Kerabu

When the Long Tail Wags the Dog

VisiCalc founder Dan Bricklin has just published a long, splendid essay on this topic. It's one of those explaining-the-meaning-of-life bits of thinking that anyone who is in the process of developing or selling a product should read. In it, Bricklin takes the Long Tail concept a step further, explaining that what makes a product a compelling purchase is often one relatively esoteric "long tail" feature the buyer can't do without, and that they're willing to pay for. This is why broadly customizable, generic products often do better than highly specific, purpose-built products. And by extension, why product designers should aim for broadly adaptable functionality rather than trying to anticipate users' needs. He gives an example here:

You have a cell phone that can receive video and display video. Should it be tuned for the top 100 video feeds and make it hard or impossible to see the birthday videos of your grandkids or grandparents? Or should it let anybody inexpensively share content composed using any of the popular tools available? I maintain that given a choice, the latter products will win. There will be some content you need (for example, created by a loved one or on the topic of a hobby you are most passionate about) that would only be available on the general purpose system, and you know it (or will find out quickly when you find out it's available). It may be that the niche content is the reason you buy the product in the first place.

The phone that plays only some kinds of video is like a phone that only lets you call certain phone numbers. And designers and marketers get excited about highly specific applications they think are "cool"--but imagine a world wherein everyone had a cell phone, but were only able to use them for ordering pizza. No personal calls, no 911, no voicemail--I think that's exactly the kind of malformed product we're often given by companies--the world is full of pizza phones.

I look at new Web 2.0 products almost daily, and find that most of them frustrate me because they lack that customizable, generic quality. Yesterday I checked out a number of Ajax desktops, for example, and found that these products that claimed to be customizable were in fact quite limited--as in the above example. I have three gmail accounts to check, and I want all three on my desktop. None of the programs let me put more than one account on the desktop, or they did but I couldn't rename them anything but "gmail"  in order to be able to tell one from the other.

That limitation alone made me lose interest in the products. But if that hadn't done it, the fact that I couldn't choose what calendar app I wanted to use would have. (A "desktop" in the bricks-and-mortar world is literally a blank slate. I can choose to load it up with any books, blotters, pens, calendars, from anywhere in the world. The variety of choice is infinite. Why can't my virtual desktop options be infinite, too? For that matter, why can't I also scribble on it? One thing I find infinitely frustrating in the virtual world is the persistent inability to scribble or doodle. I have a mouse, why can't I write on my desktop with it? Why? Why?)

On the positive side, here's another example of how my own "long tail" needs, as per Bricklin, led me to make a product purchase, at enormous cost: A few months ago, I switched from a PC to a Mac because I was working on a project that required me to conduct extensive searches in a huge list of RSS feeds; Safari let me do that kind of search exactly the way I wanted to do it. Switching saved me time, even with the learning curve and expense of replacing a nearly-new PC with a Mac. I imagine that I was using Safari in a way that very few others ever would--or that perhaps no one else but me would. But the flexibility of the program forgave me my eccentricity, and that was priceless.

Yet another example comes to mind: I bought my Panasonic digital camera for the anti-shake feature, which was designed with zoom shots in mind, but I like the feature because it lets me shoot in low light without a flash. I have never even opened the camera's manual, and know nothing about its other features, but I was willing to pay more to get the one feature I wanted.

Ebay is another obvious example of a product that is generic enough to have many tails: though Pierre Omidyar built it so that his wife could trade Pez dispensers, he didn't build in limitations ("Sorry, only Pez dispensers here, take your electronics and move along"). There's a paradox of creativity at work here, which is that it takes discipline and restraint for imaginative, creative types to refrain from wanting to imagine it all for you. How many potentially great products are killed by their creators' very overenthusiasm, I wonder? Or, put differently, how many pizza phones have fallen by the wayside because their inventors (and marketers) couldn't see past their own fetishistic visions?

