strategy

Can we all go home then?

Jay Small — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:25:47 +0000

CNET reports the folks at AT&T (I was about to say "the eggheads" or "the boffins," but the spokesman quoted is from legislative affairs) claim the Internet will hit its capacity by 2010 if big bucks aren't invested in infrastructure.

Makes me think of that home broadband commercial from a few years back, where the guy browses all the way to the "end of the Internet." Hmm ... was that an AT&T commercial? A self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps?

All I can say is, if we get to that point where we really have filled up all the pipes, you all can panic if you choose. I'd prefer to just pull a Forrest Gump, stop and say: "I'm pretty tired ... I think I'll go home now."

Open-source leadership at its best

Jay Small — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:06:06 +0000

At their worst, I'll admit, open-source software communities can breed flame wars, ugly breakups and needlessly forked development roadmaps. But at their best, you have to admit, open-source crowds share ideas, solve practical problems and tip hats at each others' successes.

Witness the Drupal community's post congratulating the developers of Joomla -- arguably Drupal's biggest competitor for mindshare -- on their new release.

Funny thing. We didn't see that from Microsoft when Mac OS X Leopard came out, or from Apple when Windows Vista came out, or from Intuit when the new TaxCut came out, or ...

Link bucket: Anyone got a paper quip?

Jay Small — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:38:54 +0000

Links in search of someone in a quippier mood than me, all the better to say quippy things at a rapid quip (enough already, Small!):

Slashdot points to research (news release) showing that the so-called Google Generation is a myth. Key claims: "Although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. ... Research-behavior traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age groups."
Search Engine Watch riffs on that same research from a different angle: "Let's abandon the notion that people only use Google or other engines, click on results, and then finish their research quickly. When there's serious exploration and study under way, people use many sources and touch points. They care if their sources are worthwhile and credible, and also depend on others to let them know."
Dave Barry's "stealth bloggerette" Judi notes a job posting with, um, hints of oppression. Yeah, that sounds like a great career move!

Social nets do battle over profile data sharing

Jay Small — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:44:57 +0000

I should have seen this coming a few weeks back when I wrote about the sudden proliferation of social network invitations.

The people at LinkedIn are not happy that Plaxo's new social networking application reaches in and grabs LinkedIn connections and profile data.

Well, guys, many of the rest of us are not happy that we now must waste online time just to contain the proliferation of our own profiles and friend links.

New social networks know a little too much

Jay Small — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:30:33 +0000

Am I the only one creeped out by how easy it is to invite acquaintances en masse to new social networks such as Spock and Plaxo Pulse?

Both these nets use the program interfaces of existing services such as Facebook and LinkedIn to let a new user log into those sites and pull their entire "friend" rosters into new accounts.

If I had done that, and automatically invited everyone on my rosters, we're talking about hundreds of e-mail invitations from Plaxo or Spock going out to people I know for all kinds of reasons -- some business, some personal.

Though the intent appears to be "meta" social net management, it feels like spam.

These new-generation social nets use the older nets' (weird to describe Facebook this way) back-end interfaces to copy over news items about people on a user's roster even if that user did not invite those acquaintances to join the new nets.

So I can track a Facebook friend's activity on Plaxo even if I never "connected" with that friend on Plaxo.

Both Plaxo Pulse and Spock advise new account holders to be very selective about invitations and connections. But that makes little difference if people from your other social net rosters, and even your e-mail address books, are treated as connections in the news rolls of these sites.

I maintain my LinkedIn profile and connection roster actively, because they have been valuable to me in my work. I have a Facebook profile but find all the zombies and slayers mostly just distracting.

When a new crop of social nets comes in, I wonder: Does anyone really need this many places to go scan the mundane details of lives of less-than-best-friends-forever? Do we really want our own mundane life details multiplied under the table to sites beyond the ones where we actually signed up?

I turned 45 today. Maybe I should be checked out for degenerative Luddite syndrome, because I clearly miss the point of these new services.

Facebook ... faceless?

