Why the small will overcome
Remember when Google's blogsearch came out and everyone thought Technorati, having only started to gain momentum was dead? How many of you use Technorati everyday, vs. Google's blogsearch intermittedly? Why? 'Cause they understand their market. They happen to all be bloggers. ;) Sure, some of Google blogs, but I've heard that it's pretty thankless...I somehow doubt that Sergey, Larry or Eric have much time to keep their finger on the pulse of the blogosphere.
Well, the point I'm making here is that there are some advantages to being small. Actually, I think being small gives you all of the advantages. As per my rather silly and haphazzard illustration above shows (I couldn't find a CC licensed photo of what I wanted to talk about...see, this is what happens when people lock down their photos...my bad drawings get unleashed on the blogosphere):
Advantage #1 - The Giant Corporations are Asleep
It's that old formula...if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you are raking in the dough, you don't want to go an take too many risks getting into areas you don't know much about (or don't even know exist - except that crazy person in Department D mentioned something about some strange phenomenon of people doing something with Micro-something or others or tags or what-not, but they must be part of some fringe group).
Okay, so companies like Microsoft are waking up, thanks to the fact that they are listening to their 'ears to the ground'...but I'm not putting my bets on them yet. The bigger the company, the lower the risk they want to assume. More stakeholders/shareholders = bigger risk.
Advantage #2 - The Giant Corporations Don't Know You Exist
And even if they know you exist, do you think they'll bat more than two eyelashes? Probably not. Sure, if you have some cool technology, they may keep a half an eye on you to watch how you execute and how successful you become, but more than likely, they'll submit to Advantage #1 until you start posing a real threat...then they'll come on like gangbusters.
Oh...and FYI...when they come on like gangbusters, no matter what your leverage is, if you don't have passionate users, you are screwed. It has very little to do with size.
Advantage #3 - The Giant Corporations Are Clueless When it Comes to Community
Okay, so Microsoft, once more, is starting to clue-in...which also means that they are less likely to come along and squash a community driven site. Take for instance their recent Microformats embracing. They could have gone all Google Base on the community's ass, but they proved to be the company that got it.
That being said, most big corporations have a good deal of arrogance and expect their employees to be 100% loyal and work looong hours to get ahead, thus producing more of the same rising to the top. Okay...so I'm exaggerating, but I've worked for and with enough big companies to witness this first hand. The loyalists and overtimers get promoted to decision making positions, where the rebellious social types (the ones that may even hang out in the communities they are serving) that could bring back some dissenting opinions, well, they get frustrated and...join startups. ;)
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Flipside...um...30 Boxes...what is going to happen there? I don't know. It doesn't look good. I'm using the Google Calendar and loving it (even though I know I shouldn't). I was a big fan of 30. Partially passionate. Okay...not totally. But they filled a need. Not extremely well, but they were there when I needed to busy schedules with Chris.
Ah. There is a difference. You tell me.
[tags: pinkomarketing, cluetrain, marketing]
14 Comments:
I fully agree. I took a startup that got aquired into a larger company and they behaved like you say. Everything down to image selection for some ad riddled with buracracy. Utter disregard for creativity because they don't want to offend anyone. Don't innovate because then we have retrain everyone and all of our customers. Its sick. Thank god a collegue turned me on to 37 signals a while ago. I used to use similar methodology myself and had gotten away from it. I missed the innovation and the small passionate teams. Needless to say it wont happen again.
PS: We also use google calendar as our main company calender to know where we all our. Don't need anything else. Forced to use MS office with other company because "we paid for exchange licences so we can send meeting requests"
Ofcourse there is a difference.
30boxes allows no integration with any other tool that you use regularly and diligently - in my case Gmail.
The integration - which is rather tight, and can only get better makes it an overly easy switch to Google Calendar, even though I loved 30 boxes when they started, and still continue to use them..
Still this might not be 'the' difference you were referring to, since there are one or two more.
What was yours?
The thing I see working in large companies is people who know that the world is changing, know that the 'same old thing' isn't working anymore, know that the company needs to change ... but ... can't!
