central London built environment.

  • Pepsi cola + more news

    Pepsi cola

    PepsiCo Gives Pepsi-Cola a Renewed Marketing Push – WSJ.com – You just can’t go dark on brands and expect them to hold their value (paywall). At a corporate level PepsiCo had tried to focus more on functional / healthy foods and so had under invested in Pepsi cola as a brand. Market share depends on market penetration and relative share of voice so keeping a steady investment in Pepsi cola would have made more sense, even if the ‘social good’ points aren’t earned. By comparison, Pepsi cola main competitor

    Ideas

    Phys Ed: The Science of Toning Shoes – NYTimes.com – is it about whether they work, or encourage people to exercise?

    Innovation

    Did Microsoft steal the Kinect? – Hack a Day – or is it like the light bulb which had about 8 inventors at the same time

    Nice try, Amazon: ‘One-click’ payment too obvious to patent • The Register

    TECHNOLOGY REPORT » Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Marvin Minsky on the current state of AI Research – a high tech research version of the ‘if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’

    Japan

    Japan’s attention to detail is all in the delivery | The Japan Times Online – since security is no longer guaranteed, fun is a key decider in roles

    London

    Afternoon Tea – Japanese tourists love it apparently

    Luxury

    Prada Woos Young Chinese With Sister-Brand Miu Miu – WSJ

    Only In China: Paper Gucci Insert Causes Vogue China Buying Frenzy « Jing Daily – shows the power of the brand, however does this dilute the brand for purchasers?

    Watches Are Rediscovered by the Cellphone Generation – NYTimes.com – an interesting article. Watches aren’t only about what information they convey to the wearer, but also what they say to other people. I remember reading an article about stainless steel Seiko analogue watches being popular with Japanese job hunters who wanted to convey that they were punctual

    Security

    Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data | ZDNet – Can Microsoft guarantee that EU-stored data, held in EU based datacenters, will not leave the European Economic Area under any circumstances — even under a request by the Patriot Act? – This screws US technology sales in a number of areas

    Software

    Why Microsoft’s ‘single ecosystem’ for PCs and tablets carries huge risks | guardian.co.uk – unified user experience just isn’t going to cut it across the different user contexts

    Judge finds HTC guilty of infringing two Apple patents; could mean trouble for Android

    Amazon’s Appstore problems run deep: a developer speaks out | ExtremeTech – interesting that Amazon has had problems

    Telecoms

    I, Cringely » The enemy of my enemy – Bob Cringely on Google’s next likely move after losing the Nortel patent portfolio to an alliance of its enemies – RIM and Ericsson together put up $1.1 billion with Ericsson getting a fully paid-up license to the portfolio while RIM, as a Canadian company like Nortel, gets a paid-up license plus possibly some carry forward operating losses from Nortel, which has plenty of such losses to spare. For RIM the deal might actually have a net zero cost after tax savings, which the Canadian business press hasn’t yet figured out. Microsoft and Sony put up another $1 billion. There is a reportedly a side deal for about $400 million with EMC that has the storage company walking with sole ownership of an unspecified subset of the Nortel patents. Finally Apple put up $2 billion for outright ownership of Nortel’s Long Term Evolution (4G) patents as well as another package of patents supposedly intended to hobble Android.