Getting out of Facebook Fatigue

We have a saying in India - "Nayi nayi Dulhan sabhi ko achi lagti he" (Everyone like the new bride). Can the same be said about Facebook now when the number of FB users in U.S has gone down for second straight months? No doubt that Facebook brought us closer to our friends , made the web world a small place to hang around but also brought the need of managing our online image and hence the need to self-censor. Plus those frequent irritating updates on your newsfeed from one or two individuals in your list making you think if you really want to know about all their activities until you want to sleep with them.

There is no doubt that facebook growth at some point of time will moderate given the fact that it depends on the internet penetration of any given country. The law of diminishing factor will start playing its part. So it should not lose sleep over the stagnating number of users but rather focus on how much average time its users are spending on Facebook, how much it can engage its users. If this user time is decreasing or stagnating , then it should certainly be wake up call as it will directly impact its advertising revenue. It is still a smaller player than Google as far as the ads revenue are concerned but certain to go through the adoption curve which perhaps would tilt the revenue share the other way.

At times, people get confused and start valuing a web company on the basis of the extent to which it engage its users.For example , Angry Bird - the game is inherently very engaging and the player gets so immersed in it that he/she gives little notice to the ads ; so it still proves to be a bad business. Now take Google, they increased the value of their Adwords by creating several non-immersive pages around google.com that makes us sitting on its sites for far more time than say when Google started. The adwords remained the same , the ads quality is more or less the same, even the way they try to get noticed is same but still we are seeing more of them with more opportunities to click on them. And then they introduced the win-win adsense and started syndicating the ads to billions and now with Android , they have captured the mobiles space. 

So here is the lesson for Facebook - Invent multitude of products and features as done by Google. But they have not done it yet. Facebook.com needs be more than a place where we can share some updates, chat a bit, tag friends, upload some photos, and do a bit of gaming - not one where we come only to refresh ourselves , sort of entertain ourselves unlike Google where we go for our needs - searching , gmailing , sharing docs et all.

The Latest One

:)

PS: Don't crib about the image quality offered by a 3-year old dilapidated iPhone.

Will Facebook Kill Micropayment Sites?

Simple it is - You post a link or write a note and people liking it on Facebook. Now extend this simple use case - You get credit points from Facebook for each like on your wall and similarly credit points deducted for each like you make on other's wall. After the netting process, you are left with a lumpsum credit say at the end of a month which you can convert for a real purchase online or say a coupon. Will this be the next level of social interactions? One Click Monetization of our social life on the web? The number of 'likes' will decrease perhaps on the fear of we losing out our points but will the inhibitions and quandary be still there while supporting a cause strong enough for an adrenaline rush within.

The case of Flattr

I remember signing for Amazon , putting my credit card details and then carry on with whatever i want to purchase. Unlike the other online buying sites (say Makemytrip.com or irctc.in) , i need not give my card details after the first purchase; they pick the predefined address and card details. Now think of a restaurant with no price list. Its totally left to the discretion of the customers as to how much they want to pay - basically extending the tipping etiquette to a full swing. Now what if it happens for the loads of online contents - articles,  blog posts, videos et all. This is what Flattr tries to do - providing a quick one-click easy way of paying to online contents. 

The image shows what put them to popularity chart. After Visa, MasterCard and Paypal closed their channels, Flattr was one of the few remaining medium through which people could donate to wikileaks. You just need to create an account and start embedding within their blog the flattr button like the one below.

Anyone else having the flattr account can use this button to like and pay/donate.Flattr makes revenue by cutting 10% of the money made by the content provider as their fee.

Cultural Catch: In simple words, voluntary payments are still like the tip we pay in restaurants, an etiquette that has survived years to become a collective habit amongst the masses.But do micropayments site such as this one have this time to catch. By the time they will do, a Facebook or a Google is sure to catch on this trend.

Product Management Challenges - II

This article is continuation of earlier Product Management Challenges - I and highlights the tough road being traversed by this genre of managers.

