Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Business

  • Just how bad is Facebook at programming?

    Cute picture of my son today.  Huge smile as he looked through a Holy Crepe.  He had eaten out some of it and looked to the camera; cute as ever.  Gotta have this as my profile picture.  Facebook profile, upload picture, wait….wait….wait some more.  Finally it uploads.    Sometimes it doesn’t of course.  Go to Twitter.   Same objective.  But hey, it magically shows me a preview of the picture instantly.   And wow, I can even crop it to the part most relevant to a profile picture.   Must be rocket science.  The boffs at Facebook haven’t figured it out.   Some ultra secret patented method Twitter is using…  The picture even uploads faster at Twitter!  Must be they have more money for better servers…

    Or Facebook is simply terrible at designing their infrastructure.  And no, it’s not about the scale of the exercise.   Facebook has always been a terrible platform.  Sure, we don’t get as many major hiccups anymore, but does anyone there even bother to test the user experience?   Tech journalists and social media pundits have a field day with every major overhaul.   Facebook cause pages are created demanding we change back.   Plug ins appear to make it “look like the good old Facebook”.   They never work.

    Because Mark Zuckerberg is still carrying the mentality he had when he started.   He is more concerned with the people gaming his system than the experience of the rest of the users.

    Here is a simple example.   Accepting friend requests.   You may never even consider this if you get 1 or 2 per day.  But anyone building up fake profiles and trying to amass a lot of Facebook ‘friends’ might have two or three hundred friend request to accept.  No, there is no “accept all” button.  Because Mark, knows some people will abuse it.   If you really are a popular person, just starting on Facebook and you have 250 friend requests, you have to click them one by one.   And of course the buttons aren’t at the same place.  No, that would be to easy to get an automated script monkey on to.   As you accept one friend request, it morphs into something else so you have to physically scroll to the next right position of  “Accept”.

    There are dozens of examples like this.  Most people with just one genuine personal account, will not even notice them.  What they will notice and what we all experience daily is just a really really bad user interface.   They build little hoops for cheats but penalise everybody else while they are at it.    The fact that it has never been done in this scale and that it has to serve billions of very different customers is no excuse;  many of the niggles I have with Facebook are due to the fact that Zuckerberg is obsessed with people that are as sneaky thinking as him.  And he can’t think of clever algorithmic ways to get over it.   In a sense, Edgerank is this magic ingredient.   And all the recent changes are a move in the right direction.

    Now let’s hope Edgerank gets good enough so that Zuckerberg relaxes the stupid interface hoops some more.  You can now accept hundreds of friend requests from the left button directly which is faster.  When I see an “accept all” button I will know Facebook has finally got a real and stable business model.

  • Does the stock market work better than journalism?

    The bias of stock market movements and the psychological phenomenae that affect it have been pretty well documented.   The purposeful ways of manipulating it less so, though with every new scandal we learn – usually retrospectively – something new.   As a person with some history in technology, what never fails to impress me is how tech journalists get carried away.  A recent example is Facebook.   Glowing reports and hyperbole, dotted with a few lifestyle titbits and dashed with vague futurological questions was all we got for years.

    And then came the IPO.

    Suddenly we learnt all about its internal management issues.   Guess what?   A major percentage of  Facebook’s users (that enormous number journalists flouted about in the titles) is fake accounts.   Oh my, what a surprise!   We learnt about Zuckerberg’s lack of skills for the job.    The huge problems in the business model, the enormous questions about the kind of advertising it sells.   The possible impact from legal action in relation to privacy concerns.

    All this was either non existent in the press before, or glossed over.   But when it comes to paying good money to buy a stock, we are obviously more careful than we are when choosing what to read.

  • Apple won’t sue Google and Cook is a better manager than Jobs. Which is bad.

