Notes from Steve - Observations from Off the Beaten Path
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Russian GPS Satellite Launch Fails
According to the Russian Federal Space Agency, the December 5th launch of 3 GLONASS satellites (their equivalent of GPS) failed when the Proton-M rocket carrying them failed to achieve proper orbit. The satellites ended up crashing into the Pacific Ocean, apparently due to a software programming error. Here's a link to the GPS World article: GLONASS Launch Fails. It includes an interesting YouTube video of the ill-fated rocket being moved into position prior to the launch.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Cybercrime in the Headlines
In last week's blog I talked about the danger of small businesses being victims of cyber-crime. Unlike your personal bank account, if cyber-criminals steal money out of your business bank account your bank is under no obligation to reimburse the loss. In my blog, I listed six steps every business should take to protect themselves against cyber-criminals.
Today's headlines underscore the need for this kind of protection. In an article titled FBI says cyber-thieves stole $70 million, the Associated Press reports that a gang based in Russia and Ukraine used a virus attached to emails and web links to tap into the computer systems of small businesses. Once an unsuspecting person clicked on the link, the virus captured account numbers and passwords the criminals could use to access the accounts.
One sentence in the article was particularly telling: "Many of the victims were small- and medium-sized businesses that don't have the money to invest in high-level computer security." This incident underscores the fact that for a business, computer security is not optional. If you're a business owner you owe it to yourself to make sure you are protected. Last week's blog describes six important steps every business should take. How well are you doing? If you need help to find out, consider working with a professional IT company like TeamLogic IT to do an assessment.
Today's headlines underscore the need for this kind of protection. In an article titled FBI says cyber-thieves stole $70 million, the Associated Press reports that a gang based in Russia and Ukraine used a virus attached to emails and web links to tap into the computer systems of small businesses. Once an unsuspecting person clicked on the link, the virus captured account numbers and passwords the criminals could use to access the accounts.
One sentence in the article was particularly telling: "Many of the victims were small- and medium-sized businesses that don't have the money to invest in high-level computer security." This incident underscores the fact that for a business, computer security is not optional. If you're a business owner you owe it to yourself to make sure you are protected. Last week's blog describes six important steps every business should take. How well are you doing? If you need help to find out, consider working with a professional IT company like TeamLogic IT to do an assessment.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Protecting Your Business from Cyber-Criminals
I was recently invited to talk to a group of local business people about computer security for businesses. It's an important topic because if your business is using computers for things like email, web browsing, accounting, online banking, inventory management, or payroll, you are almost certain to be a target of cyber-criminals. One recent study showed that an unprotected Windows computer taken right out of the box and connected to the Internet was typically hacked within 20 minutes.
Many business owners don't realize that as a business, you don't have the same legal protection as a consumer. If hackers break into your business network and drain your bank account because you didn’t implement adequate security, your bank is under no obligation to reimburse you. There are numerous stories of banks refusing to reimburse businesses who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to cyber-criminals because they didn't take sufficient security precautions to prevent the thefts.
The small business owner who recognizes the threat of computer crime and takes steps to prevent hackers from breaking in is less likely to become a victim. Here are six things every business should do to protect its computer network:
Many business owners don't realize that as a business, you don't have the same legal protection as a consumer. If hackers break into your business network and drain your bank account because you didn’t implement adequate security, your bank is under no obligation to reimburse you. There are numerous stories of banks refusing to reimburse businesses who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to cyber-criminals because they didn't take sufficient security precautions to prevent the thefts.
The small business owner who recognizes the threat of computer crime and takes steps to prevent hackers from breaking in is less likely to become a victim. Here are six things every business should do to protect its computer network:
- Use a firewall. This is the first line of defense for your system. Firewalls scan all traffic into and out of your network to block unauthorized access. There are two kinds of firewalls: software and hardware. Software firewalls such as Windows Firewall run directly on your computer. Hardware firewalls are separate boxes that sit at the junction between the Internet and your local network. While hardware firewalls might offer slightly better security, either is much better than the alternative of doing nothing. Your Internet Service Provider might include a firewall as part of their DSL or cable modem.
- Use anti-virus and anti-spyware software and keep it updated. A firewall won’t block every threat. Anti-spyware software looks for programs that secretly enter your computer and collect bits of information about you. This could include such things as the websites you visit or the keys you type to enter a password. Anti-virus software scans all your files, looking for known or suspected malicious code—viruses, worms, or Trojans. Although each differs in its details, all can be serious threats. The anti-virus software scans for them all. Files considered threats are identified, where you can quarantine or delete them. If you think the suspect file isn’t truly a virus, put it into quarantine. Otherwise delete it. In order to be effective, you need to keep anti-virus and anti-spyware software up to date. New threats are constantly being released by hackers, and the best AV and AS vendors issue updates to detect the latest threats at least daily.
- Use highly secure passwords. What are the worst passwords? Here are a few of the most common: 123456, password, qwerty, letmein, abc123, and a few obscene words I won’t repeat here. Do a Google search on “worst passwords” and you’ll see a complete list. The best passwords are at least 14 characters long, don’t include any words found in the dictionary (including spelled backwards) and use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Some sources advocate using a different password for every account and changing it regularly. At the very least you should use several different passwords for different kinds of business and personal accounts, and never share your passwords with anyone else. If anyone else learns your password, change it immediately.
