Sep
4
After Facebook and LinkedIn…?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Back from the holidays, and into the frothy turmoil of the Big Deal season. Verizon enriches every British pensioner and pension fund with a bigger boost via its Vodafone deal than the UK government has managed in years; Microsoft spends the equivalent of the GDP of Hungary as the lonely couple in the mobile phone corner decide to get married; and Jeff Bezos becomes a born-again newspaperman. Here is what he said in an interview with the Washington Post:
“I had to convince myself that I could bring something to the table,”
he said. “I discussed this at great length with Don (Graham). I thought I
could, because I could offer runway and some skill in technology and
the Internet and a point of view about long-term thinking, reader
focus and the willingness to experiment.”
Well, I am sure that he can deliver all of that, but it was the last words that caught my attention. You see, when newspapermen have experimented in the past it has been all about finding niftier ways of delivering the same old content in the same old format. Mr Bezos has been a prime mover in a different culture: you go back to the user and find out what combination of elements make him feel well-informed and give him satisfaction, then you go into beta and keep on experimenting and iterating and re-iterating… and you never finish. This is a world of work in progress. There is no “launch”, nothing can ever be left unquestioned. The quest is to become ever more essential to the user: like all great love affairs you have to keep working on it and never take it for granted.
Many of us are now caught up in the Amazon utility story (here is a test for his original customers: would you give up the ability to order or download every book whose review catches your eye if idiosyncratic bookstores who never have the book you want could be restored to the High Street?). But Amazon is a company with a difference. It will go on innovating, but once we are into same day/same hour delivery, the differentiating factors in ecommerce will start to diminish. Mr Bezos has wisely moored an escape craft to the roof of the building, like some James Bond villain of old, so that he can escape and look down at us from the Cloud – as owner of the storage that we all need to conduct our business on the networks. In my view this makes his model more robust, and the people I wonder about are the social media players.
I have heard more debate this summer about the future of Facebook than seemed imaginable a few years ago. And while I love LinkedIn (who would have thought when I first started using email in 1980 (it was called BT Gold) that one day my treasured congregation of friends would keep my rolodex up to date for me) it is becoming so big that it ceases to amuse. I am a very limited marketplace for “Four Great Thoughts of Bill Gates” or “Five Whimsical Notions from Warren Buffet”. And I have thought for a few years now that Facebook would burst under its own size pressure. The answer as I have always imagined it was a plethora on niche networks, but each of us would have an interface which collected all of the niches onto one screen, and allowed us to view them all and respond to friends without having to sign into or out of each service separately. The niche element would give greater security as well as the feeling that we are really inside a relevant community. There would be one for the immediate family, one for the golf club, one for the business sector, one for the village, one for the reading circles etc etc. And most of these are there or almost there already.
And this is a striking thought now, as we awaken to the thought that we do not really see the community element once we are much past a billion members, because I seem to be under siege at present from niche networking opportunities – and find myself signing up to them. Yes, I did join Slideshare (www.slideshare.com), because I talk a lot (yes, and often too much) and I am always interested in getting better ideas from other people’s slides. And I joined, like a nervous ingénue in fresher’s week, Charles Thiede’s clever new Zapnito network (www.zapnito.com), as a Micro Genius! There has to be a place for possessed visionaries to hang out and mutter darkly to each other. And, more seriously, there have to be better networks for sharing ideas and encouraging innovation; look at this piece about it on TNW: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/09/01/niche-networks-why-zapnito-wants-to-quieten-the-web/?awesm=tnw.to_d0bFQ&utm_campaign=social media&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Spreadus. I really hope this succeeds. And while I was at it, I signed up for the beta of BloombergConnect.com, as a network of people with interests in private equity. We shall see what the yield is from these three, but meanwhile I would like a vendor to come forward with the niche networks integration software. You see, I have this other idea that if I had on one screen all the interesting news and inputs from all of my services, they would be, well, sort of like my personal “newspaper”. Now, do you think I could sell that to Jeff Bezos?