Competitive Landscape in an “IT Doesn’t Matter” era

If we go by Nicholas Carr’s famous article, Information Technology as a whole is becoming a commodity which no more would give a sustainable competitive advantage. So , business acceptance of a software product for purchase considerations is slowly getting apprehensive. “Why to invest further on IT if they are able to go business-as-usual?” or “Today we are implementing Oracle Apps R12, tomorrow we need to migrate to Fusion, there is no end to it”. So any software product should provide ample value proposition to the customer which compels him/her to try/buy it. Add the competitors to it and your product sustainability and customer lock-ins are always at a threat. That’s why we see many product start-ups initially working in stealth mode, doing their own internal pilot testing , getting the relevant product and consumer insights to get a differentiatied offering which would outsmart their competitors.

Resource Crunch

This is especially in the area of user experience designing. There are very few visual and interaction designer and many times their scarcity limits the firm capability to form the crux of the product team. If there are no designers working side by side with the product managers & engineers, it will limit what each of them can do.

Consumerisation

In layman’s view , it refers to the blurring line between the consumer and enterprise technology needs. And many a times, a new technological product is launched first to ordinary end user and once the product gets popular amongst the masses, it is being offered to the enterprise customers with additional value layers. For example, Google’s Application products were first opened to the masses and then it came up with the enterprise version. Apple recently launched Joint Venture, a tech support offering for small businesses covering the products like Mac, iPhone, iPad -- the very same ones which got sold off to general consumer. The challenge is to formulate your product strategy and roadmap across these blurring lines , to accept that the B2B and B2C distinction of end product usage is fast getting extinct.

The Successful Company Trap

Seeing the Google making hoards of money and awed by the fantastic products line from Apple, are you thinking to do product management like them? Be cautious. The point to be noted is that while Google & Apple have their own models of product management, the same might not give you a success formula. Their model is fit for them (until their founders remain so deeply involved in their product offering).

Cloud : SaaP vs SaaS

Cloud is both a challenge as well as an opportunity. If the existing product line is not web-based , then the firm has the danger of losing out on its existing and prospective customers. This is particularly important in emerging markets where the consumer is not ready to pay too much for the software product and hence the rise of ad-supported freemium business model in these markets. With SaaS the switching costs are decreasing plus the anytime anywhere access of the product which brings newer challenges to the product manager to continually improvise on the product for customer retention.

Customer vs Consumer

Often the people that make the purchase decision are very different than those that actually use and and are dependant on the product. The product manager ends up being responsible for a product that will be sold to (or used by) people he has never met, to people that speak a language he doesn’t understand, subject to laws that he isn’t aware of, and pay by mechanisms he has never used. The platform product management is a good example - Adobe offers Photoshop which is being used by slew of designers to create media/flash applications which are finally ‘consumed’ by totally set of people.

Product Management Challenges - I

Coming in early , working relentlessly until late nights , day after day , week after week but still not satisfied and happy ; packed days with back-to-back meetings , burst of emails piling up , the changing customer dynamics, the race to catch up with emerging trends & technologies and the various stakeholders’ pressure for that one magic product expected out of your team – Welcome to the world of Product Management !

The thrill of getting a successful product being used by the whole world comes with its own set of challenges to be faced by the product managers.  This article discusses a few of these challenges:

Lack of Role Clarity

Great software products come from the collaboration of product management, product design, engineering, and marketing team. One important aspect to the organizational design is that these teams should be equals but invariably we see one getting buried within another. The organisations have a tendency to mix/overlap the Product Management with the Product Marketing roles and responsibilities. Hence , many times we might see Product Managers striving to create their own niche space and acceptance within the organization, proving subconsciously that yes they are required and needed. My short product management stint made me notice a sort of humorous role confusion : The business team thinking that the product management guys are from the engineering side while the engineering team having a notion that they are from the business side ! So the role clarity itself becomes a challenge.

In a nutshell , we can have a very high level distinction:

Product Management	Product Marketing
Responsible for defining – in detail – the product that the engineering team will build.	Responsible for telling the world about this product
Defines Product Requirements	Defines Marketing Requirements
Activities include Product discovery, idea generation , ensuring that the product is useful, usable and feasible,  optimizing the end-user experience.	Activities involve : Pricing, Positioning and messaging, Promotions, Launching, Online marketing , Customer Acquisition Strategies.
Both should collaborate effectively for the product to succeed

Stakeholder Management , Buy-ins , trade-offs and Consensus Tendency

One of the biggest challenges is convincing others like the top management about any innovation's utility. Selling the product idea and concept to the internal customers who will fund the project for product development is not an easy nut to crack. Lack of required upfront support and funding increases the time-to-market.

