PETEGRIF

Is the web dead? Hell no. And it ain’t no zombie neither!

This is a persistent contemporary meme but whilst it makes great link bait and I don’t blame mobile startups pushing their wares, I don’t buy it.

The proposition generally takes the form that mobile is killing the web and the argument, if you can call it that, is that apps are trouncing the web on mobile and mobile is growing like crazy, here and perhaps more importantly overseas in countries like China.  Furthermore, people are spending more time on mobile.  Indeed, they may even be spending more time on mobile than on PC like devices on the web.

But is it credible there are no enduringly use cases for web applications?  Can’t the web do anything better than a mobile app?  Isn’t it possible that a more likely outcome is that the web will continue to have a healthy existence for those valid use cases and that mobile apps will live alongside - each doing what they do best as determined by the market?

Perhaps history can teach us something.  Has the rise of social networking sites killed off all sites that aren’t ‘social?’  No.  Of course not.  Because there are valid use cases of businesses that just aren’t focused that heavily on the social graph and don’t benefit that much from social data.

Imho the ‘web is dead’ argument ignores the following:
a) there is value in links and there is some content better suited to the web than mobile apps
b) some content and some applications require a bigger form factor than mobile
c) some applications benefit from heavy integration of a great deal of different sorts of data and functionality - hard to do in an app.  Apps can nibble away at well defined ‘mini tasks’ but are not at their best when the application more complex and the workflow just ‘is’ tricky.  Not everything can be distilled into something simple.
d) the fact that people are spending more time on mobile than on PCs does not mean that their PC usage is cratering.  Most mobile time is new time.  People are using mobile in buses, on trains, snatching moments here and there all through the day and this time adds up but it isn’t the same kind of usage and the new usage doesn’t automatically displace the old.  The total time people are spending online is increasing.
e) most mobile usage is games and a subset of social networking activities.  A lot of this activity is not replacing traditional time online.
f) mobile is very well suited for short bursts of tasks and games but not for content creation
etc etc
Basically, mobile and desktop/laptop will coexist in technologically mature societies like the US.  Despite the valid enduring use cases for desktop/laptop the situation will likely evolve differently in countries such as China.

#Amazon crushing #tablets - told you so :)

“Amazon has so many of the required pieces to create a soup to nuts offering.  The hardware is the tip of the iceberg but even here they have demonstrated remarkable competence with the Kindle.  They already have in place the world’s most sophisticated consumer merchandising operation.  They have the credit card information of countless millions and the trust of those consumers.  They have an enormous scaleable IT infrastructure in place.  Can you imagine browsing music, video, apps on an Amazon device and then purchasing with one click and getting fantastic customer service?  It could happen.  I suspect we will see Amazon enter the market this year with a very low cost device and become a huge player.”

UPDATE:

Apparently Amazon are no longer crushing tablets.  Apparently their sales have “plunged.”  This article is worth reading.  ”Kindle Sales Plunge Made Amazon.com’s Gross Margin Look Better.”  http://seekingalpha.com/article/557151-kindle-sales-plunge-made-amazon-com-s-gross-margin-look-better  The article concludes that “The Kindle fire suffering the same fate so early, also means that Amazon.com’s attempt to mitigate Apple and Google’s dominance has already failed.”  This sounds unduly final in a market only two years old, but if Amazon’s entry into tablets has indeed run into a wall this is profoundly important for the whole market.  It is certainly possible to imagine Amazon competing at the low end but impossible to imagine at the high end.  So the question arises - if there a low end what is Amazon’s problem?  Either there is no low end tablet market or they have a product problem. It seems unlikely that there is no low end market and a product problem can in principle be fixed. The reason this is of general importance is for other manufacturers.  The number of competitors actual or potential with a soup to nuts offering is extremely small.  What does Amazon’s experience mean for them and their products?

Is Android a strategic asset to Google? (Part 2)

Last time we entertained the possibility that Android wasn’t as strategic as people might imagine.  More specifically, that Google might do better by attempting to emulate Apple - leveraging Motorola to go head to head with Apple - a soup to nuts offering.  It’s a possibility, but let’s now explore the possibility that Android is indeed strategic.  What would that imply? 

Firstly, radical steps are required to avoid the fragmentation that is hurting the whole infrastructure.  That means possible licensing changes.  Secondly, what on earth with Google do with Motorola.  When they purchased them I (along with others) thought it was for the patents and expected them to divest the rest of the business as fast as possible.  It’s been a while.  So if they don’t intend to go up against Apple, what’s the point?  A friend advises me that it’s just a tough asset to sell.  Makes sense to me.  Ironically, its very existence makes the Android problem more acute.  

