deal architect

Weekend Stuff: The-thing-formerly-called-a-book

We all know amazon and growing self-publishing have changed the book industry, and Apple with iPad is about to do even more. So, as the industry morphs in confusing ways, I am so thankful I have access to many authors who I turn to for advice on marketing my book. Or not – there is a school which says use the book just as a calling card (publishers make most of that revenue so let them spend on marketing it) and concentrate on marketing of speeches and seminars around the book.

I met Tom Davenport for coffee yesterday, I am talking to Seth Godin tomorrow. Two best selling authors with very different paths – Tom is a magnet for bulk sponsor purchases of his books, Seth just about invented the art of digital marketing of books. And some other great tactical advice I have picked up along the way:

• Timothy Chou: leave some copies in the First class United lounge at SFO
• Jeffrey Word : get the book into airport stores ( easier said than done - that turns out to the premium place for a book to aspire to. The space is so competitive that they have known to take books off within 4 hours if it only sold a few copies!)
• Phil Simon : Plant a book trailer video on amazon and other sites.

But my favorite so far (and he also gets credit for the title of this post) goes to my attorney and musician friend, Hank (“Memphis”) Jones:

“Get more interesting hair, to compete with Malcolm Gladwell”

I will ask Seth, who has no hair, about that tomorrow :)

Why isn’t enterprise software more like BMW? And National Hurricane Center?

Marc Benioff asks “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?”. And Charles Zedlewski of SAP responds a better question should be “Why isn’t all enterprise software like amazon?”

Hey, it is good that enterprise software is looking to more consumery technology for inspiration. About time enterprise software became more intuitive, did not need hefty user manuals and expensive training courses?

But can I suggest they also look at their customers and non-tech industry players for inspiration?

My book profiles the 2009 BMW 7 Series which leverages a whole bunch of ways to interface with its users – the driver and the passengers. It supports features like:

• Lane Departure Warning, which vibrates the steering wheel if you change lanes without using the turn signals
• Navigation with all the usual features, plus a 3-D map view that enhances guidance through mountainous or hilly country.
• Hands free calling with speech recognition via the Bluetooth microphone
• Active Blind Spot Detection, which senses vehicles up to 200 ft behind and flashes on the screen and vibrates the steering wheel if you put the turn signal on
• Rear Passenger entertainment system which allows Internet access

You have to compliment BMW and others in the auto industry for working around the mouse and the QWERTY keyboard. Most of the software industry does not take advantage of other types of available and emerging interfaces – surface, wearable computers, scanners, brain-machine and so on.

Move on to analytics.

2008 was a wake-up call for most enterprises. The realization sunk in that after tens of billions invested in analytical tools, their business forecasts were not just off – they were off spectacularly.

Against that backdrop, the National Hurricane Center is impressive. The Center goes out and gathers primary data using dropsondes, buoys, Hurricane Hunter flights in hostile circumstances uses massive processing power to crunch that data, considers and cautiously blends multiple forecasting models and probabilities. 

The track forecast error in the eighties, 48 hours out was 225 nautical miles. Today that error is a little less than 100. Over the annual hurricane season, that adds to hundreds of miles of coastline not evacuated. Each mile of coastline not evacuated saves millions in emergency services, panic shopping and other community disruption. Talk about ROI!

That’s what enterprise software should be aiming for. Instead the industry talks about “bringing BI to the masses”.

So, yes match Facebook and amazon. But keep going. Plenty of innovation to catch up to in many areas.

Apple’s truly lasting influence

Jeffrey Word of SAP and I were discussing the other day pricing for ebooks on the iPad and Kindle. He is an author of many books and has been extremely valuable a coach as I go through my own publishing experience.

And it occurred to me while we give Apple credit – or criticism – for its products and technologies, the enduring impact the company will eventually be recognized for is the business models it has influenced in so many verticals.

It started with music and iTunes. The music industry still bitches and moans but the 99c pricing massively increased volume especially in the Long Tail of music – let’s face it, there are plenty of one hit wonders you would not have bought the entire record for. 

