October 06, 2005
NewsGator as Platform Play
NewsGator announced today that it has acquired NetNewsWire, the most popular Mac-based RSS reader. Also, in May 2005, NewsGator acquired FeedDemon And NewsGator shipped their Enterprise Server product on Friday.
Why all this activity? Well, according to Brad Feld, it's because they are building a platform play in RSS. Read Brad's post to see some interesting stats and analysis on how all this could play out between Blogline, Yahoo and the ever more ubiquitous NewsGator. Will be interesting to see how this all develops.
And thanks much Brad for the nice mention of our book. Go NewsGator go!
Posted by johnza at 06:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
Speachless
See story"Bill Gates said Monday he regretted that the world's largest software manufacturer had ever used stock options to reward employees."
Microsoft was always good at the Platform Play of embedding it's interest with those of others. In my mind, that included employees - and by being owners making them super passionate. I counted myself among them.
Hmmmm...
Posted by johnza at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 28, 2005
Enterprise Software: Who's got the real platform?
Jeff Nolan has a great entry about all the consolodation in the enterprise software space.
First, he does a great job of industry landscape/gap analysis:
There are simply fewer enterprise software segments that are hitting good growth numbers, and even fewer that you can call 'whitespace' and grow into... The investment required to build a vertical from the ground up is too great, it's much more cost effective to acquire a dominant vendor and use the maintenance base to pay off the acquisition.
In addition he has a great observation about what it really takes to build a platform play:
"so many vendors want to claim the "platform vendor" title, and with it the underlying assumption that in order to be a platform player you need to have account control. I think this is a false assumption, witness Intel's use of partnerships to gain channel mastery without having absolute account control. Nonetheless, many enterprise software vendors believe that they have to own an account in order to reap future rewards from it, so consolidation is a natural strategy to employ in order to accomplish this goal."
Great long term platforms tend not to built by locking things up totally but by sharing the wealth and making it easy for others to make money because you exist. This does not always have to be through direct sales (in fact very, very often it means a strong channel).
Posted by johnza at 09:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 06, 2005
A very basic platform play
Lycos recently launched Dating Search. A new service that tries to go above the fray of all the casual dating sites out there in an attempt at a classic platform play in this most "basic" of categories, scraping data from data come from iMatchup.com, LoveAccess.com, Tickle, True.com, and Lycos' own Matchmaker.com. Will be interesting if it can become a bit more "cross platform" than the rest out there.
Personally (and I am very happily married) I am biased toward PerfectMatch a more differentiated approach, not to finding the best photo for a date this Friday, but to finding the right long term relationship for you (and an Ignition portfolio company).
via Adverblog
Posted by johnza at 09:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 08, 2005
CES: In praise of simplicity and in mourning for the lack of it
Rich and I just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And boy are we tired. Not from staying out incredibly late (which we will not confirm or deny), but from the truly dizzying array of stuff that we were baraged by at the show.
CNET has a guide to their favorite gadgets that they call "the next big thing." But frankly if there was a next big thing there we just couldn't find it, maybe it was covered up by all the confusing, varied interfaces and supposedly "converged" thingamabobs that no one could figure out how to use.
Seriously, Rich is much more of a gadget freak than me, but amongst either...
- the huge array of boxes that somehow stored all your movies, pictures, audio and computing wirelessly, or
- the phones that did music and photos and messaging and email, or * the game consoles that are also PDAs and heart monitors and remote controls, or even
- the auotomotive dvd, dvr, mp3 player, gprs navigational systems...
even he just couldn't seem to find anything that really seemed worth the effort.
Everything seemed to promise conversion but at the price of super complicated user interfaces, unsure connectivity and integration with the stuff you already have and at little clear compelling, life changing benefit. Personally I liked the display of stuff that took out stains and pressed clothes more easily. At least set-up was just putting in the batteries, the buttons made sense, and I knew what was supposed to happen when I pressed them.
