Business Archives
March 25, 2008
Comedy voicemail service prospers
Spinvox, the service that translates your voicemails into text messages, has raised a wheelbarrow-load of money from various top-drawer sources for international expansion. I like Spinvox and the company's continued success shows that it's clever to hang out where voice and data meet. Machine translation - especially in noisy environments like mobile - is hard so it'll continue to produce opportunities. Until translation is an embedded function, until every operator offers it as a standard (and invisible) feature of voicemail, Spinvox will prosper.
The thing about Spinvox, though, is that I'm still pretty sure there aren't any machines. People who've visited the firm will tell you that there's a roomful of... well... people translating those messages. And any user will provide plenty of evidence from their own inbox of human fallibility in the call centre. I keep a small collection of genuinely hilarious Spinvox mistranslations.
From a work contact: "Hi Steve. Beats me in the arse. Please give me a call when you're available"
From a BBC Manager I know vaguely (and whose name is not John Arthur): "Hi Steve. It's John Arthur here. I do love you very much, though. Can you please give me a call"
From my wife: "Call ham Steve"
Also from my wife (whose name is Juliet): "Hi Chloey. This is Joey".
If the heavy lifting at Spinvox really is still being done by people, why do they continue to talk about their awesome software? If the software is steadily taking over (which is the most likely explanation) where are these errors coming from: the software or the people? Speaking for myself, Spinvox's comedy mistranslations are the main reason I continue to subscribe. I do hope they don't get that software working too soon.
October 16, 2007
The smug interrogating the incompetent
Is it just me or was there something nauseating about watching a gang of smug, know-nothing MPs with their jackets over their chairs and their hands behind their heads grilling Northern Rock executives about a shocking practice (selling money market-backed mortgages) that they'd almost certainly never heard of six weeks ago?
If I'd been one of those executives I'd have been sorely tempted to ask the committee some questions myself. Like "if selling mortgages backed by wholesale debt is such a bad thing why have you never examined it before in the history of your committee?" or "when was the last time any one of you asked a question in parliament about money market-backed mortgages?" or even "since when has buying cheap, selling dear and pocketing the difference been a crime?"
Northern Rock's 'crime' was to acquire debt cheaply on the International money markets and resell it at a profit to home buyers in Britain: a perfectly sound business practice and the logical outcome of the deregulation and globalisation of financial markets. The FSA obviously thought this an acceptable way of funding mortgage lending. Likewise the Bank. Neither had ever (as far as I can tell) run any kind of investigation of the practice and neither rang any alarm bells in the run up to the credit crunch.
Were Northern Rock's management complacent? Even incompetent? Possibly. Should they carry the can for the damage to British banking's credibility? Do they warrant a kicking from clueless point-scoring legislators? No.
October 05, 2005
More Japanese corporate history
I love these Japanese corporate history sites – in fact, I'm becoming a bit of a connoisseur. Nikon's is a treat, and all the better for the wobbly translation:
I, the author of this article, used to work in Nippon kogaku's designing department, felt a bitter feeling when asked by a sales representative of an electronic parts company "Isn't Nippon Kogaku K.K. going to make a "Continuous Shooting SLR"?"
A site like this is a testament to the depth and breadth of a business like Nikon and a tribute to its people. Do businesses here, in Britain, honour the creativity and diligence of their people and the historic value of the things they make in this way? No. They don't.
August 17, 2005
The eBay effect
As I keep saying, eBay makes a previously illiquid asset (the contents of your loft) marvellously, improbably liquid. According to a report from a consultancy called The Centre for Economic & Business Research written up by the FT, in fact, the average household could easily free up three grand by unloading all that old junk on eBay. This could produce the same kind of boost to the overall economy as the building society demutualisation windfalls of the nineties and might, one hopes, help to counter the grisly retail crunch that's ripping up the High Street right now.
July 17, 2005
This is how they make business myths in America
If I remember the sequence correctly, plucky little Pipex (Britain's first proper, commercial ISP) was bought by UUNet (America's first proper, commercial ISP). UUNet was subsequently bought by MCI (America's Maverick number 3 post-break-up telco), scouting round for an entry to the strange, new world of unmetered bits, which was subsequently bought by Worldcom (America's most dynamic, most Wild West telco) in a classical boom-era, equity-driven acquisition. This is how we, here in the British telecoms backwater, got a bit part in the amazing story of Bernie Ebbers, Worldcom's bouncer-turned-gutsy-entrepreneur-turned-desperate-fraud. Wow.
June 09, 2005
Wolves and loss adjusters
Today, to our house, came a loss adjuster. You've met loss adjusters – they're the lone wolves who tell the insurers to settle your claim or not (fingers crossed for that flood damage claim, people). Anyway, the wolf thing is not an excuse for a cheap loss adjuster gag. Our loss adjuster turns out to have a fascinating hinterland. Weekends he looks after wolves. Real, live (Romanian) wolves adopted by a conservation charity called Anglian Wolf and living in Bedfordshire.
Did you know that the last British wolf was shot in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century and that the last wolf living wild in England was trapped and killed nearly a thousand years ago? That tells you something about British economic history doesn't it? Nearly a millennium has passed since any part of England's landscape was wild enough to support a population of wolves.
June 07, 2005
Oh God...