Now it is trying to do with TV shows on the iPad. And the networks, like music, don’t like it.

Ditto with apps for the iPhone, Low threshold price points have led to over 100,000 apps in such a short time. Unlike music or networks, though, the entrepreneurs here are thrilled with Apple.

But Apple has been anything but predictable, especially in challenging the incumbent players.

When it comes to books on the iPad, it is actually challenging the iTunes model amazon was trying to bring along at $ 9.99 an eBook. It has gone along with a higher and more variable price points the publishers wanted.

And when it comes to telecom, it chose not to influence AT&T pricing much. That will also go down as one area where Apple has had the least direct impact on business models - something it cannot be proud off given all the iPhone consumer issues with AT&T.

But indirectly, it has motivated Google, Nokia, HTC and others to step up and gradually reduce the channel power of the traditional telco. And forced them – gulp – to even consider doing deals with mortal enemies like Skype. And it has helped strengthen a new type of telco in so many countries – like VimpelCom in Russia, 3 in Hong Kong, Etisalat in Dubai and Telia in Sweden.

More than form-function, Apple will long be remembered for the fear, loathing, adulation – and business model changes - it has caused in so many industries.  Let’s recap – music, TV, consumer apps and gaming, book publishing and telecom – amazing the impact of smudgy fingerprints its devices draw like magnets.

Innovations in service delivery

I blogged recently about The Outsourcing Famine – little innovation in “business models and global delivery models and their partnering with interesting new technologies” with exceptions in firms like Cognizant and emerging ones like appirio and Corefino.

Jon Reed highlights some innovations in the SAP services ecosystem – most again from smaller firms like cumulusIQ  which provides SAP “Knowledge-as-a-service” – a shared service of SAP expertise.

Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion talks about their new KI OnDemand “Its our attempt to transform our little world of HCM consulting by offering an on-demand subscription service for clients.  Think of it as a HR version of McKinsey Quarterly meets TED meets Amazon ratings meets ESPN.com (minus the news)”. KI is targeting about 50 clients and a revenue of $ 1 m from the service in the first year.

Will this transform the hundreds of billions in fees in outsourcing services with its large army and bill-by-the-hour mindset? Not any time soon, but it is good to see the innovation.

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Don’t leave home without it (the Hotspot Shield)

20 years of Adobe Photoshop

The Bloom Box

Compressed Sensing

3PM = 1PM

Ray Wang has published recent data on third party maintenance.

Two things stand out. Customers are hungry for third party maintenance. They cannot find too many public choices for third party maintenance (I know on a one off basis they can find many offshore and other firms to also do it on the quiet).

Ergo – opportunity for the original publisher. The software vendor. The first party maintainer.

Read the data, guys. These are YOUR customers. Quit blaming the 3PM guys and suing them and threatening them. They are the messenger.

Every market organizes into a bell curve. It’s something Alfred Sloan recognized and institutionalized into GM divisions almost a century ago. The Chevy buyer is different from the Caddy buyer.

Same with sw maintenance. There are customers who just want base bug fixe and regulatory updates, and others who want full boat innovation. Treat them differently, and price them differently. Not just a 5% difference in maintenance rates, a 50 to 60% difference.

The 3PM market awaits. YOUR customers!!

It should not be about us

They come in threes, they say. Three things in the last 24 hours make me wonder if industry observers are not bringing too much attention to ourselves.

• Larry Dignan at ZDNet writes about an InfoWorld columnist’s conflict of interest
• Phil Fersht raises the issues around Forrester’s decisions not to allow individual analyst blogs
• Jonny Brentwood announces his list of Top Analyst Tweeters 

Don’t get me wrong. It is important to celebrate what we do well as analysts, bloggers and journalists – and we call out things that deserve being called out.

It just seems like we are becoming increasingly focused on ourselves, when there is so much good and bad in technology vendors and users that deserve our real attention – and shelf space.

More Verizon asterisks

For a fleeting moment I got excited about the Verizon-Skype announcement.