The marketing lesson here is that instead of trying to second-guess your customers' needs and meet them, try to think in terms of giving them tools with which they can meet their own needs. It's a bit like teaching a man to fish, rather than giving him a fish on a bicycle.

I'm going to cross-post this item on the Engagement Alliance website, where I'm an adivsory board member. More on that new venture later.... This is also the first post I'm writing using the beta version of the posting tool from Qumana, whose slogan is: "No restrictions, no rules: where, when and as often as you like." Sounds like my kind of product.

Tags: long tail, bricklin, marketing, engagement alliance.

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Open Source Women in Africa

Via WorldChanging (which is having a fund drive, btw), I came across the Africa Linux Chix site, which is so hot and so cool it's almost ridiculous. Here's the bulk of the post I commented on, and the bulk of my comments, after: 

It is probably a good thing that FOSS strategies and tactics are being used in Africa to move things in whatever direction they're gonna go in -- without the additional (colonial?) burden of rights-bound software.

But in the face of limited resources on the planet and even fewer resouces in the majority of African countries, will computing be to Africa be as "important" as it is in the North? Will it take the same shape as we in the US expect? Flash-animated websites, adservers, news feeds for one class of user, proprietary networks for another class of user, etc.

Are woman-centered FOSS efforts going to work differently than capitalist and anti-capitalist (male) ones?

It seems to me that successful computing in Africa is going to have to follow a low-power, distributed model. Everyone who has computing capacity is going to have to share it with everyone else... like the SETI project, in a future Africa, idle cycles from all manner of computing devices (cell phones, PDAs, desktop machines, workstations) are going to have to support the information infratstructure of a future Africa.

Or will Africans simply centralize their computing power in resource-intensive, air conditioned, highly-secured physical locations?

If Cheik Diop was right about Meridional Civilization vs. Northern Civilization, then in the same way that the regular flood of the Nile "programmed" humans to work collectively (ultimately making examples of both monumental architecture and long-term peace possible), Digital Africans would benefit from seeking similar approaches to computing resources. For Diop, what was learned in Egypt thousands of years ago still operates in contemporary Black African cultures. At the time he probably would have classified computing power as a natural resource or a scientific field... this is long before it became a lifestyle. To me, FOSS strategies & tactics, in relation to Africa, could work much more like music.

And my reply (to more in the post than this)...

Computing is indeed a natural resource--we talk of "data mining" but what computing really accomplishes is mind mining--in evolutionary terms, it's the way we can make our brilliance as valuable as once was our physical labor. No place is better situated to make that leap, I think, than Africa (I write this from Southern California).

One point I'd make is that Open Source isn't anti-profit, it's merely anti-capital--in an open source environment, you don't have to amass before you can produce. You can have an idea, write it, and take it to market. There are still barriers, to be sure, but they're fewer than ever, historically. An African woman has as much access as a white man in Palo Alto--other than being outside of the insidery tech community. What she has to weigh against that is a lack of preconceived notions and blissful ignorance of the accepted wisdom in her community--both of which are key ingredients in innovation. I'd urge you to take a "capitalist" approach in terms of monetizing your efforts--make products, start companies, sell stuff, think entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurialism is the noble cousin of capitalism.

The next Steve Jobs may well be an African woman--or women. I think it's very, very likely that this will happen eventually, and that the greatness of a continent will come about as a result of the innovativeness of a true outsider tech culture much like the underground culture that drove Silicon Valley in its heyday.

As for the idea that strategies and tactics could work more like music: that's the most beautiful and powerful idea I've heard in a long, long time, for so many reasons. Music is both deeply structured and intuitive, and that's what computing is--and the business structure that houses it must be exactly that in order to thrive.

It's the Rule of Law, Stupid

There's an excellent post on Rule of Law in India and its Economic Implications by Naveen Mandava at The Indian Economy Blog, which explains succinctly why a responsive and responsible judicial system is essential to a healthy economy.  Mandava cites two studies that show that the strength of the judiciary system in various states and territories in India correlates strongly with the regions' economic robustness. He then cites an alarming statistic: the Indian government itself is a party to 60% of all civil suits. In other words, the goverment can't get out of its own way. India's economy is booming. Imagine how strong it would be if the country aggressively pursued judicial reform?