So whether Android is or isn’t a strategic asset the status quo is not stable.  

Tim Cook - Apple & Intellectual Property

“I’d highly prefer to settle versus battle,” Cook said. “But you know the key thing that’s very important is that Apple doesn’t become the developer to the world. I’ve always hated litigation. We need people to invent their own stuff.”

Right on.

More Facebook functionality = better Facebook?

For some time I’ve had the uncomfortable feeling that Facebook is jumping the shark.  Not from desperation or lack of imagination, but from a creeping ‘featurism’ that is undermining the core experience.

IMHO Zuckerberg’s instinctual understanding of the social graph and his ruthless pursuit of that vision were brilliant.  There had certainly been ‘social’ or ‘community’ sites before, but his vision created something distinctive.  To his great credit he took bold chances and pushed the envelope (e.g. wrt privacy and sharing) beyond what his critics and even what his fans considered appropriate, yet he was vindicated beyond people’s wildest dreams.  This success stemmed from a vision of a world in which sharing is its own reward (if you haven’t read Facebook’s ‘Statement of Principles” then please do - it is an excellent statement of core values that inform Facebook and its relationship with its users).

But with great power and great reach comes great expense.  A business model must be found.  And users must be retained.  So there the pressure to continue to evolve the offering is intense.  Then there is the world of mobile and the onslaught of apps to be fended off. So continued change is to be expected but whereas many previous iterations felt bold some of the more recent offerings feel more questionable.

Obviously Facebook has access to gigantic amounts of data and makes its moves advisedly whereas I have nothing more than a prickly feeling at the back of my neck to go on.  But whereas the feed and photos are critical, the plethora of recent sharing add-ons is starting to feel as if the pudding is being over egged.  Surely it can’t be a realistic goal that everything you could possibly do or like be captured by one site to rule them all?  Isn’t there a danger that the search for the ultimate graph results in so many probes and shares and random pieces of content that it just starts to feel noisy and messy?  Let’s assume that it is perfect right now - the exact amount of content and solicitation of user input - what does that mean for where it goes next?  Is there a natural end to what any one such site can elegantly incorporate?  And if that is true then how does such a site prioritize?  IMHO photos are so emotionally laden that they are such a core offer.  But is everything?  The newspapers you read?  The mobile apps you use?  Is it possible that recent changes, which have certainly been heavily tested, represent local optima and the overall experience is suffering?

The more Facebook takes on the harder it is to digest and elegantly regurgitate.  Right now, it feels as if it is starting to have indigestion.

Is Android a strategic asset to Google? (Part 1)

At the Oracle Google trial Larry Page recently stated that he wouldn’t say that Android is a critical asset to Google.  Predictably this initiated cries of derision.Jay Yarow, for example, on BI “But that’s just dumb.  Android is very clearly critical to Google.  Otherwise it wouldn’t be investing so heavily in it.”  

Maybe Yarow and others are right.  But for the hell of it let’s just entertain the alternative possibility. What if Google has recognized that Android is a damaged brand, that it will be difficult or impossible to stop the carriers ‘adding value’ to standard issue Android and thereby continuing to fragment the offer compared with Apple’s clean offering?  (Let’s bear in mind that the Wintel alliance did not allow analogous fragmentation) What if post the Motorola purchase they have decided that rather than sell off the hardware business and hold onto the patents they will instead use the hardware business to launch a soup to nuts offering to compete head on with Apple (and Amazon)?  What if they think that a fragmented Android that doesn’t even guarantee them search on a carrier’s phone truly isn’t strategic?  They do all the heavy lifting for what benefit? What if they believe that there is a potentially an enormously bigger business for them competing head on with Apple than dicking around with carriers and hoping they get search revenues?  Apple has shown just how big a business being a leading smartphone provider can be.  And has shown what a soup to nuts offering means.  And how much consumers like it.  Google has the potential to provide such an offering.  What if Larry has decided that’s the way to go?  It is certainly an enormous business opportunity - much bigger than Android - and to grow Google Larry needs HUGE wins. If he’s thinking along these lines Android (as a free source offering) really wouldn’t be strategic any more, would it?  Just maybe he was saying what he really thinks?  

Business bs, hagiography and the correlation fallacy

Journalists and a remarkable number of tenured academics in reputed business schools are prone to inferring causation from correlation.  In the paradigmatic case they observe a successful company and try to infer why it was successful by reading the tea leaves.  Superficial characteristics of personalities and their personal style are elevated to new business principles to be emulate.  IMHO the overwhelming majority of such supposed analysis is mind-bendingly appalling.