- Keep your operating system updated with the latest security patches. If you use a Windows computer, turn on automatic updates or go to www.update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate to install the latest updates. If you use a Mac, don’t assume you are automatically protected. Accept all new security patches when they are issued.
- Be cautious opening email attachments and clicking embedded links. Most viruses infect your computer because you opened an email attachment. Don’t think an attachment is automatically safe just because it came from someone you know. Scan it with an anti-virus software program before opening. For the ultimate in security, use a third-party provider to scan all your emails and block any viruses before they ever get into your network. Also be careful about clicking on a Web link in an email. Rather than clicking the link, manually type the URL into your browser.
- Back up your data regularly. You never know when a hard drive will crash or your laptop will get stolen. Don’t wait for disaster to strike before you think about backing up your data. You can purchase a hard drive specifically for backing up your data or you can use an online service. Just make sure you do it regularly—at least daily for business data.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Is There Money in iPhone Apps?
If you read the trade press, you’ll come away with the impression that there’s big business in creating applications for smartphones. The iPhone now has over 300,000 apps, and Android apps are growing exponentially. Stories of software developers getting rich overnight from iPhone apps they wrote in their spare time are enough to make anyone who has ever heard of Objective C to think about quitting their day job to write apps for a living. Think twice before doing so.
I speak from experience. For six months, I led a small team of entrepreneurs in a startup venture with the intention of creating a successful business developing smartphone apps—initially for the iPhone and later the Android. We had a good idea, a reasonable marketing plan, and interest from outside investors. But I finally decided to shut it down because our chances of success were infinitesimally small. In this blog entry I’ll share some of the lessons I learned along the way in the hope they could be instructive for others thinking about following a similar path.
The Idea. Our starting premise was that the market for traditional printed books is in rapid decline. Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, and countless other eReaders threaten to make the printed book obsolete. (That’s a gross exaggeration, but many otherwise intelligent people believe it.) It turns out, though, that all the focus so far has been on the simple transition of printed words into an electronic display. EBook pages look just like printed pages, they’re just electronic, not paper.
One part of the eBook industry that’s still in its infancy is the market for travel guides. If you want a guidebook that tells you about the sights to see in San Francisco, Paris, or Yosemite Valley, you’ll most likely pick up a printed guidebook from the likes of Frommer’s or Lonely Planet. Even if you choose an eBook tour guide like those available for the iPhone, you’ll usually find it’s little more than a digital transcription of a printed book.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Today’s smartphones invariably have built-in GPS capability. Imagine an iPhone app that uses GPS to guide you along a tour, automatically presenting audio and visual information about each sight as you get there. No need to juggle a book as you walk, and there’s never any question as to exactly which feature is the true point of interest. Such a tour guide would not only be useful for walking tours, it would be especially valuable for driving tours.
That was our basic concept. We had a good team with the experience to pull it off. I’d written a popular book on GPS navigation as well as several travel guidebooks; one of our team members was the former publisher of a guidebook company. Other team members had experience with software programming and marketing. But even with this experience, we weren’t able to pull it off. Why?
The Economic Challenge. We quickly discovered you can’t build a successful business if your only income derives from sales of the iPhone app. At a typical selling price of $0.99 to $2.99 (with 30% of that revenue going to Apple), you’d have to sell hundreds a day to generate any significant revenue. That might be possible for some of the gaming apps written by a one-person company, but even there it’s hit or miss. For a multi-person company, you won’t have enough money to pay your salaries unless you come up with other ways to generate revenue. We came up with several ideas. Here are the two we felt were most promising:
In-App Advertising. Our first objective was to generate significant revenue from in-app advertising. Since ours was a GPS-based location-aware app, it would be easy to deliver only those ads from businesses in the immediate vicinity of the user. As you walked by San Francisco’s Union Square, for instance, you would see ads for restaurants or coffee shops nearby. Advertisers could perhaps even offer a discount coupon if the customer came in today. These are fairly high value ads—one recent study reported that nearly 10% of the viewers of such ads took advantage of them. As a result, advertisers are willing to pay premium prices for such ads and we could generate significant revenue. We planned to broker our ads through one of the big mobile advertising engines, either AdMob or iAd. But we weren’t convinced the incremental ad revenues alone would be enough to make us successful. So we pursued one more path.
Software as a Tool. We knew our growth would depend on how quickly we could generate a large number of tours. If we had to develop each tour ourselves, it would be years before we had enough tours to break even. But if we could recruit existing guidebook publishers do the work for us, we would reach breakeven much sooner. There are dozens of guidebook publishers who want to offer electronic versions of their printed guidebooks, but these publishers don’t typically have technical people on staff; they are all English majors. Our idea was to offer a tool that would allow them to drop their existing guidebook content into a simple template. Our software would then automatically create the iPhone app for them. For example, an editor could load the content of a tourist guidebook for the city of San Francisco into our template, push a button, and out would come the iPhone app. We would handle the placement and marketing with Apple and take a cut of the revenues. Add location-aware advertising to this concept and it could be a winning business.
