After having recently read Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indespensible, I’m just finishing up Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath.  Both books are great reads by themselves, but I think that adding them together makes a more powerful combination than they are separately.

Godin sets a great vision of why it’s important to become indispensable (or at least not first on the firing line when times get tough) in the new economy.  But while he provides general characteristics of what makes a Linchpin and broad suggestions of how to become one, he doesn’t lay out the path (people who have already read Switch get this first clue).  More likely than not it will require a change in an individual’s behaviors to actually become one.  That’s where Switch comes in.

Predictably, and perhaps sadly, I saw many familiar storylines in Switch – some related to companies I’ve worked for and others related to my own work-style.  But Switch gives the reader a framework in which to effect the changes called for in Linchpin – both for themselves and how to create leverage withing their organizations.  The approaches in Switch should be especially useful in cases where you have access to limited resources to move your agenda forward, which I would imagine is pretty standard fare for most people.

Amazon does list both books under the “Customers who bought X also bought Y”, but I didn’t see a special deal to buy the two books together on Amazon, but I’d suggest that you do anyway.

Have you read Linchpin or Switch yet?

I’m sure many of you saw the Mashable and TechCrunch posts about Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow’s latest post on the Flash Blog where he ends the post “Go screw yourself Apple.”

As the Mashable piece states, it’s understandable that the folks at Adobe are hopping mad at the latest move by Apple which appears to say that apps created in apps like Adobe Flash Creative Suite, but exported to Apple code won’t be accepted…a mere few days before the release of CS5 (for more background see this post and this one from John Gruber – no relation – at Daring Fireball).  And I’m not even saying whether or not he’s completely right or wrong in his position or that the post is over the top (well, it is).  But from a pure communications perspective I think it’s a mistake for a number of reasons.

• Never write angry  (and he does). It comes through the words and I think you lose credibility with your audience, especially when you’re arguing for your self-interest. I think it distracts from whether their position is right or wrong.  It just becomes complaining.
• Brimelow tried to cast the issue of Flash on the iPad/iPhone/iTouch as a red herring, and it’s not.  It may not be the proximate reason for the post, but it’s surely a major point of contention and in the back of the mind of EVERYONE at Adobe today.  It’s just another statement that seems to belie the true intention of the post and lowers the credibility of the argument he’s trying to make.
• The biggest error I saw was at the very end of the post.  Brimelow tries to separate his views from the company by saying “Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment…” just before he says “Go screw yourself Apple”.  First of all the man is a developer evangelist for Adobe and his job is to use his blog and any other platform to communicate and energize developers about Adobe’s platform.  Merely asking us to ignore that for the last 4 words of the post is moronic.  It’s even stupider given that earlier in the post, he redacts a sentence at Adobe’s request.  In my mind, this is an explicit statement that Adobe communications pros have reviewed the post before it went out, which in my mind is defacto approval of the “screw yourself” statement by Adobe.  I mean am I wrong here?
• Lastly, I think it was a mistake to close comments on the post. Brimelow tries to play this off by saying he doesn’t want spam from Cupertino, but I think more likely he’s just afraid of negative feedback from others in the developer community.  Closing off comments isn’t going to stop Steve Jobs.  I’m sure that if Steve wants to, he’d go on CNN and rip this guy.

What do you think? Agree/disagree? Did I miss anything?

In the post by TechCrunch’s Evelyn Rusli, introduces many to Erply a new firm that just raised $2M from some reputable sources and was a 2009 Seedcamp winner.  Apparently they have a number of customers and are profitable.  All good things and I look forward to seeing what they do in the future.

But there was a comment by Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures (one of the investors in this round) and co-founder of Seedcamp, that puzzled me. Klein stated:

“We think Erply can do for business software what Skype did for telecom”

My question is whether that was supposed to be a complement. Skype is a wonderful product that I use every day. And yes, they sold themselves for $2.75B to Ebay, but Ebay divested Skype a few years later losing almost $1B on their investment. Not good business by most accounts. I will agree that Skype has disrupted many telecom players, but where is the business for Skype? I downloaded their app for free and make calls and IMs for free. I can pay to call landlines, but I don’t and why would I?