Consider the case of Steve Jobs and Apple.  I have absolutely no knowledge of the truth of the reports but by all accounts he could be a total asshole - inconsiderate, dictatorial, unfeeling and manipulative.  He was however professionally successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone but Alexander the Great.  So the process begins…why was he so successful?  Perhaps his assholedom was in fact an essential ingredient of his success?  Maybe conventional management theories have not sufficiency embraced dictatorship.  And so it goes.  Book after book, basking in the reflected glory and selling snake oil for the credulous. 

IMHO success is rather less easily captured.  In any large population there will be successes.  And what makes those companies successful is certainly in some measure a function of execution, but it is also in large part being in the right place at the right time.  Alfred E Neuman could have been in charge of IBM in the sixties and they would have continued to hit the jackpot and Steve Jobs could have presided over post WWII British shipbuilding and he could not have arrested its decline in the face of low cost foreign competition.  Timing the rise and fall of the tide is a powerful thing as King Canute discovered.

How confident can you be of the opinions of these analysts?  Not very. One thing you can be confident of is that if Apple falters, if it totters, then there will be no shortage of analysts who knew all along that such a culture was brittle, vulnerable in the face of setbacks.  

Why does this matter?  It matters because false recipes peddled by parasites to sell more books or publish more case studies don’t help anyone.  They look good on shelves in airport bookstores but they just muddy the waters and their magic recipes can confuse would be entrepreneurs and managers.  Real leaders understand themselves well enough to know they cannot pretend to be someone else to try to emulate their success.  For better or worse they will create a company in their own image, either consciously by managing the culture or unconsciously by failing to manage it so that it evolves by default.  In consequence some personalities create companies fraught with infighting whilst others have harmonious teams.  Either can be successful and either can fail.  There is no magic formula.  All a leader can be is the best he/she can be so accept that fact and get on with it.  Books on Steve aren’t going to help.  Most of the people who write these books couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag and btw - you’re not Steve.  So ignore the hagiographic bogus analysis and do your best to time the tide.

Rumors of the death of the PC, the web and today’s dev frameworks are greatly exaggerated.

It is fashionable to declare various aspects of our current IT world dead.  Current supposed corpses include the web itself, PCs and any development framework that is not realtime concoction of js and node.  Obviously technology continues to evolve but are these things really doomed?  And if so, how long before we all know it?

IMHO the rumors of death are greatly exaggerated for several reasons.  Firstly, we just don’t know how users will respond to some changes that are afoot, secondly, some infrastructure changes take time to become sufficiently robust for anything other than pioneer applications and thirdly the fact that a change may be disruptive and is embraced by those who would disrupt doesn’t mean that a noisy advance guard has influence in proportion to the size of its megaphone.

Consider the death of the PC.  Apparently we are entering a post-PC age.  But are we?  What is clear is that new connected devices are gaining mind share and increasing access in circumstances where connectivity would otherwise have been impossible.  This is not new.  Laptops enabled access which would have been impossible if you had to carry around a tower.  I love smartphones and tablets, but I hate entering real data on them and apparently I am not alone.  Is it clear quite what the division of labor will be between these devices?  Do we even understand what the form factors of choice will be?  It’s not clear to me.  I have an iMac, Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air, a Kindle, an iPad, an iPhone and a Galaxy Note.  If use them for very different things.  And a device like the Note makes one wonder quite where the line between a tablet and a phone is.  It may well be that it is very different for different people.  I suspect that many of us will end up with multiple devices and that an ultraslim like the Air will be in the arsenal.  The fact that ALL computing is no longer done with a PC does not spell death for the PC.

What of the web?  Apparently the explosion of apps and the growth of one page sites that are actually js apps means the web is on its way out.  We will all be happily using stovepipe apps on mobile and reluctantly occasionally accessing websites that aren’t really websites.  IMHO this is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future. There is an enormous amount of content ‘on the web’, which can be accessed by URLs and this is incredibly valuable. Furthermore, many of the organizations who have put this information up on the web have an interest in it being readily accessible - not everyone is Facebook. And even if this were not true the massive inertia will make changing this situation take forever.

Last but not least, development frameworks.  Old style frameworks like RoR are doomed in the face of the wave of new js ‘frameworks’ like Meteor.  It’s exciting stuff, but client server computing is not revolutionary and it will take years before any such new framework is battle tested to the point that any sizable organization will risk their conservative ass on it.

The point is not that new and exciting things will not come along, nor that change is not afoot - it most certainly is.  But statements to the effect that this or that is ‘dead’ are IMHO way overblown.