Aug
14
Things Every Boy and Girl Should Know…
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
” Well,” she said, in a determined and slightly defensive tone of voice “the last thing we intend to do is turn ourselves into a software house. We are publishers and cannot be expected to understand software, which is such a terrible distraction. I took my correction silently and philosophically. After all, this has been a litany I have heard for a decade. And the paradox is that the more that software controls and modulates the way publishers create content, and the more it dominates the way in which users view it, the more permissible it has become for very senior executives in all sorts of places that do “publishing” (rapidly becoming a meaningless term) to proclaim with pride their ignorance of some of the basics. Some tell me “that’s what we have a CTO for”, while others tell me that it is not a creative area (yes, really!!) of their business. The largest decisions a modern information industry CEO will make concern software. The delivery – critical decisions a publisher of romantic novels will mainly concern software. We cannot avoid it – so surely every senior executive should know enough to intelligently quiz the CTO, outside suppliers and potential alliance partners?
You have now been reading for about 60 seconds. During that time, the software that holds us all in place in the network has been mightily engaged. 168 million emails were sent during that time. 694,445 Google searches took place. 320 new Twitter accounts were opened and 58,000 new tweets were posted. 600 new videos were posted – I could go on (courtesy of Go-Globe.com) but I hope you get the message. If people who run businesses they call “publishing” do not understand the platform upon which they stand, as they once understood the possibilities of print, then what hope is there for the traditional end of the market? I meet very many CEOs in the course of a working year, and in every 10 there are three who are brilliant on the bedrock technologies that drive their businesses. There are three more who struggle but know it is important. After that come four who do not really see it at all, and this group is strongest in the areas of greatest current risk – consumer book publishing, magazines and events. I almost feel as if there should be a test: Differentiate and suggest how you would use HTML5 and XML. Distinguish RDBMS databases from NoSQL databases and explain the advantages of the latter over the former. What does Epub3 allow you to do that you could not do before? How would you use the Cloud to support a reduction in Capex in your development programme? What is Open Source and is it cheaper or more expensive than proprietary software? What is entity extraction and how do I use the semantic web to add value? What is SaaS and how does it create scope for your expansion?
Readers here would doubtless have no difficulty with any of this. But still, we all – me especially – need a jolt of recognition of the speed of change at the moment. Venture Capital has a current investment of some $16 billion in SaaS software alone, with about half in business functionality (FactSet). The global software industry will top $1.1 trillion in 2016 (Gartner) – for comparison the current sizing of the publishing and information marketplace is $400 billion today (Outsell). Gartner see media and communications as a key area for the software businesses, with 2012’s spend by the sector of $61 billion rising to $78 billion in 2016. Some $21 billion of this spend ($25 billion in 2016) is for media-specialized applications. This is the top ranked vertical sector for software in 2016. My argument at the moment would be that this sale is resting on the shoulders of a very small, technically-capable group of senior buyers – it is time now for a better informed cadre of senior management to help to bear this burden, and for boards to have a generally better informed decision-making discussion which is capable of putting the view of the CTO and the professional advisers and evaluators into the medium term context of the business.
Finally, lets just look at one section of the information waterfront. This week I noted with interest the acquisition of a company called Edaboard.com by Design World (WTWH Media LLC). This brings together a leading brand which provides information services on design engineering with a community-driven forum focussed on electrical engineering topics. We have seen deals like this, and will see a lot more. But the decisions that come next – one platform or two, in-house or outsource, service integration, Cloud-based services etc will be critical to the success of this investment. I do not know Design World and I have no reason to believe that they are not fully capable of doing the job, but in many corporations of my acquaintance many of these decisions would be taken by a small coterie of tech-savvy operators, with some of the most senior people acting in faith and trust that someone else had made the right tech bets.
In a great allusion, Mike Olson of Cloudera remarked that “We are living through a Cambrian moment in database history”. As the Age of Data morphs into Data Science, we all struggle to keep up. As major data concentrations meet the Cloud, and we have to work with PaaS (Platform as a service) and DaaS (database as a service) it is not going to get slower or easier. But it is clear that the boundaries around “what we need to know to do the job” are radically changed as well. None of us should be frightened about going back to school!
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