Results tagged “business” from KPAO

These charts from businessinsider.com are a fantastic visualization of what really drives the business at these computer industry giants. As an ex-Microsoft employee, I think this one is particularly telling:

I have boxes of old business cards at home. I've probably given away less than 10% of the cards that were printed for me over the years. I even designed the cards for our team at my last job. As we approach Oracle Open World, the big conference where I'll get a chance to meet a bunch of customers, I was thinking about ordering some. Then I thought better of it.

It turns out my iPhone is better than a business card. If I want to exchange an email addresses with someone, I'll open a new mail message on my phone, hand it to the person, and tell them "type in your email address". Then I whip off a quick message ("Great to meet you at Oracle Open World this year!") and immediately send it. Or same thing with a phone number. "Here, dial your phone number," I'll say. "Hand it back when it rings." If they have their cell phone on them, I'll hang up. They now have my number in their history. If it rings through to voicemail, I'll leave a message including my name and phone number. Done.

Is there any reason in this day and age of mobile computing to still have business cards?

A few days ago I wrote about Gazelle, the service that buys your used gadgets from you, and thus avoiding the hassle of Craigslist. I have a gently used Nokia 6120 classic mobile phone that I'm not using anymore, so I decided to give Gazelle a shot.

With David promoting rampant consumerism over at Rated Best, (kidding! well, sort of...), I thought I'd link to an interesting new service that aims to take the pain out of selling or recycling your older gadgets. Gazelle recently launched, and they have an easy to use interface to get a quick quote, and then sell to them your used gear.

I have replaced my Nokia 6120 Classic with a first-generation iPhone -- so I'll give the system a test and report back. At the moment, they say they will pay me about $100 for my old phone -- not a horrible deal at all. Leave a comment if you have used their service -- I'm interested in how it worked.

I'm traveling in Europe right now, and I wanted a local cell phone number to make the long trip a bit easier. After a bit of searching around, I bought a UK T-Mobile pay-as-you-go SIM card, and popped it into my unlocked GSM phone. It's amazingly easy to "top up" the balance on the card -- just drop into almost any local convenience store or phone store, and give them your phone number and some money.

Buying another SIM with another number for France turns out to be not worth it, so I decided to just pay a bit extra per call and stick with the UK number. Trouble struck when it was time to "top up" again while staying in France -- no local T-Mobile shops or top-up locations here. My plan was to use the web-site to add funds to the SIM -- but T-Mobile UK does not accept a US Visa card -- only American Express (so much for the Visa commercials...).

Not expecting much, I called T-Mobile UK customer service from another phone to ask for help. I like the US T-Mobile service because of their flexibility, but I still was not expecting a good outcome. Not only did T-Mobile UK pick up on the second ring with a real human, but they spotted me 10 GB pounds so long as I promised to add that to my account when I get back to the US! Amazing -- they gave me, a person with whom they have nothing more than a $40 pre-existing relationship, a $20 advance on a "promise."

I promised to not only add that money on to the account when I get back to the UK, but also to write this post. Done. That is how customer service is supposed to work -- not as a cost center to be  whittled to the bone, but as an opportunity to cement or enhance a customer relationship. T-Mobile will continue to get my business because of it -- both in the UK and in the US.

Having nine months of time away from Yahoo has given me a bit of perspective. Things really gelled for me as I was listening to Jeff Housenbold (CEO of Shutterfly) on the Stanford Entrepreneurial podcast. In his Tips for Career Success, #3 is "Go where the money is made in the company."

Yahoo makes its money from advertising. To make money in advertising on the web, you need to have "inventory" (popular web sites that a lot of people visit). But you also need a way to sell those ads. You need tools like campaign management, analytics, budgeting, reporting, A/B testing, and a whole host of others that are compelling, easy-to-use, and generally encourage advertisers to spend as much money as possible. In short, you need to meet the needs of advertisers, who in turn will give you money.

And as far as I knew in my three years at Yahoo, we weren't doing that. I worked on the inventory side of things in the groups that built Mail, Messenger, Photos, Groups and 360. The primary exposure we had to ad sales was the requirement to include space in your design for IAB standard ad units.

The people I worked with on these inventory products were some of the best and brightest out there. Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, Delicious, Front Page and (if I do say so myself) Messenger are truly best-in-class services. Why couldn't the same be said for our ad sales tools? Why didn't Yahoo spend equal time promoting the ad sales side of things internally? Why wasn't I or more importantly my superstar peers actively recruited to go work on the ad sales tools, the very products that most directly generated money for the company? Inventory is important, but from where I sit now, generating ad sales is even more important. If you have the sales, you can easily create or find the inventory on the web.

A colleague of mine in research wanted to become a product designer. My advice to him was to go over to the ad sales group where there was a ton of low-hanging fruit and a ton of opportunity to tangibly improve Yahoo's financials. I only now realize how bad that sounds. Why would Yahoo treat such an essential piece of the business a second-class citizen? Why should that be the entry point for a rookie designer? Why isn't that where the rock star designers go after paying their dues on the "lowly" inventory products?

A friend of mine who was a PM at Yahoo shared his story of going down to LA to visit the Search Ad Marketing team. He was shocked. He said it was huge; at least as big as the main HQ; maybe bigger. It's the biggest secret Yahoo is keeping from its own employees.

This in contrast to Google. When I interviewed there in late 2004, they made it quite clear there were two main groups: end-user web sites, and advertiser (plus internal) tools. The groups were equally well respected. Both groups got similar exposure in internal communications. Employees moved between the two regularly.