Instagram & Community - a key strength

Unsurprisingly, much has been made of Instagram.  But IMHO there is one truly important fact, publicly available, that has escaped attention - the attention the company paid to building community.  A quick search of meetup.com reveals that there are 1051 Instagram communities holding Instameets.  And this was no accident.  Of the 12 employees listed in a BI piece, 5 were engineers and 5 were community managers!!  That is a remarkable distribution of effort.

Facebook & Instagram - inevitable

I am in the happy position of having said “I told you so” - on Fred Wilson’s blog.

Pete Griffiths • 13 days ago • Edit …There are other players but imho Instagram is the class act - they are more than a set of filters. Fb should just buy them. Strong synergy. :)

Obvious deal and the huge premium is not surprising.  Instagram clearly have massive upside as standalone - they can probably quickly pick up another 30 million users (Android) so suddenly FB is looking at buying the company with 70 million users and good prospects and having to pay any more.  I am sure they wanted to do the deal earlier but probably needed the IPO to assure the Instagram side that there was a real exit and seeing the execution on Android helped.

The Social Graph is just an Interest Graph

Don’t tell anyone but the social graph is simply a specialized interest graph.  It is the graph of those people in your life that you are interested in.  Is there any good reason to suppose that that graph maps naturally onto other interests in your life?  Yes and no.  Those people in your social graph with whom you have a group relationship by virtue of a shared interest will indeed map well.  But other groups won’t fit so comfortably.  You may share few interests with your family.  Your common interests with college buddies may be no better predicted by your social graph than by demographic data.  There is no way your work buddies would automatically share your interesting in recreating Civil War battles. So if you build a company focused on capturing the social graph, a la Facebook, you may discover that the resultant graph is not as powerful a predictor of interests and friend recommendations are not as influential as you might have imagined.  Hence the need for such sites to mine the data exhaust of interactions and declared interests to deduce interests.  This will always be harder than reading a person’s interests directly of their participation in a community focused around a specific interest.  This may be a community which exists for no other purpose or it may be a sub community within an environment which fosters and supports such sub groups defined by interests. This is why Pinterest, for all its copyright problems, is commercially interesting. It has a hard focus on interests.  Social is not its primary focus.  

Pinterest & Tumblr - copyright, mass infringement & their well chosen enemies

I strongly suspect that Pinterest/Tumblr have a real legal problem wrt copyright.  But this problem only becomes life threatening if they face a determined well resourced foe.  IMHO Pinterest/Tumblr have chosen their potential plaintiffs well and can probably manage the problem.

a) the legal case

It has been argued that Pinterest is protected by fair use or safe harbor.  I’m not convinced.

Fair use - a huge amount of the content they republish is not commented on, not scholarly, not partial or lower quality images or thumbnails, etc.  It is just the unadorned original.  That is not fair use.  Arguments to the effect that someone pinning it shows they like it and that such ‘liking’ is akin to a comment won’t stand up.

Safe harbor - I am not sure that the DMCA safe harbor provisions will protect you if the essential nature of your site or software is to enable copying rather than such copying being an unfortunate side effect of the technology.  P2P companies were shut down for this reason even though they claimed that they were just the conduit.  Furthermore, if the essential nature of your site/service is to provide such copying and your revenues derive from users accessing such facilities, even if your revenues are indirect monetization such as advertising, I suspect that it would be not only possible but convincing to argue that your revenues are indeed a direct financial benefit of the pirated content.  It would be very hard for Tumblr or Pinterest to argue that the extremely hard percentage of copied content on their sites is (a) an unfortunate side effect of their key business, or (b) irrelevant to their financial status - neither of them would have attracted the funding they have without the traffic and such investors clearly believe that traffic can be monetized.  So it’s a tricky area indeed, but IMHO Safe Harbor may not be enough if someone serious gets after them.

Well chosen enemies

There is a big difference between the enemies that P2P made and Pinteret/Tumblr’s potential plaintiffs.  And whilst this is not a legal consideration it is an enormously practical consideration.

Well resourced lawyered up media giants who saw widespread media copying as an existential threat went after P2P and crushed them.  What may purely pragmatically be in Pinterest and Tumblr’s favor is that I don’t see an equivalently resourced opponent who will go after them.  Their opponents are fragmented.  And right now they do not have enough $$ for a litigator to go after them on a class action basis.  

But watch out

If Pinterest and Tumblr explode in monetization and raise huge amounts of $ they become deep pockets and hence attractive targets for litigation.

Pinterest: a discussion of the Social Graph, the Interest Graph, User Experience Design and Startup adoption

Brad Feld recently posted an interesting piece on his blog entitled “Happy Birthday, I’m unfriending you” in which he describes the process he underwent to prune his social graph on the many social networks he participates in.  I found myself making a few contributions to the ensuing discussion and have summed up my key points here.  