There were more "things" at this show than any other I have been too. But what we saw most was what was not was there. It was striking that when I woke up in a haze the next morning trying to sort through what it all meant, that the USA today highlighted the same problem - "Incompatible tech confuses consumers." I think they really got it right. Outside of the iPod and the growing array of stuff that plugs nicely into it or enhances the experience around it, there was very, very little in the way of two things - simplicity or standards.
Without these two things it all continues to sound nice but end up being little more than expensive toys for hyper enthusiasts. Toys that are not likely to last, not likely to work together and not likely to get used by very many people. It was a testimony to the valuable role of industry leadership that makes it safer and easier for others to fall in line. When IBM, Intel and Microsoft first pushed forward the Wintel standards, boy what a differnce show like Comdex showed. Yes there was some lack of freedom but there was clarity and consistency for consumers and safety for lots of vendors to draft behind. And it was not just technology, it was the means of doing business. There really just did not seem to be any such platform emerging today in the consumer space.
In parallel the most striking thing was the lack of simplicity. In the search to cram more and more varied functionality into every kind of device, it really seemed that vendors forgot the real needs of mainstream users. The need to have things be obvious and clear. If you can't easily figure out how to do the terrific new thing then what use is it? In theory it seems great to have all kinds of content and applications on your phone or TV, but just try to really implement it. Wow. What a pain?
But really it is no wonder that everything is so complicated, without some kind of standards and standard bearers, folks are having to focus too much on bringing all kinds of parts and functions together and not just in plugging into the platform and making something witin it that really would appeal. Boy, I miss the time when even Microsoft's slogan was "Making it easier" and this kind of thinking was the guiding light of the industry. Will be looking for the next generation of leadership to emerge somewhere - from refreshed industry giants, new upstarts, coalitions of players, someone. Wonder what the forcing function will be for a new standard bearer to come to the fore?
Posted by johnza at 03:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 01, 2004
Broad vs. Deep - Ebay vs. Copart
Been thinking a lot about the role of target or specialized offerings vs. big general purpose brands - especially on the web. Everyone talks about the models of the web creating universal portals and market places, but what about also making wierd, out of the way specialized things really bloom?
Recently I wrote about Doug Mockett which is a great example of a niche play vs. Home Depot that really took off because of the web.
Today I want to highlight another, Copart. Copart is also an auction site but it is for cars and car parts. The twist, it's based on junk yards and salvage shops. Sexy, huh? Not quite EBay, but hey, at a $1.7B market cap, it's not bad for junk yards.
They stuck to their customer and supplier set, built a strong network made it easy for these low brow businesses to make money by tapping into the power of the web and to each other. They built a whole set of tools to do this like thier partfinder and in the end they built a highly specialized EBay like marketplace for those who really need to connect to these suppliers and vice versa. This is a great example of a platform play where partners and customers connect in a virtuous cycle of an "ecosystem" powered by the platform in the center. Not bad for something out of Sanford and Son.
Posted by johnza at 09:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 22, 2004
The Linux Play
A great comment from Dwight over in Portland who asked about Open Source and Microsoft's play there. He's not a Linux bigot even though he lives in Portland, but is certainly a great observer of the computer business. It was part of a great question about the Microsoft response to Open Source and whether the threat of litigation would work
I want to politely take issue for an eerie historical reason with your comment that the Microsofts latest open source riposte (essentially, beware the litigation threat from intellectual property issues) will have legs.
That litigation observation is just a bring down, in slightly different terms, of something IBM guys used to say in the heyday of Big Iron. Back then whenever someone appeared on the verge of straying from the way of Big Blue a similar threat/observation used to be heard. It was put in terms of cautionary advice to make a safe career decision, not dressed up as IP litigation risk, but had the same basic fear thrustand so the drill would turn into a survey of alternatives, evaluation of options, and recommendation of whatever IBM offered. It was effective enough initially to eventually become a standing joke.