Brad Garlinghouse got it partially right with his peanut butter manifesto. But it's not just redundant inefficiencies that are hobbling Yahoo; it's also inequalities in their product lines. Yahoo needs to make ad sales tools a high-profile, career-accelerating -- and yes even sexy --job where the best and the brightest vie for limited positions on great teams, and the ones who succeed are known and revered by all throughout the company. I hope the new organization is geared up to fix this, but from what I've seen in the press, it unfortunately doesn't look like it.

If you're a Yahoo employee, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Five years ago, Wired reported on the state of the art in the diamond fabrication business. Now the Smithsonian is running an updated version of the story in the June 2008 edition of their magazine (and here on the web).

What I love most about this story is that these diamond manufacturing businesses are finally taking the artificially-inflated value out of the industry. This quote from the article is most telling:

When Linares [CEO of artificial diamond company Apollo Diamond] was at a diamond conference a few years ago, he says, a man he declines to describe slipped behind him as he was walking out of a hotel meeting room and said someone from a natural diamond company just might put a bullet in his head.

Wow, there is some big business at play here, no doubt.

But right now diamonds are mostly a luxury item. Sure, the occasional bit of diamond dust is used for cutting tools and other industrial means, but the artificial value created by the luxury industry puts it out of the reach of many applications. Not only will artificial diamonds open up these applications for the first time, it will also help put an end to African violence.

Blood diamonds won't fund military efforts anymore once the bottom drops out on the diamond market, and that's a good thing. I only wish scientists would work on a way to artificially create rhino horn, elephant tusk, and yes even tiger penis. Flood the market with artificial clones indistinguishable from the original, and it eliminates the biggest reason to kill these endangered animals.

As a great paper on project management noted, the biggest factor in determining the success or failure of a project is a shared, crisp vision (or lack thereof). In the same vein, there's a great quote in the book Good to Great that talks about how said vision should be framed:

If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you'd be struck by the utter absence of talk about "competitive strategy." Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.

I just spent way too much time playing around on the Brand Tags site. I'm sure this data is massively skewed in some statistically significant way, but it's fun to qualitatively see what random internet surfers think of various brands. I suggest viewing results in "orderly view" so you can see the tags in order of importance. Some of the most interesting ones to me:

• Sharper Image bankrupt, expensive, gadgets, overpriced, crap, junk...
• AT&T phone, iPhone(!), monopoly, global, death star, evil...
• Fox News biased, conservative, news, lies, republican, liars, tv, bias, right wing, crap, propaganda...
• TicketMaster ripoff, tickets, expensive, concerts, fees, monopoly, evil overpriced, scam...
• Nike swoosh, just do it, shoes, sports, sweatshop, child labor...
• McDonalds fat, fries...
• Wii fun...

and of course the big tech companies:

• Apple mac, cool, iPod, design, computer, awesome, innovative...
• Microsoft windows, evil, monopoly, computer, bill gates, software, crap, shit, pc, sucks...
  
• Google search, internet, awesome, god, evil, useful, smart, everything, find, cool... 
• Yahoo! search, internet, email, google, old, mail, microsoft, fun, search engine...
  
• AOL internet, old, crap, online, dead, slow, outdated, sucks, lame, shit, obsolete...
  

You can browse through the brands here, or play the "name that brand" game. Fun.

Or even what it should be today. Michael Arrington's article in TechCrunch sums it up well:

[Yahoo's CEO Jerry] Yang was not prepared for perhaps the one question that every CEO should be ready to answer at all times: "What is the business of Yahoo?" He was all over the place. He said their core focus included "home page, mail, search, and mobile." He also said "We can't be all things to all people. We have become much more focused," before taking about other areas of focus at Yahoo, including advertising, social networking and their new open strategy.

[President Sue] Decker stepped in and tried to distill their core message, repeating "we focus on homepage, search, mail and mobile" but then went on to talk extensively about advertising, including a new display advertising product that the company will launch in Q3 this year.

And another thing. Jerry claims that he "bleeds purple", but I challenge you to show me where on the web Yahoo! is actually branded purple. It turns out only on the investor relations site and sort of on the corporate blog, and those aren't even a part of the yahoo.com domain!

It's sad but true. There are a lot of smart, passionate people at Yahoo!, but there is definitely a dearth of focus and leadership at the higher levels. And as Yoda would say, "that is why you fail."

In a recent techdirt blog entry, Mike Masnick comments on Zappos legendary customer service. This story is making the rounds today because of a recent Harvard Business article detailing their unusual practice of paying new customer service employees $1000 to quit, which on first pass seems a tiny bit weird. It works out that only 10% of the new recruits take them up on the offer. The other 90% apparently have decided that they like the job, company, future prospects, etc. At Zappos, customer service is not viewed as a necessary evil cost center, to be squeezed for every last dime of savings. Instead it seems that the agents are viewed as customer retention and loyalty specialists. This jives well with the common belief that it's much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to get repeat sales from existing ones.

Similarly, Subaru has decided that garbage is an asset. (Well almost). Its plant in Indiana recycles 99.8 percent of all waste. The other 0.2 percent either gets burned to make energy, or is medical or toxic waste that must be disposed of in specific ways by law.

And then there is the "no haggle" or "value" pricing of some car brands, led by GM's Saturn. What do all three of these examples have in common? They all are cases of companies turning a necessary evil of doing business into a competitive advantage. This may not be possible in all cases, but asking "how can this expense be used to make the company stronger?" seems like a valuable question to ask from time to time.