AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

The only way to unseat an incumbent in a category is to out-innovate and thereby bypass them. While MSFT is trying to angle for incremental improvements which remain, at best, debatable, they should be aiming for "10 TIMES better, not 10% better".

It has to be a "Mafia Offer", an offer to good to refuse. Nothing else will decisively convince the public to change a by now ingrained behavior and rearrange the mental (brand) real estate. "Google = Search". Inertia is just too great to show up to this fight with minor tweaks.

That's why you need "10 TIMES better" to catalyze things, to jolt people out of their current behavior. MSFT should not look to compete in "Search", but in a whole new category, something "better than search" altogether.

They tried passing Bing off as a "decision engine", but then didn't follow it up with enough proof/novelty to justify this reach. Most Bing Searches that I've seen look like plain old "search engine" searches.

There was a small window earlier this year to acquire Twitter and outflank Google by exclusively supplying Twitter results in Bing/Live. But IMO that window has passed, not least of all because Google has made significant headway with recency/near real-time options in its core search offering.

BTW, the ad campaign by Porter & Bogus(ky) must likely be viewed as a total failure at this point. I have not seen one clear, coherent message about what Bing's USP is supposed to be. And so far the ads for Windows 7 don't inspire much confidence either.

I am sure Windows 7 will turn out well enough (as in, better than Vista "del Mojave", which isn't necessarily saying all that much), but is the implied "so easy a caveman...I mean child...can do it" really the best way to get that across?

And what is with that last sentence they dreamed up for that little asian girl - "I'm a PC, and this is getting good"?!

First, it's mixing in earlier "I'm a PC" campaign elements (of the sulking "Mac vs. PC" ad war retort) in an odd way, when it should be focusing on how brilliant Windows 7 supposedly will be.

Second, "this is getting good" would imply that things were bad before, no? As in Vista = Bad. Why go there? I just don't get it.

DISCLAIMER: As a long-time Microsoft user, I feel completely empowered to criticize Microsoft as much as I want for not doing more with all of the money we've given them all these years. So don't flame me.

Lightning bolts appear above and around the Chaiten volcano as seen from Chana, some 30 kms (19 miles) north of the volcano, as it began its first eruption in thousands of years, in southern Chile May 2, 2008. Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008. (Carlos Gutierrez)

By all means click through to the boston.com article to see several more unbelievable (and full size) night-time photos like this (about half way down through the photo series). Props to @Zee for digging this up.

... Second, like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. No office. No phone system. No hiring. No press. No legal muck. No raising money. No looking for partnerships (who’s going to partner with you anyway?). The success or failure of the adoption of your product is what will create 99% of the initial value of your company.

If no one ever uses your product, you have no value. Oh, and for the record, raising VC does not help get traction – in another blog post, I’ll argue that if anything, it hurts. So just forget everything else and focus on what matters – getting an alpha of your product out the door and into the hands of your friends and family.

This is so key. All else I call "playing business". Proof Of Concept or nothing...

BTW, even though this is written from the point of view of an Internet/Web 2.0 start-up, it still holds true for ALL business/entrepreneurship endeavors, regardless of what you are selling.

I see e.g. so many coaches and personal development afficionados waste precious time and resources starting their business by registering trade-marks with catchy names for "systems/processes" that most of the time they didn't really invent anyway. All this stuff just slows you down.

And by the way, technically, for a trademark to remain valid, it has to be enforced. That means you'd really have to have an attorney on retainer to write cease and desist letters to people in the unlikely event that anyone gave enough of a dear to bother to misapproprate your trademark. And most people don't even know how to properly use their own trademark when it comes to the difference between using "TM" and "(R)" at the appropriate times.

What solopreneur or start-up really has time for this? Worry about paying lawyers when there is actual money reliably coming in from your product or service.

Similar issues apply to copyright, which is also fast becoming a non-issue in this information economy: The half-life of your content/information is becoming so short that it is very unlikely that any copyright issues will ever apply. You should be so lucky that anyone would bother to copy/propagate your stuff.

Compare the refreshing simplicity and grace of Leo Babauta's "uncopyright":

"...Terms and Conditions for Copying, Distribution and Modification

0. Do whatever you like." ( http://mnmlist.com/uncopyright/ )

42. "Focus on generating attention. The Web has liberated us from the tyranny of paying for attention! Small business entrepreneurs can generate attention for their business in four main ways:

You can BUY attention (this is called advertising); you can BEG for attention (this is called Public Relations); you can BUG people one at a time to get attention (this is called sales) or you can EARN attention online by creating great information that your buyers want to consume such as YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, photographs, charts, graphs, and ebooks—and it is all free. How are YOU generating attention?"
— David Meerman Scott, Web Ink Now

As you know by now, I am all about the Attention Economy as well as the Moving The Freeline concept. This handy quote combines both. Gotta love "you can BEG for attention (this is called Public Relations)"...

Researchers say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives—combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every e-mail message—can deplete and demoralize you. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and expert on attention-deficit disorders, argues that the modern workplace induces what he calls “attention deficit trait,” with characteristics similar to those of the genetically based disorder.

Author Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the mental state of today’s knowledge workers, says she’s now noticing—get this—“e-mail apnea”: the unconscious suspension of regular and steady breathing when people tackle their e-mail.

There are even claims that the relentless cascade of information lowers people’s intelligence. A few years ago, a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard reported that the IQ scores of knowledge workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points—twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana, several commentators wryly noted.

...