    Of course Apple won’t sue Google!   Getting a positive verdict when fighting a foreign company in a US court is one thing.   Going up against Google is quite another.  Even without the closet of Motorola patents, Google wouldn’t lose.   It would be like going up against the water utility company; they just leave you to die of thirst while you wait for the verdict.   And even if you win, you will always worry what they might put in your water…

    And Tim Cook, unlike Steve Jobs, is a good manager.   He doesn’t take chances like that.   He doesn’t believe in hocus pocus quack medicine.  He has made Apple a much more “normal” company.   After almost two decades of irrationality, he finally gave out dividends.   He actually talks to investors.   After a decade of forcing slave labor in China he finally decided to look like he is doing something about it.    Employees in the US no longer live with the fear of a Jobs’ attack on them; they actually have time to drink coffee now.

    There is more formal organisational structure; without Jobs, other people actually get some real responsibilities.   Around 53% of the employees who reference “MBA” on their Linked in profile have been at Apple (non retail)  less than 22 months.  After a lifetime of closed garden design …hey, OK, he can’t change everything all at once!   There might be a few chinks in the armour but it is still a secretive company.  Only problem is, we are less and less interested in their secrets anymore.

    Apple is based on the wow factor.   Tim Cook will make the best of disappointments like the iPhone 4s.   The company will of course not remain as succesful as it has been in the past years.   But it will not fall down all of a sudden.   He is milking the brand carefully.   But making it a “normal” company is obviously a very…unApple thing to do.   Normal companies don’t perform like Apple did under Jobs.

    So don’t hold your breath.   Some people say “let’s wait and see the new product launches before we decide”.   I don’t think you need to wait for anything.   It won’t be a spectacular success.   And it won’t be a spectacular failure either.

    Normal.   Heck, they might even start giving away more than 1$ a year to charity…

     

  • Why I care that you don’t choose Macs

    Much has been written about Apple’s amazing ability in marketing.   About Apple fan boys (and girls).   About Steve.   In terms of popular culture it is interesting and in terms of business it is amazing.   (Though not easy to emulate.)   But my question here is slightly different:   Do I have a right or an obligation even to fight Mac lovers anywhere I find them?

    Let’s not get caught up in any technical questions.   Obviously many people don’t care if it is stupid or not to insist on a mouse with just one button, or whether Safari crumbles instantly in any security competition.   And millions of people are happy, even ecstatic, about their shiny Macs and happilly play with them for years.  (Well, sort of; they are still not much good if you want to play games.)   They pay a hefty price premium for it but that is no problem in terms of the global economy.

    Current figures give the global Mac share at around 7% of annual PC sales worldwide.   It isn’t much and it hasn’t been growing much either.   For someone that has watched this debate for precisely 30 years now it seems almost stagnant.   Which would explain why we don’t do much about it.

    You see technology is not about lonely geeks behind their monitors.   Technology is about platforms.   If I really find Skype great, it will be rendered useless if all my friends or associates don’t also install it.   If I like to be able to swipe my smartphone from the top down to see settings on Android I will be put back if nobody else does and Android 6 doesn’t include such a feature.   And if I like the versatility of Windows I will be devastated if we fall into what I consider the dark ages of Apple straight jacket technology.   It is in my interest, in a very simple almost biological analogy, to persuade as many people as possible to use technology like I use it.    I liked netbooks and it is probably the iPad’s success that killed off that whole project.   If enough people sustain Apple’s premium price, fat margin, business model, I lose out.

    Conversely it is proof that Apple technology is in fact inferior that only 7% of customers choose it.   A technological product, throughout it’s lifetime is not just about looking cool or doing a few things well.   Customers figure it out and avoid Apple.   In Greece for example we have extremely bad Apple tech support simply because not enough people know the OS and have access to Apple peripherals.   They have a gut feeling that the machine will cost much more over time.

    I don’t like iTunes and what it does to my computer’s resources.   I love multitasking and all Apple devices don’t.   I really don’t understand why we should put up with Quicktime anymore.   Flash works fine for a lot of stuff and I am much happier with a mobile device that supports them.   I think machines should have plenty I/O devices and these should be as common as possible.   I don’t like manufacturers that solder things together for no sensible reason other than their warranty policy.   I’m just not built to be an Apple fan boy.

    And if Apple was ever to pass the 20% market share mark a lot of these things that I don’t like would become mainstream.   So I will fight you in Europe where you are weaker, I will fight you in the forums, I will fight you on Facebook, I will return your Tweets with links gallore.   I will never surrender.   I shall defend more open architectures whatever the cost may be.   I will fight with growing confidence and try to gather like minded warriors around me.    And if,  which I do not for a moment believe, the world or a large part of it were subjugated and Mac affected, then I will find a further land not yet Mac affected and guarded by the Open Source revolution , will carry on the struggle, until, in good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old…

     

    BTW Here is a link to the great Churchill speech I parody at the end of this post – http://audio.theguardian.tv/sys-audio/Guardian/audio/2007/04/20/Churchill.mp3

  • Social media: outsourcing your company information. Yes, it’s stupid.

    Remember CRM?  The idea was you would try and get together everything you know about your customers so you could better guess their needs.   Yes, it was a lot of work.   Ah, let’s just rely on an external provider to do it for us.   In fact we won’t even have a contract with this company and we will let employees and customers do pretty well whatever they like on it.   It’s called LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever else comes along, gets bought out or changes its technology at a whim.

    Yep, that will work just fine.

    Not!   Social media platforms are just that.   Somebody else’s platform for your information.   How many kids you have and where you went on holiday used to be something that expert salespeople got out of you over fancy dinners.   Now you just give it away for nothing.   And, worse still, that supplier of yours who used to care, now has no access to the information.  He has to pay this social media platform for “intelligence”.   That is if the little startup in Callifornia has some way of getting to him.   For the most part, awesome masses of useful information is simply going wasted.   It is like trying to guess what “the market” is feeling based on the heavily censored information Google AdWords gives you about search queries.

    Remember how everyone was in a panic to have a “fully updated” company website?   They got excited about who would put up something new everyday, they rallied up support from various company departments.   Now they pay an advertising agency to write stupid one liners on the company facebook page…  The discussion went from what sort of database can best manage the company information to… “here is a funny video about a baby that hit his data with a frying pan – have a nice weekend!”

    The scary thing is that even well seasoned managers seem to have been thrown off balance by the sudden change.   At first they treated it as just the latest fad from the marketing department.   Then they started worrying they are missing the boat.  Then they got an iPhone and a Facebook account and got hooked.   Now they are blubbering idiots who think they will conquer the world based on a social media feature which might not even be around next week.

    I am beginning to feel like a family doctor.  Somewhere between their advertising agency, IT department, PR people, internal sales and marketing resources, someone has to remind companies of targets, ROI and mission.

     

     

  • Steve Jobs was right to “go thermonuclear” against Android

    “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

    The point isn’t whether he said it or not.   Nor is it whether it is admissable in court (it is).

    “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.”

    The real issue with Apple versus Android is a much more important point about their underlying business model.   Both rely on market dominance.   Some may call it an abuse of a dominant position.   I prefer to call it the “give away” model.

    Here is Google’s version:  “we spend millions developing a cutting edge telephone OS.   We give it away to any phone manufacturer that wants to use it.   Guess what?   Android phones are cheaper that way!   We spend billions buying companies and developing Google Maps.   We give it away for free and even include navigation in Android phones.   Who cares if we destroy an entire industry, it’s not our industry!   We spend billions buying, developing and running YouTube, Gmail and loads of other services.   You know what?  You can have them all for free!  And everyone along the chanel can do what they please and make money anyway they see fit.   All we ask of you is that you click on an advert now and then on Google search, YouTube, Gmail or wherever else we put one in front of you.”

    And Apple’s version: “We spend millions selectively buying cool companies or those that have developed some technology we need because we don’t really invent anything.   We package them as cool as we can and charge as much as we can.   We squeeze everyone in our supply and distribution channel dry.  We drop prices or add features only when the competition forces us or Steve Jobs isn’t around to persuade Apple fans that whatever we have done is cool.”

