Archive for the 'Business, Marketing, Product' category

The Other Competition

Sep 24 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

In my previous article, I talked about the need for the right mindset or philosophy  when looking at competitive products.

Here, I want you, dear reader, to realize that the competition is sometimes where you don’t expect it to be.

There are two types of competitors: the tactical, and the (for want of a better term) strategic.

Tactical competitors are companies or products you compete with toe-to-toe for the same market. For example, in an RFQ process, your tactical competitors are the other companies bidding on the same RFQ. Examples of tactical competitors are McAfee and Symantec in the PC security/anti-virus space.

Strategic competitors are those, which if successful, will wipe out your raison-d’être. They will cause such a large paradigm shift that your market will disappear beneath you. In the example of McAfee and Symantec, think about what will happen if Apple were to grab 95% of the PC market tomorrow. While Apple’s OS X operating system is not 100% malware proof, it is so much better than Windows that the need for McAfee or Symantec security products will mostly disappear. Yet you don’t think of Apple as a competitor to McAfee or Symantec.

Strategic competitors are harder to spot because they are often not on your radar screen. Most times, they are outside of your space, yours or your company’s area of expertise.

The only way to spot strategic competitors is to be ecosystem-aware i.e. know what makes up the ecosystem of products or services in the space that you are in, and understand the effect on the ecosystem if something changes either within it or on the periphery.

Every time a new product comes out, think about what the impact it will have on the ecosystem. This is particularly true for products that are launched with a great deal of buzz. The publicity surrounding these products can result in a snowball effect (of similar or complementary products) that can topple a pillar propping up the ecosystem.

You also want to watch influencers like Apple whose latest-and-greatest often change the world order, and cause a ripple effect on multiple ecosystems.

When you do spot a strategic competitor, can you do something about it? Most of the time, the paradigm-shift is larger than any single company.

The solution here is to be agile enough to re-tool and ride the new wave. Being able to do this counts towards beating your competition as most of your less savvy tactical competitors will probably not survive the shift.

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The Competition

Sep 22 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

Here’s a quote from my forthcoming book, The Art of Ben:

When evaluating your opponent, focus on his strengths for they may reveal your weaknesses. Focusing on his weaknesses will not necessarily reveal your own strengths. Rather, it reveals only your own arrogance.

When we look at a competitor’s product, we tend to look for the bad parts: what doesn’t work, the bugs, the poor user interface, experience, flow, implementation, performance etc.

We tend to want to look at our own product in a better light.

That is a perfectly human reaction. When I come up with what I think is a great idea, I want to put it on a pedestal and show the world how smart I am. I don’t want someone or something to come along and smash that “great” idea to smithereens with counter arguments and counter examples.

However, an idea is not great if it cannot withstand the weight of counter arguments and in the same way, a product is not great, if it cannot stand on its merits with respect to the competition.

Dealing with the competitor’s products is not just the product manager’s job. The company’s leadership has to set the tone:  that competing products are not dismissed out of hand as poor implementations and therefore don’t matter, that the entire organization take the threat of competing products seriously, whether in fixing the weak areas on one’s own product line, or improving the quality or just by a matter of better and faster execution.

This is difficult to do in a start-up organization. Partly because passion and enthusiasm drive such organizations and you don’t want to extinguish that with talk of the competition being better. Partly, because such organizations want to move fast and hence have little time and energy to look back at the competition.

In any case, it is better to be paranoid than sorry. And that is yet another saying from the Art of Ben.

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Apple’s new iPod Nano

Sep 14 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

I’ll be at IDF (Intel Developer Forum) today and after the mid-day exhibit hours, I’ll walk over to the Apple Store at Union Square and get myself a new iPod Nano.

Between myself and my kids, we have almost all generations of the iPod Nano.

We also have a couple of generation of the iPod Shuffle. But the Nano beats the Shuffle hands down in usability. If you have been frustrated by the “select playlist” double-click on the previous generation Shuffle’s remote control, you’ll know what I mean.

The new iPod Nano is very interesting in terms of what’s new: touch screen, multi-touch user interface, built-in clip etc. From a product point of view, what is more interesting is what is not in the new Nano.

If you look at different generations of any given product, you’ll notice that as the product evolves, it gets more and more features. A tiny 1977 Honda Accord hatchback sits in my driveway. Next to it is a 2007 Honda Accord, which is almost twice the size, and categorized as a mid-size car. A great example of feature bloat is Microsoft Office, which has so many features today that you need to Google to figure how to do anything with it.

