The Return of Larry Page and Google’s Need for Revitalization

Posted on January 21, 2011 by jyarmis

The news that Eric Schmidt is being “kicked upstairs” to Executive Chairman at Google, to be replaced as CEO by co-founder Larry Page, has us all reading the tea leaves for what that means for Google.  Google is almost as difficult to work with for analysts as Apple and thus, my reflections below come mostly as a long-time, interested observer of Google than any deep insights I have from working with them.  I do, however, spend a lot of time working with people who work with Google.

  • The replacement of a CEO by a founder at a successful company is not exactly without precedent.  Michael Dell got shunted aside by his Board only to lead a renewal of the company upon his return.
  • What do these people have in common?  John Sculley, Michael Spindler, Gil Amelio.  Those were the people who served as Apple CEO after Steve Jobs was pushed aside.

Thus, there’s precedent for a CEO returning to revitalize a company that has lost its way.  Now I’m not saying that Larry Page is Steve Jobs or even Michael Dell.  That has yet to be demonstrated.  However, make no mistake about it, Google is in need of revitalization.

How can I make that statement about one of the industry’s grand success stories?  Well, let’s peek under that success.  What exactly has Google succeeded at?  I and others have long observed that Google’s a one-trick pony even while acknowledging that the one trick is a pretty darned good one.  Other than selling advertising on search results pages, what has Google done that has earned money?  I’m a big fan of Android, and happily own a Droid, but that’s not a revenue story yet.  Clearly the bet is that mobile advertising is going to be really big and that owning the platform is essential to reaping full economic benefit or at least maintaining control of its own destiny.  Perhaps true but as yet unproven.  That’s largely it from a revenue producing standpoint in the immediate and medium-term.

Google’s other initiatives have largely been either failures (e.g., Wave) or acquisitions of interesting things (e.g., YouTube, Picasa) that haven’t particularly benefited (nor been harmed) by Google’s acquisition.  Saying “nor been harmed” is actually a positive statement as we’ve seen numerous tech acquisitions over the years where the acquired company/technology disappears into irrelevance.  Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that Google’s a one trick pony.

Here’s the challenge:  that one trick is on the verge of running out, perhaps a victim of Google’s own success.  Most of you are probably aware of the acronym SEO.  Search engine optimization.  Basically it means that it’s important for a web site to show up on the first page of a Google search result either through “gaming” the Google indexing algorithm and/or through buying keywords.  Both of those today face challenges.  Google used to be magic.  When you typed something into its search box, you were presented with the pages you actually wanted to see.  Now you see more and more pages that are not really the ones you wanted but instead are ones of someone trying to sell you something who have done a better job of playing the SEO game than the actual content you were trying to reach.  And if I wanted the Wikipedia page, which so often shows up first, well, I would have gone to Wikipedia in the first place.  Thanks for nothing.  I won’t get into the discussion about the challenges to Google’s keywords because either (a) you know this better than me or (b) if you don’t, it’s not really that interesting; just know that there are a lot of dissatisfied campers in the world who are really looking for alternatives, more cost-effective and more effective, than Google.

What does this have to do with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt?  Two-and-a-half years ago, Google’s Marissa Mayer said search is “90 to 95%” solved.  I was in violent disagreement with that then and since then, I would argue we’ve moved backwards.  It is getting harder and harder to find what we want and what we need, and the introduction of more complex time and location elements is only worsening the problem.  It’s not like Schmidt had a more compelling vision than Mayer as expressed in this interview at the time with Michael Arrington.

Google is in need of a reinvention.  I was going to say “desperate” but it hasn’t reached that point.  Yet.  However, search is being reinvented in front of our eyes.  For certain things, I don’t go to Google but instead go to Twitter or Quora or Facebook or any of a hundred different sites that give me not an algorithmic result but a human or curated one.  And there’s wide amounts of room to improve the algorithmic search taking radical new approaches.  I’m not holding up Bing as an example of a radical new approach but it is a step forward with an attempt to divine context when searching and to present “solutions” and not just algorithmically-resulting pages.  Cheap shot alert:  You know when Microsoft is out-innovating you, you’ve got an issue on your hands.

I don’t know whether Larry Page is the man with the vision to reinvent search and reinvent Google.  However, I’m pretty sure Eric Schmidt wasn’t that man.  Give Page (and Brin) credit for recognizing the “problem” before it really started manifesting itself in true harm to Google’s core business.  Google has always been noted for supporting its people in the development of quirky projects which have ranged from the totally inane to the mildly interesting.  I’ll be looking for signs now that we’re going to see profoundly new, important and creative approaches to Google’s core business, led and oriented by Page.  The one-trick pony needs a new trick.  Zenith or reinvention?  It’s going to be an interesting year.

Filed under: Ad-Supported Business Models | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

How Important is Steve Jobs?

Posted on January 17, 2011 by jyarmis

With the news that Steve Jobs is taking another medical leave from Apple — his third — it’s legitimate to ask the question of just how essential he is to Apple’s success.  This is going to be a quick post, because I think the truth of the matter is that there are probably only 20 people who can answer that question…and they’re so secretive and such a part of the Jobsian communications strategy that we’re not likely to know the answer to that question for another year or more.

By all accounts, COO Tim Cook is a buttoned-down manager.  Apple has been AMR Research’s (now Gartner’s) #1 in its Supply Chain Top 25 for three years in a row.  Thus, I think it’s safe to say that Apple’s ability to execute its plan is in safe hands.  Cook has probably been running large amounts of the operational show for years anyhow.  How much it has helped him to have Jobs’s notoriously strong hammer can be asked, but ultimately this is not where Apple’s potential issues lie.

More to be questioned is how much of the marketing power of Apple is attributable to the “Jobsian reality field” and how much of the product vision is directly attributable to Jobs.  Jobs has indicated that he’s going to remain engaged as CEO and assuming there’s some veracity to that assertion, it’s reasonable to assume that his exquisite sense of product development will continue to guide the company.  With the Verizon announcement, the iPhone momentum continues even while Android continues to make inroads in the smartphone marketplace.  Apple’s business plan never was to be the volume leader so this marketplace condition was to be expected.  The same will probably happen in the tablet marketplace; Apple is quite happy to be the pioneer and then to reap early-mover profits while moving gracefully into the premium price place of the market.  But given that, the question becomes “what’s next?”  Apple has introduced two category-creating, or at least redefining, products in a row.  They probably need another home run in the next two years to sustain their momentum and lofty market perceptions.  Without Jobs at the plate, you’d have to question Apple’s ability, or at least likelihood, of hitting another home run.