At $280 Google is valued at $78 Billion. That's 50% more than the combined value of all the publicly traded newspaper groups in the US combined. Analysts seem to be happy with this, though, with CSFB forecasting a share price of $350 which would be nearly 75 times projected earnings for this year. Any of this seem familiar? People I speak to (I mean people who are supposed to know what they're talking about) say this is all cool because Google has so much room for growth in its core business (advertising) and lots of new, as-yet-unimagined businesses lined up ready for launch. It gives me sweaty palms, though. (figures from Breaking Views, by the way).
May 16, 2005
Businesses I like
Kall Kwik in Watford. My favourite kind of business: bustling, friendly, helpful, cheap and right, slap bang in the middle of the local economy. Making things happen for other businesses, almost all of them small or tiny. I wonder if there's a metric for 'contribution to the local business ecology'? If Watford's economy is a network (well, everything else seems to be...) then this little business must be a critical node – so many businesses must depend on its existence for their own survival (or at least their sanity). It also happens to be staffed by a gaggle of super-professional, super-friendly ladies who will make you a cup of tea while they run out your print job. Heart warming.
The Algerian Coffee Stores. An Old Compton Street fixture. I'm no coffee expert (just an addict) and I reckon you can get coffee as good elsewhere, but this place has always felt to me like Soho's dead centre and the place smells like heaven, not least because of the huge range of fragrant odds-and-ends they sell alongside the coffee, like cinnamon sticks and amazing spiced North African Coffee and big slabs of Chinese compressed tea (what do you do with that, then?). They've recently fancied up their web site but they still do a charming and eccentric paper newsletter you should sign up for next time you're in there and they'll mail order to anywhere in the world.
April 25, 2005
24 hours in New York
I know. I know. I didn't even see The Gates. I was in town to conclude a deal with my new friends Brad Bowers and Matt Comyns from Black Inc Ventures. Brad code-named our joint venture 'Whiplash' and, for the time being, that's all you're getting...
Matt and Brad took me for a proper American breakfast at The Pershing Square Cafe opposite Grand Central Station and then to a friend's groovy West Village apartment to sign our agreement (cue Gillette moment: slow motion high fives, back slapping etc...) and get some brainstorming done. It was the first time we'd met, after four or five months of discussions in email and Skype and on the phone.
Of course, I'm pathetically excited by this new opportunity and generally stunned by the Americans' readiness to trust a virtual stranger to run their precious business – the business equivalent of those women who befriend their death row pen friends and then marry them sight unseen. Anyway, watch this space.
I may have been there for less than a day but I did, you'll be glad to know, manage to take a couple of hundred pictures.
April 10, 2005
So long Longbridge
Heart-breaking business reality finally steam-rollers the Rover dream. Having been through one liquidation (a bit smaller, I'll admit) I feel pretty confident in saying that Rover is tragically but definitely history – its passing will be painfully and pointlessly deferred, though, because the UK Government can't acknowledge that the Phoenix route may have been the wrong one – at least not until after the election. The sad thing is that I can't have been the only person who thought Rover was done for five years ago when the Phoenix fantasy got the Government OK and £500M in cash.
What I'm wondering now is: what if some clever and realistic executives (not the ones who just took £30M out of the business, for instance) picked up the assets left behind and turned them into a green transport powerhouse. There are no significant UK manufacturers of hybrid or Hydrogen powerplants, of interesting non-carbon transport tech or of low emissions vehicles in general. Since the Hydrogen war has already been well-and-truly won (in a few years we're going to be talking about Big Hydrogen and the people behind Big Hydrogen are going to be... Big Oil!) now's the time to invest in Hydrogen transport tech. Wouldn't it be exciting if those 6,000 jobs (or a serious fraction of them) could be recycled into a really promising, really long-term business instead of being flushed down the toilet..?
Update: Wired this month has a bunch of interesting green power articles: Brendan Koerner looks at Toyota's ambition to be the number 1 hybrid/Hydrogen manufacturer, Paul Eisenstein tests all the current hybrids, and there are a lot of them: they're going to catch on quicker than you expected. Lisa Margonelli reckons the Chinese will be driving hybrid uptake, which is encouraging.
March 25, 2005
and in business news...
Fascinating and Troll-like Barry Diller buys Ask Jeeves. No visible logic to this deal but, then again, who predicted Diller's epic upside from buying the lacklustre Home Shopping Network or the equally mind-blowing outcome of his dodgy-looking 2001 Vivendi pact? Diller is a business genius and he compounds his genius by staying out at the edge of his target category and thus buying in at a fraction of the mugs' price: so it's HSN, not QVC. Ask Jeeves, not Google, USA Networks, not NBC.
Yahoo! buys flickr. This one is interesting: can the unique, clever, geeky flickr culture survive the Yahoo! steam bath? My guess: yes. Yahoo! is a friendly acquirer. They didn't buy OFoto or Smugmug or Buzznet or one of those really boring photo sharing services. They bought the best one. That says, if you ask me, that Yahoo! is alive and well. I can imagine a raft of cool enhancements to the basic Yahoo! service right now: expect flickr pics and tags to start showing up next to Yahoo! search results, in Yahoo profiles and on My Yahoo! pretty soon.
Lending goes P2P. I think this is the week's most mind-blowing arrival. Zopa (a UK firm) wants to connect ordinary borrowers with equally ordinary lenders. Borrow £10,000 and you could be borrowing it from your neighbour. No, I have no idea how they got this past the Financial Services Authority either: "So, let me get this straight: you want to be a lender?" "No, we're just going to set up person-to-person loans". "So there are going to be thousands of lenders?" "Millions, even." "And not a consumer credit licence between them?" "Not one." "Hmm..."
