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Play Catch-Up When You’re Ahead

June 14, 2015

Apple held its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last week. One theme in the media coverage was that Apple was playing “catch-up”. That’s very true. Here’s an example article from the Verge. It’s correct; in a number of areas, Apple was catching up. I think there is a bigger point, though:

Playing catch-up is okay, as long as you’ve delivered on the big things.

Here is a rough list of Apple’s major accomplishments since 1997. Compare it to any other company’s.

 

iMac iTunes Apple Stores
MacBook Air App Store China Entry
iPod Siri Mac OS
iPhone iMessage iOS
iPad iCloud watchOS
Apple Watch Apple Maps Apple CPU
Apple TV Apple Music Apple Pay
Leading Industrial and Interface Design

These are what mattered for Apple’s success. Apple went until *2015* before playing catch-up on the features announced at WWDC (iPad windowing, low power mode, music streaming, iCloud drive, transit directions, etc.). With minimal pain.

What does this show? It’s wiser to postpone (or be behind in) 100 features than the ten technologies that go into one major product (and often, more). Put differently, it’s better to be in “feature debt” than “product debt” or “platform debt”, when you have the competency to deliver one of the latter.

Those ten technologies and that one major product can end up improving the world, and your company, in incredible ways.

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Filed Under: Apple, Innovation, Leadership, Product Development, R&D

How BlackBerry Crippled BlackBerry

May 31, 2015

In the WSJ, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff published an overview of their new book, “The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry”.

It’s an excruciatingly painful account of BlackBerry executives’ response to the iPhone. Having worked in the mobile industry since 1994 and, most intensely since 2006, these executive reactions are familiar to me.

From my perspective, they reveal several key reasons why BlackBerry, and companies like it, struggled:

1. Lack of In-House Technology Development

  • “How did they do that?” Mr. Lazaridis [Blackberry co-CEO] wondered.
  • “By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, [BlackBerry’s] chief technology officer.

When executives at this level are shocked by new technology, or don’t understand it, it means they haven’t been leading their company to scout new technology, and haven’t been doing enough in-house development to push limits.

2. Focus on the Wrong Customer

  • Mr. Balsillie’s first thought was [BlackBerry] was losing AT&T as a customer.

It’s true that an operator is a customer of sorts. But the people using your product are the ultimate customers – i.e., the consumers. While BlackBerry focused on satisfying the operator executive, Apple focused on satisfying the consumer.

3. Narrow Definition of its Market

  • “It wasn’t a threat to [Blackberry’s] core business.”
  • Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”

BlackBerry isn’t alone in this. Nearly every mobile company at the time paid lip service to the Internet. But they defined it as the “Mobile Internet” and, critically, none acted to provide a device that consumers could easily use. They thought of their devices, and their market, as narrowly limited to phones, not general computing devices. And when your device isn’t a general computing device, the Internet is an afterthought.

This fundamental framing also limited technology development (#1 above). Most mobile companies, if they developed technologies in-house, limited them to the cellular radio, rather than more general areas: computer interfaces (e.g., touchscreen), computer software platforms, the Internet, or imaging. Nokia was the exception, but it’s too complex to discuss here.

4. Denial, Masked by Mischaracterization of the Disruptor’s Success

  • “I learned that beauty matters […]. [BlackBerry] was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing,” Mr. Yach says.
  • This was no ordinary phone. It was a cult with a devoted and rapidly growing following.
  • “The carriers aren’t letting us put a full browser on our products,” [said co-CEO Mike Lazaridis].

Similarly, from my experience as a mobile analyst during that time, no executive in the industry admitted (for a very long time) that the iPhone was a better device. Seeing leaders in denial, in my experience, weakened their ability to focus their companies on the right things. Which leads to point #5.

By the way, the point about “the carriers aren’t letting us”: The price of entry for a “full browser” was a stellar product. And that was under BlackBerry’s own control.

5. Tactical Responses to Strategic Problems

  • Mr. Lazaridis believed the four pillars of BlackBerry’s success—good battery life, miserly use of carrier’s spectrum, security and the ability to type—still ruled in the new smartphone world and gave his company its competitive advantage.
  • [BlackBerry] would take another stab at a clickable screen with Storm 2.