Cold Hard Reality. Reality is never as simple as you imagine. We quickly discovered that most guidebook publishers are small concerns that are barely getting by. (The book publishing industry is a terribly low margin business.) While the publishers we talked to liked the concept, they didn’t have any money to invest in it. It would be up to us, not one of their editors, to load the content into the template and create the app. Once again, our growth would be limited by the size of our own staff.
More importantly, although some of our team were software engineers, none of us had experience writing iPhone apps. Apps that use the GPS function are the most difficult to write, and iPhone developers with GPS skills are in high demand. They can easily get high-paying jobs at established companies, so they have little interest in joining an unknown startup. By the time we cold hire one, there was a real risk we would be impossibly far behind the competition.
Even with these obstacles, we had investors ready to make investments. In the final analysis, though, I didn’t want to take investor money when I wasn’t confident we could be successful. Perhaps that’s not the mark of a true entrepreneur—someone who doesn’t lose sleep if their idea fails and their investors lose everything. But that’s not me.
If you’re thinking about making your fortune writing iPhone apps, be sure you’ve thought it through. While you’re not likely to get rich enough to retire, it’s possible to build a successful business. You need to pull together the right people, come up with a credible business plan, and execute the plan flawlessly. Not a lot different than what it takes to be successful in any other venture.
I speak from experience. For six months, I led a small team of entrepreneurs in a startup venture with the intention of creating a successful business developing smartphone apps—initially for the iPhone and later the Android. We had a good idea, a reasonable marketing plan, and interest from outside investors. But I finally decided to shut it down because our chances of success were infinitesimally small. In this blog entry I’ll share some of the lessons I learned along the way in the hope they could be instructive for others thinking about following a similar path.
The Idea. Our starting premise was that the market for traditional printed books is in rapid decline. Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, and countless other eReaders threaten to make the printed book obsolete. (That’s a gross exaggeration, but many otherwise intelligent people believe it.) It turns out, though, that all the focus so far has been on the simple transition of printed words into an electronic display. EBook pages look just like printed pages, they’re just electronic, not paper.
One part of the eBook industry that’s still in its infancy is the market for travel guides. If you want a guidebook that tells you about the sights to see in San Francisco, Paris, or Yosemite Valley, you’ll most likely pick up a printed guidebook from the likes of Frommer’s or Lonely Planet. Even if you choose an eBook tour guide like those available for the iPhone, you’ll usually find it’s little more than a digital transcription of a printed book.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Today’s smartphones invariably have built-in GPS capability. Imagine an iPhone app that uses GPS to guide you along a tour, automatically presenting audio and visual information about each sight as you get there. No need to juggle a book as you walk, and there’s never any question as to exactly which feature is the true point of interest. Such a tour guide would not only be useful for walking tours, it would be especially valuable for driving tours.
That was our basic concept. We had a good team with the experience to pull it off. I’d written a popular book on GPS navigation as well as several travel guidebooks; one of our team members was the former publisher of a guidebook company. Other team members had experience with software programming and marketing. But even with this experience, we weren’t able to pull it off. Why?
The Economic Challenge. We quickly discovered you can’t build a successful business if your only income derives from sales of the iPhone app. At a typical selling price of $0.99 to $2.99 (with 30% of that revenue going to Apple), you’d have to sell hundreds a day to generate any significant revenue. That might be possible for some of the gaming apps written by a one-person company, but even there it’s hit or miss. For a multi-person company, you won’t have enough money to pay your salaries unless you come up with other ways to generate revenue. We came up with several ideas. Here are the two we felt were most promising:
In-App Advertising. Our first objective was to generate significant revenue from in-app advertising. Since ours was a GPS-based location-aware app, it would be easy to deliver only those ads from businesses in the immediate vicinity of the user. As you walked by San Francisco’s Union Square, for instance, you would see ads for restaurants or coffee shops nearby. Advertisers could perhaps even offer a discount coupon if the customer came in today. These are fairly high value ads—one recent study reported that nearly 10% of the viewers of such ads took advantage of them. As a result, advertisers are willing to pay premium prices for such ads and we could generate significant revenue. We planned to broker our ads through one of the big mobile advertising engines, either AdMob or iAd. But we weren’t convinced the incremental ad revenues alone would be enough to make us successful. So we pursued one more path.
Software as a Tool. We knew our growth would depend on how quickly we could generate a large number of tours. If we had to develop each tour ourselves, it would be years before we had enough tours to break even. But if we could recruit existing guidebook publishers do the work for us, we would reach breakeven much sooner. There are dozens of guidebook publishers who want to offer electronic versions of their printed guidebooks, but these publishers don’t typically have technical people on staff; they are all English majors. Our idea was to offer a tool that would allow them to drop their existing guidebook content into a simple template. Our software would then automatically create the iPhone app for them. For example, an editor could load the content of a tourist guidebook for the city of San Francisco into our template, push a button, and out would come the iPhone app. We would handle the placement and marketing with Apple and take a cut of the revenues. Add location-aware advertising to this concept and it could be a winning business.
Cold Hard Reality. Reality is never as simple as you imagine. We quickly discovered that most guidebook publishers are small concerns that are barely getting by. (The book publishing industry is a terribly low margin business.) While the publishers we talked to liked the concept, they didn’t have any money to invest in it. It would be up to us, not one of their editors, to load the content into the template and create the app. Once again, our growth would be limited by the size of our own staff.