Zopa could do for credit what eBay did for car boot sales and BetFair for those men in loud suits at racecourses. I love the idea – it's an intriguing extension of disintermediation in an unexpected direction – but I can already hear the cries of distress from the mainstream lenders. I can also see the Daily Mail editorials once the first defaults come in and the questions in Parliament about the moral hazard produced by turning us into a Nation of usurers and deadbeats. I'm assuming the stellar personnel behind Zopa have their tin hats firmly pulled down around their ears...
February 25, 2005
Still rotting
A long time ago I ran a company called Webmedia. It was a web design firm and we earned the special distinction of 'going bust before the boom' (as one journalist pithily put it). Anyway, I've been thinking about it lately since I spent the weekend talking about business ethics in Switzerland. One incident in particular has been making me laugh. One of my managers (she ran the production department) came to me one day and asked if I'd mind if she gave me a business book she'd just read. She thought I might like it. "Sure. I said. Please do". A bit later on, and without comment, she left the book on my desk – it was called 'The Fish Rots From The Head'...
February 23, 2005
Brand not dead after all
On the way to the airport Friday I found a Swiss Army Knife at the bottom of my bag. Not much of a knife (and the little tooth pick was gone anyway) so I gave it up to the nice lady at the X-Ray machine.
On the flight I thought about the poor sods who make these things. I assumed they must have been wiped out by 9/11. Since about 75% (complete guess) of Swiss Army knives must be bought at airports and since you can no longer take them on aeroplanes I couldn't think of a viable survival strategy. Of course, I was totally wrong. Geneva airport is thick with Swiss Army Knife concessions. Giant, mechanical pen-knives open and close silently at every gate and in every souvenir store. They weren't wiped out at all. In fact, the business insight here is that even the nastiest existential shock might conceal an opportunity.
When you buy a Swiss Army Knife at an airport now, a nifty pre-paid envelope is produced and your new knife is posted back to your home. That's pretty neat but the leap forward here is that they now (obviously) capture your name and address in the sale and, with your permission, sign you up for the quarterly catalogue, special offers, ads for related products, whatever. 9/11 had the paradoxical effect, for the Swiss Army Knife people, of converting millions of customers from an undifferentiated horde of anonymous foreigners to a rather up-to-date International customer database. I hope they make good use of it.
February 15, 2005
Google's edgy brand
Will a Google takeover of Wikipedia be a good thing or a bad thing? Don't ask me. I'm more interested in what Google's offer says about the company's persistently geeky culture. I may be wrong but I'm about 90% sure that it hasn't occurred to anyone at Microsoft to host Wikipedia (this would be more their style). Wikipedia – and Wikis in general – are a good analogue for the net itself, an expression of its technically distributed and socially collaborative nature.
Wikipedia's intelligence lives, necessarily, at its edges. In fact it barely has a centre at all in the old-fashioned sense. Most businesses find that sort of thing pretty alien, which, presumably, explains why the poor, benighted (but still awesome) Encyclopaedia Britannica actually survived the net's first big attack only, by the look of it, to be completely broadsided by bottom-up knowledge sharing. Google's culture, though, evidently still thrives on funky, open, edgy phenomena like Wikipedia. Absorbing Wikipedia (which would, presumably cause barely a ripple in Google's Ocean of CPU and bandwidth) might be commercial nonsense but it shows that the brand is alive and well.
February 04, 2005
What's the story?
Reading about Microsoft's belated entry to grown-up web search the thing that struck me was actually how level the playing field is right now. According to Infoworld, search breaks down like this: Google: 34.7%. Yahoo: 31.9%. MSN: 16.3% and AOL (Time Warner): 9.4%. That leaves about 8% for the gaggle of 'others' (including the benighted Ask Jeeves). Hardly a one-horse race.
February 02, 2005
Best spam this week
From: "Richard" (qyield@yahoo.com.cn) Date: 28 January 2005 05:13:30 GMT To: steve@bowbrick.com Subject: tent Reply-To: sales@jxtrade.cn
To Whom It May Concern,
We have learned from the Internet that you are interested in tents...
January 25, 2005
How to throw away a natural advantage
The UK cable TV business is a uniquely dysfunctional family, managing to marry epic individual clumsiness with the kind of domestic chaos that continually threatens to bring the whole family down. Having (nearly) overcome the decades of forced disarray produced by its origin in dozens of separate, local companies, the industry's getting ready for another gigantic misstep – this time into Video on Demand (VoD).
I suppose, when you own a broadband pipe into every one of your customer's homes, the logic of VoD must be pretty compelling. It must also be immensely frustrating that, so long after Sky's arrival in the UK, the satellite firm still owns the multichannel marketplace despite the complete absence of a return path, no way of delivering Internet access or a phone line and the unavoidable requirement to fix a nasty wart to the side of every home covered.
Cable's response to Sky's continued dominance, perhaps understandably, is to push ahead with the medium's natural advantage and try to make a go of VoD (you can't do VoD without a network infrastructure and a proper return path so Sky just can't play). There is, presumably, a point some time in the future when owning a fast, two-way data path into every home finally pays off and cable comes into its own but, as far as I can see, you'd need to be criminally naive to think that that time has arrived. This is still very much Sky's market and the service of the moment is not VoD (or even NVoD – Near Video on Demand – which is a big hit on both Sky and3 cable) but Sky Plus.
