Category: Tech

Michael Osofsky picks up the thread comparing Eric Von Hippel’s “lead users” to Geoffrey Moore’s “visionaries,” and prompts some more reflection on the similarities and differences between the categories of technologyearly adopters.
I suspect that von Hippel’s Lead Users and Moore’s Visionaries are mostly the same people viewed with different perspectives shaped by time and technology.
Moore saw visionaries as “early adopters” — people who are eager consumers of brand new products. von Hippel studies early adopters as innovators — people who not only consume but customize products.
Early adopters have always played a role in customizing products, but they have more opportunities to do so these days. There are more tools available to modify products, ranging from open source software to low-cost CAD and low-volume contract manufacturers.
When Moore first wrote Crossing the Chasm, it was most important to help technology companies to see how different mainstream buyers were from early adopters. A technology provider wishing to hit the big time needed to focus on packaging the product for more mainstream buyers, and to ignore the eccentric preferences of the visionaries.
These days, customer innovation has been democratized, changing the rules of business success. Successful tech companies (like Google, Amazon, Ebay) need to be good both at packaging a service for broad use, and at providing tools for lead user customization.
By moving away from Moore’s understanding of users as eager but passive “consumers” and focusing on the active role played by lead customer innovation, von Hippel reaches several insights that Moore didn’t a decade ago. Many lead user customizations are one-offs which allow a manufactured product access to an application the vendor couldn’t supply cost-effectively. Many other lead user customizations are applicable to a larger class of customers, and vendors can use the signals of end-user customization to lead their next-generation product development efforts.
So, instead of abandoning lead users, von Hippel recommends serving them with customization tools, and adopting popular customer innovations into the manufactured product line.

In an interview with CNET, the internet pioneer evangelized sensible ideas about public policy for the internet.
Cerf told CNET that he finds it ””troublesome” that various states and localities have been proposing and implementing measures to outlaw municipally sponsored broadband networks. “Why on Earth would we inhibit people from making their own investments–deciding, for example, to float a bond?”‘.
Cerf has also been out talking to Hollywood, encouraging them to ‘view the Internet as an alternative distribution outlet. “Some are responding positively, but some legal departments are still having trouble swallowing the idea.”‘
Hopefully Cerf’s well-respected presense and active evangelism will help Google throw its weight behind good tech policy and counteract the force of the telecom and content oligopolies. The tech business strategy mantra is “commoditize your complements.” Google benefits when there are fatter pipes available to more people, and more content available for indexing and related ads. The world will get better when the innovative business that see the fortunes to gain pry off the stranglehold of stagnant businesses who only see what they have to lose.

Socialtext is considering the use of Asterisk as a telephony server. We use a mishmash of skype, vonage, POTS, and freeconference.com to support our distributed team. It’s amazing that it can be done at all, but the string and baling wire is getting tiresome. “Can you hear me” isn’t amusing any more, and wastes plenty of valuable time.
The open source telephony server toolkit has tremendous potential to provide low-cost telecom services for small-to-mid-sized businesses But somebody needs to step up and market the heck out of it.
I was browsing through the Asterisk site itself, and the sites for some Asterisk VARs. The sites all focused on a long, long, long list of features. The laundry list is probably helpful for a telecom geek who knows exactly what she is looking for, and is in search of the specific set of protocols, hardware devices, and functions.
The “feature list” approach is next to useless for a small business person who wants to know how their telecom needs can be met effectively. A good marketing person would talk to small business people and understand what sets of capabilities they’re looking for in a phone server. Then they would explain, step by step, what Asterisk can do, and what the packages contain. The laundry list of features would show up on the site as a third level of detail, when the customer, now with a better understanding of what they are looking for, can see the details and compare to alternatives.
What’s needed isn’t marketing fluff — airy promises about enhanced productivity solutions yada yada. It’s for basic, clear, education so customers can learn what to buy and how to buy it.

Personal computers were overwhelmingly successful in because they supported a wide variety of software and peripherals. PCs put digital control of words and data into the hands of end-users, routed around central IT bottlenecks, and a multi-billion dollar market was born.
Special-purpose word processing computers bit the dust. IBM’s monolithic model — where you bought the computer, storage, peripherals and software from the same vendor — lost market share. Microsoft played a huge role in making the PC explosion happen in the 80s and 90s.
Now, Microsoft is breaking this model that made it successful with its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Audio and video are the latest media to move from the exclusive control of central distribution into the hands of end-users. And Microsoft has written Vista to keep that control out of end-users’ hands.
This News.com story explains how Vista is designed to restrict audio and video capabilities:

For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer’s connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren’t in place.

The News.com article goes into more detail on how Vista reduces opportunites for software developers, hardware devices, and end-users.
This is a fine reason not to upgrade to Windows Vista when it comes out. A software upgrade ought to provide customers a better product, not a worse product.
This is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs building on Linux and web-based services. People who can package easy-to-use, open personal creativity systems have a vast market to gain that’s being left behind by Microsoft.