This concern extends to Apple’s marketing as well.  Again, they do a remarkable job, second to none certainly in the technology space , and even the broader consumer space.  Here’s where it gets hard to call.  Jobs doesn’t have to be omnipresent to sustain the Jobsian magic.  In fact, lesser Jobs could actually mean more impact when he’s around.  On the other hand, if he becomes perceived as merely a figurehead disassociated from the company he used to rule with an iron fist, his magic could be compromised.

Apple more than most companies is a cult of personality and the extended absence of its leader is a challenge for the company.  That said, I don’t think it’s an insurmountable challenge.  Microsoft was able to transition from a “cult of Bill Gates” to something more nuanced.  But that was much easier because the cult of Bill was vastly weaker than the cult of Steve and the truth of a Bill-ruled company was less than the truth of a Steve-ruled company.  I think we’re nearing the time when for myriad reasons Apple is going to need to let Jobs sprinkle some pixie dust on someone else, a visionary who can sustain the momentum and help transition the cult of Steve back once again to the cult of Apple.  This mingling of Jobs and Apple is a relatively recent phenomenon.  While a search of Time Magazine’s web site and Google couldn’t help me locate the quote, I have vivid recollections of a late 80’s/early 90’s quote there which said “second perhaps only to Harley Davidson is an Apple user’s love of their computer and the company who makes it.”  The Jobs worship started with his return to the company who ousted him and with each successive product success, it grew only larger.  It’s imperative now for Apple to share the spotlight, to bring a new person to the forefront as well as transition that passion back to the company so that it transcend’s Jobs, whatever his health.

So, back to the question that started my musings.  I think Steve Jobs is as important to Apple’s success as any one individual has ever been to any technology company.  Any extended absence by him could prove to be damaging to Apple’s future products and prospects.  It sounds like there’s time for Apple and Jobs to transition that passion back more heavily to the company so that it can thrive in the inevitable absence of Jobs, whether it be this health-related matter, his waning interest or any other thing in life that could lead to his moving on/out.

He’ll be a tough act to follow, no doubt…but not impossible.  Back in the late 80’s, I actually had Steve Jobs as the luncheon speaker at a Gartner PC conference I was running.  This was right after he had introduced the NeXT computer, an amazing piece of software engineering that stood to transform the way we created and used software.  He had demonstrated it weeks earlier at Gartner’s offices in Stamford, after which none other than Gideon Gartner came to me and said “do you think we should standardize our company on these?”  The demonstration was that compelling.  I, being a noted curmudgeon, said “give me a night to think on it,” after which I came up with any number of good reasons why it wasn’t the right thing to do.  At the conference, Steve did his thing, and it was amazing.  You could hear jaws dropping in the audience.  I don’t know how many of you have ever given a meal speech but let me tell you, it’s the hardest thing in the world.  Within three minutes, all you hear is silverware clanking and the din of conversation at the tables gets louder and louder.  Not this time.  Jobs had their rapt attention.  You could have heard a pin drop.  At the end, thunderous applause.  Well, I was the next speaker.  Now what do I do?  How do you follow God and the 10 Commandments?  All I was talking about was operating system futures.  So I asked the audience, “how many of you want one of those things right now?”  Every hand in the room went up.  Then I said “how many of you are ready to standardize your company on those things tomorrow?”  Every hand went down.  (Well, I’m pretty sure Gideon wasn’t in the audience.)  I then said “so now let’s focus on what our real options might be.”

So you can follow Steve Jobs.  I’m just glad that I don’t have to do it again.

Filed under: Consumer Electronics, Hardware, Mobility | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Live from NRF: The Dismal State of Retail Technology

Posted on January 11, 2011 by jyarmis

I’ve spent the last day and a half at the big National Retail Federation’s 100th annual conference in New York.  (No, there is no truth to the rumor that I covered the technology at the first conference, although I did learn to type on a manual typewriter in 1971 or so.)  I was one of the people behind Gartner’s designation of companies as Type A (aggressive technology adopters), Type B and Type C and as I walked the floor of the trade show and listened in on keynotes and sessions, I’m struck by how hard it is to characterize retail and many retailers.  On the one hand, technology is ubiquitous and you can’t pretend to be a retailer of any scale without a massive IT investment.  On the other hand, the ability to invest, and even more to innovate, when dealing with such tight margins can be constrained.  Netting it all out, I’m struck by how far behind the technology curve the retail industry seems to be.

A few observations from the show:

  • Peter Sachse, the CEO of Macys.com appeared on a panel run by Alison Paul, head of Deloitte’s Retail Practice.  (As an aside, this was a really well-done panel, which is all too rarely the case.  This wasn’t scripted and the panelists did an admirable job of refraining from the sales pitches that ruin so many panels.)  Sachse talked about how Macy’s is working hard to get a 360 degree view of the customer.  My take:  good luck with that.  The only person with a 360 degree view of the customer is the customer themselves.  No matter how you integrate the data you have and obtain, you will have at best an incomplete picture of the customer and at worst a misleading view.  I do, however, believe that’s a laudable goal but that retailers don’t have nearly enough vision nor understanding of the impact of social technologies to realize that vision in a meaningful way.  More on that in a bit.
  • Coming as it did a week after CES, where every gadget known to man (and lusted after by me), is shown, the show floor here is not nearly as exciting.  I mean how many booths can you see with barcode scanners or keyboards.  Yes, keyboards!  I understand they’re important to the speed of a retail transaction but somehow soft-configurable keyboards just don’t get my heart racing.  By far the most interesting booth to me was Intel’s, where they were demonstrating not some far-off fantasy retail environments but rather things that are possible today (and are already in limited deployment).   While Apple has virtually no presence at the show (they’re not here and I only saw one vendor who was hawking Mac solutions), their influence on retail interfaces is pervasive.  Everything looks like an iPhone/iPad, and that’s a good thing.  User familiarity with touch interfaces will likely lead to their much wider deployment in retail settings.
  • Everyone’s using iPads to demonstrate their wares.  It actually makes for an interesting conference experience, with the human interaction enhanced by technology rather than the somewhat sterile approach of presenters standing around their monitors and kiosks.
  • For an industry that just came through a lackluster holiday season and is facing more tough times ahead, the mood around is actually upbeat.  Whether they’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or otherwise, high energy and increased attendance is actually refreshing.

