jan korbel

You may’ve heard this phrase also in a more humble (and original) form “let hundred flowers bloom”. And I don’t know about you, but I usually come across it in business context, where it means for the business to try many different ways at the same time. For example try many different products for different segments and see what catches on.

I’ve always had a problem with this phrase.

I am convinced, that for anything to succeed in the web business today, it needs to be polished in what it does. As John Gruber puts it:

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

Problem is, you can’t polish the experience of thousand or even hundred flowers at the same time, no matter how big company you are. See Google.

Polishing is usually thought about as the sort of “last 20 %” of the project, maybe less. Applying the 80/20 rule here, I would suggest, that it may be that 20 % making the 80 % of results. So we would be wise to put a lot of effort to it, which is exactly what you can’t do with “thousand of flowers”.

And anyway, why should you listen to something a known mass murderer proposed?

Horace Dediu is killing it again, this time with James Allworth.

Just one of the many thoughts: The cycle of disruption – When product is not good enough (in disruption theory kind of sense) the market tends to be better for integrated player (e.g. Apple). If a product is good enough it tends to favor modularization. Modularization in turn leads to being open for disruption (not just) from your suppliers that integrate in some new way. And we are at the beggining of a new cycle with new integrated player.

Horace Dediu asks this question from the viewpoint of disruption theory, where if you are trying to make better something, that’s good enough from perspective of some customers, you are creating a room for being disrupted.

The clue to this experiment is the presence of a control group. We could test the question of absorbability by by keeping a version of the product which did not improve (or got cheaper) and measuring whether is performs better vs. the “improved” version.

Of course, this is exactly what Apple does with the n-1 generation products. By ranging products which are older and at lower price points it can measure whether the improvements are valued.

MG Siegler for TechCrunch after explaining the meaning of “The Pledge”, “The Turn” and “The Prestige” in the parlance of magic tricks:

Look at the mobile landscape right now. There are two companies that are making any money in smartphones: Apple and Samsung. Or, put another way: Apple and the company Apple just won a billion dollar-plus judgement against for copying their smartphone designs. So while some may find Apple’s trick old hat now, no one else has figured out how to pull it off — except for the company doing a mediocre copy of the trick. I’d argue it’s because everyone is focusing on The Pledge and The Prestige, but Apple is the only one focusing on The Turn.

Via Daring Fireball

John Gruber paints the picture of how different a game Amazon is playing.

It’s a heads we win, tails you lose strategy. That’s the brilliance. If you buy an iPad but use Amazon’s iOS apps to read Kindle books and watch movies through your Amazon Prime account, Apple wins but so too does Amazon. If you buy a Kindle Fire instead of an iPad, Apple gets nothing. Amazon wins so long as you consume media content from Amazon, no matter if you play it on a Kindle Fire or an iPad. Apple only wins if you buy an iPad.

I’m watching the Amazon’s kindle press event right now and as John points out, it’s definitely delivered too slowly.

From the Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner:

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune senior editor-at-large, shares an insider look at Apple, one of the world’s most iconic and secretive companies. Based on his research into the technology giant’s internal processes and approaches to leadership and building products, Lashinsky offers insights and surprises from his book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works.

Via @robertvlach

This article by Mark Sigal on GigaOM goes nicely with my post about disruption.

We’re all lemmings in terms of following what works. So when the horizontal model made Bill Gates the richest man in the world, industry after industry embraced it as the one right way.

With the advent of the Internet, however, a vicious cycle of commoditization — horizontal’s downside — began to play out. We are now at the endgame of that cycle, a point where few companies can make money via commodity economics, and HP and Dell are Exhibit A and B, respectively.

Reading Cap Witkins’ essay “Death of the Free Web” I have a though that the once rogue 37signals-ish view, that there should be more web apps build for profit, is going mainstream? It’s about time, I suppose.

We’re discovering that you can’t create that sort of passion with free.
…
And so we’ve begun searching for and creating services that not only solve problems, but also solve them in a way that puts the customer first. In doing so we’re creating smaller, but more lasting and passionate communities of people that believe not only in the products, but in the vision and principles behind them.

The free web is dead. Good riddance.

Via @janrezac

As much as engineers like to joke about our counterparts in sales and marketing, the most successful sales and marketers think like engineers.
…
That’s when I realized – it’s not just that developers don’t see themselves as potentially amazing marketers. They might not even realize how deep and interesting of a field marketing is.

— Tal Raviv writes on his Customers over code blog

Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had.

Ruben Gamez then goes on into describing how he find out to which segments he could divide his clients and how he should present the new plans and much more.

Just read it.

Via @daeltar