Apple is not immune to feature bloat, but when that happens, it is usually in a very controlled manner and for a good reason. Bigger is no necessarily better at Apple.

Which brings us back to the new Nano. Size-wise, it is much smaller than the previous generation. Some features are also missing: camera and the ability to play movies/TV shows. While I don’t mind the missing camera (which was added only in one generation of the Nano), I do miss the ability to watch TV shows. In fact, I bought the previous generation Nano for that purpose: to watch Eureka episodes on the plane while on business trips.

What Apple did with the new Nano was to basically refocus the product. The new Nano is music-only: music with a very very cool user interface.

Apple would have gone the “normal”, evolutionary route: keep the features of the old Nano, but add a touch screen interface.

The resulting product would have been a ho-hum skinny iPod Touch.

Instead, Apple chose to come up with completely revolutionary version of the Nano. As a result,  the new Nano is a very unique and must-have gadget. Strategically, it is a way to bring consumers back to the iPod line.

This is a very brave move from a product management point of view: it is always easy to tack on more features, but hard to justify the removal of some. There will always be consumers who will be vocally disappointed at the lack of features that they are used to seeing. Witness what happened when Apple removed Firewire from the MacBooks.

But, hey, if you really must have video-playback and a camera, just go get an iPod Touch. It’s not a lot more expensive than the 16GB Nano.

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Dude! Where’s my stuff?! (Part 3)

Sep 08 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

Previously, I had talked about how today, with services like ZumoDrive and Dropbox, you can basically access your files from different devices. These services leverage the Internet as a common access point to store or sync your files.

Both ZumoDrive and Dropbox focus on the most common files that you want to sync between devices i.e. photos and music. ZumoCast also allows for video sharing. But that requires the computer containing the video to be powered on, running and connected.

For other kinds of files, like documents etc, there is no easy way to consume them. Sure, you can download them to the device you are using. However, this requires (1) you don’t mind leaving traces of those files on that device and (2) you have a software on the device that can handle those files.

In Dropbox’s video example, you could be trying to access your files at some random Internet cafe in Africa. Would you want to download your resume on the computer you’re using? Probably not.

Ideally, you want to be able to keep everything online with no residue on the device that you are physically using.

In the case of documents, there are a number of online services out there. Google Docs is one example. Microsoft Office Live is another, although I have not used it. I have used Zoho Docs a fair bit. It’s claim to fame is that it can handle Microsoft Office documents with pretty good accuracy.

So the ideal use case here, is that when you want to read a document that is in ZumoDrive/Dropbox, you click on it. Rather than asking you to download the document (as is the case for ZumoDrive today), your browser automatically uploads the document to Zoho and redirects to Zoho Docs so that you can view or edit the document. All this being done online, without actually downloading the document onto the local computer.

This can be done today as providers like Zoho feature APIs that other online services can use.

An example of how this can be implemented is the QuickWeb software that ships with HP’s consumer notebooks. When you are on webmail and want to view a Microsoft Office document attachment, the latter is uploaded to Zoho and you would view the document on Zoho Docs. In this QuickWeb example, the file is actually downloaded before being uploaded to Zoho. That is only because your average webmail provider is not integrated with Zoho in such a way that the document can be transmitted to Zoho directly from the mail server.

The above discussion assumes that we want to access our files from an insecure computer or device e.g. in an Internet cafe or on a computer that does not have the necessary software installed.

What about accessing these files from your own device?

On many Android devices today, you can find a copy of QuickOffice. This software allows you to read/edit Microsoft Office documents on your Android device. Versions are also available for other mobile devices.

On my MyTouch Slide Android phone, QuickOffice does not work with ZumoDrive or Dropbox. I have to first download the file I want to access, then launch QuickOffice. If I want to sync the file back for access from other devices, I will have to re-upload it.

On webOS 2.0, however, QuickOffice will be integrated with Dropbox, Google Docs, box.net and Mobile Me. As the screenshot (from Engadget) shows, you will be able to access your files that are stored on any of these online services.

This is a webOS 2.0 concept screenshot, so it is not clear if the files are sync-ed back online. It would ideal if that were the case. In this way, you can seamlessly access your documents from any device.

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Disclosure: I am a Senior Director, Program Management at DeviceVM and was responsible for delivering the QuickWeb product to HP. I am writing this article to express/share my own opinions and thoughts.

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