Author: will

Your customers are not lucky to have you

Posted on by will

You’re lucky to have them.

Without your customers you have no sales, no revenue and no business.

When the line at the post office stretches out of the door and into the street, I think: “How can I avoid doing my business here next time?”

When my cable goes down and it takes 30 minutes to contact tech support, I think: “What other cable providers are there?”

When an app I paid for (with my money, or with my time, and it’s irrelevant which) is slow or hard to use, when it crashes, when it doesn’t work, I think: “Is there another app that will do what I need to do?”

Your customers always have another option. Particularly for products that create needs or activate latent needs (as do many of the apps and services that exist in the modern consumer space), not fulfilling the need is a perfectly reasonable option for most people.

Beware the hubris of thinking that your customers are lucky to have you.

Kevin Spacey’s groundbreaking wake-up-call on the television industry

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Just last week I posted about how the TV and film industries can battle piracy by embracing the internet as an on-demand content delivery mechanism. I compared it to the Spotify model and suggested that if you just make television available to people anytime and anywhere they want it, on any device at a fair price, then people will pay for it. Make it easier to consume it legally than illegally, and people will “do the right thing”.

Kevin Spacey, star and co-producer of the Netflix hit House of Cards delivered the keynote address to the Edinburgh International Television Festival recently and warned that a failure to do just that will sooner or later be the downfall of the television industry as we know it.

With House of Cards and Netflix, he argues:

We have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson the music industry hasn’t learned.
Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price – and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it.
Well… some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.

See the highlights of his address here:

The solution to online media piracy

Posted on by will

Pirate Bay logo

The solution to online media piracy doesn’t really have to be so complicated. It’s actually quite simple: make it easier for a consumer to watch, hear or read legal material than it is to find high-quality pirated copies.

Simple.

Some say that the music industry is failing to keep pace with emerging technology and consumer trends. While it’s certainly true that music was late to the digital party, so to speak, the industry has made huge progress in the past years.

The music industry, along with the book publishing industry, has solved the critical requirement to meaningfully combat piracy: it is easier to download or stream music legally than it is to pirate it. Starting with iTunes, and continuing with Amazon, Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora, Nokia Music and countless others – there are so many options to legally hear music – many totally for free, or nearly – that there’s just no point downloading anything illegally.

The Newspaper industry (with a small handful of notable exceptions) is still leagues behind in this regard, as is the film industry. Outside the US the options for streaming films online are pitiful, and even in the US the latest cinema blockbusters are not available to stream until the theatre run is over. Why wouldn’t you download it from BitTorrent? Yes, changing this requires upheaving nearly a hundred years of Hollywood legacy – but what good is legacy when your consumers have already gone elsewhere? (Just ask Blackberry…)

For television, it’s even harder to legally watch the shows you want. Again, even in the US the industry is fragmented over a multitude of different streaming providers, cable providers and tv stations. Outside of the US you can mostly forget it completely.

People are creatures of habit and, most of all, creatures of comfort. If there’s an easier way to do something, it’s immediately attractive. The statistics on online media piracy prove that by playing the moral card alone (you wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a movie…) the media companies can only prevent a tiny percentage of the piracy. People clearly don’t relate to the story of the poor, undervalued Hollywood celebrities being robbed of their daily bread by heartless and immoral video pirates.

If the media industry wants to solve the issue of piracy and meet consumers’ evolving expectations, we still need to see big changes in the way content is produced, but certainly how it is distributed.

My tip: make it so easy to pay, that piracy just isn’t worth your time.

An idea is not a product

Posted on by will

In idea is not a business; and it’s not a product. An idea is just an idea.

What makes an idea ready to become a product?

Facts.

An idea made up of only opinions is just that – opinions.

Don’t get me wrong: opinions are often sensational places to start a product from. Some of the most ground-breaking and innovative products started with an epiphany, a flash of inspiration or a daydream. The trick to being successful as a creator of products is to figure out which ideas are productisable – and which aren’t – before you build and launch a product and watch it fail.

Identify the intrinsic assumptions that exist within your idea, and then test them.

Avoid making product decisions on ideas or opinions alone. Testing the assumptions behind the great ideas is the only way to know you’re investing your time and money into the right product.

The answer is not inside the building

Posted on by will

Too many of us spend far too much time in the building.

We sit at our computers and read blogs and write emails; we discuss in conference rooms and over coffee, sometimes even at the cafe down the street. But how much time do we actually spend outside the building?

Your customers are not in the building. You won’t find them lurking by the water cooler and you probably won’t see them at Starbucks.

I don’t know exactly how much of their time a product manager should spend outside the building – but my gut tells me it’s something like 20 or 30%. How else can you get close to the needs and wants of your customers, first-hand and in-the-flesh?

If you’re looking for insights into your market, you’re really not likely to find them by reading blogs or watching Twitter. Sure, some gems come along over the social channels, but the real insights are waiting for you out there – with people.

