Web 2.0 Expo – Nokia S60 Widgets – Are we making any progress?

Nokia announced its S60 Widget platform – Web Runtime at the Web2.0 Expo yesterday.  I attended their presentation, which was given by a marketing person.

 When you do away with the hype and the (really) cool demos, what you end up with is this:

- Users (who must have up-to-date S60 phones) can download “widgets” to their phones,

- These widgets deliver “point” solutions for specific use cases (weather, ebay, etc.).

Hmm… let me see… if we use the term “application” instead of “widget”, we end up with this model:  User downloads application to his phone, and uses it to access web-based information.

Wow!  True innovation.   Not. 

Can anyones say “Java apps”?  The Nokia presenter failed to explain why adoption would be higher for “widgets” than for “applications”.   The fact is that most users simply do not download/install stuff on their phones.

The presenter also used some (IMHO) misleading stats to enhance the appeal of the solution.  Even though it targets only S60 devices, which currently command a very low market share, Nokia used stats which show global mobile phone penetration (billions of devices).  When challenged by the audience, the presented acknowledged that the stats were irrelevant for the topic at hand.

Worst, the presenter acknowledged (only when asked) that even current S60 phones will not be able to support this new functionality (which has not yet been launched, and is still in beta). 

In other words, no one, right now, can use S60 widgets.

The pitch at Web2.0 Expo was clearly for developers – attracting widget developers in order to enhance the value of the S60 OS.  But attracting developers will depend on commercial availability, marketing channels, business models and adoption rates.  On all these issues Nokia is silent.

What is the role of the carrier in the seemingly open S60 widget world?  We don’t know.

What are the expected business models?  We don’t know.

How will it be any different than the Java model?  We don’t know.

Finally, a comment for presenters:  Sometimes more is less.  The Nokia presenter joked that “…I’m surprised – I just went through for demo examples, and nothing went wrong…”.  One of the first questions that came up had to do with the stability of the new technology – “…why were you surprised?  Did you expect anything to go wrong?…”

— Oren

Marketing Strategies – Federated Marketing Partnerships

In this post I’d like to introduce my ideas around federated marketing partnerships.  But before I get started, let’s set the stage.

The Setting

We’ve all seen it – you’ve just launched your new product, and the response is overwhelmingly positive.  Let’s say it is a new download-able mobile application.  Within weeks you get all the right reviews and have thousands of downloads.  You spend your marketing budget making sure you rank at the top of Google’s sponsored links, to draw in more users, and your click-through rates are excellent.

And then something happens.  Soon, much sooner than expected, growth grounds to a halt.  Your user growth dwindles and then stops.  You’re “stuck” with a couple of tens of thousands of users, out of a population of tens of millions of phones capable of running your application.

What Happened?

Classical marketing theory says that you’re having trouble transitioning from the early-adoption stage to the mass market.  But that does not capture the situation adequately.  The early adoption/mass market approach assumes that the mass market is waiting for the right conditions in order to adopt the product.  A lower price point, less bugs, more tangible value, etc.

But it is very likely that you had just ran across what I like to call the needs/awareness gap for your product, which is mostly apparent with small companies trying to operate in large markets.  Let me explain.

For each product and for each market we can draw two circles.  The outer one includes all those customers whose needs we know we can satisfy with our product.  The inner circle includes all those customers who are aware of their need, aware of your product (or product category) and know how to look for it.  The wider the gap between the two circles, the higher the chance for your adoption rate to plummet when you hit the gap.

Take your well targeted Google ad campaign.  You’re serving highly relevant, targeted (and successful) ads, but only to people who are already in context – they have executed a Google search for your product or product category.  But what about all those silent masses out there who simply have no idea that they could be running such a search, and that this would solve a problem for them (which they may not even be aware of)?

In short, unless the need/awareness gap is breached, mass market will never follow the early adopters, simply because they will be oblivious to your entire value proposition.  I’ll never search for your download-able application if I have no idea that one can download applications to the phone.

The Classic Solution – Market Education

So you go on the campaign trail.  You no longer spend marketing money on reactive measures (such as search based ads) but rather go for proactive ones.  You deliver seminars, print advertising, conferences, banner ads.  You engage PR firms, you try to leap the gap by generating more buzz.  You’re explaining the most basic elements of your offering, at a considerable cost.

Educating the Market is a long, painful, expensive process.  It cannot be measured properly, and rarely yields the expected results.  Many companies, especially smaller ones, stop here.  They try to farm their existing user base while trying to grow it at the fringes.

