Can I email a post to this blog through Posterous?
Apparently I can.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame has ditched email and will primarily use Twitter:
… the people I communicate with the most are (mostly) on Twitter. What I love about Twitter is that it’s very limited (140 characters), so you have to keep things brief, and also there isn’t the expectation that you’ll respond to every message, as there is in email. Friends can DM me on Twitter for personal communication.
I find the using Twitter part more significant than the giving up email part.
Over the past year, I’ve observed that I’ve stayed in touch with friends and contacts from my undergrad and postgrad days (and former colleagues) who are on Twitter. I’ve found that I communicate at least once with everyone about once a week. Those who aren’t on Twitter have more or less fallen out of touch.
Twitter is definitely the best reflection of our expanding social networks and shortening attention spans. Telephone conversations lasted 15+ minutes. Reading and responding to an email takes perhaps 5 minutes; a tweet (or Facebook Wall post) takes seconds.
Finally, having these channels of communication has let us grade our social network according to closeness – I still call up my closest friends occasionally – those calls last upwards of an hour. I write to a slightly larger set of people with “what’s up lately” emails, and maintain a level of ambient Twitter-fed awareness of an even larger set.
Yahoo! just redesigned the Yahoo.com home page, its crown jewel for a decade. The big change is a bar on the left with widgets that display updates from Facebook, Gmail, New York Times and some 60 other sources. The company made a big deal of it, but on the whole it’s failed to impress.
I won’t regurgitate the bucketfuls of painstakingly-written criticism of the redesign itself that I’ve read over the past few days. In any case it’s too early to measure the impact of this change. I think the problem with the lukewarm, even negative reviews was with how Yahoo! announced the change to the world. In other words, this was a communications, not an execution problem.
Why everyone said “Ho-Hum”
The verdict is that this is old hat, and too little to make a difference – and there’s reason to be skeptical. The web has seen at least two major paradigm shifts since the late 1990s (first search and then social media), but Yahoo! has persisted with the original portal paradigm – making money off visitors to its home page by keeping them on its properties. But Yahoo! now ranks 2nd behind Google as the most visited property on the web – and Google makes money by sending people away from its search page!
Yahoo! is under tremendous pressure to 1. innovate and 2. stay relevant in the future. Any move by the company needs to score very well on these two parameters. Redesigning a home page, however dramatically, is not such a move.
Let your users say how great it is
Any pragmatist at Yahoo! would have anticipated that news of a home page redesign would not be seen as game-changing by itself – either by Yahoo’s users or by its advertisers [1].
That’s why it probably made more sense to simply spread awareness of the impending redesign than to generate buzz and create hype. CEO Carol Bartz called it “most significant change in our home page since the company’s inception”. So what? While the redesign effort was probably significant internally (money, time, CEO attention), it’s presumptious to assume users will find it just as significant. Bring out the tom-tom drums after your users have given you the thumbs-up.
As for advertisers, Yahoo! would probably have been far better off sharing metrics with them on a one-on-one basis after the launch. Display new targeting capabilities. Show user adoption rates. Show clickthrough statistics. Things that will bring a grin to advertisers’ faces, especially when they’re under pressure to get the most bang for buck with dramatically reduced budgets. Of course, all this is only if the redesign really works.
In other words, it’s time for Yahoo!, in an infinitely more transparent world, to put its money where its mouth is.
[1] No kidding. Tapan Bhat, Sr. Vice President at Yahoo, crowned himself Supreme Emperor of Unintentional Irony by declaring that the new home page would put Yahoo! at the “center point of people’s lives online.”
My last post generated a fair amount of discussion (comments+email) about Firefox’s future given the increased competition in the browser marketplace.
Let’s say Firefox does buck the trends that open-source applications seem to follow (either having their best features taken by commercially backed competition or ending up as back-end infrastructure), and remains the single largest non-IE browser with an increasing market share. What characteristic of Firefox would most help it achieve that?
What keeps you on Firefox?
I polled Twitter and co-workers about which browser among Firefox and Chrome they prefer, and why [1]. Those that used Chrome did so mostly because they perceived it to be faster than Firefox. A smaller number liked its minimalist interface. Almost all those that used Firefox refused to switch to Chrome because Chrome didn’t support their favorite add-ons [2]. And almost everyone I spoke to was unsure whether they’d switch to Chrome if it supported all of Firefox’s extensions.
Extensions might be what keeps the existing user base loyal. It’ll take Chrome and the others something more than just replicating support for extensions. Developers will need to port their applications to Chrome. You can mimic a feature, but it takes years to develop a developer community. This will also be an important differentiator when it comes to gaining market share (mostly existing or potential IE users) – the ability to literally create your own customized Firefox.
Firefox could also use use deep support for Mozilla Weave as another major differentiator (check out Weave Sync, for example). However, their use cases look like Google could do the same thing with Chrome as long as you were logged in to your Google Account. I guess there’s some (limited) Weave-like functionality already with Google Toolbar.
Finally, that money thing
Now that Firefox has a certain conflict of interest with Google (regardless of how much both might deny it), it might make sense for the Mozilla Corporation to explore alternate revenue streams. As browser capabilities have improved (and bandwidth has gotten cheaper), there’s been a trend to push as much processing to the client side as possible (think Gmail). There’s a ton of potential for further enhancing the browsing experience – and making money off it.
One way of doing that could be an App Store for Extensions – giving the opportunity for developers to truly enhance specific browsing experiences and make money off the effort, with Mozilla Corp. getting a cut. Another could be Firefox Special Editions for companies with pre-configured extensions (like the one for eBay). Mozilla could charge companies for the assembly, promotion and hosting of the special edition download package.