Threats of litigation sometimes work as weedkiller to deal with minor
nuisances. But they arent a good tool for general application and, to anyone reflecting on it, dropping them is a sign of situational weakness. Interesting to see both IBM and Microsoft employing the fear cautionary, and both in the aftermath of successful antitrust defenses of their franchise, (but that last is probably a false correlative).
Anyway, enjoyed your talk. Thanks for giving it and I will look for your book when it comes out.
Posted by rich at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 03, 2004
Adam Bosworth on Platforms
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: What is the platform? Really interesting perspective and outlook on technology platforms from Adam Bosworth (former BEA, Microsoft and now VP at Google).
"The platform of this decade isn't going to be around controlling hardware resources and rich UI. Nor do I think you're going to be able to charge for the platform per se. Instead, it is going to be around access to community, collaboration, and content. And it is going to be mass market in the way that the web is mass market, in the way that the iPod is mass market, in the way that a TV is mass market. Which means I think that it is going to be around services, not around boxes."
And we think the platforms upon which a number of other folks base their businesses and make money doing so will be most successeful.
Posted by johnza at 09:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 29, 2004
eBay/Amazon: Depth, Breadth and Keeping All Your "Eggs" in Their Basket
Amazon and eBay developments over the past weeks got me thinking. Of course there is Amazon's attempt to grab more of the whole internet withA9. Meanwhile, with one of the most powerful walled gardens ever decides to keep Half.com alive despite the natural desire to push to one brand.
Across these efforts Amazon and eBay are duking it out for your all online buying dollars in terms of both breadth and depth. They clearly want you never to leave their buying/selling universe - or to put all your purchases of anything in their one big happy integrated shopping basket.
eBay leads on breadth by having so many sellers of everything that can't even be searched outside of the eBay garden, with Amazon working hard to match with auctions, affliliates, etc. Amazon still leads in depth, in particular in categories like books, music and DVDs, by shear completeness of its inventory list - if a book can be found it can be found on Amazon (or so you still believe). So how is eBay trying to match that?
I, like many other customers, go to Half.com first to see if I can get a book/dvd/cd for cheap. But often when I can't find something obscure I go back to Amazon. Why would eBay let me do this? Why shouldn't they make sure every time to have an answer to my search and offer to sell it no matter the price or the amount of time to deliver? Can't they cut a deal with big distributors and sellers like alibris to simply suck in their whole backlists too? I wonder why they let me put any eggs in someone else's basket.
(for more on the Half.com news see here, here, and here
Posted by johnza at 05:06 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 22, 2004
If you are going to be a real Platform, stay that way
Infectious Greed: Lane: Oracle Should Stop Selling Apps
Ray Lane says of his former employer, Oracle, that they ought to stop building apps and stick to databases. Key lesson of the Platform play - you make money by making others make money by using you. Never bite the many hands that feed. Wonder what Larry will think of this.
Posted by johnza at 10:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 16, 2004
A9: What Play is it?
There have been a lot of interesting entries and contrasting opinions (see below for a summary of many of these)about this week's official launch of A9, the search engine from "an Amazon company." While I'll save my impressions of the service below, I have to say I really intrigued by what play Amazon is running here.
Search is one heated battlefield with apparent dragraces galore, whether Microsoft entering the fray against Google, Google trying to extend its platform into Microsoft desktop territory, or Yahoo or others trying to win in local search, or Baidu in China.
So what play is A9?
• Stealth? Based on the relatively low profile of marketing, it seems like A9 is trying to avoid direct comparason or confrontation. Heck, they are just using Google search results and providing some "complementary" enhancements. "This is just a commerce thing - don't worry." Yeah, right.
• Platform? Well, Amazon is one of the most platform oriented companies out there. It has always been more about their platform than their actually being a direct merchant. A9 clearly extends and reinforces the Amazon ecosytem. If you've ever bought anything on Amazon, A9 knows you automatically - providing more customer data and recommendaitons for targeting - one of the things Amazon is just plain the best at. The integrated book search is clearly reinforcing, same with movies and soon everything else I'm sure. On the Amazon home page, the A9 search dialogue is right below product search and could easily be confused with it (no loss for Amazon if the previous statement is true).