Now, however, for the zinger.  If I hear one more retailer talk about “listening to the customer,” I’m going to puke.  What’s worse, generally when they say that, they mean “I’m listening for the customer to express even the slightest receptivity to getting a marketing message so that I can blast them with my multichannel outreach program.”  I have found the discussions around social media and mobility to be horribly shallow and maybe even misguided.

On the mobility front, there were actually people debating whether customer-accessible WiFi was a good idea in retail environments.  There’s a legitimate question there but the tone of the discussion was more like “do we want to enable customers to price shop while they’re in our store?”  Let me introduce you to these things called SmartPhones, 3G and 4G.  The genie is out of that bottle.  Customers do have access to competitive pricing and thus the question must become “how can we leverage consumer technologies to increase the likelihood of a purchase” or even “how can I use the consumer’s expressions of interest to sell them more stuff.”    You have to assume radical transparency and that an increasing percentage of your retail traffic is going to have good information, maybe better than the retailer has and certainly better than is known on the front lines.

And then there’s social media.  I really fear that too many — dare I say most — retailers still think of social media as a vehicle to dump messaging to customers who are eager for that messaging and have in fact invited it.  Exhibit #1:  just look at the Tweetstream for the event:  http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nrf11 .  Maybe I’m spoiled by tech events where attendees use Twitter as a vehicle to discuss issues raised in sessions or the news of the day, but this is appalling.  The stream is dominated by vendors screaming “come to my booth,” “win an iPad.”  Sure, @Teradata has generated a lot of retweets.  Do you think any of those people are actually interested in hearing anything from Teradata other than “you’ve won”?  I keep saying I’ll be writing about it, and I promise I will soon, but I think social media in its full expression inverts the relationship between retailer/brand and customer.  It isn’t about a 360 degree view of the customer; rather, it’s about my expressing my needs, interests and criteria, enabling people and companies to deliver solutions to me.  If you think social media is just another channel to enable you to dump marketing messages onto willing potential customers, you’ve got it way wrong.

Filed under: Mobility, Social networking, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Quora: The Winning Formula for Knowledge Management?

Posted on January 6, 2011 by jyarmis

However it has happened, interested in Quora has spiked in the last week.  I’ve gotten more “follow” notifications in the week than I have in the preceding year or however long I’ve been on the platform.  (Not coincidentally, I’ve answered more questions in the last week — five or so — than I have in the preceding year — one.)  I’ m really torn when it comes to thinking whether Quora’s onto something really big here, or is just a flash in the pan that we’ll forget in another week.

First, let me say what I like about Quora, and there’s a lot to like.  For starters, it’s not Facebook Questions, which I really hate.  What I hate most about Facebook Questions is that it doesn’t even pretend to be a knowledge management solution.  (Hold on KM aficionados, I’ll come back to you in a moment.)  Questions is a great example of a feature that exists because someone thought it was neat to do without it meeting any real user need.  If you’re the type of person that blurts out random questions to your friends and their friends at parties, then maybe Facebook Questions is for you.  If, however, you want reasoned answers to important questions, I wouldn’t be going to Facebook Questions.  Quora, however, follows what I believe to be a really successful model.  You look at categories that have failed (and knowledge management is certainly one of them), scale back your expectations considerably but in so doing enable the category to be accessible to orders of magnitude more people.  Then you scramble like hell to fill in the architecture so that it delivers as robust a solution as the failed category actually delivered in the first place.  This was actually the success model of the Internet itself in the first place.  We were trying all these complicated networking solutions that delivered robust client-server and other advanced functionality.  When that largely failed or proved to complex or expensive, we stepped back and said “what if we can just connect these things and do little more than exchange files or a few screens of information.”  Having done that, and gotten millions of computers into the network and having generated momentum, only then did we go back and say “now how to we layer on top all of those things we were trying to do in the first place.”

There’s room for this kind of approach in knowledge management.  The top-down initiatives have largely failed because there was little incentive for participation (in fact, there was often disincentive) and the benefits of participation were inconsistent at best and elusive at worst.  So, instead, Quora starts from a bottoms-up perspective.  Let’s not try to build a knowledge management “system.”  Instead, let’s just ask questions.  And instead of asking questions on behalf of some nameless, faceless organization, let’s ask on behalf of your friends.  You’ll answer their questions because you’re wanting to help them, not because you’re trying to fill up a knowledge management system.

Having started down this path, of course, what we really want is a knowledge management system.  Something that brings together related questions, imposes structure and hierarchy, weeds out the bad answers (and answerers) and otherwise adds coherence from the chaos that a random socially-oriented question platform would produce.  Facebook Questions hasn’t gone down that path yet and, given their friend- and activity-oriented focus probably never will.  Quora is already walking down that path, allowing for the organization of topics, collaborative editing and other organizational functions.

At some level, what’s really going on is the intersection of three or four, or more, major platforms.  We’ve got Facebook, the repository of social connections.  We’ve got Twitter, the repository for ad-hoc questions and answers.  We’ve got Wikipedia, the repository for structured answers.  And now, we’ve got Quora, the repository for structured questions (and their answers).  Even as I write this post, I get more and more excited about Quora’s position and opportunity.  Questions are perhaps more contextually relevant and valuable than answers and so maybe Quora’s position in search rankings supersedes Wikipedia’s (and when was the last time you did a Google search where there wasn’t a Wikipedia answer in the top five).

So, what can keep Quora from achieving such a lofty position?  That transition from bottoms-up approach to tops-down is fraught with danger.  Right now, we’re using Quora to some extent as a social platform:  we’re conversing with our friends.  As it scales out and more and more of the answers I see are from not even friends of friends but from strangers (i.e., untrusted sources), will I value the feedback from a broader audience or will it diminish the platform’s value.  I’ll assume that they’ll get to some kind of rating structure for people who answer questions.  Unlike on eBay, however, where it’s pretty clear who’s a good seller and who’s not, it’s going to be much muddier here.  And the moment you lose trust in the people answering the questions, the fundamental value proposition of the platform is lost.  Forever.

