What is best in life?
I contemplated this question early this morning while wrestling with a Power Point presentation that kept freezing up. There’s a status meeting next week on a project I’ve been working on for the past couple of months, and I need to put together a presentation on progress. The project is a model rewrite and port to a large framework, and the integration is anything but trivial. We’re closing on an early delivery and I’d like to capture lessons learned, limitations imposed by the mother sim, and what support and modifications I’ll need to wrap it up. (more…)
Ego is Insufficient
With the way media celebrates and demonizes pop company leadership, the message implied is that the CEO or founders are the core of a business. But I’m writing today because this is incorrect. A handful of energetic voices are an inadequate foundation for a lasting business. Nor is the core of a business it’s technology staff or creative talent. The vital kernel of any nascent business is purpose. One mega ego or even a few large egos may be present at company formation, but without a mission to drive them forward, to bind them together, and attract new talent they will drift apart, or at best develop a transient business*.
I’m tired of the ad supported model for crappy web content. I don’t feel it’s working to support high quality information, or informed decision making. I’d like to suggest a simple change in activity that can correct the failure of the current ad supported content system, and it’s not ad block. Click every ad on worthless pages. Seriously click every ad on a page that frustrates you. Drown the page in clicks but don’t sign up or buy anything. Devalue each click into non existence for that web property. They won’t get repeat advertisers if your click spam turns into nothing, and either they’ll get better content or die off.
While doing marketing research for GarageDollar this week I visited several map based sale update sites and twitter accounts. Most were graveyards of activity, a sign that their creators gave up due to a lack of discovered/perceived market, or conceded the market to a few winners. This is par for the course with startups and new businesses. It takes concentrated effort, a super network, and fantastic luck (or timing) to successfully breathe life into a novel social pattern.
Who’s not investing?
A number of tech companies have significant cash reserves compared to their yearly costs and revenue. Microsoft, Apple, and Google all fall into this category with billions of dollars sitting in money markets or other liquid assets^. These highly profitable businesses are building huge stockpiles of cash instead of reinvesting it in their own business, purchasing other companies (M&A), or distributing it to shareholders through dividends. Let’s look at the motivations behind high profit companies sitting on mountains of cash.
Attention, Duration, Action, Conversion, Location and Taste
Back in the early days of the commercial web, page views and impressions were the type of analytics that drove development and advertising revenue. If a site had a large and growing number of hits, it was considered valuable. Portals that attracted many visitors were king.
Ever expanding web services would lead us to believe millions of users attention is golden. Grow now, monetize later is the moto celebrated by Venture Capitalists who are looking for massive returns from a few companies. But there is nothing binding a visitor’s interest to a transient web service. Like a hit movie, every site fades in popularity over time. Even juggernauts Google and Facebook will diminish in time with changing generations of technology, tools, and users unless they create new services that replace their existing offers. The decline in the value of web brands is only accelerated by network effects, and we witnessed this first hand with the bubble burst of 2000. This radical plummet in value is abated by an age old idea, the customer contract.
Long before starting a company I firmly believed only field veterans or geniuses were capable of creating compelling products, and the even more impressive feat, breathing life into new markets. After working with and learning the fundamentals of web application development for the past 10 months (still a noob) I recognize vast opportunity in consumer facing and business to business web apps. The intelligent coordination of data gathering with organizing information, and well thought user interfaces has a wide range of real world applications. Shared and organized information has already, and will continue to revolutionize the way we live.
