...a small DOSE of 3C's and 4P's

Googles new move

2007-07-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

in-game advertising: will be offering adsense to game makers

iPhone: what's missing?

2007-07-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

Support for all iPod accessories—doesn’t support all car adapters for playing back, only charging
An easy way to transfer phone numbers, via AT&T, from an existing phone
Copy and paste support
MP3/iTunes music ringtones
Built-in game support
Flash support anywhere (including browser)
Instant Messaging
Picture messaging (MMS)
Video recording
Voice recognition or voice dialing
Wireless Bluetooth Stereo Streaming (A2DP support)
One-size-fits-all headset jack (May have to buy an adapter for certain headphones)
3G (EV-DO/HSDPA)
A hardware keyboard
GPS
Removable battery
Expandable Storage
Direct iTunes Music Store Access (Over Wi-Fi or EDGE)
BlackBerry support
Flash or zoom on the camera
Windows Media support

15 Things MSFT should do to make better computing

2007-06-22T14:05:00.000-07:00

Internet Explorer should automatically fix incorrect domain extensions. Ever go to Google.ocm? Or Yahoo.co.k? Why doesn’t IE just auto-fix (or at least auto-suggest) the entry?

Outlook should help resolve duplicate contacts. If I have Mike Smith in my address book and get an email from mikesmith@randomdomainname.com, rather than create a new entry, Outlook should inform me there’s a similar one already there. I shouldn’t need Plaxo to do this. Furthermore, there should be a little maintenance tool to help me clean up entries.

Alarms and reminders must require attention. This one really annoys me - you should not be able to minimize the Reminders window. Ever! The worst is when you do minimize it, and then the alerts pile up and you don’t even notice it in the taskbar. Outlook should force the user to either Dismiss, Edit, or Snooze, and not let you do anything else until one is chosen.

Office applications need constant Autosave. Why every 10 minutes, or 6 minutes, or 3 minutes? Why not save the entire editing history, and add in a visible timeline to the editing window? Forget saving multiple revisions, just have one copy of the document, and allow me to go back in time if I need to see a prior version. For an extra bonus point, save all the branches too - it’s not as if we’re running out of hard drive space these days.

Add useful information to the task manager. When you view the task manager, there are tons of processes showing nothing but a process name. Why aren’t companies required to provide useful information about their processes here? How about adding in fields like: company, URL for more info, and a real name.

Office “lite” or “quickload”. I understand that there are a lot of power users out there, people who live and die inside Excel and PowerPoint. How about lite versions of each Office application with a barebone set of features, such as viewing and editing. Note that I’m not talking about what you install, I’m talking about having an entire second version of the applications that launch extremely fast.

Use consistent keyboard behaviors. Any idea what F3, F4, and Control-F all have in common? Depending on the application, they are all shortcuts to Find, and all in Microsoft Office and Windows. I’m not even discussing external software providers here, this is all Microsoft turf!

Provide a Horizontal template for Word. I understand that Word is primarily a word processing application, but with all the fancy tools for drawing and tables and whatnot you can pretty much use it to build any type of document. As long as it scrolls vertically. How about a horizontal template that allows users to build documents that scroll left-to-right. Would be great for creating workflows, family trees, org charts, and storyboarding.

Smarter cut and paste. Only Word and Excel provide “Paste Special” and even then they are tedious to access. If I copy a table from a Web site into Excel, what are the odds I really wanted to include the table formatting? Shouldn’t that be the Paste Special?

Don’t make CANCEL the first option in ANY dialog. Ever start a huge download, then while rapidly switching through visible windows, click the space bar or hit enter? Bye bye download window. Bad bad bad.

Fix Paint or give a simple photo editing tool. I can’t back these stats up, but I’d wager that more than 80% of “image handling” on a Windows PC is related to photo editing. I’d then double-down by saying more than 80% of photo editing is one of: crop, rotate, resize, remove red-eye. The only one you can do in Paint today is rotate.

Consolidate Messengers. Windows Messenger. MSN Messenger. Windows Live Messenger. C’mon.

Clean up temp files automatically. I have too many .tmp and ~ocument.doc files laying around. Find them, fix them, get rid of them.