More importantly, although some of our team were software engineers, none of us had experience writing iPhone apps. Apps that use the GPS function are the most difficult to write, and iPhone developers with GPS skills are in high demand. They can easily get high-paying jobs at established companies, so they have little interest in joining an unknown startup. By the time we cold hire one, there was a real risk we would be impossibly far behind the competition.
Even with these obstacles, we had investors ready to make investments. In the final analysis, though, I didn’t want to take investor money when I wasn’t confident we could be successful. Perhaps that’s not the mark of a true entrepreneur—someone who doesn’t lose sleep if their idea fails and their investors lose everything. But that’s not me.
If you’re thinking about making your fortune writing iPhone apps, be sure you’ve thought it through. While you’re not likely to get rich enough to retire, it’s possible to build a successful business. You need to pull together the right people, come up with a credible business plan, and execute the plan flawlessly. Not a lot different than what it takes to be successful in any other venture.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
When Innovation Goes Awry
Not every innovation turns out as expected. Regardless of what you learn from focus groups or test marketing, the real-world experience may be different. The question is, how well do you respond when it’s obvious you’ve made a mistake? Those of us old enough to remember Coca Cola Company’s disastrous rollout of New Coke back in 1985 know firsthand what happens when a company doesn’t aggressively deal with a problem. I won’t recount that fiasco here. Just type “New Coke Disaster” into your search engine and you can read all about it.
What I will do in today’s blog is describe three innovation blunders I’ve personally come across in the last three weeks. In each case, I wrote to the company to voice my concern and ask that they fix the problem. In each case I got a reply. The differences in these replies illustrate the difference between companies that are in touch with their customers and those that aren’t.
My first example is that of Bull’s Eye Original Barbecue Sauce. A product of Kraft Foods, it was introduced in 1985 with a slogan, “The Big, Bold Taste of Bull's Eye.” It does fairly well in reviews (see here for example), and I’ve been slathering it over barbecued ribs, burgers, and chicken since its introduction. I recently opened a new bottle and rather than finding the familiar thick brown syrupy paste, I found a watery, tan substitute. It didn’t stick to the meat, didn’t end up slightly caramelized when cooked, and had a weak flavor. I double-checked the label, and while it had a different design, it still said “Original.” So I fired off an email to Kraft with my complaint.
I got a quick response from Kim McMiller, Associate Director of Consumer Relations. She apologized for my disappointment and explained that they have eliminated the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the product’s recipe (no explanation for why—cost savings, health reasons?). She promised to share my complaint with the product development staff and promised to send a check for a full reimbursement to me. The quick promise of a refund suggested I wasn’t the first to complain. I sent a note of thanks and expressed hope that they would revert to the true “Original” formula. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Barbecues need charcoal (I refuse to switch to gas), and my next example comes from Kingsford, the source of my charcoal for the last 30 years. I usually buy the 20-lb bags, which shrank to 18 lbs a few years ago. At the time, Kingsford claimed the new briquets lasted the same as the old ones. The most recent bags I bought were only 16.6 lbs, but were still claimed to last the same as the old ones (which raises the question, "How low can you go?"). My experience was not pleasant. The new briquets took much longer to light and never got as hot as the old ones. My Weber has a built-in thermometer so it was easy for me to tell. The old briquets could easily get up to 400-450 F, while the new ones had a hard time getting over 300 F. They might last as long, but only because they aren't burning as hot.
So I wrote a letter of complaint to Kingsford. Again I got a rapid reply. Patti Cooper, a Consumer Response Representative, apologized for my experience, said it was unusual, and promised to send a coupon for a replacement bag. Unlike Kraft, she didn’t acknowledge any change in formulation, but at least she understood my problem and offered to do something about it.
My final example is Comcast. As a Comcast customer, I like to use the Comcast.net home page to see the latest news, sports, and entertainment stories. Up until recently, I could access the same page from either my personal computer or my iPhone. But a couple of weeks ago, Comcast launched a new mobile site so that when I try to access Comcast.net from my iPhone, I get redirected to the mobile site, m.comcast.net, instead.
I hate the mobile site. Where previously I could scan all the news and decide what I want to read from a single screen, now it takes multiple clicks just to get to where I can see one article. I don’t want the mobile site, I want the main Comcast.net site on my iPhone. But I can’t find any way to get it. I know it must be possible because when Amazon made a similar change awhile back, they sensibly gave me the option to retain the classic view.
So I wrote Comcast explaining my problem. I got a reply from Angelo. He obviously didn’t understand my question, thought I was having problems accessing Comcast.net from a PC, and gave me a list of instructions for making sure I was using a compatible browser. I wrote back further clarifying my problem and got a second response from Ann. She apologized for me not being able to access Comcast.net from my iPhone and proceeded to give me instructions for how to access the mobile site—the exact thing I didn’t want to do. Exasperated, I thought I’d try one more time, reiterating that I didn’t want to access the mobile site, I wanted to access the main site. This time I got a response from Ernesto (apparently no one at Comcast has a last name), who again apologized and proceeded to once again tell me how to access the mobile site from my iPhone. Both of these last two responses were obviously canned paragraphs. No one at Comcast apparently reads emails, they must do a word search and send out a canned answer based on the number of times a certain word appears in the email. At this point I’ve about given up, although I will try one more time, asking to talk to a supervisor, before I finally surrender.
