Kodak update: when all else fails, sue the iceberg

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Thomas Purves

A lovely visualization by Design language that’s been making rounds connects a couple dots from recent posts on this blog. Somewhat randomly, I had been musing both about how Kodak had the foresight to invent a “consumer” digital camera 35 frickin’ years ago and yet how did the whole camera industry completely miss the boat (or iceberg as it were) on mobile technology?

I like this visualization because I’m not surprised to see the company with the least actual presence in mobile with some of the most outbound lawsuits*. It also shows that Kodak must have seen mobile coming, they’ve got the patents.

On my last post Scott Smith commented

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met with a client who said, “well, we developed that back in 19xx, but we didn’t have the demand to do anything with it…”. Which means R&D ends up inventing random futures in various formulations at a 1000:1 ratio, then shelving them until an unknown window opens.

A lot of big innovation shifts don’t actually sneak up on us. My suggestion was that the necessary conditions and tipping points may be the only hard or even random part. It’s nearly as easy to be too early as it is to be too late with a new invention. Shifts (like the digital camera example) are often very well anticipated by any designer or engineer immersed in the field.

But what do you do as a firm if your best foresight poses fundamental existential business risk to your entire firm? Forget consumer demand, you’re also not going to see a lot of right-thinking managerial demand to productize those insights. What to do if you are Kodak in the sunset of the 20th century, when 90% of your business is making money from consumables that have no place in an inevitably digital future? Quite often, the very reason a disruption is so successful is because it democratizes a product or media by sucking a lot of money out of the system and/or transferring significant economic surpluses from producers to consumers. This kind of creative destruction is what drives growth and efficiency at the macro-economic level but it’s often catastrophic at the firm level for incumbents.

In the last decade Kodak’s stock price as methodically tumbled, the shares losing more than 95% of their value since their peak in the mid 90s. Kodak still comes out with new products and digital cameras. These business lines may well be fine and profitable, but they are also just a weak echo of the firms former dominance in photography.

So I guess my question for all the foresight gurus out there is this. What do you do when the best scenario you can see for your clients is a Kobayashi Maru?

We can see what Kodak did. A classic strategy, we’ve seen it all across the media industry as a great many incumbents try desperately to stuff the internet back in the tube(s): If you can’t turn the ship, sue the iceberg.

*Not to mention Nokia, another collapsing incumbent but that’s another story

Posted in Archive, dead media, foresight | 2 Comments

The dawn of mobile in retail

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Thomas Purves

One big idea I’ve been focused on a fair bit lately is what I call “Augmented Retail”. Augmented retail is about the potentially disruptive outcome of the inevitable convergence of mobile technology, ubiquitous connectivity and retail.

Mobile technology is not necessarily good news for your average retailer.

I’m sure by now almost all of you have googled something in aisles just to get some more info on product or to see if you were really getting a good deal. When amazon first launched their barcode scanning application, pundits described it as “amazon declaring war on retailers”. By Q2 of 2010, amazon announced they had already fulfilled a billion dollars worth of commerce from their mobile app. How many of those purchases might have been white-glove Amazon delivery of fine new TV screens ordered straight from the aisles of Bestbuy?

For traditional retailers, the trouble with mobile is that it puts tremendous power in the fingertips of consumers. If they so choose, average consumers could well be better informed on the true value and best pricing of products than even the store manager. By default, smarter and better informed consumers will pressure retail margins.

But dear brands and store owners there is hope. If you are clever, Mobile also gives you chance to build deeper relationships and engagement with your customers. Tomi T Ahonen, who was recently in town for Mobile Innovation Week, has a great post recently (with many real examples!) on what retailers can do with mobile.

So this blog [post] is not about mobile banking or mobile credit cards. It is not about ‘all’ mobile commerce, ie any digital goods sold directly to a phone do not really involve (or need to involve) bricks-and-mortar type of retail. So our music, movies, videogames, airline tickets, insurance etc do not require a separate visit to a retail establishment, because the service (or proof of purchase of service) intended (music, movie, game, air ticket, insurance etc) can be delivered completely to our phone.

That is only a minority of our retail. What of the locksmith, the hairdresser, the dentist office, the florist, the clothing retailer, supermarket and drug store – the typical ‘high street’ or ‘mainstreet’ shopping experience in any small town on the planet. What of them? If you need your locks changed, that cannot be done ‘remotely’ via a mobile phone or the PC. Or your haircut? Can’t be done directly via mobile. Mobile can show you what your new haircut might look like, virtually, but the actual hair still needs to be cut with actual scissors by an actual hairdresser or barber. That can’t be fulfilled via mobile. So lets look at the real bricks-and-mortar retail establishments. What is the role of mobile to them?

Its three-fold. There is ‘marketing communication’ (ie advertising) we can deliver to our customers before they come to our store – and use mobile also to ‘drive foot-fall’ ie drive actual human visitors to our stores…. [In store]
The clever part comes to allow customers to engage with you when they are in-store. … [and After-Store] The part least understood so far, is the after-store experience.

Anyway read the whole thing, good stuff: Lets Talk About Mobile in Retail – Tomi T Ahonen.

While I love Tomi’s examples in this post, they mostly relate to using mobile to drive more business through existing retail business models. There’s even more to think about in terms of how could you change retail models entirely. Can you close sales before the customer even gets to the store? Can you use mobile speed or eliminate checkout lines? Are there premium or follow-on services that you could be delivering or billing for through mobile? Could you use mobile to deliver unique price-discriminated offers to every single customer (e.g. could you sell packaged goods the same way airlines sell airplane seats?)

What is clear is that mobile in retail will be a spectacularly large opportunity over this coming decade. So get busy.

Posted in Archive, augmented retail, mobile | Leave a comment

Dead media watch: the web is dead

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Thomas Purves

Somewhere on a dusty shelf or storage box, I have this old issue of Wire Volume One two containing the strident prediction: “Tired: lynx, Wired: Mosaic”. Lynx is/was a text-only terminal app used for navigating a relatively obscure hypertext protocol, fancifully called the World Wide Web. NCSA Mosaic, was the first popular graphical web browser, which very soon became a little app you old-timers may recall called “Netscape”. The rest, they are now saying, is history.

If you’ve followed this blog for years, you know I love to track dead media. I’ve followed the death of print, of video stores of bloggin and many more. Wired themselves have even quoted me on the subject. Well the good folks at wired (ironically the magazine that most embodied the birth of the web) have really done it this time. This time, they’ve declared the whole web a dead medium.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.

The venerable Marshall McLuhan teaches us that all media has a natural lifespan. This is because new media inevitably makes room for itself by obsolescing, replacing or just crowding out old media. While some may last much longer than others, all media eventually die. For better or worse, the indomitable human spirit is just too good at creating new things. As the pace of innovation has so quickened in recent decades and centuries, the average useful lifespan for even our most clever creations, seems to get shorter and shorter. For those of us fascinated by dead media, the graphic above provides a beautiful visualization of how new media propagate like wave functions. The grow, they crest and eventually break. Each media seem to expand and taper off to their own idiosyncratic schedule. At least until new media inevitably cascade over top. The pixels don’t lie.

Sorry kids, clearly the web is dead. Long live the web.

LINK: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet [wired.com]

UPDATE: TVO’s Jesse Brown posted a hilarious video rebuttal “Wired is Dead“. Of course, Jesse should know better. Even if only half-true, the other half of the fun of declaring anything dead, is purely for the trolling. Good job Wired.

Posted in Archive, dead media, deadmedia, technology | 4 Comments