So I’m not so sure that Skype is a great company for Erply to model itself after…unless all Klein is concerned with is a profitable exit, not necessarily a sustainable, growing business.

What’s your take? Am I all wet on this?

The march of the app stores continues, but this time for the enterprise, not the smartphone.  Earlier this week Google launched their Apps Marketplace to much fanfare with about 50 apps including Intuit, Concur, TripIt and Zoho and reportedly bigger players like Netsuite are on the way.  The App Marketplace provides very tight coupling with their Google applications like Gmail, Calendar and Docs and With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each.  Certainly a benefit for ease of use, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many CIOs and IT professionals don’t feel too good about entrusting a part of their security to Google.

I’ve read in a few areas that Google’s move is mean to bolster Google’s position against Microsoft’s cash cow, the Office suite of productivity apps which sells for $400 – and hasn’t really changed in 10 years other than the introduction of the ‘ribbon’ UI – versus Google’s productivity offering which is free or you can purchase the “business” version for a mere $50/year.

Clearly this is the thrust of the announcement at this point in time, with Google VP, Engineering Vic Gundotra stating: “The Applications Marketplace makes it easy for domain administrators to discover and install new software and have it integrated into Google Apps.”

But I’m not sure that this is the real target.  Dennis Howlett questions whether the Google Apps Marketplace is ready for primetime, but notes that surprisingly Salesforce.com was conspicuously missing from the announcement.  I was not particularly surprised and it leads me to my primary question: “What is SFDC CEO Marc Benioff thinking about Google’s little announcement?”

This to me is more likely another gambit to try to strengthen Google’s position in the Cloud/PaaS market than it is to try to destroy Microsoft’s in the productivity app space…although I don’t doubt it’s an objective.  I think that the Google App Marketplace is in direct challenge to SFDC’s AppExchange and SFDC’s attempt to become a Cloud platform company with Force.com.  Now I suppose there could be technical coexistence, but as each is trying to build their own app portal and become a PaaS play (Force.com v. AppEngine), there seems to be too many competitive obstacles for me to see them playing together.

For sure SFDC has a huge lead in terms of apps available on AppExchange (~1,000) versus Google also has several advantages in this battle (if it’s indeed taking place):

• Openness: It’s true that to connect with either the Apps Marketplace or AppExchange you don’t need to leverage their PaaS platforms, but that’s clearly the direction both Google and SFDC would like you to go.  Google by far has a more open PaaS platform where you have much more flexibility in the code choices that you use.  Force.com on the otherhand requires you to use their proprietary APEX code which is much more painful to migrate to and, while similar to Java and doesn’t have a terribly steep learning curve, requires your developers to learn a new language and development environment.  And there’s a bit of “Hotel California” feel to the platform because as difficult as it would be to move to APEX, it would be equally as difficult to leave it.
• Rabid Developer Base: You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who wants to develop on Google these days.  As Don Dodge notes in his post about the Apps Marketplace “Building a vibrant ecosystem on a business platform is all about developers. Giving developers an easy way to sell their products to millions of customers is a big plus.”  And there is no question that Google is committed to growing it’s developer base.  Don’s presence at Google is testament to that (and I’m still flummoxed as to why Microsoft ever let him go; but that’s another story).
• Larger User Base: There’s no question that Salesforce is an giant in the CRM industry with over a billion dollars in revenue and surpassing the million user mark and about 72,500 customers.  Compare that with Google’s Apps user base: 25 million people are using Google Apps in more than two million businesses. It recently said that only hundreds of thousands of those users were paying customers. But those are still huge numbers and doesn’t include the 150M users of GMail or takes into account the fact that SFDC has had well over a decade to build to those numbers while Google Apps is a relatively new service.
• Search: Oh yeah, that’s right.  Google does search too.  Now I’m not saying that somehow Google will automatically bump up Marketplace participants in their search results. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people start their day in Google and that can’t hurt.  I can also see opportunities in the future where companies can enhance the functionality of their products by integrating Google’s search technology directly into their products and that can’t be bad.

