Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • The billion strong services

    There was two announcements of services that had passed the billion strong user mark.  There was a comparison between Gmail’s slow and steady approach versus Whatsapp’s swift rise.
    messaging services

    Gmail was born as a desktop service first. It started just as web 2.0 was starting to take off. The service was invitation only for almost three years, before becoming generally available.  At the time its 1GB of storage for free was revolutionary. A year later they increased the storage to 2GB. By comparison I was paying £60 a year for an IMAP mail account that was separate to my ISP. Hotmail would give you just 4MB of storage in your email.

    Gmail set the standard for our expectations of email. Now email accounts will accept 25MB attachments – a standard set by Gmail. My corporate email account has a 1GB capacity copying Gmail at launch.

    Yahoo! had to compete and responded with ‘unlimited storage’ after Gmail became generally available. By this time Gmail storage had grown to 2.8GB and Live.com gave 2GB. In the space of under three years Gmail had grown to 51 million users.

    This was still an era when smartphones weren’t ubiquitous in the same way that they are now. I was fortunate to have mobile email access on my Nokia and Palm smartphones around this time. BlackBerry devices were a business tool, as was Windows Mobile. Data was more expensive and slower than it is now. Although Yahoo! Messenger was available on my phone it was slow. Skype worked best as an indicator of presence on mobile devices.

    Smartphone ubiquity through Android and iOS was an enabler for email adoption. But Gmail didn’t receive the same boost from it that Whatsapp did.

    If you didn’t have a Gmail account you could still send and receive emails to Gmail account holders. Early adopters of smartphones are likely to have already had an email account. So they would increase user engagement through accessiblity. But they would not drive a similar growth in new accounts.

    Whatsapp benefited from being a closed service – you can’t message a WeChat account. Also it rode smartphones as an accelerator, it didn’t have a legacy desktop user base.

    Another factor is that its competitors managed to monetise their services earlier. This was at the expense of international adoption. An extreme example of this is Korea’s KakaoTalk.

    KakaoTalk has built an absolute ubiquity in South Korea. It has continued to growth beyond 90 per cent of Korean mobile users. Profitability has increased, new services launched; whilst global user numbers declined.

    WhatsApp has grown fastest towards its billion strong user base in markets that are hard to monetise. It is big in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. It is only starting to build in features for brands.

    Not all users are equal, many present little business opportunity for internet companies. I remember when Yahoo! was rolling out the ‘unlimited’ storage email account; it was actively discussed only providing the feature in developed market accounts rather than all users. The billion strong user base is an interesting measure, but requires further interrogation. More WhatsApp related content here.

    More information
    Yahoo Mail Announces Unlimited Storage
    A Comparison of Live Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail | Techcrunch
    Email and webmail statistics | Email Marketing Reports
    Gmail Now With 1 Billion Monthly Active Users, Reports Google Chief Sundar Pichai – Tech Times
    WhatsApp has a billion users, and it got there way quicker than Gmail did
    You May Not Use WhatsApp, But the Rest of the World Sure Does | Wired
    Tencent Service Offerings (Q3, 2015) – PDF
    duamkakao 1st Quarter 2015 results – PDF
    duamkakao 2nd Quarter 2015 results – PDF
    Yahoo to partner with Yelp on local searches – Digit
    A Brief History of Email – Google Answers
    Gmail Now Has 900M Active Users, 75% On Mobile | Techcrunch

  • Articles about race + more things

    The Guardian website will no longer allow comments under articles about race, immigration and Islam | JOE.ie – interesting that The Guardian stopped at just articles about race, immigration and Islam. Also controversial given its stance on censorship

    Chips on their shoulders | The Economist – THE Chinese government has been trying, on and off, since the 1970s to build an indigenous semiconductor industry. But its ambitions have never been as high, nor its budgets so big, as they are now. More on semiconductors here and on China here.

    How Facebook tracks and profits from voters in a $10bn US election | US news | The Guardian – there goes the West Wing approach to campaigns

    Attackers Use Word Docs to Deliver BlackEnergy Malware | SecurityWeek.Com – The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor behind the recent attacks targeting Ukraine has started delivering BlackEnergy malware using specially crafted Word documents with embedded macros.