Allow simple HTML exports. Word, PowerPoint and Excel all include Save As… HTML options. All create these huge bloated files that cannot be easily integrated into other Web pages. If I’ve got a simple table in Excel, odds are much higher that I want it in a different Web page, so there should be a way to bring out the HTML with none of the MS-special style sheets.

Don’t put email from my contacts in my spam box. I don’t care if the subject line is “Mortgage loans on casinos with viagra and free software,” if it comes from a contact, it’s email.

New idea for Zune,ipod,iphone- Social Cameras!

2007-06-19T15:58:00.000-07:00

Here's an idea that came to me while waiting for a train to Genova. I was standing on a platform, across a pair of tracks a man was taking a picture of something in my direction. I was in the picture, the camera seemed to be pointed at me.
I thought to yell my email address across the tracks asking him to send me a copy of the picture. (Assuming he spoke English and I could be heard over the din of the station.)
Then I thought my cell phone or camera could do that for me. It could be beaming my contact info. Then I had a better idea. What if his camera, as it was taking the picture, also broadcast the bits to every other camera in range. My camera, sitting in my napsack would detect a picture being broadcast, and would capture it. (Or my cell phone, or iPod.)
Wouldn't this change tourism in a nice way? Now the pictures we bring home would include pictures of ourselves. Instead of bringing home just pictures that radiate from me, I'd bring home all pictures taken around me while I was traveling.
Of course if you don't want to broadcast pictures you could turn the feature off. Same if you don't want to receive them.
A standard is needed, but the first mover would set it, and there is an incentive to go first because it would be a viral feature. Once you had a Social Camera, you'd want other people to have one. And you'd tell them about it.
Not sure what technology would work best here. Bluetooth isn't fast enough. Is wifi overkill? Maybe a low-power radio transmitter?
When I told this idea to a bunch of friends at breakfast they said they probably already have these cameras in Japan. Do they?

AT&T is folding Cingular into its AT&T brand. Why?

2007-06-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

A few reasons that come to mind:

1. The Caretaker Managers at Cingular have proven themselves unable to build a brand in the telecom space. That's no big deal. The sector has a huge churn rate precisely because nobody in that space can tell you why their brand is "the only solution." So despite the zillions of dollars burned in attempting to create and sustain a brand, Cingular is throwing in the towel.

2. Further proof is that AT&T is a long-standing brand that was built in the days when people knew how and why they were building brands. In fact, their work was so strong, that like our popcorn and shampoo friends, their management sons and daughters could never equal their parents' work. AT&T stood as a monolith on the American landscape for decades, but in its later days, become known more for its price gouging and sloth than anything else. It became a laughing stock, the lumbering, unresponsive oaf that rested on its laurels while it overcharged its customers. Yet for all that, AT&T was always known for its reliability and stability. The brand still resonates strongly with baby boomers, who probably make the buying decisions for their kids, who grew up with Cingular.

3. Speaking of money, don't forget that despite the above, AT&T has never fallen out of the 30 Dow Industrial Components. Kodak has, but AT&T hasn't. Baby boomers know and remember AT&T because their fathers knew and remembered AT&T. There's just one difference:

Baby boomers have lots of pension money and nowhere to go with it. Which means AT&T's move on SBC and now Cingular is a branding story at its very best: folding weaker brands into a publicly traded, stronger brand can't exactly hurt the attractiveness of a stock's brand.

Overall, it's a sad story on the state of branding in corporate America. There doesn't seem to be anyone out there capable of creating and sustaining a brand, increasing its customers' loyalty and increasing its profitability.

Oh, wait, sure there is. He's a branding expert in Los Angeles. What was his name again?

Branding: consumer products vs high tech

2007-06-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

What is branding?

Simply defined, branding is the process by which a company or product name or image becomes synonymous with a positive impression, e.g. trustworthiness, predictable quality, performance

Branding is easier within the realm of retailing and consumer products. The nature of consumer products is basic and simple, and the target of the branding exercise is a single, individual consumer. However, for a tech firm, say MS, its customer for the "same" product are: information workers, business managers, IT professionals and coders.