Brad’s key point is that different social network encourage different social relationships and that there is no one size fits all model for how to manage your friends on a social network.  ( http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/02/happy-birthday-im-unfriending-you.html#comment-436032025 )  This is absolutely true and is related to the really tricky problem for startups designing products with a strong link to social.  If you put yourself in the position of the product designer one of the trickiest questions to answer is - what is my model for social behavior?  If there is no one model for an individual how can there be for the site?  You can’t support every single possible model. Reading Paul Adams on social groups in the real world doesn’t solve the problem. Many startups are faced with difficult decisions. Friending vs following?  Groups of friends and if so how fine grain?  If groups how prominent do I make the filtering controls?  Does the UI at the point of posting as a producer introduce undesirable friction?  There are tools to ease the pain but even such smart tools as machine learning to create your groups so your group management is minimized don’t make the problem evaporate and what’s left can be a user experience problem. These are all difficult questions even if you are tightly focused on a single well defined demographic and have reason to believe you know what their preferred model will be.  But sadly things aren’t that simple.  Many products overflow such demographic segments.  If you were to design Facebook now you couldn’t afford to be paralyzed but on the other hand, the Facebook community clearly includes many segments with many very different attitudes to social behavior and with very different propensities and competences to manage controls.  Path’s decision to restrict the size of one’s ‘friends’ is an interesting approach to a tough problem.

There are however sites that encourage a huge amount of user interaction and yet are not primarily organized around the social graph.  Pinterest is a hot case in point. Pinterest is not primarily focused on the social graph but rather on the interest graph.  Setting aside for the moment the business model implications of this (which I suspect are favorable for Pinterest), it is very natural for people from differing social groups to share interests just as we all know that our social groups do not exhaust our interests.  Some people that we interact with little and would not figure highly in any network analysis of our social behavior nonetheless may share an important interest.  So with the interest graph the primary matter is not to solve the social group question with its associated UX but rather an ontology of content which can successfully span social groups. This isn’t trivial but IMHO it is more amenable to workable general solution and there is a huge amount of prior art in cataloguing and searching content. So as a rule of thumb my hypothesis is that interest graph focused companies have the easier design challenge.

I also hypothesize that interest graph companies can grow quicker faster because the usefulness of such a site is not entirely dependent on the network effect.  Whilst people like Andrew Chen argue that any product must have intrinsic worth that can be enjoyed for its own sake it is hard to see Facebook through that lens.  FB and other such communities are about social communication and sharing and in such cases the network effect is a drag on adoption.  Unless you can find a way to concentrate your adoption to provide network benefits it is likely to be a slog.  FB focused on Harvard, then other Ivy’s then other schools…  Yelp focused on San Fran, then the next city, then..  In both cases the concentration provided early adopters with more network benefit than would otherwise have been the case.  If you consider Pinterest in this light it is clear that any user can derive real benefit from an easy to use beautiful online pinboard.  They can use it to collect and order content of interest to them and revisit such organized content even if they don’t share it with anyone.  It is more similar to Evernote than Facebook. A person has interests irrespective of their groups!  And products can be built that address a specific interest (eg wine!) or provide a platform to support any interest - Pinterest. The clever thing about Pinterest is that it is the combination of user generated content and the interest graph.  And because it is just pinning it is incredibly easy to use and highly suggestive of interest.  This suggests a very different model for say a wine site than a traditional magazine format where the user is relatively passive and of course that passivity is harder to reliably mine than when the user actively selects the material and pins it.  ’Like’ buttons and the like are, IMHO, a weak substitute in the understandable desire to capture interest.

Social graph, interest graph and website organization

In an earlier post I noted that not all websites should be organized around the social graph even if they could be.  A lemma to this is the difference between the social and interest graphs.  They are by no means identical.  Even if the recommendations of our friends have disproportionate weight with us by no means all our friends share all our interests.  In fact it is perfectly possible that none of my friends share one of my interests - it may be a deep dark secret. Organizing a website by the nature of its content is to organize it by its interest graph.  So perhaps “old fashioned” sites aren’t dinosaurs after all.  The question now is - can one employ something like  the functionality offered by social sites to enhance to experience of content driven sites?     Can one, for example, crowdsource common interests?  Yes you can.  That is what comment boards do.  Lots of people on such boards share an interest but are not friends.  A new twist on this approach is Pinterest.  Can such shared interest communities be better leveraged for user benefit (and commercial gain)?  That is what sites like pinterest are figuring out.