They brought features to a platform fight. Tellingly, the word “platform” (which means operating system – one of the iPhone’s major strengths) appears one time in the article. [I’m not faulting the authors. I’m saying it’s a reflection of the thinking – and BlackBerry’s thinking — at the time.] And even as features, none of them – except the long standby battery life –matched the iPhone. And, damningly, part of the reason that BlackBerry phones had better battery life was simply that people used them less. They were “phones”…


All this led to the following:

To Mr. Balsillie, [BlackBerry] was in an existential crisis, mired in what he describes as “strategic confusion.” The company’s business had been disrupted on several levels, with no obvious path forward.

Part of the answer — the part that gives you glimpses into the path forward — is #1 above. When you shape your own technology, you can see the future before others do. Is there another part to the answer? Yes — having a great product shaper. And it’s hard to grow, or recruit, a great product shaper if you don’t give them new technology to work with.

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Filed Under: Apple, BlackBerry, Innovation, Leadership, Product Development, R&D, Smartphones, Technology - Gen'l

Wednesday Assorted Links

May 20, 2015

1. Google brings a full-featured version of Maps to Android Wear watches. Good.

2. Tim Cook: Apple Watch in stores by June, Apple Pay coming to China ‘soon’. The headline is all you need.

3. Nest’s Tony Fadell says Google has ‘no sacred cows’ as it rethinks Glass. Sounds good, as long as that means nixing the consumer version is an option, too.

4. Marco Arment doesn’t like many things about the new MacBook.

5. LTE smartphones are becoming faster and cheaper. Clearly, but this caught my eye: “Marvell boasted that a SoC (system-on-chip) it developed is powering a $65 LTE smartphone”.

6. Bill Gates Shares His List Of Summer ‘Beach Reading’ Books. I admit, “What If?” by Randall Munroe sounds intriguing.

7. At Zappos, Banishing the Bosses Brings Confusion. Would the Apollo program (or any meaningfully-sized development effort) have worked with “Holocracy”?

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Filed Under: Android Wear, Apple, Assorted Links, Google, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Smartphones, Wearables - Other

Anderson Cooper: “Sometimes you have to do something drastic” to make your own path

May 19, 2015

This isn’t about mobile, but it’s certainly about moving forward.

Powerful words by Anderson Cooper, published today by Fast Company. I think many people can relate:

When you work at a company, people there tend to see you a certain way. In my case, they viewed me as a fact-checker—so the notion that I could be a reporter didn’t occur to anybody. Had I asked, they would have probably said no because I wasn’t on the right career path. Sometimes you have to do something drastic to change people’s perception of you. […]

I would never have been as driven to do this kind of work had I not experienced such intense personal loss. When my father died, the world suddenly seemed like a scary place. I didn’t feel that I could rely on other people, and I became fearful of what else might happen. These emotions were compounded when my brother committed suicide. I wanted to become autonomous, prepare myself for any eventuality, and protect myself from further pain. […]

As it turned out, not getting that entry-level job there was the best thing that ever happened to me. Had I gotten it, I would have spent about two years as a desk assistant and then maybe worked my way up to, I don’t know, production assistant? Movement at the networks at the time was glacial. You could be there for years before even being sent out to shoot a local story. There’s no way I would have ever been made a full-time news correspondent after three years. There was no established, internal path to doing that. […]

I was so motivated [to take whatever journalist-relevant work was available] because I still viewed it as “I don’t have another option. There is no Plan B.” […]

I rarely ask people for advice or permission when I’m planning on doing something I feel strongly about. That only opens the plan up to be crapped on. […] It’s easier [for other people] to say no than it is to say yes […].

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Filed Under: Leadership, Moving Forward

Friday Assorted Links

May 15, 2015

1. Meet the Woman Launching Google’s Fastest Moonshots. My favorite quote from Regina (from a different article): “That’s a great strategy for not losing and a lousy strategy for winning.”