Michalski, an independent consultant who advises companies on the use of social media, isn’t drowning in a cascade of information. He’s not even trying to ride it out in a barrel. He’s surfing Niagara Falls. So what’s his secret?

“You have to be Zen-like,” he patiently explained to me. “You have to let go of the need to know everything completely.”

My BOLD highlights.

This stuff is one of the keys to functioning successfully in the 21st century. You have to be OK with (as Tim Ferriss calls it) "just in time" information as opposed to hoarding of "just in case" information. All else is an illusion anyway that can only serve to drive you up the proverbial wall.

Rather than allowing informtation or technology to become a snare, start with the idea in mind that they are here to serve you, that you and your precious time are infinitely more inportant than any of the information or technology.

For years, Microsoft was the stodgy market leader. It sold 90 percent of the world's operating-system software and generally left the advertising to Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and other hardware makers that licensed Windows. The only time Microsoft hawked its most recognizable brand on television was when the latest version of the software hit the shelves. Then the company flooded the airwaves with commercials full of loud music and swirling imagery, saying the new version of Windows is out - and that it's awesome.

Apple is the classic smaller insurgent. Its share for desktops and laptops in the United States is just more than 8 percent. Every time Apple grabs another point of market share from Microsoft's partners, its stock price climbs. And one way Apple has tried to gain share is by running clever ads that ridicule everything Microsoft stands for.

Apple's ads put Microsoft in a bind. One of Madison Avenue's rules is that a market leader never acknowledges a smaller competitor in its advertising. What's more, if Microsoft responded with ads that backfired, it would look just like Hodgman's character. Maybe it was better to grin and bear it.

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/microsofts-recent-ads-branding-confusion-squared

By all means CLICK through to my full post if you're into this sort of thing, there are several more posts in this Microsoft Branding series.

... Although most cities don’t at first glance look much like brains, there are some initial similarities. 

First, unless you buy a thousand acres of land and have your own city built to order, cities get their shapes via (political and economic) selection forces over many decades. Like brains, cities evolve: ones that are not well organized wilt (people move away over time) or modify themselves to become more efficient.

Second, cities interconnect themselves with highways, and are under selection pressure to connect themselves efficiently. Highways break out of the two dimensional street grid, and “pull” the city’s edges closer to one another. Brains, too, have highways: white matter axons. The pyramidal neurons in the cortex send their axons out of the gray matter to faraway parts of the cortex.

...I asked, Given what we know about how brains change when they get larger, do we find that cities change in similar ways as they get larger? So graduate student Marc Destefano and I took data from U.S. cities varying in population from about 10 thousand to about 10 million, and determined how city organization changed as city size increased. Our paper just appeared in the journal Complexity.

We found that cities and brains are quantitatively very similar in how they change their organization as a function of size. For example, the number of highways increases more slowly than does the surface area of a city, something already known to be the case for our brain’s highways (i.e., our white-matter-projecting neurons); in particular, in each case the number increases at about the 3/4 power of surface area. [...]
...
Cities are a lot smarter than we have thought. And that, I contend, is true about most complex systems that are under selection pressure for considerable periods of time. If we can understand the organization of cities, then we might have a leg up in understanding the brain. And cities make it easy, because relative to the size of these city-brains, we are nano-particles traveling through them like the characters from Fantastic Voyage.

My BOLD highlights.

I thought this is a fascinating perspective to take, basically positing - and finding some evidence for - the idea that intelligence can be an emergent property. Whether you view this research more in the vein of metaphor, or as something more than that, it may be useful either way.

I am from Germany originally, so I found this comment quite interesting. It speaks to the relatively universal appeal of the Twitter brand:

The internet has done something wacky to this situation. It has created a surplus of attention. Ads go unsold. People are spending hours on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or other sites and not spending their attention on ads, because the ads are either absent or not worth watching.

When people talk about the problem with free online, they're missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven't gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention.

Hint: funny commercials with chimps won't be the answer.

It turns out that the almost infinitely long tail of attention varieties is what will kick open the monetization of online attention. Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it's anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do.

I can't quite agree with Seth's idea that there is an attention "surplus", given the idea that in an Info Economy, attention becomes the only scarce resource.

What he is completely right about though is that whatever attention is available on most Websites, Web 2.0 services, etc. is being very poorly engaged by advertisers/marketers.

So it is more of a squandered potential than a surplus resource, after all the people visiting these sites do pay attention to something while they are there, just not (for the most part) to the poorly conceptualized/targeted offers (i.e. ads) that they are encountering and largely ignoring there.

I have talked about this in great length before, e.g. here:
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/is-advertising-failing-on-the-internet

The next decade of self–improvement innovations and initiatives are guaranteed to be more provocative and important than the past decade's. Can you imagine colleagues getting a bonus that you don't because they used Facebook to profitably manage a client engagement while you see the social network as social irritant?

Are you pleased or disturbed to discover that a previously quiet direct report has come out of her shell because they're now taking Paxil? Are you complimented or insulted when your boss suggests you need executive coaching because, frankly, your best chance for promotion requires you to throttle back your all–too–naked ambition?

I have no clue how you'd answer those questions. What I do know is that they weren't even askable five years ago. Five years from now, the overwhelming majority of workplace issues will be "performance" related. My bet is the overwhelming majority of that overwhelming majority of those workplace issues will have a call for "self–improvement" at their core.

Are you ready to manage that? Are You ready to lead that? How are you improving yourself to deal with next year's self–improvement challenges?

My BOLD highlights.

I think I'll add this to my standard vocabulary: "...questions that weren't even askable five years ago..."