Tech Change Is So Fast Now, No One Can Keep Up

I thought it was just me. I once thought I was on top of gadgets and technologies in my field, and then it got away from me. Lately, I've been trying to catch up. Apparently, I can't. David Pogue, the consumer technology columnist for the New York Times, said this last evening on The News Hour:

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, last thing.

How can anyone -- and you wrote about this, so -- how can anyone keep up with all this? So, what was kind of reassuring in your article was, your 10-year review was, even you have a hard time keeping up -- keeping up, right?

DAVID POGUE: Right. The answer is, you can't keep up, and I can't keep up. I read all the magazines. I go to all the trade shows, I listen to all the P.R. pitches. I do two columns every single week. And, sometimes, they're columns that involve roundups of 16 cameras or whatever.

It's still impossible. I mean, you would need a full-time staff, and you would still miss stuff. Somehow, we have gotten into this cycle now where technology advances so fast, and comes out so quickly and becomes obsolete so quickly, it's out of control. It's off the tracks.

The Parkinson Group Receives 2010 Best of Minneapolis Award

U.S. Commerce Association’s Award Honors Achievement

NEW YORK, NY, November 30, 2010 -- The Parkinson Group has been selected for the 2010 Best of Minneapolis Award in the Communications Services category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).

The USCA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2010 USCA Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

The Inevitable Decline Due To Clutter

A wonderful piece of advice from Seth Godin's blog:

Digital media expands. It's not like paper, it can get bigger.

As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it's free.

One more link, one more banner, one more side deal on the Groupon page.

Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn't work any more.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it's hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

100 Portraits

For the past four years, Andy Adams has been publishing FlakPhoto.com, a website that features contemporary photography from an international community of artists. He teamed up with curator and Indie Photobook Library creator Larissa Leclair to produce a photo projection which showed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, November 6-13, 2010.

Adams developed this digital exhibition to share the work of artists with an international online audience, wherever they are in the world. Since launching in early November, 100 Portraits has been viewed by more than 30,000 visitors from 24 countries and the project has been featured in Wired Magazine, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, aCurator.com and The Washington Post.

http://andyadamsphoto.com/100portraits/

Self Portrait with Christopher (Clementines), 2007— Jessica Todd Harper

Thoughts About The iPhone, Part 2

The iPhone disrupted the mobile phone industry and did so with breathtaking speed. In Part 1, I described how it didn’t suddenly burst on the scene; Apple had introduced the iPhone and demonstrated its features a full six months before it was released, yet many pundits predicted failure. How could this relative alien enter a new market containing such entrenched, powerful companies?  Was the iPhone a fluke?  Or is something in Apple’s strategic approach responsible for the iPhone’s success? 

Generally, a company may execute more than one strategy well, but usually only one ultimately drives its success. Most market strategies fall into four categories:  1) Gaining market share  2) Being least-cost producers  3) Innovation  4) Quality.

Market Share
In PC operating systems, Microsoft won the market share battle.

Least-Cost Producers
Dell, Packard Bell, Acer are companies that found success through efficiency, outsourcing and tight inventories.

Innovation
An innovation can start a revolution. In the tech industry, many innovations come and go, e.g., Zip, Palm PDAs, etc. The difficulty with innovation is that one has to continually pull a new rabbit from the hat, or transition to a market share, least-cost producer or quality market strategy.  If asked for an example of a current innovative company, many people would mention Apple.

Quality
Nordstrom and BMW are examples of companies with low market share, but success because of their focus on quality. For the last decade in the PC industry, Apple has received high ratings for the quality of its products and its customer service.

I contend that of the four, it’s the Quality market strategy that drives Apple’s success. And not just a big amorphous Let’s-do-everything-well kind of quality to which everyone pays lip service. It’s a specific quality driver that can be isolated if you ask the key question for my business, “Who is the audience?” When one answers this question, the reason for the iPhone’s success is obvious.

Consider: Microsoft’s key strategy has been to gain market share by corralling enterprise computing. The audience was IT departments. Get one IT department and you’ll sell tens of thousands of computers with your operating system on them. You then get the individual users by trickle down. When Microsoft went into mobile, their strategy was to maintain Windows’ market share by extending it to the phone. RIM’s audience is also enterprise. It built phones delivering email with secure links to Windows enterprise systems. The primary audience: organizations and organizations’ needs.

Apple, on the other hand, has always been about individual empowerment. Think Different. 