The complete failure of the cable firms to roll out their own Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is perhaps partially explained by the announcement of their VoD plans but VoD won't come close to competing with Sky Plus (or even my five year-old Tivo) any time soon. By contrast, building a PVR for cable would have been a piece of cake – the technology is straightforward, the manufacturers ready and waiting and the kit cheaper than it's ever been. Rolling out PVRs into the cable network would be no more difficult than distributing, say, a new generation of remote controls. There'd be no impact on the infrastructure and hardly any CapEx – just a marketing and admin cost plus maybe some investment in an improved EPG (although I'm sure the Tivo people would be quite happy to share theirs). Sky has even done half the marketing job already – everyone knows what a PVR is now ("you know, the thing that lets you rewind live telly").
So, instead of taking the easy win and, not incidentally, boosting ARPU by taking an extra couple of hundred quid a year from PVR subscribers, the cable industry has, once again, chosen the rocky road of rolling out a new and expensive technology into a resistant marketplace while Sky continues to sell PVRs like ice creams in August. Oy.
January 19, 2005
eBay people
Like you (I assume), we spent a lot of money on eBay this Xmas – lots of cheap Lego and Hello Kitty and Geomag plus toys that were unobtainable in the shops. Let's face it, you can get anything on eBay (except a gun) but the experience is very different from shopping at John Lewis or from a catalogue. Why?
1. You'll get objectively better customer service. Everything comes the next day. If it doesn't come the next day you'll get a personally-addressed apologetic note and probably some kind of compensation.
2. A good eBay rating is a guarantee of good service. You can fake an eBay reputation but not a really good one. Buying something from an eBay seller with a rating of, say, 1,000+ will always be better than buying from M&S or John Lewis or [insert your customer service King here].
3. eBay sellers worry about customer service above all. You get exactly what you were expecting. Full stop. This turns out to be a phenomenally effective retail model and it means eBay sellers can stop worrying about other classical retail success factors like terms of trade and price.
4. eBay people are people people. Grumpy, impatient people needn't apply – they can't be bothered to lovingly package and despatch hundreds of low cost items, manage feedback and handle dozens of trivial customer queries. Only nice people do this, so buying something on eBay is almost always a pleasant experience.
Conventional retailers have to worry about a lot of factors: customer service (timeliness, courtesy, quality etc.), terms of trade (return policies etc.) and price (cheap or not) being the big three. eBay sellers worry only about customer service. Price is taken care of by the auction process and sellers' terms of trade are typically as tough as old boots. The lesson is simple: if your customer service is impeccable you don't need good terms of trade and price stops being the number 1 factor.
I find myself wondering whether real world retailers could benefit from adopting some of these uniquely eBay values. A clothing retailer who decided to fanatically over-deliver on customer service might, for instance, be able to toughen up on terms of trade and thus reduce the punishing cost of handling returned items. A supermarket who went customer service crazy might find a way out of the price crunch that threatens to wipe half of them out.
eBay sellers are telling retailers: if you invest more in really unflappable customer service you can toughen up those pussy-cat return policies and save a fortune. And, of course, it's more urgent than you think: a generation of eBay-literate customers is now saying: I'm not really bothered about your remedial, disaster recovery policies. I just want what I asked for.
November 30, 2004
Software stories
Anyone who does product design or marketing should read this entertaining and inspiring account of the history of a Mac software product called Audion. Why? Because a) more and more products will be made and marketed like software (and because more and more products will actually be software), b) because the Panic team's passion and sense of fun should be a model for any product team, c) because story telling should be more important in product marketing and d) because this kind of honesty and modesty is rare in business and should be encouraged...
November 23, 2004
I think I've waited long enough...
I'm really thrilled to be able to say that I've been enjoying Azeem and Shen's new venture a lot (resisting the temptation to illustrate this entry with a wedding photo). Mink Media has entered into the Thin Media business with a rush and their first two titles are excellent and part of what looks like a really well-rounded commercial package. The Honourable Fiend (Westminster politics) is my favourite but I reckon Wanda Lust (travel) will grow on me too, once it finds its tone of voice (which is harder with PR-heavy travel material to work with, I reckon).
I'm enjoying Hon Fiend enough to urge the guys to switch comments on – I keep reaching for my quill pen – although I think I'll understand if they don't. Even this humble blog is now ploughing through 300-400 comment-spams per day and sorting out the real comments from the crap is getting more tiresome by the day. I think everyone acknowledges that blog media is still at best an each-way bet for the big time but ventures like this one are going to really help to nudge the form into the business mainstream. Good luck guys!
October 10, 2004
Digital guilt
Kodak are laying off 600 people in the UK because of digital cameras. Now I feel really bad about finally going digital. It's easy enough to damn a big firm like Kodak – they should have responded differently to digital, they should have repositioned as a service business for digital consumers, they should have dumped analogue sooner, they should have bought this company or that... but these giant, technological or social changes are almost impossible to respond to with panache.
Kodak's survival into the digital era is now uncertain – the analogue generation is aging faster than we expected, middle class families want the immediacy of digital and the next generation of photographers won't know how to load a roll of film. There's a reasonable chance that Kodak won't make it, that the business will be carved up by opportunists or fade away entirely. A few weeks ago, Ilford, venerable UK supplier of B&W materials, went into administration for the same reason. Only the nimblest of companies could manage a transition as dramatic as analogue-to-digital and these businesses are not, by any definition, nimble.