A very effective way the product discovery team can handle this scenario is by creating a prototype which can be shown to the stakeholders. The nature of the discussion will be more productive when stakeholders can see a clickable prototype versus something just talked about in air or in some form of paper/powerpoint specification.

Within the organization , Product Managers need to aliase/interact with many parties : product marketeers , project managers, interaction designers, visual designers, usability engineers, prototypers, engineers, architects, QAs , cross-functional teams, etc. The decisions are being taken in concensus and become more of a group activity. The product objective shufts from coming up with something great, to coming up with something that keeps everyone happy and doesn’t get you fired which actually negatively impacts the product innovation. Seth Godin said: “Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree.” While consensus is something nice to have, we basically need more of collaboration wherein the teams can work together closely and provide a fusion of customer value/functionality, usability, and technology.

High Expectations

Yes, the customers would expect your product to solve all of their problems and your CEO would want to roll out the new release at a breathnecking speed. And if you are an engineer plus MBA breed , don’t get surprised if you are being considered superhuman. The best way to tackle is to communicate a very realistic picture to your internal and external customers. If the expected deadline is too tight , break the work to be done in chunks and modules ,  identify the actual achievable roadmap and convey the same assertively. Using numbers, some sort of data crunching to prove your point helps invariably.

Product’s Success Metric

There is a lack on clarity on how exactly a Product Manager’s performance can be articulated except the fact that it naturally should be linked to the Product’s Success. But again , there is no best way to measure a product’s success. Should it be through the revenue generated? Or Profit? Or the number of end-users? All of these parameters can be useful but they don’t really provide the exact picture.

One simple business metric coming up recently (and adopted by the likes of Apple, eBay and Amazon ) is called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The customers are asked how likely they would recommend the  product, on a scale of 0 to 10. Those rating 9 or 10 are called “promoters” (they’re out there telling others to adopt the product); those rating 7 or 8 are called lukewarm or neutral; and those giving 0-6 are called the “detractors,” which are not likely to recommend the product to others, and may even be actively warning against the product.

NPS = The percentage of promoters - The percentage of detractors 

Balance between Domain and Technological Expertise

Product Management requires skills like assessing opportunities, defining product principles, product discovery, and prototype testing. The whole idea is to discover a product-market fit and this requires a deep understanding of both the market needs and the technology’s capabilities. The challenge is how to keep pace with the domain/market trends and rapidly changing technlogies when the job requires your day-in and day-out effort. This is very critical while you interact with various teams and plan for product/feature feasibility. Even the product lifecycle is also getting shorter putting on you those extra worries to speed up in order to monetarily benefit from the existing product as fast as possible.

Muslim Brotherhood in the Social Media Era

Okay , i was confused , ignorant perhaps. I really didn't know what Muslim Brotherhood actually means. Yes these two are the catch words if you open any news channel , site or feed , in all probability you will either find them in the headlines or on the bottom ticker. One headline said : 'Muslim Brotherhood to talk to oppositions in Egypt' and i just didn't had any clue.

Wikipedia says that having founded in 1928 in Egypt, it is "the world's oldest and largest Islamic political group, and the world's most influential Islamist movement". Ohhh now i understood why president Obama chose Egypt and Cairo University address last year to reach out to Muslim world.

This group is banned in Egypt since more than 50 years now.Their members fight the elections as independents and still form the largest opposition group in the country. Hence we are hearing about them so often now when protests are in full swing against the soon-to-be-ex-president Hosni Mubarak.

Now take this : They are seeing an influx of new gen youth with an active cyber life breaking the old ideology of Jehad , accommodating the liberal thoughts and often critical of their own organization. And are they against the WEST (the decades old fashion statement)?