    Put that way, which phone OS do you think is heading for global dominance?   The philosophy of free with Android extends to apps of course.   Forget Apple style scaremongery about locked devices.   Rooting an Android phone is almost included in the package and applications that unlock any app you find are almost automatic.   Android 5.0 might include a “crack that app” in the OS…

    Steve Jobs was right to feel threatened about Android.   Not because they “stole” some iPhone features.   He, of all people, knew very well that the iPhone was never about features.   It is Google’s business model that is the real threat.   If Apple wants to beat Android it should be spending it’s money not on law suites, but on buying more companies with new features to give away.   They have done it before in other sectors when they felt desperate.   Apple’s involvement in the digital video is a good example.   Final Cut came out of nowhere to become the darling of a new movement (it’s always a “revolution” or a “movement” with Apple, isn’t it?) mainly through features they added by buying up companies.   Buy a company that makes a 4000 dollar color management software and throw it in the next version….

    The real problem with Google’s threat however for Apple, is that Google hasn’t got to worry about hardware.  Chinese workers killing themselves, the cost of components and copycats will find it hard to beat Google at its game.   Not even Microsoft has managed to mount a credible threat to its search monopoly.   Facebook’s floppy IPO shows just how little anyone really believes that sexy newcomers, no matter how big, can really effect Google.

  • Facebook screws up on the international business etiquette

    “Right now you may only reach 16% of your fans each week.  Reach Generator guarantees that you reach 75% of your fans…”   This is Facebook’s grand plan to show us they know how to make money?  Instead of “connecting people” or “helping us share with the people we love”…  Facebook is openly admitting to allowing advertisers the right to dominate our timelines!

    The idea is of course nothing new.   It’s just advertising.   Google has been taking money to tweak search results, make items disappear from autocompletion and promote certain results for years.   But they don’t tell everyone about it!   Not even pretty high ranking Google executives know the whole picture regarding what you can make disappear from Google if you have enough money.   Only people and companies with…well, enough money, know that sort of thing.

    It could be some twisted campaign to show that Facebook is opening up regarding privacy.   But no.   This is just inexperience of global corporate rules.     Worse still they are testing out a similar thing for consumers as the “highlight you want to be sure your friends see”.  If I am going to pay 2 New Zealand dollars for that luxury, I might as well make my own website Mark!   People already distrust Facebook big time (not so much Google).

    This is not the way to beat Google.  Take a page out of Apple’s book instead.   You don’t like Android?   Go out and buy 2-3 mapping companies and produce a spectacular rival to Google Maps for starters.   Buy a company and throw in a free Siri for people to start relying on that instead of Google search.   Give us freebies so that we use your service.

    But maintain appearances please!

  • Apple doesn’t break the rules; it doesn’t have any!

    What is Apple’s mission statement?

    Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

    Seriously.  Not kidding, it is from the Apple website under “Investor Relations”.   If I had written a mission statement like that, even at that project at the end of Year 1 of business studies they would have failed me.    Even the other gem, hidden in the same section isn’t much better:

    Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

    Yeah right.   That defies all rules of mission statement making.   Pretty sure nobody in the company even knows it.   Apple’s mission statement was probably more like:

    We all do whatever is cool and seems to please the Allmighty Steve Jobs.   He always knows best, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense; he will make it work sooner or later.

    Forget social responsibility (no charity, iKill workers abroad) it is all about profit maximisation.   And now that Jobs is gone a few shareholders are daring to ask whether they might actually have a share of the monumental cash pile at last.    You can only pretend to be emotionally impaired by those times aeons ago when you were cash strapped and even borrowed from Microsoft.    Apple is one of the richest companies in the world.   More than 100 billion in the bank just sitting there for what?   And they don’t even pretend to have some masterplan!