October 07, 2004
My new thing
So I'm up late making some improvised business cards for my new thing – which is called Thinner Media (and which doesn't strictly exist yet and certainly doesn't have a web site so don't ask). I'm going to hand the cards out at tomorrow night's 'An Internet Decade', one of a string of 'the net is ten' events over the next few months. This one's organised, as far as I can tell, by the DTI, NOP and e-consultancy. 100 of us (of uncertain pedigree, for sure) are to be 'honoured' for our contribution to the UK Internet over the last ten years. We are to be addressed by Tim Berners-Lee, our only authentic grandee. Ivan will, inevitably, be there...
I'm entertaining a fantasy that, once we've all had a glass or two of warm white wine, we'll be taken out into the alley and given a good kicking – “and that's for the ridiculous online petfood store, and that's for the stupid lawn in the middle of your fucking office and that's for sticking .com on the end of your name in a pathetic attempt to boost your share price and, you bastard, that's for the string of major league baseball teams you bought with the money you looted from my pension fund!” Think I'll stay at home.
October 04, 2004
Happy birthday Easynet!
This wild-eyed man is Dave Rowe, founder and veteran CEO of business ISP Easynet. Dave was our first landlord at Webmedia in 1994 and last week he invited me (and Ivan, naturally) to Easynet's tenth anniversary do – and very nice it was too.
On meeting Dave this time I asked (like you do) "what's new?". Dave didn't say "not much" or anything like that. He proceeded to give me a dazzling five minute summary of the state of the networking and telecoms business – from local loop unbundling to VOIP and from broadband to Frame Relay. Wish I could remember a word of it...
Click the small pic for a bigger one.
September 16, 2004
Anti-corporate sneakers
Business baiting is back in fashion. Don't get me wrong. I'm a firm believer in hassling corporations mercilessly until they meet their obligations – to societies, communities and economies – but I'd like to see some balance and maybe a less dogmatic appreciation of the benefits of the corporate model too.
Sure, if you eat nothing but McDonalds for a month you're going to get ill (in my follow-up I'm going to eat nothing but lettuce, get malnutrition, win a Golden Bear and single-handedly bring down the evil salad cartel) but when was the last time your local macrobiotic cafe gave $5M to UNICEF to combat neonatal tetanus? Starbucks may be big and boring (I mean really boring) but how many microcredit loans to South American smallholders were underwritten by your favourite independent coffee shop last year?
There's a serious point here: businesses like McDonalds, Nike, Starbucks are not islands. They are continually changed and deflected by outside forces, including shareholder and customer activism (a fruit Happy Meal?). In fact, businesses are better able to respond to these forces than almost any other institution. Businesses are good at change – it's what they do best. The structure of the modern corporation organises resources and capital to produce maximum change (new sources of excess profit) while protecting income from long-term assets (property, ideas, people). A business is really a machine for holding in balance constant change and necessary stasis. Compare the rate of change at your bank or telephone company to that in, say, a Government department or a church or a charity, all of which have a much greater investment in staying the same than any business. Compare Nike now, after decades of pressure from the sweatshop campaigners (and now competing, anti-corporate sneakers), to the bad old Nike of lowest-cost production and child labour.
I'm not arguing for a more forgiving attitude to business – constant pressure from activists and Governments is a vital driver for this new kind of business, part of the contemporary consumer landscape – but I do want us to at least notice when businesses do good things for the environment, promote social change, support communities or improve the circumstances of their workers.
If we can celebrate the good companies as much as we condemn the backward, damaging and greedy behaviour of the bad ones, we might harness the immense potential for change that business embodies and, while we're at it, trigger the kind of virtuous circle that produces more corporate responsibility and improves things for everyone.
July 17, 2004
Two kinds of business insight
Here's a really fascinating peek inside the Movable Type machine from Mena Trott. Like a lot of inventors, she's giving up the CEO role in favour of a more experienced operator. People usually keep schtum about this kind of thing... While I'm posting business stuff, a terrific piece from Business Week about the decline of Sun and Scott McNealy's heroic mistakes. Incidentally, these two pieces are a good illustration of the difference between blogging (high concept) and journalism (high production values). Trott's blog entry is an immensely valuable insight into her business and the way business is done now – from her own, properly subjective, perspective. The Business Week piece is a big budget production – written by a team. Forty Sun executives, past and present, were interviewed for the story. No blogger will ever be able to throw that kind of resource at a story. A recipe for coexistence, if you ask me...
July 13, 2004
A car for cartoon villains
I can't tell you how much it cheers me up to learn that the number 2 result for 'hummer h2' at Google is a marvelous bit of brand mischief called Fuck You and Your H2. So far, 845 people have taken the trouble to give the finger to a Hummer, take a photograph and upload it to FUH2. How's that for engagement with the brand? It's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the H2 is the world's stupidest car: 3,500 kilos of bog standard 4x4 wrapped in a brutalist pseudo-military suburban assault vehicle skin that resembles the original Hummer, as popularised by macho celebrities after the first Gulf War.
There's one round the corner from our house – black with black glass, natch – sporting a set of bling bling chrome wheel rims that keep spinning even after you've stopped the car – perhaps the most childish aftermarket car accessory in history – "Look! My wheels keep spinning even after I've stopped! It looks like I'm driving along really fast even when I'm at a red light!"