• Dragrace: Google in the long run has got to view this as a race with them, a threat. If people start using the A9 toolbar, just because it's nice those are eyeballs away from Google. At first it could be easy to pooh pooh A9 as a gimmick with its somewhat cluttered appeareance, history, bookmarking and other features. But they are actually kind of nice and note that Amazon also gives a small discount to anyone with an A9 toolbar. All small, sneaky, stealthy yes, but I cannot imagine that Google sees this as anything except a long term thinly veiled dragrace.
Now, for all that competitive strategy talk, how is A9? What are people saying?
• Paul Kedrosky is skeptical. He is still searching for the one feature that would make it indispensible.
• John Battelle has a balanced view recognizing in his Biz2.0 article that they have adding a new level of sophistication to search but does not know whether most users will want that level. That said, in his first look he did not doubt Amazon's intentions: "It seems to me, Google's position in Amazon's A9 implementation is at best a step backwards. If A9 is as good as it seems to be, every customer that uses and/or switches to A9 becomes an A9 search customer, and, more likely than not, a deeper and far more loyal Amazon customer. In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google's customers."
• Business pundit thinks it's clearly an interesting move, while it's readers wonder what's the big deal.
• The Unofficial Google Weblog thinks that it's a pretty different, pretty elegant interface.
• The folks at Precommerce admire it. Smart play for Amazon, smart use of Alexa, like how they are pushing search farther, and look forward to the next chapter.
• Me. I have to admit to being skepitcal at first. It seemed cluttered and oppressive. Then I noted how easily I could personalize the interface. How cool it was to have simple things like history and reference. And how nice it was that it already knew me. Personalization is huge for me and these guys did the first real step in that direction in search. Hats off to them.
Still what I'm really excited about is seeing how this all plays out.
Posted by johnza at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
"Platformness" exemplified
"We've got 114 million people working in our behalf" - Marty Abbott, eBay's senior vice president of technology
from Crossroads Dispatches: Participatory Marketing at eBay
Posted by johnza at 04:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 31, 2004
800CEORead: Great Plays in the Business of Business Books
Just had a great discussion with the Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten at 1-800-CEO-READ. Although of course we are a little self interested in doing the interview – given that we want to learn from the pros on how to sell our upcoming book – we have to declare that these guys are a great example of all the elements of the playbook. While this is a great story for the business book category it is also really illustrative for just about anyone dealing with an evolving and competitive market.
We talked to them about their strategy and how they got to it in playbook terms. Here’s a summary:
Marketing Playbook: How did you get into this business? What were the ABCs of your marketing playing field at the time?
800CEORead:
There are really two stories here. The first is how we entered the book business. The second is how we developed our specific play for entering the wild world of web book sales.
As you describe in your book, it’s important to look at the overall market and the three Cs (customers, competitors and your own competencies) of your category’s playing field. Back in 1983 when A. David Schwartz, owner of Milwaukee-based Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, asked me to explore the potential of the corporate book-buying market, I did just that.
Rather than hiring a market research firm, I talked directly to our potential customers – all the corporations I knew. I cold-called hundreds of companies. I would fill my car trunk with books and make road trips to businesses throughout Wisconsin. I could sell $1200 worth of books on a trip. In those days, that was huge.
We built our business through phone and fax sales. We built mailing lists by collecting business cards. It was really a ground up effort. As 800-CEO-READ grew, I began to looked at the competition and saw no normal bookseller was equipped to handle this corporate market. So next I looked to our own competencies and realized we needed to build something new, something special that would make this the core of our business. Thus our company was born.