How are they going to integrate with Twitter?  For some questions right now, I go to Twitter largely because of its immediate response.  At some level, I may actually want to “escalate” a Twitter exchange into a Quora solution.  Doing that systematically would be hugely powerful and ultimately essential.  If Quora is the question platform of last resort, it risks being left out of the knowledge creation loop.  How will they get higher up on our priority list or is it just one more platform I’ve got to invest time in?  Its integration with more immediate and frequent platforms (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) are likely to be key success criteria for how much value they can ultimately collect and deliver.

Almost three years ago, I declared Twitter “the most important platform you’ve never heard of.”  People have been asking me ever since “so what do you think the next one is.”  Foursquare was the one most often mentioned by others but I have steadfastly said no, that’s not it.  (And it’s not because I don’t believe location-based solutions aren’t important.  They are.  Just not the way Foursquare does it.)  Quora is the first thing I’ve even considered anointing with that lofty status.  Their challenges are considerable, however.  Unlike Twitter, where growth just makes the platform better and better (other than platform stability issues), for Quora it’s a double-edged sword.  There’s value to its growth but considerably added complexity.  What’s the right mix of friends and open community?  Can you add sufficient structure to a bottoms-up approach or does it have to be designed in from the beginning?  How good are the answers you get, how timely, how predictable and how reliable?  My early experience is a real mixed bag.  I’ve seen some good answers and seen some interesting discussions.  I’ve also seen some things where I think the answers are just bad and/or wrong.  Keep track in your own mind as you look around Quora and see what the good:bad ratio is.

I gave a speech a year ago where I made a Freudian slip and talked about the “wisdom of clowns” and not the “wisdom of crowds.”  Idiots in large number does not a solution make.  If that’s what Quora becomes, obviously kiss it goodbye.  If, however, they can make it the repository for structured questions and reliable answers, then they really do have the potential to be the next big platform.

Filed under: Knowledge Management, Social networking | 6 Comments »

Facebook’s $50 Billion Valuation: That Sounds Reasonable, Even Cheap

Posted on January 3, 2011 by jyarmis

2011 has begun with news that Facebook has secured a new round of funding which values the company at $50 billion.  I actually think that’s a reasonable valuation (although in another post later today or tomorrow, I’ll talk about my expectations of a social ennui in 2011, as we come to realize the fundamentally flawed approaches most brands are taking towards the notion of social engagement; yes, I know, a provocative statement).  In fact, I believe there’s still room for growth in Facebook’s valuation nor do I expect this valuation will cool the private trade in Facebook shares.  Many early commentators seem to the valuation is insanely high.  I actually engaged in a Twitter exchange with two analysts I hold in the highest esteem — Sameer Patel and Esteban Kolsky — around 2:30 this morning on this very subject.

My points:

  • Google’s market cap is nearly $200 billion.  Is Google really four times more valuable than Facebook?
  • Users now spend more time on Facebook than they do on Google, Yahoo…or any other web property.  Somewhere that’s monetizable (although that’s a post for another day soon).
  • Users are not only exchanging information about where and what they eat, social platforms are becoming an increasingly important way of discovering information, augmenting and, yes, replacing search in that regard.  (Where did you find out about this blog post?)
  • It is much easier to for a user to replace Google than it is to replace Facebook.  If you want to replace Google, you go to Bing.  Period.  You might even find the experience better.  OK, it’s a little tougher than that.  You might have to exchange tool bars, change a couple of preference settings on your computer and update a few links and passwords.  Those of you reading this blog are probably more sophisticated than most so you have a few more things to change but also the technical wherewithal to do so.  You could do it today and wouldn’t miss a thing.  I’ve even seen a few friends announce their New Year’s resolutions as going Google-free this year.  (Well, some of them said Google- and Facebook-free although ironically they made this proclamation on Facebook.)  Anyhow, you could reasonably go Google-free and have a completely adequate replacement by the end of the day.  How would you replace Facebook, however?  This assumes, of course, that you think there’s any value in a social platform, and I’m not going to try to defend against the argument that you don’t need to replace Facebook.  Facebook is so much more than a listing of who’s doing what but also categorizes my relationships (business and professional), captures activities (and serves as the log-in) to/from many third-party web sites and has otherwise become an important piece of the connective tissue.  Replacing Facebook means rebuilding your social connections, likely across multiple platforms involving multiple acts of outreach to friends on the disparate platforms.  Rebuilding your social graph is time-consuming and likely to be incomplete.  “Substitutability” is one component of the economic definition of a commodity.  Google is highly substitutable, Facebook is not.

Sameer and Esteban also suggest that Facebook is just the flavor du jour and that they’re due for a fall.  I do not believe this is an issue in the horizon over which this valuation must be justified.  Yes, in the early days of key technology platforms, we burn rapidly through a number of them before sticking on one for a variety of complex reasons, usually beyond the control of the platform owner itself.  How many search engines were your favorite/default?  I count Yahoo, Excite, Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista as past favorites before sticking on Google.  Similarly, I used several social platforms before Facebook achieved its prominent and dominant state.  500 million users gives you a pretty strong base from which to retain market leadership and even competitors are now being forced to embrace Facebook’s role in the “ownership” of the social graph (witness MySpace’s recent concession; TechCrunch has a particularly amusing take on it).

    I hasten to acknowledge that Google has done a much better job of monetizing its position and that in fact is the enduring genius of Google.  As I and others have often observed, Google may really be just a one-trick pony…but it’s a damn good trick.  Facebook is nowhere near as mature as Google when it comes to understanding, or inventing, how it’s going to monetize its commanding position.  I think, however, that represents as much a failing of brands and consumers as it does of Facebook.  Maybe if they hadn’t handle the whole Beacon initiative in such ham-handed fashion, we’d be much further along…but there’s no turning back that clock and besides, Facebook has continued to make boneheaded moves in maintaining the critical user trust although, critically, I do not believe it has even approached the status of irreparably damaging that trust.  People just haven’t abandoned the platform despite all the posturing and hand-wringing.

    Anyhow, I believe profoundly in the ability to monetize social platforms and their tremendous power in transforming the relationships between brands and customers, customers and customers and among brands themselves.  Today’s blather about “being part of the conversation” is most assuredly not the answer.  A few years from now we’ll look back on today’s efforts and laugh at just how immature, ineffective and ultimately misguided they were.  In fact, I think this will lead to a bit of what I call social ennui (that’s French for “boredom”), which I actually believe will be a dominant theme in social media in 2011.  Again, I’ll write about that today or tomorrow in my look-ahead blog piece.  For now, I’ll just leave it that a $50 billion valuation for Facebook sounds actually quite reasonable and that it’s not evidence of a bubble (although Groupon’s walking away from $6 billion may be).

