Tag Archives: Innovation

3 Learnings (and interesting question): “What if Steve Jobs was a telco CEO?”

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What can telecommunication CEOs learn from Steve Jobs. Interesting question discussed at TM forum, based on an initial discussion on TelecomAsia.

It has some good points in terms that Steve Jobs as the CEO of a telco operator could have made the history turn out differently regarding smartphones and mobile data services.

However, I believe that the focus on content selling is driven more by the current assumption that this is the business saviour for operators rather than being the key success story of Steve Jobs and Apple.

Apple’s business is in selling hardware. Content (music, video, apps) contributes only a small portion of their business. So in order to learn from Steve Jobs you have to take a different angle.

Here are my 3 key lessons for the telco industry:
#1: design insanely great products that stand out- telco products look the same almost around the globe, nothing really stands out
- focus on customer experience not on technology
- sweat out the details
- simplicity

#2: get your hands dirty with optimizing the business backend
Steve Jobs and now-CEO Tim Cook managed to turn Apple into the most profitable device manufacture by rigorous focus on logistics / business processes / supplier management. This is the invisible or at least mostly ignored part of the Apple success story.

#3: focus on the overall the experience
for customers and partner (read application developers).
- help the customer and make them feel treated well (retail stores, genius bars, migration services)
- don’t make them feel you just want to sell more
- no 10 pages of small print in product offerings
- support developers with a complete development environment, not just the APIs

And at the end just again getting back to the de-mystification of the innovation genius of Steve Jobs.

Two stages of simplicity

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Simplicity and Zen-like elegance has been attributed as the key success factor of many products currently.

Just coming out of a conversation about GUI design I realized that the push for simplicity has 2 challenges or stages. The first is to simplify, i.e. leave out or at least hide rarely used functionality or components.
This in itself can be demanding especially for product engineers who believe in the importance and consequently immediate visibility of each and every feature of the product.

But the more challenging part is actually to do this in a way so that users immediately “feel” the added value of the product. This requires to reflect customer expectations and standard use cases in a very natural way.

We will see this coming even more not only for physical products, but also for processes and customer interaction.

[Update: And here is some insight from Harvard Business Review into the Apple way of achieving this.]

[Update: And the interesting view of Don Norman on Google's simplicity]

iMessage + Facetime = Skype ?

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One of the more suprising announcements in Apple’s WWDC keynote was iMessage in iOS5.

Besides the already mentioned fact that the operators will not like this replacement of their SMS services, especially as it seems to be seamlessly switching between creating a SMS and an iMessage message (see “Cult of Mac“).
But even more surprising is the fact that iMessage is not better integrated with Facetime. The features iMessage provides are very similar to the Skype Chat/IM function (conversations, typing indication). And now Microsoft (also offering a Mobile OS) will control Skype with it’s very integrated communication suite: voice, video, messaging.
Apple doesn’t seem to have a bigger communication suite strategy in place yet, but I assume it is already in the making.
Think of Facetime + iMessage + Mail (now with conversations in Lion) integration available on iOS and MacOS devices.

Apple, the new / old Microsoft

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Looking at all the new features Apple announced for iOS and MacOS during the WWDC keynote I had a strange feeling of deja vu.

Microsoft has been known and accused of copying successfull 3rd party applications from the Windows ecosystem and making them part of the operating system.
Now Apple feels a little bit the same, if you consider:
  • Reminders:          much like Things and similar apps
  • Reading List:        Instapaper
  • Camera features: much like Camera+ and other apps (e.g. grid, zoom, AF/AE)
  • iMessaging:         a lot like Skype IM/chat
  • Documents in Cloud: like Evernote
Not that this is necessarily bad and in many cases they added a special touch to it, e.g. Location triggers for reminders. But still it feels a little like the past Microsoft.
The major difference is probably that Phil Schiller called the Safari Browser a system component of the operating system, something that Microsoft has fought hard to avoid.

Mary Meeker publishes “Top Mobile Internet Trends”

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Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkens just released her “Top Mobile Internet Trends”. Overall interesting read. What immediately struck me were slides 4 and 5 showing the exceptional take-off for the iPad and the Apple App-Store. The interesting part is that iPad grew much faster than iPod and iPhone and the App-Store grew faster and bigger than iTunes. In both cases the key to this is in my view that those had no real competition at the time of launch.

The iPad created the market for tablet devices without any really competitor. At the time of launch the iPod had several MP3 player and the iPhone several smartphones as serious contenders for the market. Although finally they also re-defined their category the start was not as easy for them.

Similar is true for the App-Store. There have been already several MP3-download sites pior to the launch of iTunes, whereas for mobile phone application download sites they have not been any real competitors, despite some attempts by mobile operators and device vendors.

Social customer acquisition

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Just following up on the owning the customer / softSIM post and adding the social network flavor of facebook, linkedin, xing and the cool technology of “bumping” information between phones (www.bu.mp)

What if you could just switch operators by “bumping” 2 phones. So if I’m with operator A and really like and want a friend to join, why not just bump the phones.