With Kraft, I felt my complaint was heard and understood. There’s a good chance my feedback will actually get to the product development team. Whether they change back to their old formula is another question, but at least I'm being heard.
With Kingsford, I felt my complaint was being heard, although I wasn’t as confident it was understood. I’m not sure whether any feedback will make it to the product development team, but if enough people complain, it probably will.
With Comcast, my complaint was neither heard nor understood. I’m quite sure the developers of the Comcast mobile site will never hear my request for an option to get to the main site. Perhaps they feel it isn’t necessary to pay attention to one lone consumer, but here’s the fallout from that attitude. I’m just about to select a new phone and high-speed Internet provider for my business, a much more lucrative proposition than my home service. Although I haven’t finally selected a provider, you can bet that Comcast won’t make the final cut.
What I will do in today’s blog is describe three innovation blunders I’ve personally come across in the last three weeks. In each case, I wrote to the company to voice my concern and ask that they fix the problem. In each case I got a reply. The differences in these replies illustrate the difference between companies that are in touch with their customers and those that aren’t.
My first example is that of Bull’s Eye Original Barbecue Sauce. A product of Kraft Foods, it was introduced in 1985 with a slogan, “The Big, Bold Taste of Bull's Eye.” It does fairly well in reviews (see here for example), and I’ve been slathering it over barbecued ribs, burgers, and chicken since its introduction. I recently opened a new bottle and rather than finding the familiar thick brown syrupy paste, I found a watery, tan substitute. It didn’t stick to the meat, didn’t end up slightly caramelized when cooked, and had a weak flavor. I double-checked the label, and while it had a different design, it still said “Original.” So I fired off an email to Kraft with my complaint.
I got a quick response from Kim McMiller, Associate Director of Consumer Relations. She apologized for my disappointment and explained that they have eliminated the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the product’s recipe (no explanation for why—cost savings, health reasons?). She promised to share my complaint with the product development staff and promised to send a check for a full reimbursement to me. The quick promise of a refund suggested I wasn’t the first to complain. I sent a note of thanks and expressed hope that they would revert to the true “Original” formula. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Barbecues need charcoal (I refuse to switch to gas), and my next example comes from Kingsford, the source of my charcoal for the last 30 years. I usually buy the 20-lb bags, which shrank to 18 lbs a few years ago. At the time, Kingsford claimed the new briquets lasted the same as the old ones. The most recent bags I bought were only 16.6 lbs, but were still claimed to last the same as the old ones (which raises the question, "How low can you go?"). My experience was not pleasant. The new briquets took much longer to light and never got as hot as the old ones. My Weber has a built-in thermometer so it was easy for me to tell. The old briquets could easily get up to 400-450 F, while the new ones had a hard time getting over 300 F. They might last as long, but only because they aren't burning as hot.
So I wrote a letter of complaint to Kingsford. Again I got a rapid reply. Patti Cooper, a Consumer Response Representative, apologized for my experience, said it was unusual, and promised to send a coupon for a replacement bag. Unlike Kraft, she didn’t acknowledge any change in formulation, but at least she understood my problem and offered to do something about it.
My final example is Comcast. As a Comcast customer, I like to use the Comcast.net home page to see the latest news, sports, and entertainment stories. Up until recently, I could access the same page from either my personal computer or my iPhone. But a couple of weeks ago, Comcast launched a new mobile site so that when I try to access Comcast.net from my iPhone, I get redirected to the mobile site, m.comcast.net, instead.
I hate the mobile site. Where previously I could scan all the news and decide what I want to read from a single screen, now it takes multiple clicks just to get to where I can see one article. I don’t want the mobile site, I want the main Comcast.net site on my iPhone. But I can’t find any way to get it. I know it must be possible because when Amazon made a similar change awhile back, they sensibly gave me the option to retain the classic view.
So I wrote Comcast explaining my problem. I got a reply from Angelo. He obviously didn’t understand my question, thought I was having problems accessing Comcast.net from a PC, and gave me a list of instructions for making sure I was using a compatible browser. I wrote back further clarifying my problem and got a second response from Ann. She apologized for me not being able to access Comcast.net from my iPhone and proceeded to give me instructions for how to access the mobile site—the exact thing I didn’t want to do. Exasperated, I thought I’d try one more time, reiterating that I didn’t want to access the mobile site, I wanted to access the main site. This time I got a response from Ernesto (apparently no one at Comcast has a last name), who again apologized and proceeded to once again tell me how to access the mobile site from my iPhone. Both of these last two responses were obviously canned paragraphs. No one at Comcast apparently reads emails, they must do a word search and send out a canned answer based on the number of times a certain word appears in the email. At this point I’ve about given up, although I will try one more time, asking to talk to a supervisor, before I finally surrender.
With Kraft, I felt my complaint was heard and understood. There’s a good chance my feedback will actually get to the product development team. Whether they change back to their old formula is another question, but at least I'm being heard.
With Kingsford, I felt my complaint was being heard, although I wasn’t as confident it was understood. I’m not sure whether any feedback will make it to the product development team, but if enough people complain, it probably will.