Jay Small — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:51:08 +0000

As I suddenly start receiving many invitations to connect on Yet Another Social Network -- in the most recent case, Plaxo Pulse -- I note the ever-astute Scott Karp contemplates the current crisis suffered by the darling of these nets, Facebook.

Karp, in considering the uproar caused by Facebook's advertising beacon, concludes technology and design of same offer less substantial and less enduring competitive advantage than ever:

One look at Plaxo Pulse validates Karp's point. It obviously apes some of the best networking features of both Facebook and LinkedIn. And it has quick processes for importing one's connections from either of those services.

So Pulse says me-too and switching-is-easy. But it doesn't give me a compelling, unique reason to switch. I'm still trying to find a compelling, unique reason to keep up with both Facebook and LinkedIn. The latter has helped me in my career; the former, not so much.

Karp nails it:

The next great internet company will not be one that makes a breakthrough with technology -- it will be one that makes a breakthrough with people.

If my chosen industry -- newspapers -- didn't already have such an undistinguished reputation (that may be too kind) with so many people, I'd say that was good news for us. We're certainly not going to win on technology.

About the changes at Small Initiatives

Jay Small — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:06:36 +0000

The new design of this Web site means a lot more than just a visual dust-off. Small Initiatives, the company, no longer represents just me, my blog and my occasional Internet design consulting.

My wife, Ka, has reached a point in her executive career where she has amazing advice to offer her industry -- banks and credit unions -- as a business strategy consultant.
So SI becomes a consulting firm with two primary practices. Hers covers growth strategies, marketing and operations for financial institutions. Mine covers Internet user experience, including my longstanding design efforts, but adding site architecture and development projects atop the Drupal open-source content framework.

Ka's brand-new blog joins mine, which has posts dating to 2002. Her first post dispels some popular talking points in banking, refactoring a focus on "differentiation" to a focus on "relevance" -- both of and to customers. I think it's a useful read even for my regular non-banker crowd.

So that's why things look different here, and why the attention now splits between Ka's banking practice and my user experience efforts. If you really want to know the gory details, I've tried to provide them in this handy Q&A format:

Are you both consulting full-time? No. I still have my "day job" as general manager of the Newspapers Interactive Group at the E.W. Scripps Co. Meanwhile, Ka's still a banking professional, taking on consulting projects as she evaluates choices for her next great executive opportunity.
What does banking have to do with Internet user experience? Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, everything -- such as the time I redesigned a credit union Web site. Our practices may overlap more than you'd imagine in the areas of interactive business strategy and overall customer experience.
You changed a lot about the way the SI site works. Why? As part of opening up my consulting efforts to include site development using Drupal, I thought it best to run this site in Drupal as a living proof of concept. That's nothing against WordPress, the excellent blogging software I used before, only an attempt to put my money where my mouth is.
What else are you changing? We're in the process of incorporating Small Initiatives. We also changed hosting providers as part of the relaunch of this site -- we're now happy SliceHost customers. And I replaced my old blogroll with the Drupal news aggregator, so you can see nearly live headlines from blogs and sites related to our two consulting practices.
How can I make my [site|blog|comments|tags|feeds] work more like yours? Sign me to a contract and I'll show you.
Are those rotating home page posters done in Flash? No, they're done as regular JPEG images that a Drupal module, Views Slideshow, rotates using a JavaScript library.
I'm an RSS subscriber to SI. Where can I find a list of all your available feeds? Use the site map. I'm also trying to make sure my old FeedBurner feed addresses work with minimal upheaval. Trying, I said.
I'm trying to find [insert name of old article here]. You moved stuff around. Where do I look? All the blog posts and most of the non-blog content from the old site should be here, though the directory paths are altered slightly. If you remember the headline or even a keyword or two, try entering them in the search box.
Don't you know changing directory paths will mess up your search engine rankings? Yes, but I had to do it sooner or later, and I'm taking steps advised in Google and Yahoo! Webmaster instructions to mitigate the effects. It shouldn't take long for the path changes to be reflected in search engines' caches of this site. I hope.
SI now has two newsletters. What's the deal? Ka and I wanted to develop separate e-mailing lists for our occasional alerts and longer-form newsletter essays. I had a list before, but it has been months since I sent out a letter to those subscribers. So I thought it best to let people choose subscriptions anew. You may subscribe to either newsletter with just an e-mail address, and unsubscribe anytime.
How do you say "Ka"? Just like you'd say "Kay," as in Diane Keaton's character in The Godfather. It's short for Karen. Around the house we all call her Katie. And yes, people do chuckle and ask, "Where's L?" when we introduce ourselves as "Jay and Ka."
You didn't kill Sid, did you? No. He wouldn't like that. You'll find Sid's sayings on the right side of all my blog pages.