Anyway, the H2 must surely represent the high water mark for the 4X4. Although it's been a big hit and is already spawning clones from half a dozen manufacturers (and they're assembling the damn things in Russia now), sales of the three-and-a-half tonne school run device are down by a quarter since the invasion of Iraq.
The H2 and its ilk are the contemporary equivalent of the muscle cars of the early seventies – killed off by that other oil crisis – only with less charm. Steve McQueen could drive a Mustang in Bullitt and Warren Oates a GTO in Two Lane Blacktop but only a cartoon villain (Emissions Man?) would drive a Hummer. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a lot to answer for.
July 06, 2004
Why don't more cars look like this?
Saw the two Nissan Figaros in the top pic on a forecourt round the corner – someone's obviously developing a specialism. Why, meanwhile, in the ocean of car choice, is there so little real variation? The design vocabulary of cars is so restricted and advances so slowly. What are the keywords on the mood boards at the car designers these days: sexy, aggressive, practical, safe, sporty, flexible, successful, family, active, fun? Other designed goods have a much wider vocabulary – what's wrong with: 'eccentric, cheeky, brassy, edgy, funny, baroque, playful, green, chintzy, daft, alternative'? Why are clever cars like the 1991 Figaro stuck in a sort of experimental ghetto? Are we so inflexible, so blinded by decades of auto engineering convention that we can't imagine ourselves in something new?
Ivan points out that what we actually like about cars might be different from what we tell the manufacturers in those focus groups – for instance, in the latest brilliant Peugeot 407 ad, the car I really want is the oversize wooden baby toy and not the very dull 407 itself.
June 26, 2004
Making things in a deflationary climate
The economics of making things is all over the place these days. I guess I understand how Argos can sell this really handsome steel barbecue for £9.99 (that's how much it costs if you visit a store) or John Lewis this beautiful six colour photo printer for £49.95 (likewise, it seems to be cheaper in-store than on the web site) or Dell this amazingly good PC for £369.00 (including delivery) but what I don't get is what happens once the margins have been driven out of the system entirely.
Presumably someone in Argos' supply chain is actually making some money on those barbecues but this continuous downward pressure on prices must mean that, in the end, once all the profit has been flushed out and passed back to the customer (this is a good time to be a customer), no one makes any money at all... Then what?
Links: The Economist and Paul Krugman, famously, on deflation and how to prevent it. Tesco saw deflation in non-food products in the last quarter. So did Japan (again).
June 23, 2004
Simpson of Piccadilly
Dropped into the lovely Simpson of Piccadilly yesterday – now no longer a classy clothing department store but a giant Waterstones book shop. When I got my first proper job I used to get my shirts there (I seem to remember you could buy a shirt from them and they'd repair the collar for you every time it wore out for nothing – can that possibly be true?). The shop was built especially for Simpson (home of the Daks brand – ready-to-wear innovators at a time when men still had their suits made for them) in 1936 and Waterstones have retained most of the important detail (I suppose they had no choice) – including the tiny lifts, the handsome curving handrails in the six storey stairwell and the genuinely beautiful curved glass windows on the Piccadilly side.
That other retail shrine in Tottenham Court Road – Heal's (also a Victorian design pioneer) – had similar windows but I guess they're a dreadful waste of retail space and now they're gone. I'm certain removing them was a false economy since they do beautiful things for the stock on display – canceling glare entirely even on a sunny day. Simpson was an innovator in its time – pioneering mass produced style and industrial-era marketing techniques – so I guess it's appropriate that modern innovators Waterstones should be there now.
(Click the small pics for bigger ones).
June 11, 2004
Middle management anarchists
Notcon was, of course, splendid. I didn't see enough of it to provide much of an overview (so you might want to read these guys: Wired News, David Brake, himself, Will Davies) but I so enjoyed the two presentations in my own session (the.. erm... 'business' strand) that I wanted to link to them for you. Tom Dolan's 'Shit I'm a Manager' was a handy primer for new managers but it was engaging principally because Tom has obviously really enjoyed learning about managing people and projects. I think he's probably an excellent and inspiring manager. Pete Windle's highly sarcastic 'Mediocraties of Scale' ran to about four minutes but his idea – we need to industrialise software production sharpish – was clever and almost certainly correct (Oops. Pete's presentation doesn't seem to be online).
June 04, 2004
World's oldest company?
I sat down today to write 300 words for a special New Media Age to mark ten years of 'new media' in Britain and I thought I'd just get some perspective and see if I could find out how old a business can really get. Anyway, in Japan, I learn, there's a family-owned building firm that's 1400 years old. They completed their first job in 598 – or at least they will do as soon as they can get a skip... (of course, this article is a year old so they've probably gone bust by now – which would be pretty funny, really, wouldn't it)
May 27, 2004
The food industry is not the enemy
Ad people are clever – problem-solvers by nature. Stopping them from using celebrities to promote food to kids is dumb because it's just another creative constraint and ad people eat creative constraints for breakfast. Likely net effect on the sales of high sugar, high fat food to kids? Zero. A clever approach would exploit the collective brains of the marketing community by setting them a huge, industry-wide challenge – one with some measurable goals: increase take-up of municipal sports facilities amongst kids by 15%, reduce the incidence of early-onset diabetes by 5%, grow sales of 'green light' foods through fast food outlets by 10%... that kind of thing. The ad industry doesn't need a bunch of clueless and ineffective new rules – they just need a good brief.