They just can't accept the bet-the-company risk that it takes to, if not walk away from existing revenue, at least stop pouring prod dev and marketing dollars into it, and place a lot of bets on new stuff.
So everybody gets busier and busier working harder and harder on more and more of the same old stuff ... producing less and less real ultimate end user value all the time. What a downer!
Plus, as you mentioned, they just don't get it. You have people who use phrases like "it is needful" and could not write a real honest plain unvarnished true paragraph to save their lives ... much less less the hoi polloi come and start trampling around on the sacred carpets everywhere with their own ideas and values and priorities.
How about corporate blogging as one way for the big to act small?
Some thoughts you helped inspire
Microsoft gets it? Oh, please push the bong pipe away! They are pushing the four year mark for many of their upgrades which frankly don't exhibit any innovation or creative spark.
As to Microsoft blogging, Scoble is the only employee with any major visibility. Yet he is totally in the camp of not only supporting Microsoft's support of censorship in China, he now censors all of his blog comments that are critical to himself or Microsoft.
A little bit of censorship is just a step on the road towards putting just a few people in concentration camps.
All companies get it...
It's just that not all companies care or can move quickly.
Tara is correct that disconnects occur but at the end of the day the question might be - how do you change your community of interest - rather than if you engage it that is important... Micorosft is huge they have a massive community. It's not like Riya with one community and one major interest has to move the community to a completly new dynamic. If they give me a mac uploader I'd be happy :) *sorry tara couldn't resist!*
Thats a startups advantage - not first mover & not the lethargic nature of large organizations, but being engaged with little bagage and one focus.
Micrsoft(and othe large corps) has to re-engage their community while not alienating those that aren't ready to move.
Well at least imho.
Maybe some day Yahoo will come out with huge improvements in del.icio.us, flickr and upcoming and all this thinking will be proven mistaken. Or maybe not...
Exactly. My favourite example is YouTube vs. Google Video. There's simply no community with Google Video.
But for some tools, big definitely overrules small. My pick would be 30boxes vs Google Calendar. Google Calendar wins here - calendar & email is too important to be left to the small guys.
We (30boxes) hardly fit the "small guys" mold, having scaled Webshots to portal class. Our new email integration is better IMHO than anything than within gmail. You want your calendar to be service agnostic and very open.
We have a snappy to do feature that intelligently incorporates tagging coming out soon.
Anyway, Google has to take down the 20 million people that use hotmail's calendar. I wish them luck with that.
We will be busy building an open social network.
I know this is only nominally related, but I don't get what the big deal is with Google Calendars. I can email stuff via 30 Boxes now, I like the interface, all my stuff is in there, Google Calendar doesn't integrate gracefully...and...biggest of all, there's no RSS integration?. I can see all of my friend's posts on any given day in 30 Boxes, not to mention all my Upcoming stuff, not to mention all the show feeds. I need it. My calendar is but a blind and hobble half-calendar without the feeds.
I feel like I must be missing something with Google Calendars that everybody else is getting. Is it the drag and drop? It can't just be the drag and drop. Um, can it?
Very interesting conversation. I think I'll need to re-read it to get my mind wrapped around it ... but I do think you're on to something here. I blog for a "small" and am always looking for honest ways to get the "BIG" to notice us.
Wake the Dragon
We are moving towards a period on the internet where only a small number of companies control the vast amount of revenue that is generated in any one area of service offerings. We are also at a point were the likelihood of competing on a revenue basis with any of these large corporations that control most of the key areas grows smaller by the day. If one were to start a business that could possibly be replicated by any of the existing quasi monopolies one would find it very difficult to raise any investment capital from traditional institutional sources. Indeed most of the institutional investors that one would seek out would of course be looking for a return on their investment in a short period of time. This return on investment is usually expected to take the form of an IPO, or an acquisition.
Because of the current situation that sees a handful of companies dominating most internet technology markets; many investors would see any new entrant as a high risk. Most of the quasi monopolies could easily replicate any new technology, and because of this would more than likely not want to acquire any new entrants.