Real R&D: An answer for the newspaper business

Jay Small — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:57:08 +0000

This article by Jay Small was originally published in 2001 in the Future of Print Media Journal at Kent State University.

Technology fans are easier targets for sarcasm than technology skeptics. Think about it. A technofan's boundless enthusiasm for the latest and greatest gizmos, games and gewgaws begins to resemble a happy addiction. A technoskeptic, confident in mainstream appliances and leery of new inventions by nature, comes to a discussion well armed with a hundred logical reasons not to try the Next Great Thing. Plus, a technoskeptic probably has a much more useful arsenal of insults - they're part of any skeptic's job description.

As a long-time journalist who now works for a consumer electronics conglomerate, I represent both camps: sometimes forward-looking gizmophile, other times quipping naysayer. I balance a greedy love of subwoofers, streaming media, plasma displays, digital signal processors and all sorts of flashing, buzzing toys with a simple desire to go home at night and spud out in front of some ball game on my plain old TV. I read personalized, instant e-newsletters on a computer screen while at work, but happily thumb through an old-fashioned printed newspaper at home. I have a digital satellite system with access to 200-some channels, but when it's on, more than half the time it's tuned to the same news channel.

I sometimes buy electronics for features I think are cool but will never use. That's the technofan. But I sometimes satisfy myself with old technology long after better alternatives are available, to save money. That's the technoskeptic.

Many people in the computer and electronics industries wish all consumers were technofans because they're the ones who buy cutting edge products with the highest profit margins. The risk is that technofans' enthusiasm fuels development and production of many proclaimed Next Great Things, which the technoskeptics, along strict party lines, will refuse to rush out to buy. Therefore, manufacturers resort to escalating hyperbole, which feeds technofans' happy addictions while providing inventory for the technoskeptics' insult warehouses.

Case-in-point: Microsoft, working with a couple of major electronics manufacturers, is launching a product called Ultimate TV. It combines Internet features like e-mail with a hard-disk-based video recorder, all in a set-top box. In effect, WebTV meets TiVo.

It's the Next Great Thing for technofans. For technoskeptics, this development raises four questions:

How many set-top boxes does it take to give consumers every feature they could possibly want on or anywhere near their TVs?
Why do they call them set-top boxes when almost no current TV cabinet is designed with enough flat space to put a box on top?
If this product is, as its name suggests, Ultimate TV, what are we supposed to think when the inevitable Ultimate TV 2.0 (or Ultimate TV Plus, or Ultimate Ultimate TV, or Ultimate TV: We Really Mean It This Time) comes out?
Will that release, in fact, force us to rename the first version (wire editors, please note) Penultimate TV?

The preceding rant came from my technoskeptic persona, or possibly from my spleen. We've sent a sample to the lab for analysis. Meanwhile, while trying to find roadmaps to the Next Great Thing for the newspaper business, I recently read an article written by flagrant technofan Alice Hill for ZDNet News, a Web-based technology magazine.

In it, Hill laments a lack of innovation in home electronics. She says we're under-teched. Cordless phones, she discovers, have more or less the same features they had 10 years ago.

"Where's the color LCD interface, the option to receive faxes and e-mail?" she asks. "Was caller ID integration the height of improvement? And what about the fact that we still have those ugly antennas?"

