I am going to be a lazy blogger today and cross-post a forum discussion topic that I posted in the Competitive Intelligence community on Ning that explores the concept of Apple’s strategic secrecy. My hypothesis is that Apple and other companies earn the privilege to be strategically secret (note: not completely opaque) by delivering customer value and excellent products or services. Some executives may begin to look at Apple’s secrecy and conclude post hoc ergo proctor hoc that strategic secrecy alone will bring them success. On the contrary, I argue, secrecy without excellence is a sign of either corporate egotism or incompetence.
Feel free to comment here or head over to the Ning discussion to share your thoughts.
I always look forward to Ken Sawka and company’s “Looking Out” newsletter in my e-mail in-box. The articles are usually very challenging and expand my own understanding of the relevance of curren business and political happenings to competitive intelligence. In this morning’s newsletter Ken poses a question about one of my favorite companies, Apple. Speaking of Apple’s track record for secrecy when the cultural trend is pulling in the direction of openness and transparency: Is Apple’s obsession with secrecy good business?
This article resonates with me because very recently I finished reading the Jeff Jarvis book What Would Google Do. This book touches on themes of openness and transparency and lays out a set of rules for how to be Googley and succeed in our modern business environment that favors “ecosystems” and “platforms” over stand-alone companies. A great video summary of the book is at readitfor.me.
In WWGD Jarvis puts Apple forward as the unGoogle and asks how it is Apple can break all of the rules of being a modern technology company and still be as successful as they are. It is clear that Apple are playing a clever game of chess about when to be transparent and when to be completely opaque. A few examples of Apple’s openness: adoption of the USB port for peripheral connectivity, support for the MP3 file format on the iPod (Sony chose to support only proprietary music formats and effectively ceded the portable music market they had owned for nearly two decades) and what I consider to be deliberate “mistakes” in updating the code of Apple web pages to pique interest in pending product releases.
Jarvis makes the case that Apple get away with this because their products and services are truly excellent. Early this week Jarvis posted an entry to his blog that named The Economist as the Apple of the news media industry. The Economist is able to break almost all of the rules of modern news business (charging for on-line content, no writer bylines) and is much better positioned than most other news media properties to innovate into the new age that is clearly upon us. Apple and The Economist can be rule breakers because, Jarvis posits, the products they deliver are so clearly excellent and in-line with what customers really want.
Part of the key to effective strategic secrecy and overall success in the marketplace is excellence in the eyes of your customers. While this seems self-evident, how many companies and governments have we seen that don’t deliver quality products or services yet remain opaque? How do we regard their secrecy? I tend to regard it as a sign of poor processes and a clear misunderstanding or disregard for the needs of their customers or constituents, indications of either laziness or self-interest.
Many executives, I am afraid, will take the wrong lesson away from Apple’s strategic secrecy and put the cart before the horse. “Now we’re going to be cagey about our widgets and then the cash will just come rolling in!” The freedom to be opaque must be earned.
As always, I am interested in the thoughts of the community here assembled. How do you perceive strategic secrecy and excellence as competitive differentiators? What criteria do you believe (if any) are required before a company gets to break the rules in its industry? What are other companies that are delivering excellence or applying strategic secrecy? Can you have the latter without the former?
John Hodgman is one of my favorite nerd comedians. I really enjoyed his exploration of the nerd aesthetic (uncertain, questioning) versus jock aesthetic (certainty, confidence) and ribbing of Barack Obama to determine whether or not he is truly the first nerd president of the modern age. Hodgman reminds us that some have even gone so far as to suggest that Obama is the Kwisatz Haderach.
In an effort to establish professionalism, I do try to not pimp my employer’s products or services. I’m an unabashed user of a product on a competitor’s network (iPhone) and try to make it clear that the content here represents my own opinions and not those of my employer. So I hope that you will maintain a level of respect for me and give me some objectivity points when I say that I have a new love: my Verizon Wireless MiFi. It’s a pocket-sized wifi hotspot for up to 5 devices that connects to the Verizon Wireless EV-DO 3G wireless broadband network. The device is manufactured by Novatel Wireless and is also sold by Sprint.
My Verizon Wireless MiFi, next to standard business card for size comparison.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time you have no doubt concluded that I am a gadget hound and tech nerd. Would it surprise you to learn that when I travel for business I usually travel with two laptops? It’s a sickness, I know. I’m a firm believer in keeping my work work on my work PC (an HP) and my personal material and projects on my MacBook Pro. In most hotels this has resulted in a life-or-death decision of which computer will be registered for the (usually expensive and slow) hotel broadband connection. In a few instances in the past I was able to use my Apple Airport Express to connect multiple devices to the hotel broadband. In those instances the connection is generally very slow, and often I find myself unable to use my VPN to connect to my work e-mail and other intranet resources. Bummer.