2. Robots, Hungry for Power, Are Too Weak to Take Over the World.

3. The Importance Of Founders. Some quantification, too.

4. The Detrimental Pitfalls of Open-Plan Offices.

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Filed Under: Assorted Links, Automation, Google, Innovation, Leadership, Productivity

Paying Attention to Short Term Sales Trends Blinds You

May 13, 2015

You might not notice, but I don’t post much about market unit growth. That’s because 1) the big markets are known and because 2) the fluctuations matter little. (Today they matter little; the time to plan for *today’s* market growth in China or Brazil was years ago). Regardless of the period-to-period changes, to succeed in mobile devices, you still need a great product to compete, and that means great people, great R&D, and great marketing to communicate it. That’s why I loved how Horace Dediu, writing on his site Asymco, put it:

This understanding of the maximum potential of a market — its highest level of user adoption — is crucial for product development. Paying attention to short term sales trends blinds you to the power of the job your product is hired to do. Your product’s purpose is not to be sold, but to be hired. If your product is powerful enough, it can be hired for universal jobs and it should be desired by all consumers, not just the fickle.

Being patient for growth means that you can release features when the majority of users can absorb them, not just when early adopters choose to play with them. Often, early adopters offer feedback which is off-putting to later, mainstream adopters. In engineering and design one has to always make compromises. The right balance at the right time avoids overshooting a market or under-performing against competitors.

His other point, of course, is about market timing of features. I might have more to say about that topic in future posts.

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Filed Under: Leadership, Product Development

Wednesday Assorted Links

April 22, 2015

1. Eric Schmidt: Here are the three most important things Google is working on.

  • Voice recognition
  • Image recognition
  • Machine learning

2. Justine Musk, previously wife of Elon Musk, writes good words about how to become an ‘extreme success’. I highly recommend this. Must-read.

3. Yole on Image Sensor Future. Especially relevant to machine sensing and learning, one of Google’s ‘three most important things’.

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Filed Under: Assorted Links, Google, Imaging, Leadership, Machine Learning, Voice Recognition

The High Price of Risk Aversion

April 17, 2015

Marc Andreessen, speaking with Fortune in San Francisco last week:

One of the things that’s so striking about the current environment is public companies are so risk averse and then, as a consequence, a very large percentage of kind of interesting new, innovative high-ambition, high-investment things are happening on the private side.

Active and Passive Risk Aversion

From studying how businesses compete, I’ve noticed that risk averse companies are either “passive” or “active” in their risk aversion. Companies in the “passive” group ignore the necessity of risk and ignore the upside. Those in the “active” group focus on the downside and retreat from innovation.

In a technology company (my focus area), here’s how these types of risk aversion can manifest themselves: On the “passive” side, if a company leader is overly focused on traditional sales and marketing*, he or she tends to underestimate the amount of product or technology risk required to deliver a compelling product. On the “active” side, companies that run into a financial hurdle might, “temporarily”, reduce investment in R&D. Either path effectively reduces a company’s ability to satisfy consumers in the future.

Passive Aversion Leads to Active

Very often, the passive aversion to risk leads to the active one. For instance, without a product- or technology-competent CEO, investment (or effective project selection) in R&D atrophies, and products become less competitive. To reduce expenses, senior leaders opt to further reduce R&D. On paper, reductions appear minor, but in practice, the remaining resources are usually only enough to support the current product pipeline. They’re usually not staffed or equipped to do development that goes beyond the next product cycle. At this point, while it might actually help to trim the product portfolio (so that select R&D staff can focus on higher-order work), every revenue stream is considered important. So, the higher-order – riskier — work waits.

Even if a company recovers […] it has often lost the ability to set ambitious goals, hire additional talent, and effectively manage new risk.

If You Don’t Take on Risk, You Reduce Your Ability to Do so Later

Even if a company recovers, by that point it has often lost the ability to set ambitious goals, hire additional talent, and effectively manage new risk. Key people have likely left, remaining employees are weary, and focusing on cost-reduction “is obviously what works best”.

In addition, to manage high risk in one area – say part / feature / product / initiative “A” – a company might need to invest in another: for instance, in a back-up component program, a much higher level of prototyping, the acqui-hire of an important partner, or in hiring multiple subject matter experts from around the globe. These are mitigating actions, but they appear risky to a company with a risk averse mindset.