[Update 17 July 2009: Mozilla is now soliciting (voluntary) contributions from users who download extensions/add-ons. What's striking is this: "Mozilla is not getting a cut of any contributions at this point, but I think it would be fair and could become an additional source of income for Mozilla to finance the necessary infrastructure." That's one step closer to launching an App Store.]
I’d like to hear ideas for both issues in this post:
- what will sustain Firefox in the face of increased competition
- what revenue options the Mozilla Corporation should pursue for Firefox
Comment of email rahul@rahulgaitonde.org.
[1] Yeah, that’s a ridiculously small sample and totally not representative of the population. Why don’t you help and let me know in the comments? Chrome or Firefox? And why?
[2] A lone exception said he stuck to Firefox only out of sheer inertia.
Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:
“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”
“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”
The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.
A successful open source project will see one of two trends:
- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].
- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].
[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.
[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.
Marc Andreessen agrees with the view that building the components of the nascent Internet Operating System is a massive opportunity. In fact, a $300 million venture fund opportunity.
(With reference to last week’s post “What you need to do to be the next Google/Twitter/Facebook“).
For the longest time, the only two entities that made money from a mobile phone were the carrier and the handset manufacturer. Open and shut [1].
No longer. Not only are more mobile phones being sold now than ever before, there are more types of folks making money off it. For smartphones with an ecosystem such as iPhone, there is
- Apple, the iPhone manufacturer
- AT&T (in the U.S.) that provides cell phone connectivity
- tens of thousands of developers who sell their iPhone applications through the App Store (with Apple getting a cut). And this is not just indie developers. Amazon stands to make a huge bundle through book sales via its Kindle Reader app for iPhone [2]
- businesses that create free iPhone applications but make money off ads within their applications [3]
- record labels that offer their music for sales on the iTunes Music Store
- television networks and Hollywood studios that offer their TV shows and movies (respectively) for sale/rent, also on the iTunes Music Store
Of course, this runaway success has inspired every smartphone label to scramble to bake its own pie. Witness the plethora of application stores (Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android) [4], and Nokia’s attempts to sell music.
Open or closed?
The more mature a product category gets, the more players there are that stand to make money off it. That’s because the pioneer quickly realizes that for true scale, it must “open up” the product to entities other than itself. And that’s where it seems we have from history, a clear lesson: IBM opened up the specs of its original PC, and hordes of beige box manufacturers crowded Big Blue out of its own market. Apple itself nearly destroyed all that the Macintosh stood for when it licensed the Mac to other manufacturers.
“Opening up” a successful product and creating an open ecosystem divides the pie into so many slices that the pioneer is left picking up only crumbs. Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has been “opened up” to all those players above through the iPhone OS developer API, the iTunes Music Store and the iPhone App Store, but the ecosystem itself remains tightly closed.
[1] OK, so there were (are) electronic component manufacturers on the source side and advertising agencies on the sell side. But let’s limit ourselves to those that gained directly from the mobile phone.
[2] Also with iPhone OS 3.0, developers can now charge for features within the application (unlocking extra weapons and purchasing weaponry within games being the most commonly cited examples), so you could have a free basic application with paid features if you like. Before OS 3.0, the best that developers could do was offer separate “free” basic and “paid” full-featured apps.
[3] Take Twitterific, for instance. The free version of the application inserts ads into your tweetstream.
[4] With comical attempts to make them sound different (Palm Software Store, Nokia Ovi Store, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Android Market).
When it comes to the Internet in India, the low-hanging fruit has beeen picked, across sectors. Think Travel. Books. Jobs. Dating. Electronics. Money. In his post today, Rajesh Jain lists a few more: Search (dominated by Google), News (Rediff, NDTV, CNN-IBN), Email (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Rediff), Cricket (Cricinfo/ESPN), Video (YouTube/Google).
Online pioneers have lapped up the biggest brands and most popular goods: the largest cities, the biggest hotel chains, the most popular travel destinations, the widest marriageable demography, the most desirable gadgets, the most viral videos, the news everybody reads, the the matches everyone watches.
Now comes the hard part. The cities only a few want to travel to [1], the outliers for whom it isn’t easy finding a match [2] , books in regional languages, people with odd skills, niche but tremendously useful gadgets, highly technical videos. There’s a market for all those. In aggregate, they’re as large and lucrative as those that have already been monetized [3].
Then there’s an even larger market – for individual professional services. The mother of all yellow pages, with a location-based and rating-based component. One that connects me to the nearest puncture shop when my car has a flat on a stretch of highway (and takes Rs. 10 for that connection), directs me to the nearest ATM in any city, to the most reliable service center for my phone.
There is no technological barrier to setting up these businesses anymore (you really don’t need broadband for most of this – just plain Internet access, and in some cases, a cellphone). What makes this hard is convincing small businesses/individuals to sign on. Building trust and credibility. Selling to Jet Airways is much easier than to Pravin Puncturewalla on a random national highway. If you’re willing to tackle that, you have a successful business.
Finally, Rajesh has a compelling vision of the “now-new-near” web, which you should read. I think that “niche” is about as much the future as the others. I also think that “now” and “new” are synonymous for the vast majority of cases, so I propose that tomorrow’s web will be the “now-near-niche” web (built around the evolving Internet Operating System)
[1] RedBus.in is doing a spectacular job with that, by my estimates. Driving to work today I spotted a travel service that did a Hyderabad-Kolhapur (!) bus route. And hey presto, Redbus.in has that route listed.
[2] Secondshaadi barely scratches the surface, but hey, it’s a start.
[3] Yes, yes. It’s the same old tired Long Tail phenomenon. Let’s set aside discussions of how cool the phenomenon itself is and why it works, and explore how you can build businesses in India with it.