Then I read it will not work on Wi-Fi. WTF? Only on its 3G network, marginally better than AT&T’s, and the likely risk we get slammed soon with some data plan overage charges?

And what about international roaming? Pay Verizon a few dollars a minute to get on Skype?

I am used to such asterisks from Verizon. But Skype, I am disappointed you could not push for something worthwhile for your customers to get excited about.

Setback for the social customer

Paul Greenberg is on a crusade to educate the corporate world about the social customer. His new book, his seminar series are all aimed at that. As he is quoted in my upcoming book “Social CRM measures not just Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) but Customer Referral Value (CRV)”

So, based on the negative stream this weekend from Kevin Smith (Silent Bob) who has 1.6 million Twitter followers, it would appear to be a big FAIL for Southwest Airlines when it comes to CRV.

First, much as I admire Southwest and have written positive blogs about them, not sure they even do CLV right. Their front line and reservation agents have no way to distinguish a one-time flyer from the frequent flyer (I know I have qualified for their highest level – a free companion pass – 6 years in a row). This is part of Southwest’s “democratic” mindset which treats everyone equally but makes them insensitive to the fact that Kevin, besides having a huge CRV also has a impressive CLV.

But Kevin’s behavior in going and on and the language he used frankly makes this incident also a FAIL for the social customer. Let me elaborate.

Southwest has a “customer of size” policy - basically if you cannot lower both armrests around you – 17 inches wide – they make you buy two tickets. You can argue it is insensitive (though Southwest argues they get plenty of complaints from inconvenienced passengers who sit next to “customers of size”) but it has had this policy for for almost 3 decades. In fairness, if the flight is not full, they refund you the second ticket.

For some reason they let Kevin board on one ticket on a full flight. Then once he was settled in his seat they asked him to get off the flight. And apparently did not handle it as discreetly as they could have. If things had stopped there and Kevin had posted a calm, but hurt, post everyone would have sympathized with Kevin. But he chose to spend days talking about it.  Then when Southwest explained that Kevin knows the 2 ticket policy from his previous travels with the airline, Kevin claims they violated his privacy for letting the world know that he knew that policy. Sorry, this social customer just qualified as a whiner abusing his soapbox. 

This is not Dave Carroll and his guitar episode which United Airlines ignored for months till his song hit big on YouTube. Southwest was monitoring the Twitterfeed and tried to placate Kevin almost immediately. They did what Paul is telling companies to do with the social customer.

In return though, us social customers need to learn to talk softly. First resolve the issue directly with the company we have with. Then gradually turn to the big stick in our hands called our web community. If we just throw on-line tantrums, we are only making Paul’s crusade that much tougher.

Who said enterprise software had no soul?

Hey, I was just quoting that guy from Google :)

I mean this is Dallas and All my Children and bunch of other soaps bundled in one if you believe Maureen O’Gara. Screw Apple’s faux consumery sex and sizzle and Facebook’s continuing privacy intrigue – beat this!

“Considering all that, the billboards (which forced him to disclose his affair) were a Machiavellian masterstroke to keep Chuck Phillips in his place, maybe not for the next four months, which would have been ideal, but at least for last week, which Larry will tell you went swimmingly.”

Surely, she means sailingly? But I digress…

Add to this all the intrigue coming out of Walldorf in the last week with Leo Apotheker, then John Swartz resigning from SAP. Did you hear the one that since both had Paris connections it was imminent the Germans were about to invade France again?

And that Charles, having missed his chance at CA, was going to become the 3rd co-CEO at SAP? Don’t laugh -he is one of the few people in the world to have that experience (remember Greg Maffei?)

BTW, you say you have never heard of Maureen? You must live in consumer la la land, not enterprise tech land. She says she is “the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years”. She certainly is one of the few who can get away calling Charles Chuck - must still have his Morgan Stanley 1-800-MR-CHUCK number in her speed dial. He has me trained so well, every time I see the Schwab ad I scream “It’s Charles, not Chuck, you morons”

Remind me to read more of her and listen less to folks from Google. What do they know about the enterprise and things like evil and souls?