Even when I bite the bullet and decide that my work PC will be the sole digital link to the outside world performance is inconsistent. In my years of travel I have found it amazing how many times my VPN did not work. It still also amazes me how many hotels still treat broadband as an optional amenity. It’s not– a hotel room might as well not have electricity or running water. The net is central to how I and many others live our lives today and in non-negotiable if I am going to remain a productive employee while on the road. It also still amazed me the rates hotels charge for Internet connectivity: $12.95/day seems to be the standard. You don’t learn the work VPN won’t function until after you’ve connected the work laptop and tried to connect. Want to cut bait and just use the personal machine? That’s another $12.50, please. Don’t even THINK of connecting your iPhone or other wifi-enabled smart phone (you can generally fall back on your usable if somewhat slow 3G connection there). Coffee shops and other hotspots also have spotty, inconsistent support for VPN connectivity. A lot of productivity has been lost struggling to get a VPN connection only to give up and just resign myself to days of catching up on e-mail and other tasks when next I am at home or in the office. To put it mildly, connectivity when traveling sucks.
I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Since I bought my MiFi I’ve had one day of meetings outside of the office and one business trip. On my day running around the Washington metro area I was able to use my down time to great productive effect The VPN works flawlessly every time. I can connect my PC, Macintosh and iPhone all to a blazing fast (in wireless terms) network with great coverage. On my recent business trip I did a speed check to find that I was getting 1097 Kbps down and 652 Kbps up. While it’s not as fast as my FiOS connection at home (I will limit myself to pimping one Verizon product in this post) it’s faster than most hotel broadband connections.
I’m not the only one who loves this devices and have made productive use of the MiFi. Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch and Bob Gourley of CTOVision has both sung the praises of their MiFis. Guy Kawasaki made a great post to the American Express OPEN for Small Business blog highlighting some valuable use cases for his Sprint MiFi, and some relevant to people who are not afflicted with my tech nerdery:
In your hotel room
Traveling with kids
MacBook Air, iPhone and iPod Touch owners
Smartphone users using VoIP such as Skype
Making a sales pitch when you need a reliable and fast Internet connection
Conference attendance (often wifi at a conference is either completely unavailable or an additional daily expense. Now you can even use the MiFi’’s support for multiple connections to make friends and influence people).
Speaking or presenting when you need an Internet connection (a requirement I can say with experience many venues are challenged to provide reliably)
Alternative to tethering your computer with a mobile phone
One challenge I have had with the MiFi is maintaining a charge on the device. On my recent business trip I learned that my MiFi as well as a few other devices that charge via USB do not like my Belkin travel surge suppressor. This is a handy three-outlet surge suppressor that also has two USB ports to charge devices without the need for additional power adapters. This I think is a problem more of the Belkin than the MiFi, because my iPhone also would not take a charge from this device. So the one cautionary advice I would offer is that travelers should take the MiFi’s power adapter on the road with them just to be safe. The MiFi can be charged via USB from your computer, and I found this to be somewhat idiosyncratic and felt that the MiFI didn’t get the full charge it does when plugged in directly to an outlet.
Overall this is a device I strongly recommend. The retail price is competitive with standard 3G adapters for laptops (that only support connectivity for that single device). You barely have to travel more than once a month to make the $60 monthly price (5 Gigabytes cap) more cost-effective than paying for daily connectivity at hotels, in airports or coffee shops. The MiFi has already paid for itself this month and kept me happier and more productive in the bargain.
Back in January 2007 I wrote a blog entry trying to explain the basics of network neutrality one more time. This was in response to a Forbes column by Peter Huber that claimed Content Delivery Networks such as those from Akami, were violations of network neutrality. On the contrary, I argued, CDNs were examples of well-designed solutions to deliver a great customer experience while also maintaining the basic tenants of network neutrality. At the time I speculated that the claim that CDNs violated network neutrality was an attempt to confuse the policy debate on the issue.