MS Case:

Microsoft’s confusing and incomprehensible use of “Live” branding does more than just baffle users — it is also costing the company millions, because people don’t bother to visit Live sites because they can’t figure out what the sites do. When will Microsoft finally fix this nagging issue?’

CNet reports that last week Microsoft lowered sales forecast for its Internet services for the year from 11 percent down to between 3 percent and 8 percent. The company also admitted that its share of the search market has dropped, while Google’s continues to rise. The site notes, “Windows Live Search saw its searches drop nearly 10 percent from a year ago, while Google’s rose more than 22 percent, according to figures released this week from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google has 50.8 percent market share, followed by Yahoo at 23.6 percent and Microsoft with only 8.4 percent.”

This should shock no one. Microsoft has done everything it possibly can to confuse the world about what “Live” means. One the one hand, the company seems to say that “Live” services are those accessed online. But if that’s the case, why does its security product carry the Live moniker — OneCare Live? It’s a downloadable piece of software, not an Internet-based service.

Beyond what, why does it call its online service for small businesses Microsoft Office Live, when it has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft Office?

As for Windows Live, it has absolutely nothing to do with Windows. It’s the search engine formerly called MSN Search.

Given that mess, who would want to get near anything with the word “Live” in it?

This confusion has hurt Microsoft’s bottom line, says David Smith, an analyst at Gartner.

“Microsoft’s Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company, and it is very likely contributing to the situation they are in right now,” he told CNet. “They’ve created another brand and have not differentiated it.”

Will Microsoft eventually fix the “Live” mess? I’m not sure. Several years back, it similarly confused the world when it applied “.NET” to every product and service it could find. It hasn’t cleared that confusion up yet. So don’t expect it to fix the “Live” problem any time soon.

MS Software Branding(document)

Branding is the emotional positioning of a product as perceived by its customers. Product branding is achieved through a combination of factors, including the product name and logo, use of color, text, graphics, and sound, the style of various other design elements, marketing, and most importantly, the attributes of the product experience itself.

Successful branding requires skillful crafting of a product image, and is not achieved simply by plastering a product logo on every surface and using the product's color scheme at every opportunity. Rather, meaningful and high quality branding that enhances users' experience will be much more successful.

Note: Guidelines related to icons, fonts, color, animation, sound, and window frames are presented in separate articles.

Design concepts

In a competitive marketplace, companies brand their products to help differentiate them from the competition. It would be naïve to suggest that product branding in general is wrong or should be avoided, but it is fair to say that software branding is too often executed poorly. The goal of software branding is to associate the brand with the style and quality of the product and its experience. Too often, developers attempt to achieve this by drawing attention to the program itself. The result is to distract users instead of delight them.

Attributes of good software branding

When well done, software branding has these attributes:

Establishes a clear, distinct style and personality
Creates an emotional connection
Has high quality
Is strategically placed and consistently executed
Aligns to the overall brand strategy
Is long lasting...as enjoyable the thousandth time as it was the first

By contrast, poor attempts at software branding have these attributes:

Has no obvious theme or point
Is in the user's face
Is annoying
Is everywhere
Has a custom look and feel without any user benefit
Becomes quickly tiresome

Start with the product itself

Successful software branding starts with the design of product itself. A well-designed program has carefully crafted functionality aimed at an appropriate target audience. Unique functionality and extraordinary attention to detail make powerful branding statements. For more information, see How to Design a Great User Experience.

Carefully choose the product's name

Great product names drive strong brands. A great software product name is memorable and concisely conveys the benefit of the product, providing distinction in a crowded market. Hire a branding professional to help you choose the right product name. In the long term, a well-chosen name is far more important to your branding effort than details like logos, color schemes, and control theming.

What to brand

Software branding elements can be categorized as follows:

Primary

Product name
Product logo
Product color scheme
Product-specific sounds

Some primary branding elements from Windows Vista™.

Primary branding elements tend to draw a lot of attention, so they should be used with restraint. Limit your use of primary branding elements to a few strategic experiences. Product-specific sounds aren't recommended for most programs.