    Happy 2011, friends.

    Filed under: Ad-Supported Business Models, Marketing, Social networking, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

    Groupon: TFM

    Posted on December 5, 2010 by jyarmis

    Groupon has apparently turned down as much as a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google.  They’re thinking that if they grow their business out a little more, an IPO or subsequent acquisition could bring them as much as twice as much.  I have three letters for them:  TFM!!!

    What, you say, is TFM?  Some of you may remember Pointcast.  It was a darling of the very early Internet days.  In fact, it was a pre-Internet company, providing dial-up access to its information resource.  I actually was a delighted user of their screen-saver product (and still wish I had something like it).  Rumors had it that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. had made a $450 million offer to acquire the company.  I was on the advisory board of ad-tech at that time and we had Chris Hassett, Pointcast’s CEO, on stage and asked him about the rumors.  He wouldn’t confirm them nor deny them, indicating that there was a lot of discussion about how best to maximize their value and saying that he believed it would be best maximized via an IPO.  “IPO?,” someone in the audience called out, “TFM!!”  “TFM?,” Hassett replied.  “Take the f***ing money.”

    Two-and-a-half years later, Pointcast sold the company.  For $7 million.

    Do you really believe that Groupon’s position is so unassailable and their approach so unrepeatable that there’s no risk to their future opportunity?  Would you turn down $6 billion??

    Groupon, TFM!!!

    UPDATE 1/14/2011

    It boggles my mind but maybe it was a good idea to turn down the $6 billion.  If, that is, you believe these rumors of a $15 billion IPO.  I admit to not having looked at any financial models but my sense of this valuation is that it’s totally insane.  On the one hand, you’d think that there’s some barrier to entry in this space, with the requirement to build out a local salesforce.  On the other hand, I already get at least five or six discount offer emails a day, some with a local focus (e.g., LivingSocial), some with a national focus (e.g., Woot) and some (e.g., Thrillist) which bridge the two.  And the people who do those mailers (e.g., Valpak) are getting into that business as well.

    There’s a lot of competition from entrenched players already.  There’s going to be growing competition from big players (e.g., Google, Facebook).  Pretty soon, everyone is going to be playing this game.  Is Groupon really the killer implementation?  Or are they getting out just in time?  Again, I’m no valuation expert but I think these numbers are just wild.

    UPDATE 2 1/14/2011

    Interesting take from Greylock, one of the VCs investing in Groupon.  They say two things for why they invested in Groupon:

    1. The power of data.  I’m not convinced Groupon has any inherent advantages or different slants on this subject to merit a stratospheric valuation.
    2. This is a winner-takes-most kind of market.  I see no justification for that assertion.  On any given day, I’ll peruse a few of these offers and purchase based on what’s most interesting to me, not the source which originates them.  I don’t think they have any inherent advantages in offer acquisition that make their offerings any better than anyone else’s.  There are so many local merchants that consolidation in merchant acquisition is unlikely to occur.  I can think of no example where there has been this consolidation other than maybe Craigslist and eBay, and their approaches (zillions of items) are different than Groupon’s and others’, where they offer one or several deals a day.  I think there’s room for many players and that you will actually see aggregators step in and consolidate multiple offers from multiple sources in a single email.  (Come to think of it, I should start that business.)

    Filed under: Ad-Supported Business Models, Marketing, Social networking, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

    Facebook Messages: Why This Could be Even Bigger than Anyone Thinks

    Posted on November 17, 2010 by jyarmis

    It’s hard to imagine that anything Facebook does, let alone something on the scale of Facebook Messages, could be underappreciated, but I believe that’s the case here.  Facebook Messages could be “the next big thing.”  I’m not prepared to anoint Messages as such, yet; I haven’t even been blessed with being one of the platform’s first users and thus haven’t had the opportunity to see if the reality is remotely in the league of the promise.  But the promise is huge.  Facebook has an enormous opportunity to capitalize on several intertwining trends.

    • Email ceased being a productivity tool a decade ago or more.  We are overwhelmed by the volume of email and have few good tools for harnessing it.  My friend and former colleague Bill Kirwin, the godfather of TCO, has spent good portions of the last few years focused on this issue alone.
    • Email has become the bearer of malicious payloads as much or more than it has been the source of valuable information.  Simply put, without email, viruses, phishing and spam are much less prevalent.
    • At the same time, a new generation of users views email as the platform of last resort.  If you ask a teenager today what they use email for (and I have a focus group of two of my own), if you really parse through the answer, they use email to communicate with old people.  The new generation uses Facebook, IM, Skype, Twitter (maybe) and texting as more immediate, personal and relevant forms of communication.  Email has been forced upon them.
    • The prominence of email has made us slaves to Outlook and the inbox.  We have the appearance of productivity without really being productive.  We have the appearance of communications without really sharing anything valuable.  We have the appearance of progress but that progress is fragile and is broken the moment the next person in the thread doesn’t click reply.
    • Email is directed to people, not communities of interest.  The maintenance of email communities (groups or mailing lists) is slow if not glacial, incomplete and organizationally driven, not user-driven.
    • As we move to increasingly mobile platforms, we need a communications system that blends both the comprehensiveness of email with the urgency of texting.  Today they co-exist uncomfortably on the device.  Unifying them is an opportunity, if not an imperative.

    For all these reasons and more, a replacement for the email platform is necessary.  It’s not like there haven’t been attempts.  Ray Ozzie spent much of his pre-Microsoft career trying to introduce new platforms (including Notes and Groove).  He was met with limited success at best and his tenure at Microsoft will not be remembered by progress on this front.  Google with great fanfare introduced Wave, only to abandon the platform, retreat and introduce Buzz, whose market impact has been approximately zero.  When Google, Microsoft and Lotus/IBM fail at something, you realize the enormity of the challenge.

    So why might Facebook succeed where these others have failed?