Do yourself (and your product) a favour and get out of the building this week. Go and talk to a customer or meet an industry partner. Run a panel, inviting some of your most vocal advocates (or detractors!). Attend a think tank or a networking event relevant to your industry.

Because the answer to your problem is probably not inside the building.

Why I’m addicted to Rando, a different kind of photo sharing app

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The web is awash with photo sharing services designed to broadcast your photos to as many people as possible. Even before the ubiquitous Instagram services like Flickr and Facebook were flooding you with photos from your friends of their holidays, their achievements, their pets, or whatever… photos that were liked, re-shared, posted, re-posted, pinned, re-pinned, tumbled, re-tumbled, tweeted, re-tweeted…

Among all the noise, the beautiful simplicity of sharing a moment with another human being – the supposed core mission of Instagram – was lost underneath the “social” deluge.

Enter Rando: a very different way to share a moment with someone.

Rando works like this: You take a photo and send it to the service. That photo will be sent (sort-of) immediately to another random Rando user, somewhere in the world. In return, you receive a so-called ‘Rando’ back from another user somewhere in the world. You have to send one to get one. Randos are always sent to exactly one person only, and they are always anonymous. You will never know who sent you the Rando, or who received yours. All you know is from what city it came.

You cannot select a photo from your gallery to send – you must take a photo with the camera right then and there. Most interestingly, all you can do with the randos you receive is look at them. You can’t share them, like them, reply to them or ‘re-rando’ them. They’re yours to keep – but only to look at.

When I heard about it, I thought two things:

  1. This app will take about 20 minutes to become all about porn
  2. It’s a bit pointless, isn’t it?

After sending a few Randos however I found I was becoming strangely addicted. I realised it’s really beautiful in a way.

When you receive a rando, you know that it was a photo that was taken moments ago (because you cannot choose from your gallery). This gives the moment that is captured a sense of immediacy – what you’re looking at just happened. And because you’re sharing with exactly one person, and that person is waiting for your rando, it makes the exchange more like a gift, thoughtfully prepared and delivered with a touch of altruistic love.

Compare this interaction with sharing your moment on Instagram or Facebook (ie blasting your whole network of friends and colleagues or indeed the whole internet with your ‘special moment’/interruption). Instead you’re sharing it with one special person who is literally waiting for your photo – your moment – to come in.

I found myself wanting to share special things with random people on Rando. This morning I happened by a strange Superman statue with its head blasted off. Cool, I thought. But instead of spamming my network with it, I felt immediately compelled to share this special find with someone on Rando. And the best part is that when I do, I get a rando back.

I’ve received randos from Russia, South Korea, Brazil, Venezuela, England, Scotland, Finland, Holland and even a random tiny island somewhere in the pacific. Looking at my growing rando collection I see incredible diversity of culture, architecture and people. It makes you realise that things and sights that for you are totally mundane and ordinary are for people in other parts of the world new and fascinating.

Rando is a beautiful idea that finally makes sharing pictures ‘social’ in the sense that you actually create a meaningful connection with another human being. It fights against the trend of making every object likable, sharable and distributable to as many people as possible, and instead lets you gift a moment to another human in a way that adds human meaning.

It’s available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, and comes from the UK based design studio ustwo.

Is it Google’s plan to index the world’s information, or to curate it?

Posted on by will

I just heard (via @montymunford) that Google will start ranking mobile websites lower in search results when they use a “download our app” popup on the page. Read about it here.

One of Google’s justifications is that the experience of seeing a pop-up banner may be ‘disruptive’ to the user experience.

Is it Google’s job to play User Experience police to the whole internet?

It’s one thing to deprioritise sites with poor or duplicate content. But to de-rank sites based on user interaction decisions of the developers? Isn’t that taking it a bit too far?

Some argue that it’s a good thing… that it helps us find better content. Maybe that’s true… but where would it end? What if Google started de-ranking sites because the navigation was unclear? Or because there was no ‘about’ page?

It’s a slippery slope.

Google already controls access to a huge proportion of the internet. They are the gatekeepers… the ones who decide what we get to see, and what not. To me, consolidating all of this power in one gate puts the freedom and openness of the internet at risk.

What Stalin learned about incentives (and how most companies are still doing it wrong)

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In the 1930’s, in the very early days of the Soviet Union under Stalin, the communist leaders knew they had a problem.

The process of Stalinist Industrialisation forced the majority of the Russian population, most of whom had lived in the countryside, into newly constructed settlements based around factories and industry. People were dispossessed of their land and belongings (which then became property of the state) and were put to work in new industry for the glory of the Soviet state and economy.

Although there were many efficiency gains created by the reallocation of resources to industry and the introduction of new tools and processes to factories, Stalin found that economic growth beyond that created by manual allocation of labour was essentially non-existent.

Why?

Stalin had uncovered the critical flaw of the communist system: incentives. His entire population had been dispossessed of their lands and property and put to work for a stipend salary and subsistence diet, with the entire profit going to the state. Where was the motivation to work hard?

Stalin had an incentive problem.

As early as 1931 Stalin realised that the dream of a society of citizens intrinsically motivated to work hard purely for the glory of the Socialist Party would never be a reality, and he gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work hard without incentives. So Stalin introduced two kinds of incentives:

1. Fear – of being imprisoned, tortured, sent to a gulag in Siberia or shot; and
2. Monetary incentives.

FEAR
Keeping people working was enforced by the absenteeism law, which defined absenteeism as any twenty minutes of unauthorised absence or idling on the job. Even giving the perception of idling was sufficient. But even Stalin appreciated that fear will only get someone to their job such that they do the bare minimum. You can’t scare someone into being extra productive, much less innovative.

And yet, it turns out fear didn’t work so well after all. 36 million people – about one third of the adult population of the Soviet Union – were found guilty of absenteeism at least once between 1940 and 1955. Of these, 15 million were sent to prison and 250,000 were shot.

It seems that fear will only take you so far.

MONETARY INCENTIVES
Stalin also experimented with various monetary incentives. For example, he introduced monthly bonus payments to individuals and companies who exceeded their production output target, and penalties for coming in under. (Sound familiar?) It seemed like the perfect way to motivate workers to produce more.

So what happened? Stalin saw that while in some cases output targets were exceeded, it was relatively seldom, and simultaneously levels of innovation dropped. Why?

One problem was that the monthly targets were always based on the previous month’s achievement – so although people may have been incentivised to exceed their target, they certainly weren’t interested in exceeding it too much, or their next month would only be tougher.

Innovation requires time, effort and resources… resources that would necessarily have to be taken away from producing output for the monthly target. As a result, little extra effort was invested in innovative creative idea creation. Furthermore the monthly targets kept people focussed very much on the present, where innovation necessarily requires investing today in things that will not pay off until tomorrow or next year.

The point is – we’ve known for years that the stick (fear) doesn’t do a great job at incentivising people. The conventional wisdom is to use the carrot. The problem, as this example shows, is: the carrot is broken too, and money is a poor motivator – a fact which countless studies have also shown. (Read the book ‘Drive’ by Daniel Pink).

So why do we keep getting it wrong?

Companies who motivate through fear (fear of a bad performance evaluation, fear of not getting that promotion, fear of losing my job), and poorly constructed monetary incentives, will at best achieve only a short-term production increase. These motivators are not, as Stalin has shown us, sustainable for a long period.

It’s time for a new incentive structure. How about: everyone believes in what you are trying to achieve, and is motivated intrinsically by the challenge, the vision, and the passion to win? (Which is, incidentally, exactly the first thing Lenin, Stalin, Kim Jong Il and countless others took away from their people).

Device fatigue and the next connected device form factor

Posted on by will
A pile of devices
Photo: Wikimedia

I suffer from device fatigue.

Not just the kind where I cannot deal with the sheer number of connected devices, gadgets and gizmos being released every day – but the kind where I am overwhelmed with the number of devices that I actually already own.

I have a Macbook Air, a Sony Vaio running Windows 8, a Surface Pro tablet, a Nokia Lumia 920, a first-generation iPad and a Kindle, and in my living room I also have an XBOX 360.

And that’s not counting devices that I have temporarily for testing or benchmarking… the iPads, the Galaxies, the Kindle Fires…

Now, I like devices, and I work for a device company and my job is building device software, so i’m trying to build them into my life… but I just cannot deal with having so many different devices. The basket under the bookshelf where I put old devices is overflowing with dead, partially working or even fully functional devices that I just can’t find a good reason to carry anymore.

They all have their specific use cases and particular strong points: the MacBook’s power and good quality hard keyboard; the tablet’s big screen but relative portability; the smartphone’s ultra-portability and LTE connection… But the real problem is that there is maybe 80% crossover in the use cases and usage contexts of the different form factors, and this is frustrating and tiring.

I want one device that does everything – but I don’t want to trade the specific benefits of particular form factors, like the portability of my Lumia 920 and its amazing camera, or the stylus/drawing input of the tablet, or the physical keyboard and relative horsepower of my Macbook.

One of the greatest challenge now facing connected device manufacturers I think is the next form factor. The form factor that truly converges the fragmented connected device space.

While the last 5 years or so since tablets started their meteoric blast into consumers’ living rooms the focus has been on device divergence – building devices of every conceivable form factor, with increasing household incomes (in first-world markets) driving a huge increase multi-device ownership.

The next 5 years will be about device convergence. The search for the next form factor that unites your devices into a single, adaptable and flexible touchpoint.

Quick low-light comparison: Nokia Lumia 920 vs the iPad mini

Posted on by will

While playing around with an iPad mini I tried out the camera, and was not too impressed with the result.

These photos below were taken at the same time of day in a relatively dark room with no flash and no additional lighting. There was no post processing of the photos at all – this is exactly how they came out of the respective devices.