This adds a dimension to something I've been writing and thinking about for a while now: that the rule of law, not democracy, is the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of an entrepreneurial economy. Democracy follows on both of those.

This means that judicial corruption and inefficiency is far more damaging to emerging economies than corruption in other branches of government.

It also means, dare I say it, that most of our foreign-policy activism that is aimed overtly at promoting "democratic" reform is wasted effort, in the absence of a foundation of judicial and economic reform.  One need only look at the absurdist "democratic" rise of Hamas to see that democracy can't really function properly in a corrupt legal and economic system.

Capital 2.0

Dave Winer has a thought-provoking post up outlining his "plan to reshape the VC industry around the philosophy of the web."

He has two main points, one being that it's now entirely possible to start a venture without capital. The second point is to cut out the middleman:

We don’t need the partners, limited or general, they gum up the works. We need money to start new ventures. Luckily we know the people with the money, they’re the users. And we need people to validate the ideas. Same people, the users.

Winer points to the successful evolution of online investing as a model for this kind of transition, and I think he's spot on. Kerabu's business plan is a model for just that type of direct transaction. And I'm encouraged to see simultaneous thinking along the same lines beginning to crop up. A year ago, when I started working on the project, it was inconceivable. Now it's gestating in the ether.

Vitamin "I"

Boris Veldhuijzen at Fleck tells an amusing story about helping the startup he recently sold produce a brochure. The "corporate" estimate on photography alone for the piece: 10 weeks and $35-$5K euros. Boris, entrepreneurial soul that he is, snorted, called a couple of friends, and got them the photos in a few days for $2500 (of which he pocketed $1000). He goes on to explain why this particular transaction illustrates the core reason big companies buy small companies:

While we were negotiating the price for our company they told us 'This is a buy or build question for us. You do understand we have over 18.000 people working here so we could copy your concept within a day'. That sounded very real to us at that moment. In reality however a big company can't do anything in 24 hours. It will take a week just to get a meeting with the first person of the 100 people you need to reach and convince if you want to do anything. And then there are budgets, targets and other projects that take up all resources or seem to be more important to the CEO or your manager.

Boris concludes that when companies like Yahoo! buy companies like Flickr, they aren't buying a product, they're buying Entrepreneurial Spirit.

I love that Boris couldn't not jump in and solve the incredibly annoying photo problem, even though he needn't have. Innovators are constitutionally unable to withstand bureaucratic nonsense--just as bureaucrats are unable to tolerate innovation. Which is why we're evolving an economy whereby big companies need a steady "diet" of small companies in order to continue to thrive (innovation being an essential vitamin, so to speak). Is it an ideal system? Not by a mile. But it's better than one that only allows those few mutants who have both genes to survive.

Why Bayosphere didn't work

There has been a whole lot of analysis of Bayosphere's failure-to-launch (in the sense of growing up and becoming an "adult" company), stemming from founder Dan Gillmor's open letter on the closure. If new media isn't your industry, Gillmor is a former star of the influential San Jose Mercury News who left to create an innovative forum for online "citizen journalism," called Bayosphere.

I look at Bayosphere and the reasons for its failure seem perfectly clear to me. There are three of them. One was described in a comment on Gillmor's post:

The role of the editor should be emphasized here. Without editorial direction, guidance and oversight, it is hard to deliver a quality publication. Even high school yearbooks have editors, and online publications are no different. There are various editorial styles and orientations, but they all share common journalistic ethics which define and shape the publication. Without this editorial leadership, whether it is in the form of an editor-in-chief or an editorial staff, the publication in question may never see its second issue.