The lack of a market for acquisition will and has led to a shrinking amount of companies that have the financial ability and needed market traction to enter the stock market, and thus return a financial gain to investors. Many times a pending IPO is the prime mover in the acquisition of a competitor by a larger corporation. The acquisition allows the purchaser to acquire the company at a much lower possible price, and it also prevent the company being acquired from attaining the needed capital to expand, grow market share and compete.
While noting the above argument It is interesting and important to realize that the current scenario is not one that is new. Indeed it has played out in history before. One need only look at the old world media industry to see how market consolidation by a handful of quasi media monopolies has led to a lack of investment that would lead to competition. The main difference in the scenario above and the current one that exist in the internet business sector is that the old scenario of market domination, and consolidation has been super imposed as a belief model in an space that it will not fit.
Investment in the previous era of the non internet technology economy was needed to hire people and to purchase the required machinery to do the job. You could not create a competing news paper without writers, presses, and distribution. One of the key barriers to entry was the cost of people, distribution, and equipment. Because of technologies and in particular the internets evolutionary and revolutionary nature the old world economic barriers to company creation no longer exist. The cost and time that it takes to create an application are so small that the creator does not need to worry about the bottom line or break even points. There need not be a profit motive to create a compelling internet application. Just as an artist paints out of an inner drive to paint, a application developer can create because of a very similar inner drive. I believe that this will create a situation where the current quasi monopolies will ultimately fall to the mass community of application developers that will and have become creators for their own needs as well as for others. Because they have very small over heads and tend to be self funding thorough full time employment, they will be very difficult to compete with. They have an open distribution channel; they have access to low cost creation tools, and they are self funded with their own capital. The large corporations that are currently in the market must support large staffs as well as the expectations of investors that expect profit. They cannot compete against the many no cost and open competitors that are now entering and will continue to enter the market.
It will be seen that taking the revenue possibility away from potential competitors in the evolutionarily and revolutionary platform that is the internet does not decrease entrants, but increase entrants that cannot be competed with on a market share and thus a profit basis.
This kind of paradigm shift was seen early with the struggle of traditional newspapers losing classified readership to online creators that provided the same service at a low to no cost. The new entrants did not need presses and had an open and relatively free distribution channel. The newspapers had to sustain profits to support their existing infrastructure of men and machines, and in most cases because they were public companies had to return profit for investors. The newspapers were slow to go into the online classifieds market because they were under the assumption that for any of their online competitors to continue they would need to make large profits. They also viewed the internet in an old world economic framework that postulates that business are only created and survive when revenue can be generated that makes the endeavor profitable. Once the newspapers did react they discovered that they could not compete or gain any market share from the many classified advertising applications that now existed. Most of the existing classified applications have very little overhead and are not motivated by going public or large profit gains. Most do not have to support large machinery infrastructure or large numbers of employees. Because large profit is not the motive, the newspapers cannot compete.
Newspapers and other media are now seeing this same pattern with blog content creators. The blog creators have low over head and low or no profit expectation and an open distribution channel. Because of this newspaper cannot compete and will eventually become extinct online and possibly the in the off line world.
We are also seeing this in other media. Radio, television and film will be the next to fall to the masses of application creators that can create applications at little to no cost and expect and need low or no profits to keep the application going. No equipment cost, an open distribution channel and users that create the content.
No area of internet technology will be immune from the mass of application and content creators that now have the means and ability to create for creations sake readily at hand. Somewhere below the radar there are many competitors to Google and Yahoo and Microsoft. Sooner rather than later we will see these giants reel.
I mostly agree with what you are saying. Sometimes you wonder why a multi billion dollar company isn't doing/investing into something that is so obvious to rest of us small fish. I have worked for a big company (msft actually) and I now run a startup. My guess is that a 1 year old company runs at least 10x faster than a big company. But big companies have a great advantage - they can start very late in the game and yet catch up based on sheer $$$ power!
having tried quite a few shared calendars, found airset.com to be the best - ease of use and desktop ("outlook") integration, and for free.
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