Until recently, I’ve often noticed that my non übergeek friends who used Windows computers at work generally disliked computers. Some didn’t even have them in their homes. The computer experience had been so confining that people wanted to be done with it after leaving work. This has changed, but more because of cloud computing and the new social media sites than because of desktop PC innovation.  Mac owners, on the other hand, have tended to be ardent computer users. To paraphrase one of Steve Jobs’ statements from the early days of the OS wars: Our goal is to deliver a tool that will empower people who use it in thousands of different ways that we can’t possibly imagine. For Mac users, he achieved this.

The contrast of these two approaches puts the reason for the iPhone’s success in sharp relief. It’s because Apple focuses on a different audience than almost everyone else in the PC industry: the individual user. In terms of the four basic market strategies, Apple’s key driving strategy is to maximize the quality of the individual user experience.

When people got their hands on an iPhone, it was so different from anything they’d previously experienced that to many it seemed like having been launched into the future. The subsequent proliferation of new apps made the iPhone continually more useful and empowering in ways no one had anticipated, consistent with Jobs’ earlier vision and intent. 

Maximizing the quality of the individual user experience is a very different approach from approaches like having more features than our competitors' products, building something we can sell for less than our competitors, building a product that appeals to the needs of the wireless quasi monopolies, acquiring company X, etc. It’s a strategy that just hasn’t seemed to occur to a multitude of B school graduates. Maximizing quality to meet the needs of the end user is at once common sensical, yet in today’s marketplace, brilliant.

Photo: Winter Has Arrived in Minneapolis

iPhone: 4% of the Market, 50% of the Profit

More disruption.

Photo: Very Early Morning, Minneapolis

Photo: Early Morning in Minneapolis

 

Thoughts About The iPhone, Part 1

To paraphrase the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”...a current revolution has its focal point in a small 4.5 x 2.3 x 0.37-inch slab of sleek glass...the iPhone. Three years ago, the iPhone didn’t exist. Now it’s the most profitable smartphone in the cellphone industry—more profitable than its three top competitors combined! And it’s forced all its competitors to run to catch up.

It’s a classic breakthrough. A product that seems so obvious in hindsight, yet one that no one could imagine before its introduction. And even after it was introduced, pundits declared it would never succeed. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January, 2007. It wouldn’t go on sale until late June of 2007, with only one carrier (AT&T). Although the iPhone introduction was well-presented in January, many smart people—pundits—declared it would be a failure (Thanks to Phillip Elmer-DeWitt):

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” Palm CEO Ed Colligan, commenting on then-rumored Apple iPhone, 16 Nov 2006

“Apple is slated to come out with a new phone… And it will largely fail." Michael Kanellos, CNET, 7 December 2006

"The only question remaining is if, when the iPod phone fails, it will take the iPod with it.” Bill Ray, The Register, 26 December 2006

"Apple will likely have a tough time convincing application vendors to build specialized clients for the iPhone until the volumes are there, and the volumes could be limited by the lack of third-party applications – a Catch 22.” Jack Gold, J. Gold Associates, 10 January 2007

“The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks." Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg, 15 January 2007

"Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized, with a plan? It is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine… So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 17 January 2007

I am not sure how it will stand against Sprint’s Wimax (when it successfully launches) and its phones, which I am looking forward much more than over-hyped Apple iPhone.” Bhaskar Chitraju, Indews Broadcast, 18 January 2007

"iPhone may well become Apple’s next Newton.” David Haskin, Computerworld, 26 February 2007

“Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” John C. Dvorak, 28 March 2007

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 30 April 2007

“How do they deal with us?” Ed Zander, Motorola CEO/Chairman 10 May 2007

“Apple begins selling its revolutionary iPhone this summer and it will mark the end of the string of hits for the company.” Todd Sullivan, Seeking Alpha, 15 May 2007

"What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much… Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious.” Laura Goldman, LSG Capital, 21 May 2007

“We Predict the iPhone will bomb. Which means that when the iPhone comes, Digg will likely be full of horror stories from the poor saps who camped out at their local AT&T store, only to find their purchase was buggier than a camp cabin.” Seth Porges, The Futurist, 7 June 2007

“The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld combined. Because its designers forgot Platt’s First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design (“Know Thy User, for He Is Not Thee”), that product is going to crash in flames. Sell your Apple stock now, while the hype’s still hot. You heard it here first.” David S. Platt, Suckbusters!, 21 June 2007

“God himself could not design a device that could live up to all the hype that the iPhone has gotten.” Harvard computer science professor David Platt, 25 June 2007

We now take the iPhone’s success for granted but it’s worth taking time to look back at the skeptical environment in which Apple launched it and the many reasons for the skepticism. That makes the successful outcome an even more fascinating story. In subsequent posts, I’ll describe the four basic market strategies and Apple’s particular focus and strengths that led to this success.

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