Secondary

Element shapes
Icon and graphic styles
Secondary graphic elements
Accent colors
Animations
Transitions
Shadows
Backgrounds and transparency

Some secondary branding elements from Windows Vista.

Secondary branding elements tend to be more subtle, and because of that, they can be used more often. While some of these secondary branding elements may not have much impact individually, when taken together they can give your product character and style. Transitions can have more impact than fixed graphics, which users learn to ignore over time. Prefer the secondary level of branding over the primary level.

Tertiary

Finally, there is another category of branding elements to be aware of.

Custom window frames
Custom controls

While it's appropriate for certain types of programs (such as games) to create a completely distinct, immersive experience based on custom controls and windows, most programs should use the standard varieties. Having your programs look and act weird doesn't make for a strong brand identity. Rather, your goal should be to create a program with character—a product that stands out while fitting in.

Where to brand

Not everything needs to be branded. A few strategically placed branding elements can make a more powerful impression than slapping uncoordinated branding elements everywhere.

Focus your branding effort on the special experiences in your program. These are the places that have the most emotional impact, such as:

The first experiences, especially when the program is used for the very first time.
The main window or home page.
The start and completion of the important tasks.
Important transitions between tasks or program areas.
Waiting time during long-running tasks.
Log in and log off.

Where not to brand

While you can potentially use any element in your program as a branding opportunity, don't use the Windows desktop (including the work area, Start menu, Quick Launch bar, notification area, or sidebar) for branding.

The desktop is the user's entry point to Windows. Leave the user in control. Use these entry points appropriately—never view them as ways to promote awareness of your program or its brand. For more information, see Desktop.

Use branding professionals

Branding is a specialized skill best done by experienced professionals. It is far better to expose your users to minimal branding than to use extensive branding that is annoying and ineffective. Work with your branding and marketing team to create a good end-to-end branding experience.

If you do only five things...
1. Start with the product design. The most powerful branding statement is to satisfy your customers' needs especially well.
2. Choose a good product name that is memorable, distinctive, and concisely conveys the benefit of the product.
3. Think of branding in terms of experiences and making an emotional connection, not product logos and color schemes.
4. Prefer secondary branding elements. Limit your use of primary branding elements to a few strategic experiences.
5. Get help from a branding professional.

Guidelines

General

Choose a good product name that is memorable, distinctive, and concisely conveys the benefit of the product. This will be the foundation of your brand.
Focus your branding effort on the special experiences in your program, such as:
- The first experiences, especially during setup and when the program is used for the first time.
- The main window or home page.
- The start and completion of the important tasks.
- Important transitions between tasks or program areas.
- Log in and log off.
Prefer secondary branding elements. Limit your use of primary branding elements to a few strategic experiences. For example, consider using secondary graphics, transitions, and color instead of logos. Also, avoid prominent primary branding elements places where users spend a lot of time because they will be perceived as clutter.

Acceptable:

Better:

In the better example, a secondary graphic element is used instead of the product logo for Windows control panels.

Don't use branding that is distracting or harms usability or performance.
Don't use the Windows desktop or Start menu for branding. For more information, see Desktop and Start Menu.

Names and logos

Limit the use of product and company logos in the user interface. Don't plaster company or product logos on every UI surface.
- Limit product and company logos to at most two different surfaces, such as the main window or home page and the About box.
- Limit product and company logos to at most twice on any single surface.
- Limit product and company names to at most three times on any surface.
Incorrect:

In this example, the company name is overused.

Incorrect:

In this example, while individually the use of the logos is acceptable, the overall effect is overwhelming.
Use small product and company logos. Place the logo out of the user's workflow, and choose a size that is appropriate for its location.
Use graphic logos. Graphic logos are more stable than text logos because they aren't affected by font, text size, language pack, or theme changes.
Don't use animated logos.

Controls

Don't use custom controls for branding. Rather, use custom controls when necessary to create a special immersive experience or when special functionality is needed.

Incorrect:

This example shows a custom control incorrectly used for branding.

