Google Office Bamboozle Adds PowerPoint

Google last week added a PowerPoint viewer to Gmail, then this week announced the acquisition of Zenter, developer of a web-based PowerPoint-like application. This follows CEO Eric Schmidt's April announcement that a presentation component was coming to Google applications by year-end.

As we have previously discussed (Google Bamboozles Microsoft, Bamboozle Update, Bamboozle Update 2), Google continues to give Microsoft fits with its bamboozle attack on Microsoft Office. This attack is intended to divert some Microsoft resources away from improving search to instead defend Office against the Google threat. This theme is amplified in the previous posts on this subject and in my book, Attacking The Crown Jewels.

I bet someone in Google is responsible for assuring that Steve Balmer and Ray Ozzie have at least one bad night each month as the result of a Google Office bamboozle announcement.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Google

Fuzzy Strategy Fells Yahoo CEO

Yesterday, Yahoo replaced CEO Terry Semel with co-founder Jerry Yang. The consensus is that Semel, who joined Yahoo as CEO in 2001, was axed because Google galloped past Yahoo is search volume, revenue, share price performance and market cap during his watch. While true, the root cause of his demise is that he failed to focus Yahoo on a clear strategy, which, to me, is CEO job one.

In a February post, I wrote:

On Tuesday, Yahoo announced to journalists with a bit of fanfare that it had a new mission statement it had developed last year as part of its management restructuring. Here is the previous Yahoo mission statement:

"Our mission is to be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses."

This was vague enough to cover just about any Internet activity and what makes a service "essential" is surely in the eyes of the beholder. No one could operate on the basis of this fuzz, though it could be used with slight tweaking as a vision statement.

Now here is the new Yahoo mission statement:

"Yahoo's mission is to connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world's knowledge. To ensure this, Yahoo offers a broad and deep array of products and services to create unique and differentiated user experiences and consumer insights by leveraging connections, data, and user participation."

A mission statement must communicate three essential ideas:

• What the organization does
• Who it does it for
• How it does it differently from others

The new Yahoo mission statement attempts to do this. It drops the reference to businesses and aims at consumers, so there is a bit more clarity as to the "who."

The first "what" is "connect to passion." This surely is intended to imply entertainment, but the Yahoos could not simply say that. Then again, perhaps they did not want to limit themselves and intend to appeal to other forms of passion, which I leave to the reader's imagination.

The second "what" is "connect to communities," which again casts a wide net, though it is likely a pitch for Web 2.0 relevance.

The final "what" is "connect to the world's knowledge," which is so Google-esque that we get that it means "compete effectively with Google in search."

As for the "how," the Yahoos used 31 words in their second sentence to be as fuzzy and broad as possible. They will do almost anything for which the Internet can be used.

Mission statements beg for clear, unambiguous language. If you work for Yahoo, how do you use this mission statement to help you make decisions? By trying to be the sun, the moon and the stars, Yahoo has crafted a mission statement that assures continuing lack of focus. They continue to suffer from a grandiose fuzziness of mission, as we discussed last November in Peanut Butter Portals.

Lack of focus kills careers and companies. But don't cry for Semel. He made $72 million last year and remains non-executive chairman of Yahoo's board. It is that very board of director's that deserves castigation.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Yahoo

Safari Trips Over Steve's Quips

Steve Jobs is a marketeer par excellence. And as long as the Mac was a closed system, he could get away with all sorts of hype. Problem is, iTunes and now Safari also run on Windows, which allows real head-to-head comparisons with other software. Apple software does not always compare well under the harsh light of the other 95% of the PC market.

Consider the just-released Safari for Windows beta. Frankly, it does not show well compared to either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Item: Jobs announcement this week of Safari for Windows hyped speed as one of its advantages. Wired News reports benchmark tests showing that Safari on Windows is slower on average than IE and Firefox.

Item: Jobs touts Safari as "secure from day one." As of this writing, researchers have already found ten security flaws in Safari for Windows, several of which are catastrophic, allowing exploits that gives the attacker complete control of your computer.

Item: Jobs brags that Safari is the gold-standard for browsing. Safari displays many simple web pages incorrectly (including my own). This is not new. It is due to flaws in its rendering engine, long known and documented. Web designers know workarounds for these bugs, though they are cumbersome and most web sites do not bother to chase these issues that less than 5% of visitors (Mac users) experience. These errors will become more glaring as Safari is used on Windows. Simply put, IE and Firefox observe the W3C standards and Safari does not.