A recent Forbes article suggests that efforts to confuse the debate are continuing anew. The article March of the SkypeTube from the June 08 edition of Forbes leads me to wonder if there is not still a movement to confuse the debate around network neutrality (especially wireless network neutrality) with a specific bit of misinformation. From the article:
Creating stable economic value in these markets depends on creating stable service-content-bandwidth bundles. Amazon’s Kindle is a good example. The elegant tablet runs on bandwidth that Amazon purchases wholesale from Sprint; Amazon then embeds the cost in the price of the books, magazines and such that it sells and delivers. Everyone prospers–publishers of books and magazines, middlemen like Amazon, manufacturers of the hardware that handles the delivery at the customer’s end and secures copyrights at the same time, and customers, who seem to be delighted with the whole package. Maybe that’s why nobody has dared point out that the whole setup is a grave affront to “network neutrality”–Amazon’s bits get preferential carriage on Sprint’s bandwidth, until Google or Ebay strike their own deals.
I added the emphasis to the claim that Amazon receives preferential treatment for Kindle traffic that moves across Sprin’t network. I have looked and looked for evidence of an arrangement between Sprint and Amazon to give priority to Kindle data packets over other data packets. I have found no such mentions of data prioritization being an element of Amazon’s contract with Sprint for wireless connectivity for Kindle e-book readers. I do not believe that any such arrangement exists, I do acknowledge that details of the contract between Sprint and Amazon are by nature proprietary, and so it is conceivable that Mr. Huber has access to legitimate information that I do not. However, I am fairly certain that this is not the case. Such an arrangement would no doubt cost Amazon a premium, and the latency-tolerant nature of Kindle data does not mandate data prioritization.
Generally when there is a discussion of providing priority to specific types of traffic on an Internet backbone or wireless data network the application being discussed is a latency intolerant application or medium. Real-time media such as voice over Internet, video and high-transaction business applications are put forward as the examples of applications backbone providers would want to prioritize. End users will see a real difference in the experience or the performance of prioritized traffic: the applications will perform noticeably better in most cases where their packets are given higher priority and therefor greater effective throughput from point of original to point of destination.
The electronic books, publications and blog entries on the Kindle are not consumed in real time the same way an on-line video or Internet phone call is. In other words, giving the data priority over other data on Sprint’s wireless network would not make any difference to how the end user experience. The difference in performance would be a matter of seconds for a piece of information that the suer consumes over the course of hours, days or weeks. There is zero reason to give such latency-tolerant data priority.
The fact that electronic books are latency-tolerant, combined with the lack of any mention of priority treatment for Amazon’s data on Sprint’s wireless network, leads me to conclude that indeed no such arrangement exists. As the Obama administration, Congress and the still forming FCC re-examine the debate over network neutrality, I believe this is an attempt to subtly introduce additional confusion into that debate.
In preparation for my presentation on RSS at the SLA 2009 conference I created a set of screencasts of simple RSS workflows. These workflows are very simple and straightforward.
This is the most simple workflow for finding RSS feeds for standard sources such as on-line publications and blogs:
Next I demonstrate the simplicity of creating a custom RSS feed using search. In this case I want to ride the coattails of Twitter and demonstrate the potential for custom RSS feeds based on Twitter searches to give you near real-time tracking of company reputation or tracking of developing events.
One of the reasons I am such a big fan of Google Reader is the ease with which users can share the items that they find interesting (witness the ever-changing list of my latest shared items from Google Reader that graces the right side of this very blog). For the information professional this ease has real potential to facilitate team collaboration on research projects or create information products such as corporate news portals.
I’m not entirely thrilled with the video quality of the screencasts as they made their way from Quicktime files on my Mac to flash-based videos on YouTube. Your viewing experience will be improved if you expand the video to full screen.
A week from this coming Monday I will be reprising my presentation on how competitive intelligence professionals can best use RSS as a low-cost method to cast a wide research network. I’ve tried to update the material to discuss the potential of Twitter to track sentiment, issues and breaking events in near real-time.
I’ve also updated the material to highlight one of my favorite features of Google Reader: the ease with which users can share news items of interest, and how the RSS feed of a user’s shared items can simplify collaboration and publishing of relevant news items. Anybody who is tracking my shared Google Reader items will quickly see that I am a promiscuous sharer of items related to telecom, competitive intelligence, technology, politics, economics and other topics. Between this and Twitter this blog has really become more of an aggregation point for me (and I suppose my Facebook page functions in a similar way) than a site for which I write frequently (and never as frequently as I would like).
As much as I think Google Reader is a great tool and the best RSS aggregator around, there is one feature that is sorely missing. The SmartList feature in NetNewsWire (a Macintosh RSS reader) is a sophisticated way to filter all of the news items in your RSS aggregator based on the occurrence of key words that the user defines, including with some Boolean functionality.
Feel free to take a look at my slides and let me know what you think. I would actually appreciate feedback in the next few days that might help me deliver an even better presentation to the SLA audience.