There are problems inherent in aggregating ideas. Ideas are different from data, and what works for selling lampshades (eBay) or person-to-person transactions (Craigslist) doesn't necessarily work for content. Whenever I land on the homepage of a new content-delivery site like John Palfrey's Top 10 Sources or Mike Rundle's 9rules, with their harvested, denatured headlines, I feel a sense of alienation. When I visit a great single-purpose blog like TechCrunch, or content site with a strong and cleanly articulated editorial vision like Cato Unbound, I am instantly drawn in and engaged.

Which brings me to the second thing Gillmor did wrong, in my book. He failed to go with the grain of the web. In trying to invent a stand-alone format for fostering "Citizen Journalism" he didn't see what was right in front of him--that Citizen Journalists already had the tools they needed, in the form of blogs and blogging software, and didn't need his proprietary site and clumsy content management system. Had Gillmor focussed on giving the bloggers something they needed, he might have made a go of it.

Instead, Gillmor tried to invent a one-step-back model based on an out-moded, custom-built content management system. I have had some experience with content management interfaces, and they universally suck. What works to help a corporation plug in repetitively formatted content isn't really good for fostering human discourse. What Gillmor did was to bring the worst of the newspaper world--dictatorial formatting and heirarchy--into a field of endeavor (blogging) that had already declared itself happily entrepreneurial and chaotic.

But wait, there's more!

The third thing that Bayosphere got wrong is that it lacked an innovative or elegant visual concept. The site is ugly. It offers the eye no point of entry. So many sites get this wrong. The problem reminds me of a parking lot I recently had the misfortune of visiting quite frequently in El Segundo, CA. This multi-level structure had three entrances and several levels, and was divided up into "sections" and no-man's-land cul-de-sacs with chains, cones, concrete pillars and aggressive yet vague arrows. Every time I tried to find my car I ended up having to hit the "panic" button on my key fob and follow the shrieking alarm to the source. That's a fair description of what it's like to visit most content-delivery sites today, including Bayosphere. If I'd been Gillmor, I'd have hired a game designer, rather than a CMS company to design my site.

Where, I ask, are the web designers with the chops to focus on structure and elegance of function, rather than pulling out some file folder-based template and slapping crappy flash animation all over the place like so much tinsel on a Christmas Tree (I'll give Gillmor that much, at least there's no Flash on Bayosphere)? In gaming, of course. When will the artifical barrier between gaming and the internet come down, I wonder?

You say China, I say Rutabaga

Now that Google has agreed to block certain Chinese search terms like "e**ality" and "de***racy." The solution, it seems to me, is to take an entrepreneurial approach to helping the Chinese find work-arounds that will give them access to the information they seek.

So here's what I propose: let's look at the list of these forbidden keywords (here) and devise clever euphemisms for them, followed by descriptive definitions that make clear what the new terms denote--the list can be passed around like a chain letter. If enough bloggers posted the list, it will be impossible for google to block every site, and our Chinese brothers and sisters could simply google the new word for China--rutabaga--and find the list (along with the odd root vegetable appreciation blog, but hey, it's the most obscure-yet-ordinary, hide-it-in-plain-sight word I could come up with on short notice). 

Using the ordinary yet specific words would give them a language in which to talk about what they want and need to talk about. Seems the least we can do to help.

I'll do the first five "forbidden" search terms (some are words, others word combos). Anyone who wants to carry on down the list, take it and run with it:

"Turnip" - def.: a small, landlocked, mountainous country in East Asia where they eat a lot of potstickers and ring a lot of bells.

"Cabbage + Rutabaga" - def.: a small, isolated and highly prosperous Asian subdivision, often preceded by the words "made in" + the biggest little country in Asia.

"Jalapeno" - def: the concept of things or people being on a par with each other.

"Crabapple + Rutabaga" - def.: the theory and practice of picking a body of windbags and a chief windbag by polling all of the people who bother to show up on the designated day + the biggest little country in Asia.

"Gooseberry + Rutabaga" - def: a disgruntled person who speaks their mind + the biggest little country in Asia.