    Forget increasing market share.   They could easily drop prices, increase product range or just buy a few companies and give away something of value like Google does.   Buy Adobe, give away Photoshop or something.   (More or less what they did with the digital video market which they then almost abandoned.)  But no, the ghost of Jobs walks the sleek halls of Apple still.   They still shamelessly do everything they can to maximise profit.   Nothing else.   After all, if everyone has a Mac how could they urge you to “Think Different”?

    But that is no mission statement either.   To cater to weird designer type people and make them feel special.   I made that up but it would still be more accurate than what they have now.    So Macs are stuck at much less than 10% market share globally and iPhones not much more than that, 25% globally for the optimists.   Depending on your mood you can do statistical hoopjumping to consider iPads a threat to the global status quo or not.  To force other technology companies to produce cooler gadgets than the geeky stuff they did so far.   That would show some awareness, some commitment to helping the planet in some way.   It would give us an idea where it might be heading and all that stuff we learnt about missions statements.   We all thought it was really necessary for a well functioning company…

    Sorry to be the party pooper but this doesn’t make sense.   What is the point of this company again?   And without a magician to tell us that the emperor is not naked, how will it pull off any future tricks?

  • Marketing myths: Beta vs VHS and the demise of Kodak

    Before the web there were just plain marketing gurus.  They were the closest we had to the to soundbite Twitter sized slogan makers we are used to today.   Before Google searches, they were the ones discovering interesting stories about products, companies and brands.   And they packaged them neatly for us with branded big fonts and style.

    A well known and well circulated in Marketing classes myth concerns Sony’s “failure” to promote Beta against VHS as a video format.   They usually forget to mention the main reason (Sony not wanting to go to bed with the porn industry) but – most importantly – they don’t even get their numbers right.   Did anybody bother to quantify the profits made from VHS versus what Sony made from Beta in the longterm?   Because as a broadcast standard for many many years I have seen that equipment being sold and rented for pretty big sums of money for more than two decades!   Even now there are TV stations ticking along with a dozen betaMax decks for A/B editing or even playout.

    If Sony lost the battle against VHS as a format for every living room, they did pretty well getting it in every TV station and post production facility and even better as a base for launching a huge business around media production.   Doesn’t look like a failure to me.

    Kodak going down has a similar smell already.   It is as if scores of writers had the obituary ready.   That little colored box in the marketing manual as a case study.   A perfect illustration of a big company getting arrogant and getting it wrong.   How new technologies overtake even the strongest firms.   How bad management is blind to change.   A company with more of a century of global domination seems an easy target.

     

    Maybe they should wait a bit before writing that chapter.

  • Your first move in social media is…market segmentation?

    For most business people, social media appears to be something exotic, even alien.   Partly due to the way it is presented in the media and largely because their “older media” companies are still not sure how to sell it.   There is a big temptation to see it as a completely new paradigm.   Of course it isn’t.   It still homo sapiens communicating.   And by the way, many of those homo sapiens are your old customers communicating.

    Social CRM got me excited from the beginning.   I always loved CRM systems, even when they were clunky, tiring and meant more data entry for everyone.  If the customer is king, you had better make sure you know how the king likes his eggs cooked in the morning.  Just as we strived to find ways to unify what an organization knew about a contact into CRM, Social CRM systems try to unify the social media activity with whatever else you know about a contact.  XeeSM was the first system I saw which had the concept of “touch”, in a product called “Flights”.  This is an interaction via social media which isn’t a sales pitch, but a deliberate attempt to get in somebody’s peripheral vision in order to prepare the ground.   Social media is ideal for this.   You just need to “like” their photo on Facebook and they are reminded you exist.   Which makes the next telephone call, less of a cold call.

    But you still feel lost.   It is as if all your customers are suddenly out of control, tweeting, blogging and posting anything they want.   It is scary and intimidating.   I am famously quoted as saying more than 15 years ago that “if you want to sell to the Greek market, your CRM system needs 11 million entries.   For starters.”    Sure, that CEO of your main customer is important and you might want to remember his wife’s birthday and kids’ names.   But those 11,000 people that “liked” your offer on Facebook yesterday and then clicked through to it on your website might be more important.   If only you knew them…