With Comcast, my complaint was neither heard nor understood. I’m quite sure the developers of the Comcast mobile site will never hear my request for an option to get to the main site. Perhaps they feel it isn’t necessary to pay attention to one lone consumer, but here’s the fallout from that attitude. I’m just about to select a new phone and high-speed Internet provider for my business, a much more lucrative proposition than my home service. Although I haven’t finally selected a provider, you can bet that Comcast won’t make the final cut.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Adventure in Africa
Well, my daughter Juliana is off to Tanzania for the next couple of months to do volunteer work at a hospital in Arusha. She figures it's good experience in her quest to get a medical degree, and since she's now certified to draw blood, feels she might actually be able to make a useful contribution. As with any trip to Africa, it's already been an adventure. To follow her travels, you can read her blog here: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/jhinch/4/tpod.html
It's been nearly 40 years since I was last in Tanzania myself, a 3-week photographic safari through Kenya and Tanzania. Besides the adventure of it all, what I recall most was the friendliness of the people. Bumping across 2000 miles of open savanna in a beat-up Volkswagen bus was quite an experience, but well worth it. It was my first chance to do any serious outdoor photography, so I learned as I went. And unlike today's instantaneous-feedback digital cameras, I had no idea whether the photos were any good until I returned from the trip and had the film processed. Given my novice skill level, I'm surprised how many of them turned out OK. Here's one example, a composite of four 35 mm shots of a water hole outside my room at the Kilaguni Lodge. This was taken long before anyone thought of digital software for stitching together multiple shots, but even then I figured there would eventually be a way to do so. I've seen some more recent photos of the same water hole posted on the internet, and it looks pretty much the same today as it did back in 1973. For a different travel experience, you might consider a photographic safari in East Africa.
It's been nearly 40 years since I was last in Tanzania myself, a 3-week photographic safari through Kenya and Tanzania. Besides the adventure of it all, what I recall most was the friendliness of the people. Bumping across 2000 miles of open savanna in a beat-up Volkswagen bus was quite an experience, but well worth it. It was my first chance to do any serious outdoor photography, so I learned as I went. And unlike today's instantaneous-feedback digital cameras, I had no idea whether the photos were any good until I returned from the trip and had the film processed. Given my novice skill level, I'm surprised how many of them turned out OK. Here's one example, a composite of four 35 mm shots of a water hole outside my room at the Kilaguni Lodge. This was taken long before anyone thought of digital software for stitching together multiple shots, but even then I figured there would eventually be a way to do so. I've seen some more recent photos of the same water hole posted on the internet, and it looks pretty much the same today as it did back in 1973. For a different travel experience, you might consider a photographic safari in East Africa.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The Fifth Tenet of Innovation
In today’s blog entry, I’ll wrap up the discussion of the five tenets of innovation by exploring why innovation must be a team game, not the exclusive domain of R&D.
Tenet #5: Innovation is a team game; R&D can’t do it all on its own.
Just as an army’s success in battle depends on its logistics and supply lines, an R&D team’s inventions will fail if they aren’t successfully marketed and manufactured. I am always amazed when management’s response to an economic downturn is, “Cut the marketing budget and lay off all the support staff so we can leave R&D untouched. That way we’ll be ready with a slew of new products when the recession ends.” Such a reaction indicates that management doesn’t have a clue as to how a good R&D department actually functions.
Think about it. How do you know what to invent if you’re not getting feedback on what the market wants? Inevitably, one of two things will happen. You will either miss out on this market feedback and invent the wrong product, or you will send the R&D engineers out to customers to get that feedback themselves. In that case, your R&D team is doing the marketing job instead of the R&D job. You’d have been smarter to retain some of the marketing professionals who really know how to do this kind of customer research.
Unfortunately, I’ve met a few vice presidents who don’t understand the role of marketing or how to use it as a competitive weapon. “Our marketing department is a bunch of amateurs,” they cry, and then proceed to cut the budget and lay off the people rather than fix the problem. I’m embarrassed to say I used to think that way myself, until one day I found myself the head of a 100-person marketing department for a $400 million product line. Having never managed marketing before, it was an eye-opening experience. Far from the Dilbert “2-drink minimum” perception I had of marketing, here was a brilliant team of people who had more impact on our product line’s success than I had ever before imagined.
In my previous role as R&D manager I had worked closely with the product marketing team, so I had a healthy respect for marketing’s ability to bring a customer-focused perspective to new product designs. As marketing manager I learned how much more marketing had to offer—sales development, customer support, marcom, and technical marketing. It was soon evident how critical all these other functions were to the overall success of the product line. Based in part on this experience, I now strongly counsel anyone with aspirations to executive-level management to develop their skills by taking on management-level experience in both R&D and marketing.
The problem doesn’t stop with marketing. Disproportionate elimination of such positions as administrative assistants or manufacturing engineers is also false economy. The reason you have these people in the first place is that they are making important contributions to the organization. (If they aren’t, you shouldn’t be waiting for an economic downturn to get rid of them!) Lay off the administrative assistants and your engineers now have to spend time ordering parts, scheduling meetings, shipping materials to subcontractors, and countless other mundane things. You didn’t eliminate the work, you just transferred it to more highly paid staff who now have less time to get their real jobs done.