This morning I came across a presentation in my RSS feed that describes the real threat represented by an alarming “social media” technology that threatens the modern corporation. We’re all familiar with the threats that Web 2.0 both inside and outside the corporation represent. I thought I was on top of things, but clearly I didn’t know the HALF of it. Look at this distributing presentation from Norman Lamont of Lloyds Banking Group and you will be as concerned as I am:
As a child growing up in the 1980s I remember the classic Dunkin Donuts commercials with Frank the Baker (”Time to make the doughnuts.”). This was one of those memorable commercials, and seems somewhat relevant to some popular misconceptions about what competitive intelligence is.
In recent months there has been some great material on predicting the moved of players and decision-makers. The McKinsey Quarterly ran a great article in January “How companies can understand competitors’ moves” that detailed the results of a recent survey of corporate strategists (subscription required). My comments on the article can be found at the Ning Competitive Intelligence social network here. In this month’s Harvard Business Review there is an article Predicting Your Competitor’s Reaction by Kevin Koyne and John Horn (two co-authors also of the previously mentioned McKinsey Quarterly article). This attention to predicting competitor moves and reactions for strategic insights is heartening to this competitive intelligence professional. Another great example of a framework for predicting courses of action through a relatively simply mathematical analysis of the decision markers’ attributes. This framework is described by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of New York University and the Hoover Institution. He applies his framework to the potential for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.
While he doesn’t reference the specific study, Bueno de Mesquita claims that a CIA study has shown his prediction model to be 90% accurate even when the experts that provided the data inputs into the model got it wrong. This claim took me several attempts to properly parse– it’s not to say that the data input into the model can be wrong and still return the proper results, because the law of universal conservation of garbage in/garbage out must be maintained. Rather, the claim is that experts that provide data input into Bueno de Mesquita game theory-based model can make mistakes using their expertise-based prediction methods, presumably with the very same data that they input into the game theory model. Certainly we’ve seen some recent literature on the power of quantitative analytical models over intuitive or expert opinion-driven prediction models– one example being Ian Ayres’ compelling SuperCrunchers. That book has several examples of breaking down expert-driven data requirements to get to some small number of variables that are highly predictive in a large majority of instances. A compelling example is a diagnostic framework for cardiac-related emergency room visits that can predict with high certainty the likelihood of cardiac arrest using a small handful of seeming low-relevance variables.
Bueno de Mesquita provides excellent detail of his framework and the important attributes of decision makers that are incorporated into his model:
An analysis of the individuals that have a stake in the decision.
What is their stated preference. This is an important distinction because Bueno de Mesquita actively dismisses the notion that we would need to know what individuals want in their heart of hearts. Their stated preferences are strategic choices that reflect their full analysis of the decisions that need to be made and the circumstances. Intuitively this makes sense because in the case of a corporate decision interested parties’ statements will tend to reflect their assessment of their own political standing and interests inside the organization.
How salient or important is the issue for them? In other words, how willing is the decision maker to drop everything else or put other issues or decisions on hold for this one issue. This seems in me to be related in part to the decision maker’s willingness to take risk related to the issue at hand.
Probably the most important question is how much influence each decision maker has on the situation. This attribute is important to distinguish between influencers and ultimate decision makers.
One of the more interesting elements of Bueno de Mesquita’s framework is the importance of where each party falls on the Outcome – Credit framework. I have to admit this is always a difficult one for me to grasp, and I think this is related to the second attribute mentioned above: that stated opinion incorporates not only a person’s preference for a specific approach or outcome (more or less) and also an assessment of the organizational politics. As an ENTJ (off the charts on the N and the T) I tend to be very outcome-oriented. I suspect the Thinking – Feeling attribute of the Myers-Briggs has some relationship here, and I would be interested in knowing what others think of this and other methods analysts might be able to use to determine where influencers and decision-makers’ fall on this spectrum. Could the individuals corporate function play a role as well, and how might a person move along the Outcome-Credit spectrum over their career?
With these inputs, Bueno de Mesquita argues, we can apply a game theory analysis to determine the following:
What choices are available for the decision that needs to be made?
What risks or chances are the decision makers and influencers willing to take?
What values do they hold?
What are the decision makers’ beliefs about other people?
Bueno de Mesquita’s framework presents some very interesting possibilities for scenario analysis– perhaps a more reelable alternative to war games and Delphi surveys. His assertion about stated preferences has real implications for the government intelligence practice, because it places higher value over the statements available more generally from open sources (OSINT) and de-emphasizes the tradition priority for human intelligence (HUMINT) or signals intelligence (SIGINT).