Ok, agreed, maybe this is not possible today and there are a lot of issues related to it: you need to sign a contract, transfer or change of mobile number, somehow the payment needs to be cleared, termination of the old contract.

But, if you could actually manage this within your backend processes the world suddenly looks different: very limited acquisition cost, acquisition by recommendation, leveraging social networks.

And this example shows the disadvantage telecom operators today have above Internet companies like facebook, twitter, etc. This kind of recommendations/social network scaling is very difficult and expensive to achieve.

Who owns the customer ?

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Again and again I come across remarks about the fight for ”who owns the customer”.

Especially in the telecommunications industry there is a lengthy debate about this with regards to telecommunication operators, device manufacturers, Internet companies, content owners.

My first point is that the question is wrong. It should be ”who gets permission to serve the customer”. Probably very much in line with Seth Godin (see Permission Marketing). Personally at least I don’t want to be owned by any company and if I feel that way they have already lost. I would also assume that most people would not feel owned by Google, just because they use their search engine (although in fact they are to a great deal)

The second point is that if your business is based on ”customer ownership” it might disappear pretty fast.

Most recently this was part of a debate on Apple’s rumored initiative to add a SoftSIM to the iPhone or iPad in one of the next releases. SoftSIM would replace the normal, physical SIM card and would allow customers to switch operators without replacing a card. (Obviously also without the hassle to get the card etc.)

The immediate reaction in the operator community was an uproar, because of the threat to loose “ownership” of the customer. Currently operators spend large amount of money (of which the management and distribution of the physical SIM cards is only one part) to acquire new customers. This obviously only works if the customer stays with the operator for some time so the initial costs can be refinanced by service charges.

That is also why churn (i.e. loosing customer to the competition) is considered to be a bad thing. But what if you re-define the operations to streamline the acquisition of new customers. In saturated markets, i.e. with limited number of additional customers, churn usually works in all directions. You loose some customers and you gain some customers (from your competition). If you could make acquiring new customers more effective than your competition, you could immediately create a business advantage.

So don’t try to own the customer, get the permission to serve them and serve them more efficiently.

Now the GSMA (the organisation of telecommunication operators) seems to have taken up initiative to work on a SoftSIM (or embeddedSIM) standard. However, the officially stated driver is the increasing number of connected devices.

The value of the process

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Just yesterday I came across this great presentation by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels at Ted 2009.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.
.
Besides the gorgeous architecture and the interesting ideas captured within, what especially struck me were his remarks about their design process and how to capture it.

It became clear that the value comes – not only – from the final result, but from the process of the creation and all the discussions related to it.

For me this sounds very familar from discussions around scenario planning, where also the main value is not so much in the final result (the future will be different anyway), but in the conversations and discussions that lead to it.

I also like the view of their office and storage with all the architecture models collected for future use.

Now, here comes the twist or the question that haunts me: How do you do this in a distributed environment, where teams a scattered around the globe and interaction is with 2 hour phone conferences and document sharing? How do you create a continous interactions and joint conversations along the process? How do you do brainstorming on the Internet?

Is a wiki infrastructure the right answer?

Or does it just not work efficiently?

Smart Grids – Differentiated Electricity

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In the mobile industry policy control and differentiating bandwidth and service is one of the key topics at the moment. Not only to correlated usage and price, but also to allow communication operators to establish new business models.

In parallel there is a lot of hype about smart (power) grids equipped with smart meters that allow to monitor and report usage and costs in real-time to the customer.

No in utilities there is the deep-rooted assumptions that power, like water and gas is a commodity, but taking the above two aspects together the next question is when and how to differentiate your electricity. The smart meter would actually know for which appliances the power is used. How to do this? Maybe just by adding a small device at the power outlet that talks to the smart meter and reports usage per applicance.

What to use it for ? Well you could start thinking about cross bundling. The retail shop of your choice would offer you a bonus on your refrigerators power usage whenever you shop their. Or you would actually get it for free.

Or advertisers would cross finance your TV power supply for you to watch more programs.  Or a car manufacturer could cross-finance the recharging costs for your electric car.

What would be the benefit? Well, it would at least increase the flexibility in business models and the power of this is visible with one of the most successful cross-financing business models today at Google.

Admittedly there are a few details to be worked out yet, but what an opportunity if not all electricity is created equal.

Twitter: Serving of the Day

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From his blog Seth Godin lead me to Lula’s Apothecary serving vegan ice cream in New York City. It’s not about their ice cream or business model, but they also publish their daily servings on Twitter.

Every restaurant, bar, bakery etc. should have their daily specials published on Twitter !

Especially if they serve something I would make a detour for and make an impulse purchase. Ice cream being definitely one of the cases.

Monitoring customer response either on Twitter or with business results would definitely help to steer the business. And positive re-tweets would also serve as promotion.