Jan
5
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
My holiday reading, courtesy of Skip Pritchard who gave it to me, has been Michael Korda’s vast biography of T E Lawrence, and despite my familiarity with the story, I have found it an entrancing experience. Lawrence is almost impossible to reconstruct, since he shone a different light in the direction of every individual he met, and one is left feeling that nowhere does a real Lawrence exist. So very like the information game, then! Every observer sees a different fraction of play, and no one can predict the outcome. This comment is meant to mask my residual guilt at reading my book while my knee mended and not writing pages of forecasts and predictions for the amusement of readers, and to confirm my frailties as a prophet of anything.
Lawrence wrote “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, one of the world’s unread classics (and almost unreadable in parts: he lost the only copy of the full manuscript on Reading train station and had to recreate 200,000 words, during which he clearly became bored.) In 800 words I can communicate seven thoughts – not so much Pillars as pillows, and not predictions but observations of this unknowable industry. Here goes:
1. Some think its about content and others that it is about platforms and technology. For me it is still about communications, and the greatest challenge is still holding people’s attention, having gained their recognition. Even Facebook hits a plateau. The gods remain Reputation, Identity, and Attention.
2. You are either a communication company or you are not. News Corp is a format company. It does newspapers, film and television and has little corporate bandwidth for non-format communications. This cannot be changed by executive whim, and the collapse of Beyond Oblivion, its music initiative, before the holidays (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds), as well as the veil of silence around the performance of The Daily on the iPad, following on as they do the oblivion that was My Space, demonstrates all of this very well. Yet Mr Murdoch has signed on to Twitter. There is no evidence yet that the world can be saved with a single Tweet. There is no evidence yet that traditional media and information businesses can recreate themselves in new marketplaces without either starting afresh somewhere else or by buying a new business and moving into it. Boinc.
3. Apple, according to MacRumors (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/apples-january-media-event-to-involve-digital-textbooks-and-education/), is about to enter the textbook market, maybe with Pearson and certainly via the iPad. This was apparently a dearly held dream of Steve Jobs, at least according to Walter Isaacson, who is shaping up to be not just the biographer but also the Delphic oracle. I have some doubts – not about the iPad as a display device, but about whether markets want textbooks re-invented. Learners would like learning re-invented, and made easier and more compelling. Textbooks are an extinct format. And learning should operate equally well on whatever platform you have available. What a waste of all this energy around eLearning if we abolish the old formats like textbooks and replace them with rigid device platforms. And yet I am sure that the analysts are right – there are only a few global growth markets and education is the largest.
4. Then I had a great comment from Brad Patterson at EduLang (www.edulang.com). He points out that 500 million people are trying to learn English and only 50 million can afford textbooks, online or otherwise. So his business model for his interesting TOEFL and TOIEC Simulators is “pay what you can”, with half going to a reading charity. In many ways this is very neat – it reaches out to 450 million people with a trust relationship, and could be a really interesting business model to watch. Above all, how encouraging it is to see someone moving the goalposts – we did not score many goals in regular business model configurations so lets applaud the courage of someone doing something different.
5. Semantic Web technology and deployment in mass markets is getting closer and closer. I took part in the beta of Garlik (www.garlik.com) some 3 years ago, partly because of an interest in technology around identity, and partly out of interest in technologies derived from the University of Southampton Computer Science department, and blessed by such eminences as Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt – and Sir Tim Berners Lee himself. Two days before Christmas Garlik was sold to Experian, in a move that I think was as significant as Reuters buying ClearForest all those years ago. Garlik protects personal identity through web search, was founded by the men who built the UK online banks Egg and First Direct, and backed by Doughty Hanson. This is a straw in a wind which will go galeforce.
6. But if the Semantic Web is going to be so clever, and linked data will recreate so many service environments, where is it now? Well, look at the obvious places. In most of our economies building and construction is the largest sector in terms of activity and players, large and small, and has great companies serving it with supplier and materials information. Thus, in a US market replete with Reed Construction, Hanley Wood and McGraw-Hill. But what if a semantic web-based environment were able to search all online catalogues and directories to produce a sweeping coverage of suppliers and products that was at once more detailed and more comprehensive than any directory-style database, and could include more metadata from suppliers and users to create a continually developing industry specification site, deliverable and self-formatting to every platform and device? That is what interests me about MaterialSource, (http://www.materialsource.com/about) as well as its use of SPARQL, Semantic Web Pages for faceted and graph-based browsing, smartphone and tablet Apps using HTML5, ontologies etc, etc. If they do it, someone will have to buy them!
7. I keep on thinking about the neglect of audio, so I was delighted to see SoundCloud (http://soundcloud.com/). There has to be room for an audio portal, and a community for sharing sound and cross-referencing its sources and users. I anticipate that they know things about users that Beyond Oblivion didn’t.