It’s easy to think that in today’s Internet-driven world of automation, professionals can easily do much of this work themselves. But again, think it through. Here’s another example from my own experience. As a senior marketing manager in a large multinational company, a fair amount of my job involved travel. In the old days, I used an in-house travel agency to arrange my trips quickly and efficiently. A travel professional made sure I got the best fares, and if I forgot to request a rental car in a distant city, she would catch it and check to see if that’s what I really wanted. Then when I returned, I would deliver my travel receipts to my administrative assistant, who would fill out the forms and submit them to our accounts payable department. Things went smoothly and I didn’t have to divert a lot of time to dealing with routine details. At my pay level, that was a sensible strategy.
Then the company switched to an Internet-driven software program for scheduling travel and another program for submitting expense receipts. According to the finance department (staffed by people who rarely traveled and didn’t appreciate its complexities), we could now do it all ourselves and didn’t need as many administrative assistants or travel agents. So a lot of them were laid off.
The reality was considerably different. Previously, scheduling a trip of any complexity was something I could handle in 10 minutes and then turn over to a travel professional. Now it took an hour just to search for the best fares and work out the connecting flights. And if I forgot to request a rental car there was no one to catch the mistake. Speaking from experience, you don’t want to arrive at a strange airport at 11:30 pm only to discover there is no rental car waiting for you!
Filling out on-line expense reports took another hour. When you added it all up, the real cost saving was far different from what finance had proclaimed. And the finance department never calculated the true total cost, which included not only the difference between my salary and that of a travel agent, but also the two hours of lost time I could have devoted to higher-payback activities. Two hours I wasn’t using for innovation.
A smart leadership team must analyze the organization’s total needs and size all parts of it correctly, regardless of the phase of an economic cycle the company happens to be in. This is one advantage the large multinational company has over the small startup. In the startup, I would have no choice but to schedule my own travel, handle my own shipping, and do both the marketing and the R&D work for my new product. The multinational company is large enough to afford experts in each of these areas. The improvement in efficiency this can yield is priceless. Make the most of it.
Finally, let’s talk about the need for a certain amount of equality across all departments in a company. In the high-tech world, it’s not uncommon for R&D engineers to be anointed with a higher status than their counterparts in marketing, manufacturing, or administration. They get higher pay, more stock options, and other perks not available to the rest of the organization. Some level of disparity is unavoidable. An R&D engineer who has specialized knowledge will command a higher salary than a marketing engineer with similar years of experience. Where possible, though, try to eliminate unnecessary class distinctions. Recall my earlier example of the R&D team that bought a massage chair and invited everyone to enjoy it rather than reserving it exclusively for their own use. This action did far more to cement their relationships with marketing and manufacturing than any top-down edict could ever do.
I began this series of blog entries with the premise that corporate America often gets innovation wrong. Management frequently focuses too much on creativity and not enough on execution. I presented a definition of innovation that every manager should memorize:
Innovation is the ability to see opportunity in places others don’t and then turn that vision into reality.
By now, I hope you recognize how important the last part of that definition is. In business, creativity means nothing if you can’t turn it into financial success. Flawed execution has doomed many more companies than lack of innovative ideas.
You should now also recognize there is a big difference between having an innovative idea and being an innovative company. Anyone can have a single innovative idea. The innovative company is one that knows how to repeat that success over and over. This doesn’t happen just by having a ping-pong table in the break room or free dinners for your engineers in the evenings. The five tenets of innovation go far beyond these kinds of “soft” features. They include such fundamental principles as educating everyone on your high-level business strategy, being good at different kinds of innovation, creating a work environment in which innovation thrives, and understanding that innovation isn’t the purview of a few individuals, it’s everyone’s responsibility. These are the things that separate the truly innovative company from all the pretenders, and it’s management’s responsibility to make them happen.
Will following all these principles guarantee success? Of course not. Innovation can’t be reduced entirely to a few mechanical principles. As much as anything it’s the commitment to the intent of these principles, not their rote details, that make the difference. But if you hire creative people and give them the necessary encouragement and support, you’re on the right path to create a successful innovative environment. You know what to do. Now go do it.
Tenet #5: Innovation is a team game; R&D can’t do it all on its own.
Just as an army’s success in battle depends on its logistics and supply lines, an R&D team’s inventions will fail if they aren’t successfully marketed and manufactured. I am always amazed when management’s response to an economic downturn is, “Cut the marketing budget and lay off all the support staff so we can leave R&D untouched. That way we’ll be ready with a slew of new products when the recession ends.” Such a reaction indicates that management doesn’t have a clue as to how a good R&D department actually functions.
Think about it. How do you know what to invent if you’re not getting feedback on what the market wants? Inevitably, one of two things will happen. You will either miss out on this market feedback and invent the wrong product, or you will send the R&D engineers out to customers to get that feedback themselves. In that case, your R&D team is doing the marketing job instead of the R&D job. You’d have been smarter to retain some of the marketing professionals who really know how to do this kind of customer research.
Unfortunately, I’ve met a few vice presidents who don’t understand the role of marketing or how to use it as a competitive weapon. “Our marketing department is a bunch of amateurs,” they cry, and then proceed to cut the budget and lay off the people rather than fix the problem. I’m embarrassed to say I used to think that way myself, until one day I found myself the head of a 100-person marketing department for a $400 million product line. Having never managed marketing before, it was an eye-opening experience. Far from the Dilbert “2-drink minimum” perception I had of marketing, here was a brilliant team of people who had more impact on our product line’s success than I had ever before imagined.