I'm going to pass this off to my good friend Jackie, who will hopefully introduce her own non-vegetative verbiage for the next couple of terms.

Fleck!

I haven't been blogging much (a job and a book have gotten in the way), but I have been reading lots of blogs lately, including a lot of startup blogs. One that I find particularly endearing is the Fleck.com blog., which I stumbled on via TechCrunch, which is my current favorite.  I have no idea what Fleck do, or plan to do, just that they have a sense of humor. I learned a long time ago that when it comes to work, it isn't what you do so much as how you feel about doing it.  I have a feeling that whatever these guys come up with will be genius, as giddy as they are around their own startup process. This morning, it was the Fleck Hand Signal, and this afternoon, it's an offer to include anyone who posts the Fleck badge on their blog in their beta test (count me in--see sidebar).

Read their blog posts and you can feel sparks of glee flying from their fingertips, the excess energy that comes off of people who are working in some kind of theta state of creativity. Supports my theory that we really do need to merge the best of our professional and personal technologies--that love should be a lot more like work, and work a lot more like love. Both being human constructs that (I hope) are still early on the evolutionary curve. But by God, I just hope doesn't turn out to be an online dating service because that's not what I mean.

Why hobbies make bad businesses

I just got back from spending a week with friends who live on Ruxton Island in British Columbia.  It's beautiful and remote, inhabited by eccentric folk who don't mind having to dinghy to and from Vancouver Island for groceries and fuel, or shovel snow to the outhouse in winter.  Things I personally wouldn't mind myself in exchange for living in such a beautiful setting (check out my friends' wood-fired bathtub-with-a-view). 

While there I met a gentleman who was in the process of starting up a boat-chartering business. He owned a classic wooden sailboat, and wanted to offer tourists four-hour sails around the Gulf Islands for $200 a trip.  He was mostly concerned with finding a dock at which to board passengers.   But listening to him, I couldn't help thinking, "I know this business is going to fail."  Why?  Because it's a business with no repeat customers.  How much marketing would it take for him to get each passenger?  Boat charter businesses are notoriously disastrous for that very reason.  Even the fishing charter boats associated with a full-time sport-fishing organization have a hard time making ends meet.

Often when discussing grassroots entrepreneurialism, people romanticize the idea of "following your bliss," i.e., creating a business out of what you love.  I think that is a very dangerous proposition more often than not.  Just because you love sailing or skateboarding doesn't mean you can or should turn it into a business.  On the contrary, you will probably be able to buy yourself a nice boat and retire early to enjoy it if instead you look around for an actual business opportunity--i.e., an unmet need out there in the world, and create a business to meet it.  Occasionally, businesses can be made out of hobbies--my brother is starting a coffee roasting business, and he's been roasting coffee in his garage "for fun" for years.  But you have to admit that roasting coffee is a particularly industrial hobby in the first place.

Part of the problem with romanticizing "fun" business ideas is that by default it implies that other more practical business ideas just aren't as fun.  I disagree.  Personally, I enjoy nothing so much as problem solving, and can do it in almost any context, with any subject or raw material.  Success is also fun--in fact, I recommend it both as a hobby and as a career.

Ristretto Roasters

In a dazzling moment of reciprocal guinea-pigism, I got to taste the first-ever latte made on the premises of my brother Din Johnson's new coffee roasting business, Ristretto Roasters, while he in turn will be the first "Kerabu business" to actually open its doors.  If you have seen the Kerabu demo, Ristretto's business plan is the one detailed as an example (see below).  Din and I wrote the plan in a single weekend.  He then used it to approach "friends and family" for investment, and now he's about to start selling what I can quite objectively say is the best "hand crafted coffee" in Portland, OR.  I wouldn't call any of this nepotism--maybe a nepotocracy, which I can only construe as a good thing.

Over the next couple of months, I hope to be orchestrating some small, intensive "Keraboot Camps" to workshop the process of writing a business plan.  Can it be done in a single day?  For many basic businesses, I think so.