Anyway, if I’m Benioff I’m concerned.  But so far it looks like everyone’s playing nice or at least deflecting any discussion.  Gundotra only focused on Google’s apps and recently Benioff has been talking about why enterprise software companies aren’t more like Facebook (who Google also seems to have in their sites, although Buzz and Wave have been less than inspiring so far).  So I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

What do you think? Should Salesforce be worried?  What do YOU think Benioff is thinking? Let me know.

This was the only commercial that my wife and I actually watched as we sped thru the Oscars on DVR.  But I was very disappointed.  Apple advertising usually hits it out of the park, but in my opinion this had no impact. It didn’t spend time really communicating any of the capabilities of the device. It all went too fast.  Apple hopefully will create a number of different spots promoting specific capabilities that they believe will drive consumer adoption. Personally, I still plan on buying one, but if I was on the fence, I don’t think that this ad would have pushed me over.

The only thing Apple has going for it is that their advertising is still miles better than Microsoft’s advertising and Google hasn’t bothered at this point. I must say that I’m appalled at the Microsoft Windows 7 ads. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, so as it kind of fits here, let’s go. The Windows 7 ads fails along several dimensions:

• It tries to be a little hip and isn’t.  It’s actually that uncomfortable in-between, just a shade better than Bill Gates wiggling his butt, which may be the all time worst moment in advertising history — or at least Bill Gates’ career.  The whole “I’m a PC”-thing doesn’t have the warm and fuzzies of a Mac campaign if for no other reason (beyond the abject awkwardness of the spots themselves) that “PC” is not a cuddly term the way that “Mac” is.  The “PC” as a brand of sorts represents nearly every over-structured, unfeeling, bland attribute that one ascribes to the factory-like businesses (to borrow a concept from Seth Godin’s Linchpin) that most people work for, and the very same attributes which most people dislike about their jobs.  They may have well featured the uber-boring “Knit Knots” from Disney’s kid-show the Imagination Movers (see pic) in the ads.
• It portrays mighty Microsoft as clueless about how software should behave, giving consumers credit for every good idea that made it to the gold code.  I understand that they’re trying to create a connection to consumers, show that they were listening to what didn’t work in Vista and other prior iterations of the Windows OS.  I just wonder whether a ‘mea culpa‘ ad that said “We listened, and here is your new operating system that we think you’re gonna love” would have worked better and felt more authentic.  But perhaps Microsoft’s general inability to admit mistakes is what truly makes this campaign authentic.
• Lastly, so many of the features that are highlighted are so basic (paraphrasing: ‘I wish it would start up fast and just work’) and seem to echo the benefits of Mac OSX that it could have had a slightly different, yet crushing ending with each of the people featured saying “It’s a Mac”, rather than “I’m a PC”.  Anytime an ad sets up that way, it portrays a fatal flaw, at least in my opinion.

Here are 10 items worth reading in case you missed them:

• Tnooz: Can travel be smart about Smart Computing? Issues with search in the travel industry.
• Roughly drafted magazine: An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash.  Real reasons why Flash not suited to touch-oriented devices rather than the usual “Jobs-hates-Adobe” crap.
• ReadWriteWeb: Mobile Cloud Computing: $9.5 Billion by 2014.  I sort of have a problem in the way that people are confusing mobile web v. apps v. Cloud based services, but you get the point.  The numbers will be big.
• MobileCrunch: Maybe AT&T Has Best 3G Network After All.  Note reliability #s. Maybe I can’t hear you now.
• Google extends Comparison Ads drive, hints that travel is in its sights.  Anytime Google sets its sights on a market, those in it should start to step up their game. How can you create new innovations to stay a step ahead? Direct, undifferentiated competition with Google doesn’t sound like a game most companies would want to play.
• PhoCusWright: Kayak takes on the big guys.  It will be very interesting to see what other twists and turns Kayak takes in its ever-evolving business model.  Certainly interesting with respect to recent comments that changes in OTA fees have really started to level out the playing field across direct and indirect booking channels.  So is the NEED for meta-search reducing? Is that the reasoning behind the changes in strategy that Kayak is taking?  Find my take here.
• UpTake Blog: Opening and Running a Hotel – The IHG Way.  Good demonstration of how companies build solution accelerators to help their partners and franchisers be successful.
• Tnooz: Concur corporate-booking tool and mobile app land Southwest Airlines
• 4Hoteliers Blog: The great GDS unbundling – not pretty
• Christopher Penn’s Awaken Your Superhero: The reason why your personal brand sucks Just  a great read on finding your essential quality and what that means  to establishing your personal brand, your value to your organization and others that you touch.