Splash screens

Don't use splash screens for branding. Avoid using splash screens because they may cause users to associate your program with poor performance. Use them only to give feedback and reduce the perception of time for programs that have unusually long load times.
Don't use animated splash screens. Users often assume that the animated splash screen is the reason for a long load time. Too often, that assumption is correct.

Sound

Generally, sound is not recommended just for branding. If you do use sound for branding:

Play a sound only at program startup, but only if the program was launched by the user.
Synchronize the sound to a visual event, such as a UI transition like the display of a program window.

For more information,

Why Linux ( read open source)is not a challenge to MS?

2007-06-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

I am a computer nerd... and I don't like Linux. Straight out. (I hear a gasp!) Personally, I don't like the idea of open-source software for business applications. You end up counting on a community of software developers for updates rather than an established business with a consumer base at stake. I like using Tomcat for my own personal sandbox, but I'll stick with the status quo when it comes to my customers and their enterprise. In all honesty, how much longer do we REALLY think 'open-source' will last? If the sun rose tomorrow and Linux were the majority, it would only be a matter of time before someone found a way to make it 'profitable'... Just my cynical view. :-)

The mystic concept behind Price Erosion!!

2006-08-04T01:53:00.000-07:00

It just can't get any better than this:

Prices do not erode! What erodes is a company’s ability to be more successful than their competitors at satisfying customers. So called price erosion doesn’t happen to individual companies, it happens to entire industries. When an industry experiences price erosion it is really an expression of the fact the players in the industry are achieving less and less diversification between themselves. When everyone offers what appear to be more or less the same products and services prices fall. Price erosion is only a symptom or evidence of the lack of innovation within an industry. Managers will sometimes justify lower revenue and weaker margins by proclaiming that they are victims of price erosion. You never hear them say prices are down to due their lack of ability to outpace their competitors!

Continuous improvement in value creation is hard. Lowering prices is easy! Most companies find themselves in situations where they are compelled to lower prices in order to maintain their customer base from time to time. Short-term profit margins can be maintained by reducing costs but long-term, the only way to earn more money is by creating more value for your customers. At some point in time you will reach a level of efficiency where cost reductions erode the value of the customer offer and only lead to further price reductions without additional margin. Many companies discover that although their margins are the same as a percentage they have declined drastically in real money.

Excerpted from Kelley Odell's Blog

Best Marketing Tools for High Technology

2006-08-04T01:15:00.000-07:00

I would not have given "white papers" a chance, but Marketing Serpa sure does rank it among the top 5 marketing tools. Here's the list:

1. Free Trials -- Business software marketers ranked free trials extremely highly, with 54% calling trials very effective.
2. Webcast -- At 41% this was another favorite for software marketers, however technology services and related hardware firms also ranked webinars at 33% and 31% respectively.
3. White paper -- All business technology marketers rated white papers fairly evenly, giving white paper offers ratings ranging from 31-36% 'very effective.'
4. Blog -- 35% of software and ASP marketers rated their blog as very effective, as did 33% of technology services firms. However, just 19% of hardware companies felt that a corporate blog was effective. This may be because general business executives are more likely to read a blog, while IT staffers may not.
5. Podcast -- Last year the concept of a podcast was barely on the technology marketing map. By June 2006, 22% of software marketers who'd given a podcast called them 'very effective' lead generation tools. Perhaps IT professionals are more likely to be in an early adopter community that might listen to a podcas

Click here for the full summary in pdf

YouTube: will it be the next ebay for clips?

2006-08-04T00:49:00.000-07:00

Hmmmmmmmmm. Don't think so if they don't watch out for copy right violations(Link to the story). YouTube was recently dragged into a copyright violation by Robert Tur, a freelance photographer who had his "30 seconds "of fame courtesy 1992 Los Angles riots. An interesting bit:

Tur's lawsuit shows the fine line that YouTube is walking as it attempts to build its business model. Tur is suing because his videos of the riot and other events were uploaded without his permission. Although lawyers agree that YouTube should be protected by copyright law as long as it responds to content owners' requests to take down their works, it entered uncharted territory when it recently began adding ads next to search results. The law prohibits a site from benefiting financially from infringement, but the company argues that it's protected since it doesn't sell ads against individual videos. Still, the courts haven't set clear boundaries. "There has to be some way to make money with advertising that doesn't deprive you of the safe harbor. But where that line is, no one really knows,"

Will YouTubes's argument hold? Don't know that but these chaps are sure treading on thin ice!