The superb What Geeks experience contrasts with the dismal customer service black hole which is Cingular Wireless.
My account has fallen victim to the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless. I sent Cingular a payment, but continued to get dunning phone calls. It turned out that while I had changed the address from Cingular to AT&T, I had failed to update my account number to the new Cingular account. They couldn’t find my payment. So I double-paid using my credit card to keep them from turning off the account.
The next step is to fax bank and bill-pay records of the transaction to their research department. The support person had a helpful demeanor, but was unable to confirm the fax number of the research department, or any way to check on the problem once the records had been faxed in. I’m scheduled to get a call back on Wednesday.
In the meantime, Cingular has a visible amount of my money earning interest somewhere. If one has bad memories of MCI billing “glitches” that turned out to be genuine, one might start to be suspicious at this point. There’s plenty of money to be made by double-billing people who have problems with the AT&T conversion. Hanlon’s Razoroffers some mild comfort to the paranoid: “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.”
p.s. Here’s Chris Shipley of Network World and the Demo conferences telling her story about getting stuck in the AT&T/Cingular transition.

I dreaded an endless cross-vendor finger-pointing maze when when the Microsoft documentation for securing a wireless network contradicted the Linksys documentation, and the Microsoft rep tried to send me to Fujitsu.
At that point, I gave up on the vendors and called Whatgeeks a rental help desk service that promised assistance at $.99 per minute. The Whatgeeks tech support person was superb. He helped me through configuring security for a network with several versions of Windows and different speeds of network cards. Then he helped with another network misconfiguration. The tech was polite, informative, knowledgeable and efficient. What great customer service. Highly recommended.

Google maps, Flickr, Ebay, and other web services with APIs are pulling the relevant platform away from the desktop and toward the web.
Still, the network effect of powerful, privately owned web APIs is potentially as dangerous as the network effect of Microsoft’s desktop APIs. On any given day, Google or Ebay have the right to change their APIs and make life difficult for their developers. They have the right to change the terms of service, and increase prices on services that their developers depend on completely.
The lockout effect could be even worse, because Google and EBay own the servers, and changes can take effect in real time. When Microsoft bakes DRM into every copy of Windows, users don’t need to upgrade their PC immediately. But if Google or Ebay changed terms of service, those dependent on the service would need to comply immediately.
Google and Amazon, and Ebay’s big servers are a big deal. A web service can start small. But once service becomes popular, it takes a good amount of capital to complete. Currently, competition between GOOHOO and AMABAY are keeping things lively. But oligopoly could lead to complacency and extractive economics, as in other industries.
The owner of a dominant API/service is in a very powerful position. Google has the ability to adhere to its corporate slogan, “do no evil.” That ethical stance does make a real difference. A powerful ruler can choose to be a benevolent dictator or a tyrant. But the temptation is there for power to corrupt.
I can imagine a way out of this oligopoly bind.
What if there was peer to peer for web service requests. Many small servers could run the popular service, and publish their availability. When a client issues a request, the request would be taken by an available server. This wouldn’t work for services that require a pre-existing content store (like maps?). But it would work for services that require large amounts of individual content (like calendars?).
Maybe the technology already exists somewhere, and is waiting for the killer app. Maybe I’m missing something — this is just musing outloud. What do you think?

Yowza! How long will it take for Google’s IM and voice chat to meet and surpass the usage of the whole sorry proprietary lot of AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. And how many minutes will it take to open their networks after Google’s announcement?
In a world where you can phone anybody and email anybody and fax anybody, the IM vendors created absurd islands.
Google’s service is based on the open Jabber protocol, unlike Yahoo, which fought and lost a guerrilla war last year against the third-party clients Gaim and Trillian, which patiently reverse engineered the repeated protocol changes that Yahoo used to fend off other clients.
By contrast, Google’s site proudly advertises other clients, including Adium, Gaim, iChat, Psi, and Trillian. The developer site invites developers to build more tools to help more people connect.
The vile AOL terms of service claims that AOL owns the content of its customers’ conversations: “”Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content.” AOL makes customers agree to those draconian terms, and then has the gall to claim that they don’t really mean it, it’s just boilerplate, the lawyers made us do it.
By contrast, Google’s lawyers know who’s the boss: ” Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not otherwise claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload or transmit from, or store using, your Google Talk account.”
I look forward to hearing from voice gurus about Google’s choices for security and voice — they’re starting off with XMPP, and adding support for SIP, and are federating with Earthlink and Sipphone service.
Summary — the anybody talks to anybody approach will destroy the island approach. Reed’s Law wins: the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
tip from Chip, who explains that the server supports TLS security to encrypt your words in transit.
p.s. critique from the folks at Techdirt that the Google IM client is missing some important features — it doesn’t save conversation history, and it doesn’t search. It’s hard to imagine that Google will forget search in future versions.
I still think that major provider + open network + developer community will beat the closed islands over time.

via Peterme, an Economist article argues that Yahoo’s business strategy is contradictory — they want to provide content, and to provide tools for user-generated content.
The Economist’s analysis misses two key points about networked business models.

• the Long Tail. Chris Anderson rightly argues that businesses providing “niche content” benefit from having popular content as a draw. A shopper might come for ColdPlay and find less popular artists through the recommendations. There’s no conflict, and a lot of benefit, to having a broad spectrum of content from commercial hits through homegrown productions
• the Lead User. Services like search and blogging and mapping are streamlined for convenience-seeking, mainstream users. At the same time these services have APIs that allow “lead users” to craft more specialized applications that build on these basic services.

The Economist quotes John Battelle to make its point:

Yahoo!’s

Share this:

• Share

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Pocket
• Email

MIT professor Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation studies the role of user innovation in product development, and concludes that businesses should follow their lead users to find profitable new products.
The book cites research showing that a surprisingly large number of users