Until next week!

Travel industry analyst firm, PhoCusWright, recently posted that “Kayak Takes on the Big Guys“, noting the apparent changes in their business model, and poses the question whether Kayak can still be considered a meta-search player.  Kayak’s introduction of ‘booking facilitation’ and ‘Private Sales’ are pushing them closer to becoming an OTA in some aspects.  However, Kayak CEO, Steve Hafner, maintains that is not the goal, explaining that they intend to evolve into a full service travel planning site, but will retain it’s advertising based revenue stream and ‘media company’ status.

Lorraine Sileo, PhoCusWright vice president, research has said “Kayak has become another intermediary or layer that never replaced any of the other steps in the search, shop, buy process. This move is important to their long-term success.”

Sileo’s comments about Kayak never replacing the other steps in the booking process  are even more important given a few items in the news this week that I saw:

• Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference 2010 in San Francisco this week, Priceline President and CEO Jeffery Boyd noted that OTAs’ (Online Travel Agencies) decision to remove booking fees on airlines has really started to level out the playing field across direct and indirect booking channels.  So the primary consumer benefit behind meta-search, to find the best prices across channels and sites, seems to have been mitigated.  So is the NEED for meta-search reducing? Is that the reasoning behind the changes in strategy that Kayak is taking?
• The second item in the news was a report from Kevin May, editor for tnooz, that Google may have travel in it’s sights by extending it’s Comparison Ads pilot.  May even says that “Comparison Ads is effectively a metasearch…of products already in the AdWords system.  It looks and feels like a scaled-down Kayak in terms of functionality.”  I always believe that anytime Google sets its sights on a market, those in it should start to step up or change their game.  And if you’re a search company — that also relies on advertising as a primary source of revenue — is Google the one that you want to compete with? Direct, undifferentiated competition with Google doesn’t sound like a game most companies would want to play.

To me what’s most interesting about all of this is that it’s happening in advance of a much-rumored IPO for the company. Some thought that the IPO was a driving force behind the $60M TV ad campaign that Kayak recently undertook.   Of course it’s always better to make these changes prior to the IPO so that there’s some consistency in the earnings and therefore stock price…especially while restrictions are in place.  But how these changes may impact the company’s valuation are beyond my comprehension.  I’ll leave that to other folks smarter than me AND the investment bankers — just over a year ago, I might have clubbed the two together

So what do you think is in Kayak’s future?

OK, maybe I’m overreacting…I mean it’s been a whole 10 minutes since I’ve been using Google Buzz…but the early results do not portend well in my opinion.  But even though I’m only following a handful of people the information is coming in torrents.  It’s funny, with the Google Wave beta, I never saw that much activity as I wasn’t using it for any collaborative projects, but Buzz, which seems to incorporate some Wave-style features, has created a tsunami of information in short order.

At least with Twitter, I can segment the inflow with searches, hashtags and lists.   I don’t see those kinds of controls/filters straight off the bat with Buzz.  And with Twitter, you can let the tweets wash over you, jump out for a while and no big deal.  But now all this stuff is piling up in my Inbox and I can’t find the off switch. Oy.

Perhaps I will get used to it or perhaps I just need less prolific friends.  But I’m afraid to add more folks to mix for now.

Has Buzz been activated for you? What are your reactions?