Last words of a predictive nature before I get back to real work. A correspondent asks “what technology are you following in 2012!” Since I say every week that I am not following technologies but users, I take mild offense at this, but I do admit to a penchant for 3D printing. Now that really could have an impact. Especially in medical workflow. I have also been asked by a venture capitalist who should know better what is likely “to be certain” to succeed this year. He is a serious man so I owe him a serious answer: anything that saves more time and money than it costs. The prime example this year in the UK has been Shutl, a delivery logistics service that gets your online purchases to you physically (average delivery time in London was 90 minutes, with a cost of £5). Is that all the queries? I am beginning to feel like an Agony Aunt!
Dec
3
Accelerated Departures Confront Reality Shock
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, internet, news media, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Workflow | 1 Comment
You can tell when even major corporates are embarrassed. Their use of language deteriorates to the point when meaning (hopefully) vanishes and we hacks are left to put our own, corporately deniable, slant on their gnomic pronouncements. Thus it is with the “accelerated departure” of Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters. What exactly does that mean? Did he leave before his time, or was he unexpectedly ejected? The rumour mill had it that he was going in April 2012, so was the acceleration to be found there (his fourth anniversary is not a huge senior service for such a stable outfit as Thomson Reuters), or in his contract, or elsewhere? And did he know, or was he pushed?
Certainly it is always alleged that his predecessor, Dick Harrington, did not know that a discreet negotiation continued behind the scenes bringing Thomson and Reuters together with no place in it for him. That, if true, must have been a surprise. Did Tom Glocer come by a similar “confronts reality” shock, as the FT termed it? And what was the reality that was being confronted? I can think of at least three realities that must needs be in the minds of Thomson Reuters CEOs, and none of them relate to the decline in market value which is widely blamed for triggering these changes. The first, and most important, is the nature of the company’s ownership. Wherever a big player is really 55% controlled by the family of its original founders, confidence issues will come into play. This is real control, not the artificial dominance of voting shares practised by Murdochs or Harmsworths in defiance of market views of good practice. And this real control means that, as in the eighteenth century, once the incumbent first minister loses the confidence of the King and his closest advisor, it is impossible to continue in office. That rule applied to the reign of Ken Thomson and John Tory, as it does in the Woodbridge Trust of David Thomson and Geoffrey Beattie. It is simple and natural; you go when the owners no longer believe you can deliver.
And since Thomson Reuters are the largest professional player in the marketplace, it is worth asking what these men need to have confidence about. As far as the press commentary is concerned, one would think that the only issue is the Eikon terminal and its slow start. Well, the history of Reuters is littered with slow starts, one of which let Bloomberg into the marketplace to begin with, and several of which cumulated to create this peculiar position where the smartest and most modern application is also the cheapest and has lost market share in the recession to Bloomberg’s older and more expensive option. In each of these cycles the market for trading systems has returned to rough parity. Over at the professional side of Thomson they know about these cycles, having sometimes been up and sometimes down, but in that market they are currently in the Bloomberg position and Lexis are in the Reuters position. So did Tom Glocer’s acceleration towards the swing doors relate to all this?
Certainly this may have been the symptom, but perhaps it was not the underlying problem. The mandate that Tom Glocer accepted was to build an integrated company and it is possible, as the company became wracked by the issue of combining the parts to create new growth as a whole, that the Woodbridge owners began to doubt whether this aim was ever going to be achieved through these policies. Certainly the sacrificial slaughter of a layer of Reuters management and the balkanization of the company into an unmanageable number of operating units did not lull any misgivings in Toronto, though they may have given rise to rejoicing in old Thomson management circles, where the attitudes of their new Reuters colleagues had been met with all of the enthusiasm that the Anglo-Saxons showed to their new Norman rulers. In the new dispensation we are back down to five divisions, with former Reuters strategy chief (latterly running GRC) David Craig taking the old Market divisions, Legal going to Mike Suchsland, Tax and Accounting to Brian Peccarelli, and Global Growth to Shanker Ramamurthy. Jon Robson gets the Business Development role. What factor is common to all of these? None of them comes from a very long term Reuters and/or Thomson background. A generation has effectively passed.
And what of Jim Smith, the new CEO. Some commentators have him as a caretaker, awaiting the new strategic leader to be found and installed. Others, and I incline to this view, see him as chairman and arbiter of resource and manpower development and deployment to support and drive the integration of these two companies. So not a traditional Thomson CEO, any more than Erik Enstrom is a traditional Reed Elsevier CEO. In the latter case one has a feeling of a profoundly numerate portfolio owner looking to encourage the growth points with acquisition investment, dispose of underperformers and reward successful managers who reliably produce results. It is almost as if Reed Elsevier does not see a need anymore for an informing central strategy about its market positioning, other that “we will invest in anything that works and avoid the bits that don’t”. By contrast, Thomson Reuters is built around a distinctive market positioning, a “big niche” strategy and definite ideas about what it needed to buy, sell or grow to make the aspiration work. And yet… once you have the strategy in place, here too market strategic thinking devolves to the operating unit quite quickly. Hopefully that means that in both of these market leading players, the doors will soon stop revolving at the speed of light and we can get back the real problems of addressing the needs of global information markets in times of scarcity.
PS. One of the items on Jim Smith’s agenda must surely be the finalization of the sale of Healthcare, whose projected disposal was an early agenda item for his predecessor. It is hard to remember but this move has now been projected for almost four years!
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