    • Taking a page from the Microsoft playbook, Facebook is adopting an “embrace and extend” solution to the problem.  Rather than introducing an entirely new platform and hoping to migrate its users to the new approach, over time, Facebook instead has taken the email metaphor — the installed base, if you will — and has added capabilities that bring the new forms of communication under the email umbrella.  If you’re an email user, you’ll find the approach familiar.  And if you’re a next-generation “Facebook communicator,” you’ll find the new platform is familiar and extends your capabilities in interesting ways.  If Facebook can truly blend the email world and the IM/text world to the benefit of both, this is a massive accomplishment.  I still say “if” because the requirements of the two environments don’t lend themselves obviously to a merging but if Facebook has done a good enough job here, then they are well-poised to realize the kind of success I’m positing here.  Note, “good enough” is usually the market requirement for massive success.  In fact, in a Gresham’s Law-like way (I have to leverage my college economics major every once in a while), good enough has usually been better than great in the technology space so in fact some of Messages’ shortcomings can and should be overlooked.  View someone saying “Messages, while interesting, is not as good as ‘x'” as a success indicator, not a shortcoming.
    • With over 500 million users (probably 600 million by now), Facebook is one of the rare platforms that has bridged the two user groups with their distinct communications styles.  Email is an activity of the old (get over it, friends!), texting is an activity of the young.  But Facebook is actively used by nearly half of all Americans (and even greater percentages of people in other countries).  This gives them a bully pulpit from which to reach both categories with neutral footing.
    • Facebook itself has been responsible for a change in the way we communicate.  No, they didn’t invent the status update but they’ve certainly been the largest beneficiary of it and have evolved it in meaningful ways.  And this is not just a consumer-driven phenomenon.  Hardly a day goes by when I don’t have a conversation about what I’d loosely call “Facebook for the enterprise.”  They’ve already evolved the way we communicate which gives them a great opportunity to continue to evolve it while subsuming existing forms of communications.
    • It’s frequently the case in the technology industry that a successful platform follows a platform that failed by overreaching.  Windows 3.x was a step back from OS/2.  The Internet was actually a step back from many more specialized platforms that sought to do so much more than “just” hyperlink.  Thus, Messages, following a litany of failed “groupware” approaches and major platform initiatives (Sharepoint, Wave) has the requisite market conditioning and, perhaps this time, the market timing.  (I don’t want to hear from you that Sharepoint isn’t a failed platform.  It has certainly achieved some degree of ubiquity but that’s more a testament to Microsoft’s tenacity and doesn’t really reflect its market impact or certainly its leadership.)
    • It’s the subject for another upcoming blog post but I don’t think social capabilities have been understood and embraced nearly as much as they’re going to be.  “Social” is more than status updates and tweets.  It transforms application categories and the way users relate to each other, and the communities, companies, suppliers and friends with whom they interact.  Adding social capabilities to the communication platform in a fundamental way is going to happen, and Facebook has as good a vision as anyone and is better-positioned than anyone to make that happen.

    For all these reasons, I’m excited by Facebook Messages.  We need a new platform that blends the urgency of texting and IM with the familiarity and functionality of email.  Messages is the leading contender to do just that.  Can they fail?  They certainly have ample opportunity, and track record to do that.  Their last attempt at a “game changer” — Beacon — didn’t end well.  Because I correctly identified Twitter in a February 2008 research note (“Twitter:  The Most Important Platform You’ve Never Heard Of), I’m often asked “what’s the next big thing.”  Wave, no.  Foursquare, no.  FriendFeed, no.  We don’t have one of these a year.  Messages?  I’m not prepared to declare it “the next big thing,” but it’s the first thing in years that I think has that potential.

    Filed under: Mobility, Social networking | 1 Comment »

    Android Tablets: Why I’m Waiting

    Posted on November 16, 2010 by jyarmis

    You know I’m a gadget junkie.  I’ve been optimistic about Android for several years now.  I own an Android-based phone and am thrilled with it.  I’ve carried various Windows-based tablets for most of the last seven years.  You’d think, therefore, that I’d be the first person to get one of the new Android-based tablets coming to market, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.  But no, I haven’t bought one nor have I added one to a holiday wish list.

    The Samsung device has several fatal flaws which rule out any portable electronic device for me, which is also why I’ve never carried an iPod or iPhone.

    • Replaceable battery.  I will never, ever, EVER carry a portable electronic device — at least what I’d call a mission-critical one — that doesn’t have a replaceable battery.  If I can’t replace the battery, there are so many potential negative outcomes to that, I’m not interested in your device.  We’ve all seen it.  People sitting in conferences around the perimeter…because that’s where the plugs are.  Picking and choosing what you do with the device as the day goes on as you attempt to conserve electrical power.  I carry a replacement battery for my Droid so that I never have to worry about this.  I’m free to do whatever I want to do with my device — what I bought the device for in the first place!! — because power isn’t an issue.  If you don’t have a replaceable battery, power is going to be an issue.  Period.
    • Non-standard power chargers.  Is there anything more consumer-unfriendly than a proprietary charging plug?  I haven’t asked an engineer but nor have I heard any good reason why you can’t use a mini- or micro-USB plug.  I carry two or three cords like this and a variety of electrical sources (car and wall chargers; USB hubs) that power that plug.  If you’ve got a proprietary plug, I’m not always going to have it with me and I’m not always going to be able to find one when I need one.  Show stopper.  I won’t buy a camera, MP3 player or phone with a proprietary power plug.  I certainly won’t buy a tablet with one.

    The bigger issue for Android-based tablets is that the fit-and-finish of the platform is just not prepared for the tablet form factor.  Virtually all applications were not only designed for a smaller screen form factor, they don’t scale up well on bigger screens.  By optimizing for the small screen, they’ve actually sub-0ptimized for larger screens and you’re left with an experience that just feels wrong at best and doesn’t work well, or at all, at worst.

    This, ultimately, is the challenge, and opportunity, for Android.  Apple tightly controls the experience, for better in this instance and worse in others.  For Android to make a virtue of its diversity, it has to deliver great experiences across a diversity of platforms, not just enable them.  The learning curve for supporting these multiple experiences isn’t large but to maintain competitiveness with the Apple iOS platform requires great speed.  The early experiences of Android tablets is disappointing.  If I’m not eager to buy one, you’ve got a problem.  And I’m not eager to buy one.  Right now, I’m content to stick with my Droid, my laptop and my netbook.  (OK, my daughter’s netbook.  But she didn’t take it to college with her.)

    Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

    Dear Google: Buy Adobe

    Posted on October 27, 2010 by jyarmis

    Recent news reports have linked Apple and Microsoft as potential suitors for Adobe.  While Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan has thrown cold water on the Microsoft discussions and the rancorous relationship between Apple and Adobe renders an amicable partnership unlikely, one name has been absent from these discussions, and they’re the ones who should most likely want to buy Adobe, has the resources to do so and can build an extremely synergistic business case for the combination, and that’s Google.

    A brief look at the financials.  Adobe at this writing has a market capitalization of a little over $14 billion.  Google has $33.4 billion cash on hand and generated over $10 billion in operating cash flow in the last 12 months.  Not only does Google therefore have the financial wherewithal to make an acquisition of this size, it’s probably one of the few acquisitions of this scale (along with Salesforce.com; market cap almost $15 billion) that it could make without significant antitrust scrutiny.  While continuing to trash Adobe, it’s not like Apple could argue compellingly that Google shouldn’t be allowed to buy it.  (While we’re at it, Google should also buy Salesforce, but we’ll talk about that later.)

    So, why should Google buy Adobe?

    1. In a battle for the hearts and minds of developers, Google is missing key elements.  Yes, Android is a successful and growing platform but Google’s developer relations are no better than Apple’s, with both of them being substandard.  As Google grows out its platform ambitions, with Chrome OS on the horizon, having a well-developed developer relations program will be important in its battles with Apple and also increasingly Microsoft.  Do developer relations matter?  One could argue that one of the compelling reasons why early Windows beat IBM’s OS/2 in the marketplace after the Microsoft/IBM split in the late 80’s and early 90’s was because Microsoft had strong developer relations and after the split, IBM had to effectively start from scratch and was way behind even while having the technologically superior platform.  Developers matter, differentiated applications matter and so developer relations matter.  Adobe has a long history with them; Google has none.
    2. Google, despite its myriad product offerings, is effectively a one-trick pony:  advertising.  Of course, if you’re going to rely on one trick, this is a pretty good one to rely on, and Google is an ongoing financial juggernaut.  However, to realize their full software and platform ambitions, Google is going to need to broaden beyond advertising as the sole source of their revenue.  Adobe presents Google with great opportunities to grow into traditional software licensing models.
    3. And while offering traditional software licensing models, Adobe also presents some familiar-to-Google bottoms up enterprise opportunities.  Adobe has, shall we say, an interesting portfolio of enterprise software.  Traditional industry analysts (read:  Gartner) have always had a hard time characterizing Adobe since they don’t always neatly fit into Gartner Magic Quadrants or at least their products are missing certain features that Gartner considers key in its category definitions.  Adobe’s response has always been “we just meet actual customer needs.”  While they haven’t therefore neatly fit into architectural diagrams, Adobe has successfully penetrated enterprises with a bottoms-up, or more accurately middle-out, approach.  This fits well with Google, who <sarcasm alert> hasn’t exactly penetrated the enterprise through the front door. <end alert>
    4. While Google advertising opportunities have enabled “freemium” models to flourish on the web, paradoxically Google itself has not benefited from such models.  Over 98% of Google’s revenue derives from advertising and there are scant opportunities to upgrade from free Google products into revenue-producing ones.  Adobe offers several such opportunities, from consumer-oriented ones like moving from Picasa to Photoshop to enterprise-oriented ones like Acrobat.
    5. While Google has major cloud computing infrastructure initiatives in place, the early market has been dominated by key emerging competitors Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.  Adobe has interesting infrastructure elements that expand Google’s presence in the cloud architecture space.
    6. As noted earlier, Google’s enterprise approach is largely lacking.  One could have said the same of Apple, who has pursued a consumer-driven strategy for virtually all of its corporate life.  It was interesting to see, therefore, Apple’s announcement earlier this week of a partnership with Unisys to better help integrate Apple technologies (notably the iPhone and iPad) into enterprise architectures.  Google, too, must pursue external relationships to meet real customer requirements but an Adobe acquisition would give Google some much-needed internal support capabilities as well.  As mentioned earlier, I still believe Google should acquire Salesforce.com to expand its software and platform capabilities and to dramatically expand its enterprise support capabilities.    Google is going to have to either acquire Salesforce or get serious about competing with them.  Either way, an Adobe acquisition would be a step in the right direction.
    7. Lastly, this makes sense as a defensive move.  To the extent Apple and/or Microsoft are seriously looking at Adobe, it would hurt Google were they to acquire Adobe, necessitating Google to adopt a piecemeal solution to the elements addressed above.

    So why should Adobe be interested in a Google acquisition?

    1. While I hardly embrace Steve Jobs’s bombast about Flash, it’s clear that HTML5 presents a significant challenge to one of Adobe’s major and enduring platforms and thus from a purely financial perspective, this may be the best time to sell.
    2. Adobe’s cross-platform arguments diminish in a world where there are fewer platforms and different requirements.  If, as I have argued, the mobile world is coalescing around Apple IOS and Google Android, and Adobe’s presence on one of those platforms is insecure at best, the rationale for an Adobe solution is dramatically diminished.  Further, with the different requirements of a mobile platform, with its lesser hardware power, the ability to support interim software layers is not as clear-cut as on the desktop, or in the cloud.  Mobile devices are heavily about the integrated experience and Adobe doesn’t play well against that requirement.
    3. Adobe is a better fit with Google.  With Microsoft and Apple both, there are significant overlaps in the product portfolio and/or minimal interest in some of the pieces with the the likely result being that core Adobe products and platforms are discontinued or sold off.  There is little to no overlap with Google and yet strong synergies; thus the ability to preserve the product portfolio, and the driving vision behind it, remains largely intact.

    Google and Adobe…better together

    Filed under: Ad-Supported Business Models, Cloud Computing, Mobility | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

    Technology Change: Slower than I Think but Faster than You Think

    Posted on October 26, 2010 by jyarmis

    Last week, I gave a presentation to a “traditional” publisher on the impact of new technologies on their business.  This is someone who has a very successful and profitable “dead trees” business and my mandate was to come in and challenge their thinking with regards to the impact of technology on their business.  Their managers feel no sense of urgency to do anything about new technology now because the existing business continues to thrive and despite the prognostications of industry pundits, they have yet to feel an impact on their current business and thus are in no rush to actually invest in new approaches (even while it’s fun to think and talk about them).