A New Approach – Federated Marketing Partnerships

Ultimately, this is a challenge in “spreading the word” across diverse audiences.  Going beyond the techies or the enthusiasts.

One way we are doing it here is by establishing a federation of marketing partners.  By this I do not mean your typical “partnership” website section, where we list our closest industry friends and peers.  The federated marketing partnership model is about bringing together companies which roughly operate within the same industry, but which still have distinct user bases from one another.  Each customer base is somewhat likely to be more receptive to my offering than the general mass market.  And the same holds true for my customer base and the offerings of the other partners.

Let me illustrate.  Suppose I want to increase the reach of my download-able application.  Why not strike a marketing partnership with a company which is, say, in the mobile messaging space?  I can safely assume that their users are somewhat more informed than the general population about mobile technologies, even if they have never downloaded an application to their phone.

A real-life example exists in the browser toolbar industry.  You download a piece of software, and as you install it, it will ask you if you’d like to install somebody else’s browser toolbar or search engine.  You may not even be aware that this toolbar exists, you would certainly have not looked for it yourself.  But you are just a bit more receptive now, when you are installing new software, to this kind of suggestion.

What you end up with is a mesh of partners, each bringing its customer base to the table.  It is almost like a peering arrangement between bandwidth providers.  The goal is to stimulate user “traffic” inside the federated network, exposing your customers to my services, and the other way around.  Customers learn of new offerings from a trusted source, making them even more receptive.

But wait, isn’t this just what affiliate marketing is all about?  Well, almost, but no.  The power relations inside the federated marketing partnership network are much more balanced than in the case of marketing affiliates.  If I am promoting Amazon.com books on my website, I am powerless in my relationship with Amazon.  Traffic flows one-way, my benefit being a revenue-share cut.  Also, the federated model is not performance or transaction based, it is based on the shared understanding that pooling our user bases provides us all with more value.

The federated marketing partnership model allows small companies, with distinct products and customer bases, to come together in a loosely-coupled marketing mesh.  Network effects make the mesh more and more valuable, as more members join.  Market education happens by osmosis, as users on the edge are gradually exposed to products and ideas which exist elsewhere on the network.

More to follow in weeks to come.

— Oren

Mobile Internet – It is all about Context

Last Friday I was attending several business meetings in downtown Vancouver.  What with one thing and another, I ended up taking the Skytrain back home.  We’re talking Friday evening, rush hour.

Suffice to say, I now know how sardines feel in their can.  I had a book in my backpack and the Metro newspaper stuffed in my pocket, but I was struggling for elbow space.  So reading was out of the question.

Or was it?  I ended up taking out my mobile, and going through some blogs I have not caught up with for a while.  Lo and behold, before I knew it I was home.  I know this is not a big deal for all you Treo/Blackberry users out there, but for us lowly feature-phone (or less) users, this was a real treat.

We’re all happy to complain about the inadequacy of the mobile phone as an Internet access device – small screen, lousy keyboard, slow, you name it.  Hmm… hold on.  Small screen?  Exactly what I needed.  Lousy keyboard?  Who cares.  I easily used single-hand navigation to walk through the text I was reading.  Slow?  First, I’m on EVDO, that’s anything but slow.  Second, it’s not as if there’s an alternative when you’re commuting.

I don’t expect the mobile to replace the desktop anytime soon.  For me it is always the 2nd choice for Internet access.  I’ll always prefer the PC/broadband combo over the phone.  But in the right context, the mobile shines.

We need to move away from thinking mobile Internet is simply WiFi on a larger scale.  It is a totally different interaction model.  Consumption is restricted to very specific time frames, typically when no other alternative presents itself.  Mobile Internet marketing needs to focus on fulfilling the needs users have during those particular time frames, or to invoke such needs by utilizing the “in-context” features of the phone – alerts, localization, always on, always near me.

Blogs/feeds seem to be the “secret sauce” if you will.  The perfect “filler” for when you have time to kill.  Not important enough to be consumed in real time or to defer more urgent tasks, they can be visited opportunistically. 

Oh yes, I made it back to where I had left my car in one piece.  And got a notice for a parking violation.  I guess the phone cannot solve all life’s problems.

— Oren 

When is “Just Good Enough” good enough?

Pragmatic Marketing recently published an article describing the “just good enough” product planning concept.   In a nutshell, the concept says that you should always figure what what is “just good enough” for your customers and focus on delivering products and product features which are just good enough for your market.  

Like all consultant-based approaches, this one is also easily described using a magic quadrant and a simple graph.  Unfortunately, while the concept seems to make lots of sense, applying it in real life is, well, tough.