Marketing Lessons: new 4Ps

2006-08-03T03:25:00.000-07:00

Came across a pretty intense marketing blurb!!
.........and it comes from former HBS professor

Compelling graphic

2006-07-31T12:28:00.000-07:00

Check out how the numero uno's of technology stack against one another when it comes to R&D expenditure.

Business lesson: operating margin vs rising revenue

2006-07-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

Came across a great piece titled "the not so fantastic four" about 'why Yahoo,ebay,amazon and AOL are tanking". And here's the relevent bit:
--On Tuesday afternoon, Amazon, the leading e-tailer, announced its quarterly earnings. The top line was good: Revenues rose 22 percent from the year before. The bottom line? Not so much. Operating income fell 55 percent to $47 million from $104 million in the year-earlier quarter. Why? Amazon ramped up spending on technology and content, slashed prices, and offered more free and reduced-rate shipping. In other words, it had to work a lot harder for the money, especially in its mature and massive U.S. market.
--eBay also took some lumps when it reported earnings last week. Net revenues at the auction giant were up 30 percent year over year. The core auction business, which accounts for about three-quarters of revenues, was up 22 percent, while the payments unit (PayPal) was up sharply too. (Good!) But the amount of money eBay spent on administration, sales and marketing, and product development was up by a much larger amount. The result: Operating income fell 18 percent in the quarter.

Case in point: rising revenue is not suggestive of operating margin!!

1....2....3.... Mobile news

2006-07-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

(1) Sprint unveils teen phone that puts parents in charge
EXCERPT:Bill Jacobson, a product marketing manager for Sprint, said the phone is aimed at bridging the gap between the limited-function, toy-like phones now marketed to younger children, such as Cingular Wireless' Firefly and Verizon Wireless' Migo, and function-rich adult phones.

For full article

(2) Bad news mixed in with Palm's stellar results
EXCERPT:"Palm reported that revenue for its fiscal 2006, which ended June 2, grew an impressive 24% to $1.6 billion, surpassing analysts' estimates. The results were driven by Palm's line of Treo smart phones, which accounted for $1.1 billion of those sales."

Full Article

Galvin Manufacturing Corporation's take on Product Management!!

2006-07-03T02:29:00.000-07:00

Check out this excellent Fortune article by Adam Lashinsky for a detailed story on how the Motorola, which was the earstwhile Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, RAZR came to be!!

words of wisdom @ age of 80

2006-06-28T04:39:00.000-07:00

Ok that 80 years old veteran happens to be Eugene Kleiner ,founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, and formarly with KPCB , a numero uno VC firm.

Anyways, this is what he has to say(read Kleiner’s Laws)

Make sure the dog wants to eat the dog food. No matter how ground-breaking a new technology, how large a potential market, make certain customers actually want it.
Build one business at a time. Most business plans are overly ambitious. Concentrate on being successful in one endeavor first.
The time to take the tarts is when they're being passed. If an environment is right for funding, go for it. Eugene, more than anyone, knew that venture capital goes in cycles.
The problem with most companies is they don't know what business they're in.
Even turkeys can fly in a high wind. In times of strong economies, even bad companies can look good.
It's easier to get a piece of an existing market than to create a new one.
It's difficult to see the picture when you're inside the frame.
After learning some of the tricks of the trade, some people think they know the trade. This reflected some of Eugene's own humility; he recognized that many venture capitalists thought they were experts when they had just a bit of knowledge.
Venture capitalists will stop at nothing to copy success.
Invest in people, not just products. Eugene always respected founding entrepreneurs. He wanted to build companies with them not just with their ideas.

Incidently, there are 2 indians @ KPCB. One the inimitable Vinod Khosla, whose intro page contains couple of pdfs and ppts on VC, and another Ajit Nazare, who intrigues me more than his colleague . Kudos to you both!!

angu

2006-06-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

"A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless."

Stephen King, WPP Group, London