Today's
Wall Street Journal tells a tragic tale of unanticipated consequences. It seems that many AIDS sufferers in South Africa are not taking their medicine in order to make themselves REALLY sick. Why do this? Because only when one is terribly ill are you eligible for a disability payment which creates cold hard cash. The AIDS drugs are then not taken because people who can't get jobs or find other means of employment want that disability payment. It's gotten to the point where some individuals are infecting themselves to become sick enough to qualify. There has got to be a better policy than this!
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- Posted Admin on April 07, 2006
I've probably spent a solid 6 hours with Apple people on the phone, trying to figure out why my shiny new iPod with video and photos won't sync properly. They told me it was my computer. They told me it was the physical memory. They sent me an incomprehensivel 'knowledge base' article which was so vague that it didn't say to do anything.
Then, I downloaded the most recent update to iTunes and voila! Everything works swimmingly. Which might be a problem because I am now feeding my "Daily Show" addiction. Here's hoping Apple gets its act together so we don't collectively face these frustrations in the future.
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- Posted Admin on March 28, 2006
I was recently asked to comment on Internet selling of software:
Internet sales of software has obvious advantages: it is vastly less expensive than shipping physical products; allows a company to develop direct relationships with its end-users (as opposed to those relationships being filtered through distributors) and can (when done right) provide the capability to custom-tailor solutions to specific target segments. For these reasons, I think we can expect to see those companies that can figure out a profitable business model for internet software sales move aggressively into this area.
The challenges of Internet sales are also daunting. Protecting one’s intellectual property will become increasingly challenging, since the cost of duplicating digital products is virtually zero, creating a huge incentive to illegally copy software.
The model for Internet selling is also different than the classic product to distributor to customer model. The would-be Internet software firm has to now perform the functions – marketing, branding, and creation of awareness – that distributors conventionally handled, which can require entirely new skills. This can make the sales force in place obsolete.
Internet selling also has to compete with the problem that firms that ‘grew up’ as Internet-based retailers tend to offer lower pricing than their more conventional competitors.
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- Posted Admin on March 28, 2006
I was recently asked about the emerging practice of replacing payment for services with watching ads. Here are some thoughts:
The practice of trading ad-watching for bill payments has been tried before, without very good results (remember
e-machines in its first incarnation?).
Nonetheless, entrepreneurs continue to try. Some recent experiments are with the free phone lookup service that promises to replace the $1.50 fee charged by operators with a free lookup, provided that the caller is prepared to sit through an ad first.
The advantage to a company is obvious: they can obtain a bigger footprint and more users by offering services that can be used without an out-of-pocket cost.
The big disadvantage of this approach is that the people you will tend to attract are those with more time than money, when the people advertisers tend to want to reach are the ones with more money than time. So you actually create a self-selected group of particularly undesirable users for many offerings if you offer this to the general public.
If you could conceive of a way to target the segments, however, you might have a winning formula. Say that your prime targets are people with a certain interest – say, women who enjoy needlepoint. If you could convince the needlepointers that the ads they will hear will be targeted to their specific interest, and the advertisers that they are targeting desirable customers only, then an operator might have a winner, because the service adds value to both parties. So yes, if there were enough of such targeted niches, it might work.
The big dilemma is that for many extremely desirable customers, sitting through ads, no matter how targeted, is considered a waste of time.
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- Posted Admin on March 28, 2006
Last year, my good colleague Geoffrey Moore asked me to have a look at a book project he was working on, which I did. The book is now out and I think it is terrific. He argues for continuous innovation, identifies different kinds of innovation that make sense in different boundary conditions, and (one of the best ideas) suggests frequent recycling of resources rather than the grow-and-downsize pattern a lot of companies get themselves into. It's called "Dealing with Darwin" - available on Amazon. Definitely worth reading for anyone concerned with innovation and renewal of their organizations.
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- Posted Admin on January 27, 2006