Did we find any anti-US slogans, SHOW ME ONE in the current ongoing Egypt's pro-democracy protests? In fact twitter is filled with praise for western reporters (Anderson Copper, Sonia Verma et all) for covering the agony these people are going through. If you are a western reporter at the Liberation Square , the crowd cares for you more because they look up to you helping them to get the freedom they are longing for. The 3 western companies Google+Twitter+SayNow gave rise to new Collaboration for the Cause in form of Speak2Tweet and the other one Facebook gave them the courage to mobilize through various FB pages.

So where United States stands? The dictatorial regimes in Arab worlds are (financially) supported by them. There is a catch here. They don't support them for carrying out this dictatorship. They support them for their own military mileage , with or without democracy it doesn't matter to them. Tell me a current regime who could have been democratic had US not supported them the way it has as of now. US was never the cause for this regime effect.

Whether its Egypt or Jordan or Yemen or just any state dominated by any religion , caste and creed , these people want to be part of the economic and social development, part of globalized flat world, a better life which they were deprived of. Root of Fundamentalism comes from not getting the pie of these developments , it comes from being left out , from not moving on and changing with time. Now these new additions to the brotherhood want to be like us, yes the fortunate us. They are not jealous , they are aspirants. They are not destructive , they are collaborative. They are not aliens, they are us.

And they are coming. We should embrace and share rather than create doubts in the minds. The dangers part of these minds erupts on not being accepted and respected. Once we the fortunate ones start doing it, the world will be a better place. 

Collective Intelligence is said to be the main driver of all future innovations. The more diverse , unique we are the better the Collective groups will be. Hence we should cheer not fear from this cry of freedom from Egypt.

One problem is that protagonists of the Muslim Brotherhood and even those using it currently left and right with the pro-democracy uprising all over don't have any clue what it means now. The term has changed in front of them in their own lifetime. The New Media has done it. Slowly transforming the world we live in.

Who says the next war will be for currency , crop or crime. Let the world get rid of its ammunition , lets have more treaties to remove them all and fight it all out herein @ SecondLife . The winning nation will get what it might be (virtually) fighting for.

Groupon Hype

Groupon seems to be benefiting out of all the hype surrounding it !

Network Effects Revisited

In network effect , the utlity of a product increases as more and more number of people use it. So the more ubiqitious the product becomes , the more valuable it is. Example includes mobiles , telephones, fax machines , Social Networks, web marketplace like eBay, Groupon (the higher the free subscribers the better are the chances to meet the minimum guaranteed number of purchasers for the deal to actually materialize),  Wikipedia, Stock Exchanges(yes , as the number of participants increases the transaction cost decreases). 

What about SQL?? (Why all/most databases use this as their basic language?)

The initial value of any of the examples mentioned above depends on the quality of its offering and not on the number of people using it. This is the value generated by the offering when there are no other users.The initial quality is the key to atract the users which calls on other users also to join say through word of mouth. The product overall value accelerates once a certain critical mass joins in and derives value from interactions/connections with each other.

Drawbacks

Firstly,  it leads to congestion and slowly after one point of time the value of the product starts diminishing. This happens in case of telephone/mobiles networks wherein if the infrastructure is not scaled at appropriate time , then each additional user will increase the load on the network and decreases the value for other users. Is this what we are seeing happening with the Google Search engine. As pointed out in the article 'Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google' , the search engine has become more of a jungle with spammers and marketers hunting around with their Ads and Sponsored sites and hence losing out on value. Thats what happened with Bill Gates who left Facebook due to huge number of friend requests pouring in; for him the value of the network started decreasing. Social Networking sites like Facebook surely will need to go an extra mile to safeguard the 'Spirit of Community' which will get destroyed with increasing number of friends/followers in one's network. The network will no more be social but again the same jungle of spammers and advertisers what Google is today.

The other drawback is that it causes vendor lock-ins wherein the customer becomes dependent on the provider for products and services and is unable to switch to another vendor. Microsoft has been doing that with its office products which required one to have MS Office to remain compatible with others many using it until Google Docs and OpenOffice's of the world came up and era of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) got some momentum..