The ubiquitous television, Hill continues, is also a stagnant platform.

"Blinding technical achievements: When I mute the sound, it goes into closed captioning automatically," she writes. "I can also plug in my camcorder from a front panel instead of hunting around the mess of connectors in the back.

"My screen is flatter and I am also theoretically digital-ready. This took decades, and the rest is still pure 1970s."

Medically, this sounds like a case of technofan withdrawal. Hill looks around her house at objects that do what she bought them to do and says that's not good enough. The technoskeptic, on the other hand, appreciates something Hill forgets: the fact that those devices perform their intended functions better than older models at a lower cost.

So computer and electronics companies can't just think about the technofan - they apply their engineering resources to address late adopters, as well.

Research and development engineers connect emerging technologies to theoretically profitable consumer applications, competing with other companies' engineers to create whole new categories of electronics. These engineers are the auteurs of digital satellite systems, high-definition television, multimedia computers, DVDs and rich-media gaming consoles - all still comparatively new product lines, with their high ends pointed directly at technofans.

The Other Kind of Engineering

But another kind of engineering - cost engineering - comes into play as a product line matures. Cost engineers simply squeeze the same sets of capabilities out of less expensive components and assemblies. Cost engineering can be every bit as innovative as R&D engineering, but its results show differently. It's the reason high-fidelity VCRs now sell for $69 instead of $1,999. Clearly, cost engineering is aimed at the technoskeptic.

Newspaper publishers, whether they know it or not, regularly practice cost engineering. Every newsprint conservation project, pagination system, recycling program and carrier route remap fits this category. Its an effort to reduce (or steady) the cost of putting out products without reducing quality, but not to create a substantially new product or feature. And there's nothing wrong with cost engineering on a mature product.

So, yes, cordless phones are still just cordless phones. Except that you can get a clear-sounding, long-range phone today for less money than a bulkier, harder to hear, battery-sucking model 10 years ago. That's great news for the technoskeptic, apparently not enough for the technofan.

How should we suppose these two personality types would view a typical daily newspaper? Much the same, I'd guess.

Technofans probably pay little heed to a printed edition, except perhaps as a portable, analog diversion in an otherwise digital world. They would seem more likely to use a newspaper's Web site and expect the publisher to provide content and features well beyond the print product. Remember that a technofan wants a cordless phone that also faxes, plays video and makes mounds of julienne fries. Why not a digital newspaper that also tracks the technofans bank account and MP3 music collection?

Technoskeptics, it seems, would be satisfied with the print edition as long as (a) the carrier hits the porch every day, and (b) those @$%^#!! editors dont pull Crankshaft off the comics page again. They may have a PC and even use the Internet but spend the lion's share of online time in e-mail or other communications functions, not on the Web.

If you're a newspaper publisher, which audience do you want? Both, I presume.

Your marketers probably prefer the buying habits and demographics of technofans overall - and any newspaper probably has more room for market growth with them than with technoskeptics. But I think it's just easier for newspaper folk to relate to technoskeptics (journalists' classroom-honed skepticism is legendary, making them kindred souls). Thus it is easier to develop content and services tuned to their interests.

A Comfortable Kinship With Technoskeptics

Unfortunately, I think we fell back into this comfortable skeptic kinship when we first approached the Internet and digital media. Think back five or six years, to the time when the newspaper industry ramped up its collective efforts to seize the potential of these emerging technologies. Those of us who were new media managers in those early days love to talk about our freewheeling experimentation with Web sites. Looking back, I think the only reason it was remotely free-wheeling was that the corporate brass (a) spent only a blip of their operating funds on our skunkworks, (b) didn't have Internet-ready computers and therefore (c) never saw what we were doing.

And our experimentation was nothing like the R&D engineering youll find in the electronics biz. Compare how the two industries approached key developments in new media (stereotype disclaimer: yes, I realize a few newspaper online efforts are exceptions to the following general statements, but all too rare):

The Web: It looked a little bit like a newspaper, so the newspaper industry built or bought systems that put articles and pictures on it so it would look even more like a newspaper. But to the electronics gang, it didnt look much like anything they had dealt with before - so they designed entire new platforms (WebTV, Web phones and Internet appliances) to bring it out of the PC and into the living room.

E-mail and chat: Newspapers bolted chat channels and message boards onto their Web sites, trying to keep them loosely tied to news topics, but wrung their hands over the sometimes crude nature of unmoderated communications. Some finally have learned the distribution power of permission e-mail. The electronics gang brought e-mail into mobile phones, chat into pagers and myriad synchronized Internet applications into personal digital assistants.

Streaming media: Newspapers tinkered with sound bites on their Web sites. A few even worked out deals with local TV stations to share video clips. The electronics biz, meanwhile, is still heads-down figuring out the transition that will make these digital media formats readily available in audio shelf systems, portable players and mainstream televisions. Already you can buy a dedicated Internet radio that can pick up 4,000 stations and customize your music choices. Soon we'll see satellite radio receivers with commercial-free music in our cars.

You get the idea. The electronics gang saw the Internet as fertile ground for R&D engineering on entirely new products and applications. Our industry kicked into cost engineering before it had ever done the real R&D. Now newspapers are pained by meager Internet ad numbers, the near disappearance of paid content online and new cost pressures in the core print business. So the real cost engineering begins: new media staff cutbacks, Web site retrenchment and attempts to automate content producers' handiwork.

We missed the R&D step where we were supposed to connect emerging technologies to theoretically profitable consumer applications. Oh, we spotted the emerging technologies; just like everyone else it was hard to miss the Internet bus. We just failed to define appropriate consumer applications before starting our freewheeling experiments with news content.

So we learned, the hard way, that consumers don't see our Web sites as one-to-one replacements for the printed newspaper. They don't like having to log on, find our sites and then poke around through nonstandard user interfaces to find articles of interest. Though they hate the way advertising is presented on the Web, they miss the advertising they could get in the print product. And they feel they've paid enough just for Internet access, so by God, theyre not going to pay again to read one newspaper there.

Its a good thing for newspapers, then, that the rest of the world economy is learning the same painful lessons about the Web. Its a fine library, but not a very good entertainment medium. Interactive digital media have to get much better before they can grow out of the adolescent novelty of the Web.

Thus, the electronics business is cranking hard to build new, Internet-connected, consumer-friendly media devices. I believe some of these devices will make fine homes for newspaper-style content, among other things.

What's the Next Great Thing? I don't think there's only one. A steady stream of Next Great Things will keep technofans happy, and a few will even suit technoskeptics if they meet basic needs.

After 5, 10, 15 or more years of these Next Great Things, maybe not so many people will still need those drab cordless phones. But they will still need phones in some form. Though I cant speak for Crankshaft specifically, it follows to assume they'll still need most of what makes up a newspaper in some form.

Its up to the industry to do the R&D - the real R&D - to find that form and the business model that supports it.

What's wrong with Internet advertising

Jay Small — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:48:00 +0000

Matthew Roche, writing at MediaPost, describes how a sizzling multimedia ad experience quickly degrades into a game of "throw me in the dumpster":

"The ad is beautiful in its simplicity and it serves its purpose -- but only to an extent. It enticed me to click through, and the splash page enticed me to click through further. But when I got to the Web site, the experience ended with a bone-rattling thud. I was forcefully (and, I might add, brutally) thrown out of the 'ad' and onto the 'site,' and the experience couldn't have been more jarring.

Sorry, you have to be registered and logged into MediaPost to see the story behind the link. I find the best way to see MediaPost commentaries is to subscribe to, and then properly filter and route, the site's many e-newsletters.

But Roche is right: what he describes reflects what's wrong with Internet advertising.

The lines cross in 2011

Jay Small — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:31:17 +0000

From the News of the Inevitable department: Online ads to overtake U.S. newspapers (from FT.com, linked by Greenslade).