For instance, before you can determine what is good enough, you must clearly define your target market and your customer persona.  In other words, “just good enough” is always relative, and is always on the move.  What is good enough for a Ford buyer is not good enough for a BMW buyer.

One seemingly obvious example of a company which has embraced the “just good enough” principle is Google.  When you look across their entire product base, it is clear that they are not the technology leader in any category.  There are better search solutions, better advertising platforms, certainly more feature rich email solutions, etc.  Just looking at their products, one is tempted to say that they had cracked the “just good enough” formula, and are applying it left and right with great success.

However, I would argue that Google is doing anything but “just good enough”.  Applying “just good enough” implies that at one point someone at Google took a look at GMail and said “enough, we don’t need any more features, this is good enough”.  And at that point all the developers simply junked the hundreds of features they were considering, feeling disappointed that they are not going to deliver the most feature-rich platform out there.

This, of course, is bull.  Google’s chief design principles revolve around simplicity and clean interfaces.  Its products are not devoid of features.  Their simplicity IS the feature.  GMail is not a crippled version of Hotmail, and happens to be “just good enough”.  It is a BETTER (IMHO) platform than Hotmail, and delivers excellence and market leadership on dimensions other than just feature-count.

In the business strategy world we’ve always used “just good enough”.  It is called “show me the money” or “if we build it, will they buy it?”  At the corporate level there is nothing new here.

At the practical level, “just good enough” deserves to be R&D’s guiding light.   Product managers, marketers, developers and the rest of us, are always interested in delivering the best possible product.  This is natural. 

However, given resource constraints, time to market needs and just our incapacity to hold 30 meetings a week, there

Right now I am in the midst of planning a new product offering.  With a core product idea, this is the point at which the product can develop in many different directions.  New ideas pop up all the time, each one is supposedly better than the last one.  Feature creep is upon us.  The product plan grows horizontally (new features, new ideas) and vertically (“we simply cannot launch until we optimize this and solve that!”) 

It is at this critical point in time that I use the “just good enough” principle as a practical tool.   All members of the product planning team are reminded daily of the priorities:  Launch, launch soon, and launch fast.  Make it work.  Sort of. 

Mind you, we are talking about alpha and beta launches.  The risk here is that feature creep and general defocusing lead to delays and (while adding more features) to a more buggy product. 

Each team member is encouraged to keep a journal of ideas that can deliver value, but that currently go beyond what is “just good enough”.  Personally I use a Wiki system, as I find it the most flexible tool out there to record, grow and expand ideas.

Ideas get written down even though it is clear to everyone that some of them will never get implemented.  Still, it is better to spend 10 minutes writing down an idea than spending two weeks implementing it, only to find out nobody cares about it.  Periodically ideas get reviewed, and, depending on what is “just good enough” at this point in time, may get incorporated into the product plan/roadmap.

So here’s my 2 cents:

- Clearly define what is “just good enough” relative to where you are in the product life-cycle.  Define your most critical business and marketing goals.  Anything which does not contribute greatly to achieving these goals is distracting and resource consuming.

- Log every idea, bug, comment for future reference.

- Establish clear milestones for re-evaluation.

- Learn to embrace less-than-perfect solutions.  Fight the urge to make your service respond in 0.01 millisecond, when customers are happy to accept a 5 second lag.  Apply your resources where they make the most customer impact, not product impact.

- …don’t spend too much time posting to blogs (Actually, this is a serious comment.  Blogs have become the #1 time-sucking activity for me.   I now have specific time slots set aside for feed-reading…)

— Oren

Good News, Bad News

We’re getting ready to launch a new service offering.  Whereas our existing Service Delivery Platform product line is currently targeted at the Chinese market (see Shanghai Mobile Announcement), our upcoming service offering targets the rest of the world.

 As we’re still pre-alpha, I cannot discuss it in detail (hey, I just lost most of you).  I’ve been spending the past few weeks travelling, meeting with potential partners, potential customers and most importantly with people whose opinion I value.  The result of this activity is a Good News, Bad News situation.

The good:  Everyone is excited by this new offering.  It seems to resonate with current market trends, and bridges a gap in the current value chain.

The bad:  There was not a single person I had met who did not ask me this question:  “Is it legal?  Can you do it and get away with it?”. 

And there you have it.  It all hinges on that seemingly simple question.   Often product managers and marketing executives in general tend to be so taken with the opportunity, so excited with the prospect of real product innovation, that they tend to ignore this often fatal question – am I allowed to do this?  (If you’re Google or Microsoft you may ignore this and just refer to your legal team/department/army).

Oh well.  I’m meeting the lawyers on Monday.

 — Oren