If there are no competitors to a successful network , then the monopolism sets in and the network provider starts hiking its charges and put restrictions. These restrictions out of the monopoly nowadays are inspiring many firms with new revenue model. The best example being Linkedin which restricts almost everything except your capability to add connections(that will come soon ! its just the beginning , let them face some 'congestion'. There is certainly going to be an inflection point where each new user will make the life harder for existing users. Imagine twitters and facebooks of the world charging you for making a status update.What will happen then? Multiple networks will then compete on an even similar basis, the core product value will again gain prominence. Eg: There are more fax machines in the world now than ever before but its value has decreased because of other substitutes like email, scanner, faster courier , etc. So the numbers have lost value here while the product is inherently losing out with modern ways of communications).

And if there are competitors to a network , then the silos sets in wherein each player starts setting their own standards and benchmarks. Thats what we are seeing in Mobile Operating Systems war - from Nokia and , Blackberry to Google and Apple all players trying to form their own community which promotes their distinguised OS.

One other interesting drawback can be that the markets can adopt an inferior product in place of some superior alternative just because of the network effects. For example i feel that Macs PCs are superior to Windows one but still its the Windows who are dominating the market. Same case with Apple iOS and Android and its the Android which seems to be winning the race. And governments/regulators do realize that since markets cannot be matured enough to choose the best standards/practices/products/networks , its the government who should take the lead to investigate and monitor the firms intention of making any offerings. Hence we see so many antitrust actions !

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Take this one now - Consider IT as an offering , is its value increasing with more and more of its adoption. If we go by Nicholas Carr argument , then slowly its becoming a commodity with no strategic advantage. So does it mean that IT doesn't have any network effect?

Google Adwords Free Advertising Trial

In case you are not an existing Google Adwords account holder , they are providing Rs.1500 advertising credits for you to try out. You can use the same to put your Google Adwords ads that might appear above or along the Google search results as Sponsored Links.

Fill this form to get the free credits

The offer is valid to only new Google Adwords advertisers. The terms and conditions as mentioned by them on registrations are:

Promotional credit must be applied to a new AdWords account within 15 days of creating the AdWords account and is valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed signup accounts. Advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. Advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount. Subject to ad approval, valid registration and acceptance of the Google AdWords Program standard terms and conditions. The promotional credit is non-transferable and may not be sold or bartered. Offer may be revoked at any time for any reason by Google Inc. One promotional credit per customer. Advertisers with self-managed signup accounts are subject to a Rs. 250 activation fee. Offer void where prohibited by law. Prepay customers must deposit Rs. 500 into their account for activation. Please note: After the promotional credit has been exhausted, your campaigns will continue to accrue clicks for which the costs will be charged to your credit card. If you don’t want to be charged for additional clicks, you can pause your campaigns at any time.

The Google's Dilemma - Part 1

Google - the ultimate company to work for is no more so. There was a time when it was a matter of surprise if we heard anyone is leaving the company. Surprise because there wasn't any specific better place to go, the lack of alternatives they say. Yahoos , eBays and Amazons of the world were just not enough. The Google guys challenged AltaVista, the search engine before Google; they were the ones who brought simplicity of user experience to us; they were the ones who ruled the world; but not now.

The world they are trying to conquer has changed a lot since they engineered their search engine and their array of products. The user behavior has shifted from searching to engaging. The same and the new sets of users now want to stick to the web pages(read social sites). This is what lies against the Google's philosophy of using only and only data to define its strategies and future. They need to find out how best they can keep the web users stick to their page rather than just helping them out to find the information they want and allow them to shift gears to the other pages. Until the social web revolution , it was okay to send the users to other pages as many of these pages did displayed the google ads from Adwords and there was no strong rival , no strong alternative in web advertising. But the whole paradigm of online advertising is shifting. People now go to pages which are being 'liked' and 'recommended' by their (web) social friends. And this social race is the one which Google is fast loosing out.

There are other aspects too. Like , i want to purchase an Android phone but deep inside i know i need to compromise on the smooth touchscreen experience of Apple iOS. And that is why we are seeing the manufacturers like Samsung and HTC putting their own layer of user experience over Android. And the response which Google TV got from the critics has clearly forced them to postpone on the commercial roll-outs. It lost on simplicity (yes, Google forgot its own mantra) , no apps (you are no Apple who released the first iPhone without the apps either at a time when apps weren't craze as they are now) in current era is a big no-no and again it lacks social flavor(people like to watch what their friends recommend, engage through YouTube here, its all yours dear).

to be continued...