Then in the 1990’s with the advent of the web and the emergence of Amazon as a new force in book retailing, we saw that we needed to reassess our playing field. If I were to describe our assessment at that time in your ABC or gap analysis terms it would be something like this:
• Customer Gap. A. Yes, our regular customers like us and we have done really well. B. But, more and more customers are going online. C. So, they need a way to get the same service we have provided with all the benefits of online/direct.
• Competitive Gap: A. Yes, Amazon is exploiting the web and its software to revolutionize and dominate the single book sale business online. B. But, they focus on offering every book in existence, and on using their platform to sell everything else too. C. So, they are not capable of selling business books in the special way that larger corporate buyers have come to expect.
So we saw the opportunity to adapt, learn from many of Amazon’s strengths but also to migrate our own special competencies in a way that took full advantage of the web and grow the business in a strong new way.
Marketing Playbook: So how did this affect your core strategy or Marketing Play?
800CEORead:
Well, here also there are really two stories. I guess you could describe our first strategy as a kind of stealth or niche play. We chose not to compete head on with either the biggest book retailers like Barnes and Noble or local community bookstores in their core foot traffic business or later with Amazon in its core single book sales business. We chose to focus and specialize on one area – business books, to businesses who wanted to buy many copies. We built a great reputation as a specialized alternative to these players.
But over time I think, while retaining this focus, we’ve also evolved into what you call a Platform.
We have and are actively building and supporting a healthy ecosystem of interested parties. Not just of our customers but also across the whole value chain of business books. With many customers, we use our platform to simply become their in-house, branded corporate/employee bookstore. It isn’t their core competency and it works out great for all parties involved. One of the other constituents that we address better than anyone is people like you, authors of business books. In a world of so many books and so much crowding in stores and online, authors have to do a lot more of their own work to get their book noticed and sold. They do their own speaking, they give workshops, they do their own tours, they drive demand with their own corporate friends and clients. All of which are special and unique to them and their relationships. And in each of these cases they can’t really rely on either someone like Amazon or their publisher to handle their special needs – like making sure that there are enough copies to be signed everywhere they speak or sending personalized notes or signed copies to the most influential buyers.
That’s where we come in. And authors love us for it. We also believe because of our focus on business books our influence in this category is of growing significance, whether in terms of our own “Jack Covert Selects” or the growing use of our best seller lists. All this reinforces what we see as a self sustaining and mutually reinforcing ecosystem in this truly dynamic category.
Marketing Playbook: This is a great example of Plays and their progression. Any highlights or secrets of how you executed these plays in your marketing efforts and campaigns.
800CEORead:
Yes. But we’re not telling.
Ok, look. It’s a competitive business so we like to play it pretty close to the chest. We are proud of our basic value proposition – kind of fits your rule of oxymoron – we offer the speed and selection of an online retailer with the personal touch and handling of your own book buying or selling agent. In terms of promotion stuff I will say we really think we do a great job on our site, in our PR and reviews, newsletters, and in our blog. These are important. More than that I will keep “stealthy.”
Marketing Playbook. Thanks so much. It’s a great model. Really appreciate you sharing it.
800CEORead:
Our pleasure. And lots of luck with your book.
Posted by johnza at 09:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 27, 2004
Small Fish Strategy - Platform/Add-on
E M E R G I C . o r g: August 27, 2004 Archives A great link about a new book "The Keystone Advantage" by HBS professor Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien.
They really describe what we call a platform play (where your position is derived by helping others succeed) and a stealth play (where you hide from and feed off the ecosystem of the platform). They call these two plays "keystones" and "niches." Big fish and little. Really interesting.
Here's an exceprt thanks to Rajesh Jain:
"Think of the business environment as a series of ecosystems, they urge, with 'keystone' companies such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart providing for the health of all who do business with them. What are the best strategies for companies living in these ecosystems? This excerpt focuses on strategies for niche players...
The essence of a niche strategy is to achieve specialization by taking explicit advantage of the opportunities provided by the ecosystem while avoiding the kinds of traps that challenge firms in such environments."
Makes sense to us!
Posted by johnza at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 20, 2004
Think globally, act locally, and know the difference
We were honored to be able to meet with Wang Jianzhou, Chairman and President of China Unicom, China's second largest wireless carrier. He shared a lot of wisdom with us but a few things really stood out.
The first was that he very explicitly chose to follow NTT DoCoMo's platform play in launching their wireless data service. Rather than trying to build the "killer apps" on wireless data themselves they opened it up to tons of ICPs (independant content providers) - over 600 major ones at last count. And made it easy for them to make money, providing billing and other infrastructure and charging only 10-15% of the revenue in return. Result, wireless data has taken off (a very, very good thing with over 300MM cell phones in China). By not being too greedy, China Unicom established an awesome ecosystem and reaps ongoing rewards.
Another of the many insights that left a huge impression. When searching for the plan of how import DoCoMo's success Mr. Jianzhou went to Japan and took the subway to watch how the Japanese used their cell phones. As he watched, he noticed that at least 50% was staring at thier handset screens and clicking away quietly. He took the same subways in Korea and the number was around 25% and others were talking on their cells. In Hong Kong, no one.
Why? Culture. In Japan it is considered impolite to talk loudly in subways. So data phones are the perfect outlet. In Korea less so. In Hong Kong everyone is loud anyway(look at the US where Cingular has to run ads about the annoying cell phone man - to get people to stop talking in movie theaters).
How did he figure this out and adapt? The smart, practical way - on the ground with his real target customers. What a wise man. Assume nothing. Check it out for yourself!
Posted by johnza at 06:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 09, 2004
Gmail part of Google moving to plaform play?
We've talked a lot about search and email dragraces. Now, Rajesh Jain and Rick Klau both look at how email can really move more and more toward developing a platform. In their view gmail is very well positioned to do the right things - to be open to more and more functionality (like adding an RSS/ATOM reader) and utility.
In our view, though to be a true platform you have to embrace others and be embraced by them. Gmail is clearly embracing others by doing things like making it easy to import contacts. But will they go further and encourage/make it easy for outsiders to develop applications and utilities for them (as Anil Dash and Omar Shahine note that Outlook - you got it, from none other than Microsoft - has been doing for a good long time)? Until they really embrace their own ecosystem of third parties who really love helping them win the email race (like they have done well in search), they will still be just a dragracer vs. yahoo and msn and not yet a real platform.
Posted by johnza at 05:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 08, 2004
Go Spamnet!
"Thank goodness for spamnet." Frogblog notes a beneficiary of all the email wars, Cloudmark's Spamnet. I agree. Love 'em and I'm rated a gold star spamfighter! Smart way to build a highly involved spamfighting Platform Play.
Posted by johnza at 07:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 17, 2004
Beyond the Google Search Dragrace
filtered: Google steals from Starbucks' playbook Lots is being written about the Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. dragrace in search. As well as now its dragrace using Gmail. Filtered's Mark Jones gives another perspective on the emerging Google set of line extenstions that it's moving in the direction of ubiquity a la Starbucks. Two other entries follow this - including "GBay, GCommerce..." with the Industry Standard's guest blogger, Jen Muehlbauer. And indeed why not the Google OS See also Topix for a great full analysis. Is the direct truly for Google to evolve into a complete Platform? Who will it face then? Will it be up to it?Posted by johnza at 07:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2004
Marvel - "Super" Platform
Brand Autopsy: Who'™s on First? Spider-Man? Even though they later canceled the deal, what an amazing example of the power of an extensible brand as a part of a platform play. And this tactic of advertising on baseball plates is yet another example of how traditional media might not be cutting it anymore.Posted by johnza at 08:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Platform Play
In this Marketing Play you rise above the competition, or even coopt them. Instead you win by becoming a Platform from which a whole industry can win too. You win by making it easy and profitable for others to ally with you and painful for them to let you loose.
Posted by johnza at 06:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
