June 7, 2011

71) Google Wave

危 wēi  danger

A couple of weeks ago an entrepreneur I respect told me that Google had “lost it”.  He pointed to the high profile failure of Wave, which was released to the general public in May last year as clear cut evidence. At the time, Wave was heralded as the future of communication.  It was billed as a web-based platform and communications protocol that would merge the best features of e-mail, instant messaging and social networking, enabling users to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. Its launch was hotly anticipated, invitations were even sold for up to $70 on auction sites.

But, despite this initial buzz the uptake was poor, and Google announced that it was going to suspend the product’s development in August, just 3 months after launch.  As my friend said, surely this was clear evidence that Google was losing its way?

机 jī opportunity

I see the failure of Wave differently.  Firstly, I respect the fact that Google is still failing with product launches, albeit a high profile one in this case.  It appears that its Innovation Time Off programme (in which employees can use 20% of their time to work on any project that interests them) is still alive and kicking.  It would be easy for Google to sit back on its laurels and focus on its core business, after all its most recent quarterly profit was $2.3 billion.  But instead, it seems to retain its hunger: some launches end in failure but many of Google’s successes, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from Innovation Time Off.

Secondly, with the benefit of hindsight, I like the way that Google handled the ‘failure’ of Wave.  It made the decision swiftly, even though it had sunk significant resource into the project, and looked at the residual value in the product before choosing to retire the code absolutely. Much of the code was handed to the Apache Software Foundation and turned into Wave-in-a-box: it made sense to open up code that Google couldn’t obviously benefit from to the open source community as any developments would probably drive the usage of Google tools. In addition, Google held on to some of the code and I have started to see Wave functionality appear in other Google products.  Most obviously is its use in Google Docs “Discussions”. Discussions happen alongside documents, they can refer to selected parts of a document, and can be accessed both in the Google Docs interface and also by email.   You can watch a video on the product here.  Given that Google is now benefitting from many of the Wave features that were well received it seems odd to call it an total failure, and even more odd to point to it as an indication that Google has “lost it”.

At IDEO we enjoy developing sacrificial prototypes which we put in front of consumers to test hypotheses.  We call them sacrificial because they are designed for learning rather than as the final solution, we are never too emotionally wedded to them.  With the rapid compression of time and costs to launch startups the Wave story and Apple choosing to discontinue Mobile Me yesterday make me wonder if we will see a trend toward ‘sacrifical startups’ – launched to learn and test approaches with successful aspects rolled over into new startups or folded back into the core business swiftly even if the startup fails?

How About…

  • Judging companies not by their failures but by the blend of successes and failures and how they handle the latter?
  • Failing fast and looking for the value in the embers?
  • Launching sacrificial startups: specifically to learn from consumer reaction to individual parts of the offer?

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March 16, 2011

68) Quora – innovation from recombination

危 wēi danger

Adam D’Angelo quit his position as CTO of Facebook to create Quora, an online knowledge market that aggregates questions and answers on various topics and allows users to collaborate on them.  He explained at the time: “Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet.” He’s right that Q&A has been around for a long time, with sites such Answers.com and Yahoo! Answers both receiving over 40 million unique visitors a month.  In addition there are more specific solutions such as Stack Overflow (for professional and amateur programmers) which has 250,000 users. Surely Quora would struggle to differentiate?

机 jī opportunity

On the contrary, Quora has had continued strong growth: since receiving funding from Benchmark Capital last year (valuing the start-up at a rumored $86 million) it has grown to nearly 500k users. This is all the more interesting because none of its components are revolutionary, instead the Quora team seems to have done an excellent job of spotting and tapping into emergent online behaviours and trends. Robert Scoble wrote this great post on why he thinks Quora is the future of blogging, in it he references some of the things that Quora learned from other sites, for example:

  1. Quora learned from Twitter – if you ask your social network a question they’ll answer it.  Twitter also taught us that alerts when new people follow you or answer questions you follow are a great way to pull users back to the site
  2. It learned from Digg – a voting mechanism (in which you can vote an answer up or down) enables you to have the best quality answers rise to the top
  3. It learned from Facebook – if you build a news feed that pushes new items to the user their average time on site and page views increase
  4. It learned from the best apps – we all want a sense of community instantly so it imports yours from Twitter
  5. It learned from RSS readers – curation is a valuable service so it allows users to follow topics in addition to people
  6. It learned from blogs about how to do great SEO – it’s amazing how often Quora shows up at the top of Google searches
  7. It learned from instant messaging clients – it shows who is answering a question while they are answering it
  8. It learned from Wikipedia – people are willing to suggest edits and the whole process can be predominantly user-administered

Although none of these features are necessarily groundbreaking the combination is completely novel. Often innovations are just a recombination of existing features to create a new offer – in this case the Quora founders call their offer “reverse-blogging”. In other words, it’s a content system that starts with an interested audience and then fills in the content to serve that audience. The question is whether Quora can maintain the quality of answer as it grows beyond its Silicon Valley early adopters – when the numbers of questions outstrip the capacity of the informed to answer them.  But that’s a whole other blog post.

How About…

  • When launching a new venture – look for emergent trends in adjacent industries?
  • What features can you recombine to create a completely new offer?

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November 29, 2010

65) Dropbox Votebox

危 wēi  danger

I’ve written about Dropbox before here.  The file storing, sharing and syncing service is great, not least because of its simplicity.   In fact, I often reference it as an example of a company that did a great job of launching with ‘just enough’.  Too often companies kid themselves that they need more features, often to avoid launching (a strange defense mechanism?) or addressing negative feedback.  I’m not alone in loving the service, Dropbox now has more than 4 million users and its reach is truly global, as shown by this cool video showing its client activity:

With this success the feature requests came flooding in via email after launch, how would Dropbox ever be able to prioritise the right features?

机 jī opportunity

Dropbox’s solution is Votebox, a section on the website that lets users suggest and vote on what features should be developed next.  Votebox retains the simplicity of Dropbox while doing more than a basic forum – it enables users to nominate new features and vote on those that they would benefit from most.  Dropbox allocates regular users 6 votes per month and ‘premium’ users 9 votes per month.  Votebox also makes clear what the team is working on and celebrates new features launched.

The system is effective because:

  • Dropbox only works on the features most beneficial to its users
  • It stays true to its premium users (by enabling them to have more votes it ensures that it doesn’t just cater for the needs of the non-paying users)
  • It shares what it’s working on, reducing duplication of requests
  • The commenting feature enables debate by users, iterating feature ideas
  • Finally,  it acts as a marketing tool – reflecting the company’s continual development and often referred to by existing users – a quick Google search for ‘Votebox’ shows the number of users trying to drum up votes for their feature request.  @Dropbox:  why not make this easier and allow people to ‘share’ their requests and votes through social media?  Ironically, should I have put this idea on Votebox?

How About…

  • Remembering to only ever launch with ‘just enough’?
  • Creating an intuitive system for users to offer feedback and feature requests? GetSatisfaction (more consumer facing?) or ZenDesk (better as an enterprise solution?) might  offer simple solutions
  • Assigning importance to different user types?

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