    Twitter Execs Are Annoyed At Facebook For Referring To Them As “Social Media” – BuzzFeed News – At any moment Facebook trending posts always include 2 stories about things happening “on social media” … — Whitewashing Twitter out of news agenda

    Completely Ignoring the DMCA an Option for Torrent Sites? – Rutracker gets blocked in Russia so strips anti piracy bodies of special ‘takedown’ accounts

    TransferWise’s revenues grew by 5x in 2015 — but so did losses – For many companies unicorn status seem to share dot bomb characteristics

    Does Better Internet Access Wind Up Disenfranchising Lower Income Groups? – As counterintuitive as it seems, reducing the digital divide isn’t necessarily beneficial: Our results show that participation in local elections has dramatically declined in recent years, in part as the internet has displaced other media with greater local news content

    Vampire Weekend Played This Classic Song in Honor of Bernie Sanders in Iowa – use of music industry supporters to gather votes is interesting, particularly in the mid-west

  • Twitter troubles

    You can read elsewhere about Twitter troubles, I have linked to some of the best analyses I found out there at the bottom of this article.
    Twitter
    If you don’t have time to go through the the analyses around Twitter troubles, here’s the ‘CliffsNotes’ version:

    • Management turnover. Three different heads of engineering in 18 months, five different product leads in the past two years, three CFOs in 18 months and 2 COOs (mainly because the role was left vacant for over 12 months)
    • Growth in user numbers has been stagnant in the U.S.. The three published quarters of 2015 showed U.S. active users at 66 million. The last two quarters of 2014 were steady at 64 million
    • Growth in user numbers globally has been a modest 11 percent. Growth outside the U.S. was just 13% year on year in quarter three of 2015

    James Whatley and Marshall Manson called the user number plateau ‘Twitter Zero’.

    There have been product-related Twitter troubles:

    • The ‘Promoted Moments’ advertising option is confusing to look at
    • Will it, won’t move beyond 140 characters
    • Algorithmic filtering of the timeline
    • Utility of the news feed is becoming diminished for the digerati
    • Likely reduction in user engagement
    • Likely uptake in bot content publication
    • Inability to deal with community issues like #Gamergate
    • Twitter’s auto-playing videos are barely more than a rounding error in the battle between YouTube and Facebook for video supremacy

    What less people are talking about is what Twitter troubles means beyond Twitter.

    Advertising purchases are a near-zero sum game. Facebook and other high growth native advertising platforms gain from Twitter troubles. But for marketers this is not all good news. Facebook is poor at giving marketers actionable insights and intelligence. There is no Facebook firehouse of data. Facebook only provides aggregated data.

    The OTT (Over The Top) messaging platforms (WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Kik) are data black holes. Commercial dashboards on some accounts allow you to see how your account is doing. There is no insight of what is happening across accounts. There is no measure of influence beyond follower numbers and click-throughs.

    Twitter troubles with declining relevance, has a direct effect on social media monitoring and analytics platforms.

    Social media analysis of Twitter data is widespread. From consumer insights / passive market research to brand measurement and financial trading models.

    I had seen data which showed a direct correlation between brand related market research conducted by respected market research firms and social media analysis using Twitter data. The implication of this was that Twitter data could provide a more cost effective alternative.

    All of these research benefits are moot if Twitter is in decline or becoming irrelevant.

    Twitter data has its use beyond market research. It is the source of breaking news for the western media. Twitter’s firehouse also goes into making smarter phones. Apple’s Siri sources Twitter content to answer news-related requests.
    Siri using Twitter as news
    A poor performing Twitter has implications across the tech sector beyond online advertising. There are no obvious substitute solutions for its data waiting in the wings.

    Perhaps Twitter’s earning’s call on February 10 will give a hint of improvements at the company. But I wouldn’t bet on it. More related content here.

    More information

    Twitter Inc. quarterly results
    How Facebook Squashed Twitter – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    Can Twitter turn stagnation into progress, or has it hit the wall? | Technology | The Guardian
    Twitter’s Fiscal 2015: Up, Flat, And Down | TechCrunch
    Twitter is teetering because it has turned into one big pyramid scheme | Andrew Smith
    Twitter Might Ditch The 140-Character Limit: What This Means For Marketers | SocialTimes
    Daily Report: The Tough Realities of a Twitter Turnaround – NYTimes.com
    Next Twitter boss faces complex challenges, says departing Dick Costolo | The Guardian
    Twitter data show that a few powerful users can control the conversation – Quartz
    Twitter’s Jakarta office is now open. Here are 6 reasons why Costolo is focusing on Indonesia | Techinasia
    Inside Twitter’s plan to fix itself
    How efficient is Twitter’s Business Model?
    Black Widow | Dustin Curtis – interesting analysis of Twitter and a warning about APIs

  • Safari suggestions + more things

    Safari Suggestions bug causes browser crashes in iOS and OS X | Ars Technica – I noticed this first thing in the morning with Safari Suggestions my Mac, goes to show how dependent we are on network based services. Safari Suggestions are a great concept, let’s hope that Apple gets it right. More Apple related posts here.

    Apple is preparing for a future where individual iPhone sales don’t matter | Quartz – but what about how the investors see it? I think this is about growing average revenue per user (ARPU), but make no mistake individual sales of devices will still be very important. Services revenue is directly tied to device sales.

    Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin takes aim at the global credit card system, promising to become No 1 | South China Morning Post – Dalian Wanda think their internet finance business will upset global credit card payment system. …Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest commercial property company, told the Asia Financial Forum in Hong Kong on Monday that he hopes to issue 500 million Feifan cards, a type of credit and payment card for Wanda merchants and customers, in the coming five years (paywall)

    Meizu set to layoff 4000 staff | Gizchina – Despite seeing a surge in sales by as much as 350% last year, Meizu are planning to slash its work force by 5%.

    No other tech company spends more on lobbying than Google, new stats show – GeekWire – and it doesn’t seem to be doing that much good. Apple needs to up its spend, as does Uber

    Spotify Ready to Introduce Video Product – WSJ – tough going up against Netflix, iTunes, Amazon etc (paywall)

    Censorship in the social media age – Columbia Journalism Review – news published on third party platforms like social has platform level editorial control on top of the journalistic process. What are the ethics?

    LaMem Demo – how interesting is a visual?

  • Yahoo! – how did we get here?

    Understanding who Yahoo! is today means understanding changes in the technology and media sectors. These changes occurred over the past 20 years.
    Jerry, Liam & David celebrate the new Yahoo! Mail

    The Fear

    Yahoo! started off as a hack. The directory grew from a list of sites catalogued by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They did this as students in Stanford. This was back in the early 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant technology company. It is hard to understand the power that Microsoft had at the time. Apple was on a fast track to oblivion. This power was later clipped in the Judge Jackson trial of 2000.

    The Media Company

    At the time, investors and founders were reluctant to go into business against Microsoft. Even the idea that Microsoft may enter a sector was enough for others to stay clear.

    The technology sector was full of casualties: Digital Research, Borland, Go and Stac Technologies. Microsoft’s approach to competition of embrace, extend and extinguish was already well known.

    Yang and Filo would have had this in mind when they positioned Yahoo! as a media company that happened to be online. Yahoo!’s early business deals such as Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and display advertising are symptomatic of this media thinking.

    The advertising display model that Yahoo! operated was reminiscent of print magazine and newspaper businesses. It even went ahead and hired a traditional media sector CEO in 2001. Terry Semel was a former chairman of Warner Brothers. He was brought in following a 30% collapse in online advertising sales. Semel’s efforts to build a media business at Yahoo! didn’t succeed.

    The Technology Company

    Yahoo! has a history of contributing to key open source technologies including:

    • Debian Project
    • PHP
    • Hadoop
    • Oozie

    The work done on Hadoop lead to a spinout technology company called Hortonworks. Hortonworks customers include eBay, Spotify and Expedia. Not bad for ‘media company’.

    Panama, was to drive quality and profit in advertising by increasing click through rates. Yet it took too long to develop, many other projects ended up being canceled.

    Despite of the technical expertise at Yahoo!. The company bought in many key technologies rather than building themselves. Yahoo! Mail came from acquiring the 411.com directory service which owned Rocketmail in 1997. The modern mail web application has its roots in Oddpost, acquired in 2004.

    Failure To Make Big Bets

    Yahoo! bought video and audio streaming company broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion. This was the most expensive thing Yahoo! every bought. By comparison Tumblr cost $1.1 billion dollars in 2013. Yahoo! ended up with little to show for it’s $5.7 billion. This meant that Yahoo! developed a culture which made it hard to make big bet the farm kind of changes.  Terry Semel rejected the opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. It also failed to buy DoubleClick. Google bought it instead, and used DoubleClick to speed up growth beyond search advertising.

    A secondary effect of not being able to make big bets was a constantly changing set of priorities. Insiders have gone on record talking about the missed changes with aborted projects. This also made it harder to develop and pursue a vision.

    The Google comparison

    Google started some five years later. Google came into a world where Microsoft looked weaker. The US government filed charges against the company and Linux started to gain momentum. Google’s original business model was to be a search engine provider for web portals. There were other competitors in this space like Inktomi. It wasn’t until 1999 that the company started selling its own advertising. Google waited six years to go public. The size and profitability of its business masked from competitors and customers until 2004.

    Google hasn’t been afraid to make big bets or have a big vision:

    • Search
    • Enterprise search
    • Personal productivity
    • Enterprise productivity
    • Mobile operating system

    It has thought carefully about focus and vision – which is part of the reason why the Alphabet conglomerate was formed.

    More information

    New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today | Search Engine Land
    A Cyber-Arsenal for Road Warriors | BusinessWeek
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation
    The Yahoo! Post-Bartz post and the perils of Microsoft Excel
    Inflection Point | renaissance chambara