Their clients are a different matter, though. Manufacturers and retailers need different incentives – some real legal constraints: mandated reductions in salt and sugar content and scary labeling for 'red light' foods, for example. Once the new constraints are in place, though, the creativity of the industry should take over. Look at McDonalds. The nasty prospect of commercial annihilation at the hands of next wave outlets (from trendy soup-in-a-hurry merchants to cool 'third place' coffee lounges) has produced a flurry of changes to the menu: from the cosmetic and largely pointless (organic milk, free range eggs) to substantive dietary novelty (salads, fruit happy meals). McDonalds is a brand in transition – I'll bet you a Big Mac you won't recognise The Golden Arches in five years. Call me credulous but I think the food industry, given some smart guidance from legislators and some help from their creatives, could surprise us by helping to deliver a healthier population sooner than we think.
Some links: opposition to regulation from a Times leader, remarkably comprehensive obesity briefing from The Daily Mail, Gay.com on Lord Tebbit's hilarious buggery gag on The Today Programme. Chairman of the Food Standards Agency on the obesity crisis.
May 13, 2004
But is there a redemption penalty?
I can't tell you what a relief it is that God has finally entered the highly competitive sub-prime lending market (from today's slightly-more-entertaining-than-usual spam).
May 07, 2004
No, really. I'm fine. I didn't want any Google shares anyway
Like I said, me and Warren Buffet, we won't be buying any Google shares in the company's upcoming IPO. Of course, he could actually buy some if he felt like it. I'm not allowed to because I don't live in the USA.
May 05, 2004
Why I'm getting lots of extra traffic (and still won't be buying any Google shares)
Bowblog's site traffic has nearly doubled in the last few weeks. I'd like to think this has something to do with the sustained wit and verve of my writing but I'm afraid it's almost all to do with this entry, in which I dole out free worthless investment advice to people thinking of buying Google stock (James Crabtree added some interesting comments too). If my traffic boost is representative then Google's IPO is already producing an economic lift for the net, even before the date's been set – at least for bandwidth providers.
The FT has a good briefing page on the IPO (for most of which you'll need a subscription). Business Week has a useful Q&A for the planned Dutch auction and some scepticism about the company's longer term prospects.
April 16, 2004
Do me a favour, Ms Figueroa!
The sainted geeks at Google want to read your email and embed relevant ads in return for 1GB of free storage. News at 11. Sounds like a pretty good trade. We planned to do exactly this at another.com (which was, as I'm sure you'll remember, the UK's number one email service for a heady year or two) and even Stuart, our authentic geek conscience, thought this was a pretty good idea since we wouldn't really be reading your email, just parsing it (note: Stuart has a degree in philosophy. He has no difficulty with the difference between parsing and reading). In the end, we decided to take the direct route and charge our customers cash money for using the service. In fact, I think this might be a better strategy for a powerful brand like Google but I really don't think we can blame them for trying to balance privacy, security and convenience to produce a sustainable business that fits with their other (free) services.
Meanwhile, in California, which I thought was the spiritual home of free market capitalism and a place where exercising your free will is a compulsory daily chore, like flossing, a Senator Figueroa is framing legislation to stop GMail. She says Google's embedded ads are like: "having a massive billboard in the middle of your home". If someone knocked on my door and offered me the opportunity to have a massive billboard in the middle of my home I might say 'no' – or I might (what the hell) say 'yes'. Figueroa has presumably been nobbled by Google's competition or simply fails to understand the nature of choice on the net. Either way, her naivety could be seriously damaging to Google and to other online innovators.
February 12, 2004
The really big deal
I know a lot of you come here for straightforward, unbiased advice on what to do with your next $66 billion so here's my angle on the Comcast Disney offer: they're on drugs. Executives in big media firms are addicted to the buzz of the epic deal. Do we not have enough case studies of failed mega media mergers? More to the point, what's the success rate of mergers that produce vertically-integrated media giants? Sony and Columbia, AOL and Time Warner, Time Warner and Turner, Vivendi and Universal (and dozens of smaller but equally ill-starred deals) were all sold to shareholders on the promise of producing new value by hooking together content and distribution.
None created appreciable value – in fact, most destroyed truckloads of shareholders' money in short order – some of these deals have turned healthy businesses into basket cases. The fact that the engineers of these deals continue to produce the same discredited justifications – Comcast CEO Brian Roberts says: "There is no doubt these two companies can achieve things together that neither is able to do on their own" – says more about the irresistible glamour of the really big deals than about their commercial logic.
Some people don't agree: Business Week, Forrester. Lex in the FT lays out some defense strategies for Disney (subscription required).
December 10, 2003
High Street Showbiz
The Economist on the future of retail – playing out in a mall near you if you live in the United States, ever the over-heated laboratory for this kind of thing. Summary: it's roll reversal time for the retailers. Traditionally mall-bound department stores (Sears, for instance) are moving out of town and building multi-acre warehouses. The warehouse types (Walmart, Target) are taking over the abandoned multi-floor mall sites always thought to be too expensive to operate for a discounter.