    This caused me to reflect on the technological change I have seen in my lifetime.  I have spent 31 years focused on “disruptive technologies.”  I started working on PCs in 1979 — two years before IBM launched its PC — and I’ve witnessed some amazing technological change in those 31 years.  As an observer of, and advocate for, those changes, I’ve come to an interesting and important realization.  As optimistic as I am about the pace and depth of technological change, I’m usually over-optimistic about the time frames in which it happens.  This was the case in the early Internet days and I believe is once again the case with regards to a new set of disruptive technologies.

    While I was never a wild-eyed proponent of Pets.com or Webvan, I am certainly guilty of feeding into the hype that led to their elevation.

    So, we technology pundits are overly optimistic.  No big news there.  However, there is big news:  while we may be overly optimistic in the short-term, we’re actually overly conservative in the medium-term!  Ten years ago, the Internet bubble was about to burst.  All those wildly optimistic claims about how the Internet was about to change everything were going to be laid to waste.  Yet here we are, ten years later, and the truth is that the Internet has changed everything.  It has reached a point where, if you lose your Internet connection at work, you just go home or go somewhere where you can get that Internet connection because without it, well, you just can’t do your job.  And it’s not much different at home.  When I lose my cable TV connection, well, there are lots of other ways to entertain myself and, short of a major sporting event (on the level of the World Series), I feel no obligation to leave the house.  Lose my Internet connection?  I may wait around an hour to see if it comes back but anything longer than that and I’m contemplating a run to Starbucks or Borders or somewhere else where I can grab a Wifi connection.

    The truth is that the Internet revolution is more profound than even we wild-eyed optimists thought it might be a decade ago.  We had the timing wrong but, even more significantly, we had the impact wrong, and weren’t wild-eyed enough.  And guess what?  We’re doing it again.  And this time again, it is going to happen more quickly than you think…and more quickly than the Internet took.

    So, what is “it”?  Regular followers know that I have been talking about the “perfect storm” of disruptive technologies — social, mobile and cloud — for over three years now.  My premise is that each of these, while an interesting phenomenon in their own right, actually serve to amplify each other such that the overall market impact is greater than if any one of these phenomena were occurring in isolation.  That amplification effect is one reason why I think that the medium-term impacts of these technologies tend to get understated.

    There are two other unique characteristics of these new technologies that I think will cause their impact to be so significant more quickly:

    • Pace of change
    • Economics

    With regards to pace of change, the fact that we’re heavily Internet-connected enables us to embrace new capabilities much more quickly.  In the early Internet days, we were faced with the daunting challenge of upgrading connectivity models from dial-up to broadband and to deploying new software (the browser) on a large number of machines.  Having done that now, we’re in a position to embrace new Internet models of distribution (e.g., cloud computing) with very little friction.

    Mobile also has some radically different market dynamics than the desktop that enables, and leads to, a faster pace of change.  First of all, we’re embracing the mobile Internet even faster than we did the desktop Internet, as famously called out in a Morgan Stanly report.  In fact, they project that the number of mobile Internet users will pass the number of desktop users in the next 3-4 years.  The dynamics of the mobile market are also very different than those of the desktop, enabling more rapid change.  First of all, this is a much larger market.  Cell phones of all kinds (not just Smartphones) are shipping approximately 1 billion units per year, or about 4x that of the desktop market.  These will rapidly shift to Smartphones across the entirety of the market as prices plummet (in Moore’s Law fashion).  Even more striking, the average lifespan of a desktop or laptop computer is in the 3-5 years range whereas the average lifespan of a mobile device is 21 months.  That means we are changing over the installed base of a multi-billion unit market every two years or so.  There is very little installed base drag in the mobile marketplace!  And this perhaps understates the pace of change.  Granted, we’re in a period of software immaturity but the leading mobile software platform providers (e.g., Apple, Google, RIM) are upgrading their software platforms with significant new capabilities (both software and form factor) every 3-6 months.  That contrasts sharply with the desktop, where software advances are measured in 3-7 year cycles and are often met with significant market resistance because of the cost and disruption of upgrades.

    Bigger market, faster turnover, greater pace of change.  Yes, the impact is going to be felt faster than you think.

    Economics are also contributing to a faster-than-you-think impact of new technologies.  I refer particularly here to the impact of cloud computing.  In the past, for businesses to embrace this kind of technological change would have required massive capital investments on their part to deploy infrastructure to exploit the new platforms.  Cloud computing now enables companies to embrace new technologies in a much more flexible fashion, requiring little to no capital investment and as a result, much faster and more scalable implementations.

    I don’t want to get into an argument here about cloud computing.  That’s a discussion for another day.  Security?  Red herring.  In fact, I posit that over time you’ll find cloud computing solutions will have better security than on-premises solutions because the cloud computing providers have greater incentive to provide that security.  I have come across many CIOs who have an immediate negative reaction to the cloud.  I’ll ask them “if you were starting a business today…” and usually before I can complete the question, they’ll go “well, of course then I wouldn’t own infrastructure.”  The question therefore isn’t whether or not to do cloud but rather how and when.  But I digress.

    Bottom line, the flexible economics of cloud computing enable a more rapid embrace of new technologies than would be the case if companies had to make massive capital investments to support new software platforms like social and mobile.

    It’s easy to ignore we proponents of massive technological upheaval in the early days.  Yes, we’re probably overstating how impactful these technologies will be in 2010 and maybe even 2011.  However, ignore our forecasts for 2012 and beyond at your own peril.  And if you wait until then to start embracing the change, you will find the pace of the market change then to be so fast that you’re unable to keep up, let alone catch up.  My advice to that publisher was this is absolutely the best time to be embracing technological change, while you’ve still got a successful business to fund that change.  If you wait until your existing businesses start to feel the impact from technological upstarts, you might find yourself in a very uncomfortable position, akin to the way Barnes & Noble and Borders feel about Amazon.  It’s not inconceivable that one or both of them will be out of business within a year.  They didn’t feel the urgency to get involved early — and probably saw the demise of Pets.com as validating their thinking — but when things happened faster than they thought, they had already lost the innovation edge and, more importantly, the customer.

    We overstated the timing but understated the impact before.  I think we’re doing it again, and this time the change is going to be even greater, and so should your urgency.

    Filed under: CIO, Cloud Computing, Marketing, Mobility, Social networking | 4 Comments »

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