In my previous role as R&D manager I had worked closely with the product marketing team, so I had a healthy respect for marketing’s ability to bring a customer-focused perspective to new product designs. As marketing manager I learned how much more marketing had to offer—sales development, customer support, marcom, and technical marketing. It was soon evident how critical all these other functions were to the overall success of the product line. Based in part on this experience, I now strongly counsel anyone with aspirations to executive-level management to develop their skills by taking on management-level experience in both R&D and marketing.
The problem doesn’t stop with marketing. Disproportionate elimination of such positions as administrative assistants or manufacturing engineers is also false economy. The reason you have these people in the first place is that they are making important contributions to the organization. (If they aren’t, you shouldn’t be waiting for an economic downturn to get rid of them!) Lay off the administrative assistants and your engineers now have to spend time ordering parts, scheduling meetings, shipping materials to subcontractors, and countless other mundane things. You didn’t eliminate the work, you just transferred it to more highly paid staff who now have less time to get their real jobs done.
It’s easy to think that in today’s Internet-driven world of automation, professionals can easily do much of this work themselves. But again, think it through. Here’s another example from my own experience. As a senior marketing manager in a large multinational company, a fair amount of my job involved travel. In the old days, I used an in-house travel agency to arrange my trips quickly and efficiently. A travel professional made sure I got the best fares, and if I forgot to request a rental car in a distant city, she would catch it and check to see if that’s what I really wanted. Then when I returned, I would deliver my travel receipts to my administrative assistant, who would fill out the forms and submit them to our accounts payable department. Things went smoothly and I didn’t have to divert a lot of time to dealing with routine details. At my pay level, that was a sensible strategy.
Then the company switched to an Internet-driven software program for scheduling travel and another program for submitting expense receipts. According to the finance department (staffed by people who rarely traveled and didn’t appreciate its complexities), we could now do it all ourselves and didn’t need as many administrative assistants or travel agents. So a lot of them were laid off.
The reality was considerably different. Previously, scheduling a trip of any complexity was something I could handle in 10 minutes and then turn over to a travel professional. Now it took an hour just to search for the best fares and work out the connecting flights. And if I forgot to request a rental car there was no one to catch the mistake. Speaking from experience, you don’t want to arrive at a strange airport at 11:30 pm only to discover there is no rental car waiting for you!
Filling out on-line expense reports took another hour. When you added it all up, the real cost saving was far different from what finance had proclaimed. And the finance department never calculated the true total cost, which included not only the difference between my salary and that of a travel agent, but also the two hours of lost time I could have devoted to higher-payback activities. Two hours I wasn’t using for innovation.
A smart leadership team must analyze the organization’s total needs and size all parts of it correctly, regardless of the phase of an economic cycle the company happens to be in. This is one advantage the large multinational company has over the small startup. In the startup, I would have no choice but to schedule my own travel, handle my own shipping, and do both the marketing and the R&D work for my new product. The multinational company is large enough to afford experts in each of these areas. The improvement in efficiency this can yield is priceless. Make the most of it.
Finally, let’s talk about the need for a certain amount of equality across all departments in a company. In the high-tech world, it’s not uncommon for R&D engineers to be anointed with a higher status than their counterparts in marketing, manufacturing, or administration. They get higher pay, more stock options, and other perks not available to the rest of the organization. Some level of disparity is unavoidable. An R&D engineer who has specialized knowledge will command a higher salary than a marketing engineer with similar years of experience. Where possible, though, try to eliminate unnecessary class distinctions. Recall my earlier example of the R&D team that bought a massage chair and invited everyone to enjoy it rather than reserving it exclusively for their own use. This action did far more to cement their relationships with marketing and manufacturing than any top-down edict could ever do.
I began this series of blog entries with the premise that corporate America often gets innovation wrong. Management frequently focuses too much on creativity and not enough on execution. I presented a definition of innovation that every manager should memorize:
Innovation is the ability to see opportunity in places others don’t and then turn that vision into reality.
By now, I hope you recognize how important the last part of that definition is. In business, creativity means nothing if you can’t turn it into financial success. Flawed execution has doomed many more companies than lack of innovative ideas.
You should now also recognize there is a big difference between having an innovative idea and being an innovative company. Anyone can have a single innovative idea. The innovative company is one that knows how to repeat that success over and over. This doesn’t happen just by having a ping-pong table in the break room or free dinners for your engineers in the evenings. The five tenets of innovation go far beyond these kinds of “soft” features. They include such fundamental principles as educating everyone on your high-level business strategy, being good at different kinds of innovation, creating a work environment in which innovation thrives, and understanding that innovation isn’t the purview of a few individuals, it’s everyone’s responsibility. These are the things that separate the truly innovative company from all the pretenders, and it’s management’s responsibility to make them happen.
Will following all these principles guarantee success? Of course not. Innovation can’t be reduced entirely to a few mechanical principles. As much as anything it’s the commitment to the intent of these principles, not their rote details, that make the difference. But if you hire creative people and give them the necessary encouragement and support, you’re on the right path to create a successful innovative environment. You know what to do. Now go do it.
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