Today I read a good post by CrispWireless CTO, Xavier Facon, entitled “Apps Call, but will your phone answer? Maybe not.” The post was a response to an MSNBC CES article bemoaning the fact that many apps exist on certain platforms, but not others.  This of course is not news.  Apple’s iPhone had 100,000, Google’s Android 20,000 and Palm’s WebOS just over a 1,000 (please make more, I like my Pre and do have app envy).  The fragmentation of the mobile industry across different operating systems and different hardware systems is well documented and is the bane of many software developers and testers across the world.

The crux of Facon’s post seems to provide tacit support a more standards-based approach coalescing around HTML5, but also acknowledging that the industry is not close to supporting a single standard and therefore they try to solve the quandary by re-writing the app across different platforms. At least Crisp seems to focus on keeping the functionality, something that many companies don’t do.  This is an important decision by Crisp because it helps maintain not just common functionality across devices, but also promotes a common design and better usability as users move from one device to another.

But I want to get back to the standards issue.  As much as software engineering teams across the globe would like to have a standard “write once, run anywhere” approach as they’ve been used to with modern languages like Java, I don’t think there is any likelihood of  this happening in the short to medium term.  It’s really not all that dissimilar to creating desktop apps for Mac v. PC, it’s just that there are more options in the mobile world.  The hardware platform providers like Apple, RIM, Google, Nokia and Palm each have different OS’ that they think create differentiation for their platform and provide better performance/user experience.   If you want to take advantage of the full capabilities of the device, you have to write for the platform.  And the reason behind it all is usability.

While using a standard language like HTML5 may make it easier to program across platforms, but it doesn’t allow you to take advantage of the specific capabilities that the OS and hardware allow for.   Plus you have to design for the form factor.  Mobile apps — perhaps I should  say “good mobile apps” — look vastly different from the content on the web.  They’re designed for action more so than information.  For fingers, not mice.  For use by broader segment of the population who may be less tech savvy.  I mean can you even imagine using an iPhone or Palm Pre without multi-touch and gestures?  Look how that changed the entire experience and drove usage through the roof.  In a recent PhoCusWright report Mobile: The Next Platform for Travel, they demonstrate the difference in presentation and usability between a standard web site, a mobile transcoded site and an app.   Now there are many WAP-enabled sites that run in a browser and provide something in-between the transcoded site and an app, but anyone that’s used a WAP site still prefers and app to get the same information.  Usability is what it’s all about.  The App strategy wins over a WAP strategy.

Google wants HTML5 because it wants a web-oriented portable computing device to better leverage the web apps that is the core of its business. Android is more of a strategy to extend it’s platform rather than to create a new one that is optimized for mobile.

Additionally, an app strategy rather than just a mobile web strategy provides a performance advantage. A downloaded app only needs to get refreshed data over the network rather than reloading the entire page each time.  It’s true that 3G and 4G networks are improving (if you have coverage; no apologies to AT&T coming. As tiresome as the Verizon ads have become, Luke Wilson is seriously annoying), performance is extremely important.  Abandon rates on the web are high for a 3 second delay.  Most people would kill for a 3 second delay on their mobile applications.
So while it may be a pain to code for multiple platforms, it’s the only way to go.

What’s your take?  Agree? Disagree?

I just got the Pre on Sprint and am pretty happy with it. Definitely think the value package ($20/unlimited data + email + text) Sprint put together is better and less expensive than what is available from AT&T or Verizon for the Blackberry (both effectively require $50/month to enable the phones) and after all the griping I hear about coverage, I took the plunge.  On top of that, I think the Pre has some great features, particularly multi-tasking, layered calendars and Palm Synergy which seamlessly consolidates contact information across multiple address books (e.g. Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo).

Much has been written about the sure-to-fail marriage between 2 also rans in Sprint and Palm (see here and here), but I don’t think it has to do with the viability or scale of the companies themselves. The real concern about the success or failure of the Pre in my mind is tied to the number of apps available for the platform. In many ways I think the device itself has advantages over the iPhone, but 250 apps v. 100,000 isn’t much of a competition. If Palm is able to get more apps out quickly, at least to the point that it approaches the 10,000 that’s available for Android, it could actually compete more effectively.

Would you consider the Pre versus the iPhone, Droid or Blackberry?