If you don’t take on risk, eventually your competitors will deliver it to you.

And so the dynamic, and perils, of being risk averse continue. The lessons so far: if you don’t take on risk, eventually your competitors deliver it to you. And your ability to create leading products or capability will be compromised.

Technology Isn’t the Only Domain – by far – for Taking on Good Risk

While I’ve outlined a dynamic related to a usual source of risk (technology R&D), there is meaningful risk and reward in other functions, too. The pitfalls of risk aversion apply there just as well, and so do the opportunities.

For example, if a company invests and innovates in new ways of selling and reaching markets, there’s great value to be had in working through that kind of risk. Even building core sales and marketing capability is a risk, if the ambition is to reach a level of performance far higher than the company has ever had. (Without, again, compromising future products.) Recent examples of include:

  • Amazon: Prime membership
  • Uber: How it reaches consumers, dynamic pricing
  • Airbnb: Connecting hosts with guests
  • Warby Parker: Shifting an intensive hands-on transaction to on-line.

Or the risk might be in pursuing a supply chain model that’s different from incumbents’ (Dell in the 1990s). Or new HR practices (Reddit is experimenting with a “no salary negotiations at time of hire” approach to reducing gender inequality at work).

Hire people who have the skills and ability to take focused risks and adjust. And let them do so.

Information and People

Finally, the quote I chose from Marc Andreessen, and this post, are about “risk” in a way that’s essentially an abstraction. More tangibly, risk is an information problem, about the specific activity you want to undertake. Sensing a risk means “I don’t know if my action will produce the outcome I want. And if that will be valuable to my consumers at the time that I deliver it. And if I find something unfavorable, I don’t know how to improve.” So, risk averse leaders and managers are saying, through their actions, “I don’t know enough”, and – critically — they’re not taking action to find out more.

Get past “I don’t know enough” and on to “how can we move forward?”

That’s the most important take-away. When you’re finding board members, executive staff, or subject matter experts, hire people who have the skills and ability to take focused risks and adjust. And let them do so. (That may mean changing how you identify candidates, select interviewers, and design questions.) These individuals will help teams and companies get past “I don’t know enough” and on to “how can we move forward?”

______

*The value of sales and marketing is unquestionable. They are as valuable as product development. What we don’t want to do is deprive our great sales and marketing teams from having a great product.


Note: This started as a rapidly-written post. In response to the higher-than-expected traffic, I re-read it. I didn’t like it. So I made it better. I’ve made a number of adjustments and clarifications.

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Filed Under: Innovation, Leadership, Product Development

Don’t Just Monitor Outcomes; Build Capability

April 7, 2015

Super perspective from Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz. It illustrates the difference between leaders who simply pressure the team for outcomes (most managers can do this) and those leaders who work to build capability. Read the entire post here. Excerpt:

If you are worried about the quarter, you might think that it’s a good idea to call your head of sales twice a day to get the status. By doing so, you might think you are creating the appropriate sense of urgency. In reality, you are just distracting her from closing the quarter twice a day. In fact, by radically overemphasizing the quarter, you will likely cause your sales leader to begin focusing on the cover up — the byzantine set of excuses that she will deploy in the case that she actually misses her number. […]

While it’s correct to worry about the big issues, you must resist the urge to act on them directly. Before acting, you should first translate the big thing into a related set of little things. For example, if you are worried about making the quarter, then you should go on a few sales calls and see if you are selling your product in the most effective way possible. Are your sales people properly trained? Do they run a process that puts your product in the very best light and sets appropriate traps for your competitors? Are you selling at the right level in the organization? Is your product truly competitive? As you get the answers to these questions, you will develop more constructive little things to take action on. These little things might not help you make this quarter, but they will certainly help you make next quarter.

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Filed Under: Leadership

Thursday Assorted Links

April 2, 2015

1. Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Peter Thiel (VC and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (recommended)).

2. Microsoft brings its Office Lens document scanner app to the iPhone. This looks very handy.

3. LinkedIn buys predictive insights startup Refresh. I’m hoping it’s for the sincere, vs. the lazy.

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Filed Under: Acquisitions, Assorted Links, Innovation, Leadership, Microsoft

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