Downtown department stores are turning into 'showcases' (like Selfridges in the UK) where more than half the floor space is stocked and managed by third parties. Supermarkets are leveraging huge purchasing clout and customer base to take business from everybody. Scrappy specialist retailers are filling gaps and stealing margins from the old-fashioned stores who are stuck with thousands of unprofitable lines they have to keep for their old-fashioned customers – and they're worried.
George Jones, CEO of venerable Saks, says: "the model is so illogical. The model is messed up. There's a real win out there for a company that can break out of that mould." This is gripping stuff, at least partly because we all do retail all the time – it's like breathing (name a day in the last month when you didn't enter a shop – real or virtual). Show business was never so exciting (and I bet he didn't say ‘messed up’).
November 11, 2003
I dreamt this
If you dial 1471 from a BT phone you can find out the last number that called you (you can get the last five numbers now, in fact). If you dial 1671 (or something) you should get the next five numbers. You could charge a lot of money for a service like that.
November 03, 2003
Looking for Laurent
Laurent Byford (or is it Bayford?) used to work at a web design firm called Designercity (now defunct). I need to contact him urgently on some another.com business. Do you know him? Do you have any idea where he might be? I understand he is French and returned there after he left Designercity but that he's now back in the UK.
October 29, 2003
Why I won't be buying any Google shares
Actually, it's quite boring. I won't be buying any shares in Google because I never buy shares in anything. The only businesses I've owned shares in are my own. This probably explains why I wasn't on Concorde's final flight last week.
Anyway, Google is now such a household word that you can barely pick out the news about the IPO from the casual mentions of the brand everywhere. Try searching for 'google' at The Guardian, for instance.
This is an extraordinary brand, crossing over from weird, stripped-down, geek phenomenon to mainstream consumer fixture in three years.
Zoe Williams Googles herself. An unnamed correspondent in The Times scrabbles for laughs with Google's translation services. Tom Reilly celebrates Googlewhacking in The Observer (Hey, I've got one of those, sort of).
Closer to the point, Vic Keegan, in The Guardian, laments the flotation and John Gapper in the FT worries about Google's fragile technology lead.
People have a skewed, idealised image of Google. Businesses, once they've achieved a certain size, look for a stock market listing. That's how capitalism works. Listed businesses get access to larger amounts of (cheaper) capital than private ones. They use it to build boring, mainstream businesses and these businesses create jobs and boost economies. The idea that Google might have avoided going public is a product of the twisted Internet imagination. A privately held Google could never really change the world. The obvious risks from exposure to the great unwashed are inevitably outweighed by the growth that access to all that fresh capital will produce. There is a reason why important businesses are listed on stock markets and Google – unconventional image notwithstanding – can't ignore this.
Homework: make a list of very large privately owned companies (Bertelsmann?). Now make a list of really important privately owned companies – ones that can move cultures and economies over the long term (clue: there aren't any). Google, like any proper business, consciously and unconsciously longs for influence, notoriety, longevity, scale – all of which flow from a stock market listing much more easily than from a nice, quiet, private life out of the mainstream.
October 26, 2003
Things I'd have been reading if I'd been reading the right things lately
Tom Standage's survey 'Beyond the Bubble' from the Economist a couple of weeks ago. You could use these, beautifully written, periodic Economist surveys to plot a pretty accurate graph of sentiment in telecoms and the net business over the last decade. I've kept them all, over the years – covering telecoms, the net and ecommerce.
In the old days (that would be 95–99, I guess) I remember ordering boxes of reprints from The Economist and sending them out with brochures for my web design firm. "Look", I'd say, "it's all real, It says so right here in The Economist!" Frances Cairncross, the Economist's original telecoms seer (and author of The Death of Distance, a book that looked like a pretty sober evaluation of the net's promise when it was published but these days looks more like a brochure for Bubble Inc.), wrote the Economist's reports on the sector in those days. She seems to have staged a tactical retreat to loftier matters of social and economic policy now, though. Very sensible.
The Guardian's pull-out survey on housing regeneration, from 24 September (not apparently online, though – unless you know better). Can't really think of a bigger social issue in this country right now – we're going to need 5 Million new homes over the next couple of decades – but one that media and politicians relegate to a NIMBY ghetto somewhere behind asylum and gun crime. Only the post-war housing crunch presented a bigger opportunity to rethink urban policy and that crisis brought us a wholesale reengineering of mainstream housing in Britain (epic slum clearances, prefabs, sprawling council estates, misconceived high rises and – finally – the mass privatisation of public housing under Thatcher). Why aren't we paying attention this time round, though?
October 07, 2003
The caffeine economy
Friday, schlepped around town with Stuart, talking wi-fi with Mike Nutley, veteran New Media Age editor (He's pleased to point out that his tenure spans the magazine's fattest ever issue – swollen with boom-era dot.com ads – and its thinnest – 32 pages) and Nigel Shardlow, Head of Something Exciting and Mysterious at Orange, alumnus of High Concept, boom-era management consultancy The Fourth Room and over-qualified zombie expert.
The big thing, though, wasn't the interesting range of public wi-fi options on offer but the sheer quantity of caffeine consumed – Costa Coffee (BT Openzone, ridiculously expensive), Blacks (no wi-fi here. No. Never. No way), Starbucks (TMobile, stupidly expensive), Caffè Nero (Surf And Sip, much too expensive) and Ben Ugo (half an hour free wi-fi with any purchase – what nice people). What impact is all this extra coffee having on our economy and our culture? Jittery? Moi?