Of course, Safari for Windows is not about being the web browser of choice for Windows users. This is instead about iPhone. Jobs this week announced that third parties could develop iPhone applications that run in the iPhone's version of the Safari browser. The Safari for Windows strategy is to provide all those Windows-based software developers a development platform for iPhone applications. Safari becomes the analog of Visual Studio for iPhone.

None-the-less, as Safari is exposed to "the rest of us," it may need to actually live up to its hype.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Safari, Apple

A Simply Strategy For Services Growth

The June issue of Harvard Business Review reports on research by Gary Davies and Rosa Chun, professors at the Manchester Business School, that confirms a simple strategy for driving growth in service organizations: sell your staff and they will sell your customers.

Davies and Chun set out to follow up on the ideas in their 2003 book Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness. If your company's reputation among customers is vital to your success in the market, how do you best influence this perception? They found that when a company's service employees thought more highly of the organization than customers, customer perception and sales rose. When a company's service employees thought less of the organization than customers, customer perception and sales fell.

The researchers get into the reasons for this, a phenomenon called emotional contagion. This means that a service person's feelings are inevitably transmitted to customers through all sorts of cues. Customers absorb these emotional signals and are influenced to feel the same way.

This means marketing needs to turn its attention internally. More importantly, management needs to focus on demonstrating to staff that theirs is a great company, on an ongoing basis. All too often, companies focus on what customers think and then do all sorts of things, mainly led by marketing, to change their views. But in services organizations, customer views trend towards staff views. So if you want to sell your customers, sell your staff. Perpetually.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning

The Effect Of Globalization On Human Services

Economists have long understood that direct services--services provided hands-on, person-to-person--are inherently inflationary. The reason for this is that such services are not subject to productivity gains. A hair dresser can dress only so many heads in a day. A therapist can serve only so many clients in a day. And so forth. When other kinds of work benefit from improved productivity and you can thus buy more widgets with a dollar, that dollar still buys the same amount of direct services. As productive capacity rises and real earning power increases, direct service providers increase their charges to keep pace but the service remains pretty much the same. Now your dollar buys more goods but less services.

Globalization--an inevitable process, not a political one--increases general productivity by driving production to low cost producers. This in turn encourages innovation, in particular the use of technology, as producers worldwide battle to drive their costs ever lower, maintain quality and thus increase their productivity. The global battle of globalization is ultimately not the exploitation of low wage, poor regions. This is a temporary phenomenon. It is the total global productivity battle.

Human services, dominated by directly delivered services, thus becomes increasingly inflationary as the rest of the economy benefits from the productivity gains driven by globalization. It certainly means that all the activities that surround the person providing the direct service must be focused on for productivity gains, in particular through the use of technology. But the bottom line inflationary nature of these services will continue to be the dominating trend. This has profound implications for public policy and service providers.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Globalization, Strategic Planning

Zero Billion Dollar Markets

I was talking to the VP of marketing for a Silicon Valley startup recently. He was lamenting that he believed his company was in too small a market. "We can't meet the projections we've made to the VCs. We have a few peer competitors and none of us can get enough traction. I just don't think the market is big enough."

This is a familiar theme. I call it the zero billion dollar market. That is a market whose total potential is less than $500 million, so when you round it off to the nearest billion it is zero billion dollars. In the hyped up VC funded high tech pressure cooker, a market of at least a billion dollars is critical. Without that potential, a market is unlikely to support a company with a potential market cap of over $500 million (which rounds off to a billion dollars). This is now the magic threshold for a successful IPO and VC nirvana.

Many tech startups find themselves in zero billion dollar markets, usually with a bunch of peer competitors who got into the market for the same trendy reasons. After a while, some fail, some exit the market, some are acquired by RBCs (really big companies) and some get rolled up in a consolidation wave. When the dust clears, though, the survivors are still stuck in a zero billion dollar market. The biggest still have zero billion dollar market caps.

One sure sign of a zero billion dollar market is that the major players, who all sell widgets, claim they are really not in the widget market but that widgets are just their entry point into some other, larger market. Yet years pass and they are still mainly widget companies.

Entrepreneurs, a zero billion dollar market can be great if you are a privately and closely held company. Sure, the VCs and investment bankers will sneer at you and call you (shudder) a lifestyle entrepreneur. But you can do quite well for owners, employees and customers in markets under $500 million. You can even get rich. But be sure you have owners, not investors. You can tell the latter, they have billion dollar stars in their eyes.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning