I have to say, once you miss a couple of post times, it's really easy to let blogging slip as a 3rd tier priority. Now, here I am, 7 months later, needing to thank my loyal readers again for their patience and sticking with me. I guess I should just acknowledge that my efforts will be intermittent, and then make a best effort to not be.
This time, the habit got broken when I started an intense contract that within a few weeks, quickly crowded everything else out. At the same time, I was taking Vicodin to help ignore my broken foot, which both made it harder to concentrate on work, let alone a blog, and made me fall asleep much too readily. I know -- excuses, excuses. To get back in practice, I've been posting some comments on other people's blogs, but now the juices are flowing and it's time to get back at my own.
Hint: Vicodin Can be Very Disrupting
Lot's has happened since my last post, as you might imagine, and I'll be trying to bridge the gap as I go along. I have some important news to share as well, but that will have to wait a few more weeks, so just know that something exciting is happening soon.
Since I've been out of touch a while, these first few posts back are going to be lighter than usual, and round the circle on some old things before I move onto weightier material.
American Idol Redux -- How did we do with the analysis and predictions?
My old guilty pleasure, American Idol, ended a few weeks ago, and I got to reflecting on the dynamics of the show itself and whether an article I wrote just before last year's finale would prove to be prophetic on review. I talked about how AI was being disrupted, and the producers were either ignoring the problem, or didn't get it. In my analysis of why, I offered some prescriptive changes that they needed to undertake to avoid an otherwise inevitable fate. So, how did I do?
American Idol rules the roost; as #1 rated show, it has become complacent and resistant to necessary change and highly susceptible to disruption
Any changes have become largely cosmetic (incremental "sustaining" innovations), and they've "overshot" the audience needs on the "slickness dimension" and no longer approximate an "authentic" experience
The reality that creates ratings for Fox is that only a couple of the top 12 are actually good enough to have a chance at winning. The rest are there to become the train wrecks we want to vote off, to sass back at Simon, to sing gloriously out of tune and make us laugh, to impress with their self-absorption or self-delusion or just plain wacky personalities, to do whatever they do with Paula, and most of all, to give the audience time to get to know the eventual winner and build a following to buy their records.
The ruse being perpetrated is that the show is really a singing competition, when in reality the producers have constructed a promotional stage which sells lots of advertising (because of the entertainment value in seeing train wrecks get voted off the island) and a vehicle for selling pop records, crafted in the form of a quasi-reality show
A large minority of the audience has seen the wizard behind the curtains and tired of the deception, and using the power of the web, started to turn the tables on the show's producers, exposing the sham and actively working as a block to "Vote for the Worst", keeping the train wrecks going as long as possible at the expense of singers that the judges and producers actually wanted to "win". Last year, this resulted in the best singer (by any objective measure) being voted off early and two mediocre performers making it to the finale. The resulting winner's album was awful, and sold miserably (opening week sales for Jordyn Sparks first AI record were less than 1/2 same stat for Fantasia, the previous worst-selling AI winner, and only about 40% of the same stat for Taylor Hicks, who was generally considered a bomb and was dropped by his label).
The voting system that Idol uses is suspect to begin with. By asking the audience to vote for their favorites, and as many times as they want, they have created a system which generates revenue but can't reliably identify either the best singer or the audience favorite(s). Even superior voting systems (audience votes for the worst and the person getting the most negatives is eliminated, one vote per person, one ballet with yays and nays for all contestants tabulated, it is open to manipulation, but the way it is, the best singers and performers are routinely voted off several weeks too early.
Because of the above, the grand prize of a recording contract has become meaningless, and even a bit of an albatross. The contestants voted off early routinely get recording contracts and outsell the winners, because they a) can sing better, b) have more control over their albums (AI doesn't dictate what they can sing or how it gets produced), and c) therefore better songs, or at least songs they are better suited to sing, get on their albums.
Note that to try to deal with the last point, the judges practically fell over themselves this season to tell the voting audience as bluntly as possible who they thought needed to go and who should stay in an apparent effort to ensure that one of their favored singers actually won this time. They became so transparent about it, that Paula got caught offering judgment about a song that hadn't yet been sung, casting the wizard's curtain wide open.
The above factors are causing audience disenchantment, and eating into viewership.
Are these predicted results actually happening? If so, how are they manifesting?
Viewership in 2008 was down an astounding 7% from 2007
In a year where the two stars were considered "hot" guys, the primary viewing audience of women aged 18 to 34 was down by 18%
The median age continues to skew ever upward, from mid 30s a few years ago, to 42 today. Hardly the prime music buying age group.
The over 50 age group has increased in viewership.
All this suggests increasing irrelevance to the trendsetting youth audience, boredom among core fans, and disenchantment and disenfranchisement from the process. Typically when this sort of thing begins, it is irreversible because by the time executives acknowledge it is a serious problem (whether the product is a tv show, a newpaper, or a me-too generic cell phone, it's too late to make the major changes necessary to right the ship.
Will American Idol will take my advice? There's no doubt they have to do something and we're highly likely to see some changes next year, but the question is, how will they diagnose what's going on, and therefore come up with appropriate solutions. (It's at this point that I should helpfully point out that if they want to get the skinny on how to counter this disruption before it kills the show, I'm available as a consultant.) Here's a little free advice:
The dynamics are old, and some highly visible changes are necessary. First to get the shake up should be the judging crew. Only Simon is core to the program -- it's time for Paula and Randy to go. Besides, the show needs more authenticity, and you can always count on Simon to say what he thinks in an entertaining way.
Sacrifice some of revenue stream from voting to create a system that isn't as vulnerable to manipulation (people need to believe that their votes are meaningful if they're going to keep paying attention and spending money to vote).
Recognize that music trends don't stay the same forever. There was a minor nod in this direction this year as David Cook got more kudos and promotion from the judging crew as the show progressed. The interesting thing about him was that he already sounded like a lot of what's on the radio, and his looks and personality didn't hurt either, so it was easy to imagine him as the winner.
Jason -- CATS is sung by Cats?! -- Castro
Most of the material that gets sung on the show is from a time before these kids were born (was it such a big surprise that Jason didn't know that CATS showstopping Memory was sung by an old dying female cat?), so it isn't that surprising that it's more popular with people older than 50 than with teenagers and 20 somethings. It would help the producers to look at this from a "jobs to be done" perspective, rather than a "what we want to sell" perspective. The job to be done is to engage the youth audience (primary music buyers), identify a new "star" that they relate to, and create records that are current and interesting to that audience. Like Chris Daughtry did (but then, he had the advantage of being voted off and picking his own band and music -- hmmmm.)
Understand that superstar singers and bands sing hit songs. After spending most of the season telling contestants that song selection is critical, how much sense does it make to give your winner songs which don't fit their style (make a blues guy sing a sugary pop song, for example), or which are simply crap (letting amateur song writers write stuff that is total trash musically and lyrically) and then asking a newly minted winner to make it a hit song is absolutely nuts.
One possible voting system that could work better would be to count song downloads from iTunes in the 24 hours following the performance show. Even if it cost the same as texting in a vote, the fact that you get the song with it would be a big discouragement to VFTW, and iTunes doesn't let you buy the same song twice (at least not easily).
These are some easy big things that would make things more authentic, freshen things up, and introduce some sustaining innovations to counter the disruption to American Idol's artful guise. There are several smaller things as well, but the above would be a healthy start. If not, watch for even bigger declines next year, and a franchise that may not recover from disruption.
Up to now, the Wall Street Journal has been one of the very few media outlets able to sustain a paying audience for its electronic version. They were able to do so because a) it was priced reasonably as an add-on to a paid newspaper subscription, and b) because of their unparalleled authority and quality of writing and research. Basically, the WSJ brand was what enabled them to charge for it when no one else could.
But, long term, that was a losing battle. Traditional journals have been slow to react to the changes wrought by blogging and social media, and even TV, cable and other media before that, and have been on a steady downhill decline for decades. It is very uncommon to see someone in their 20s or 30s reading a "real" newspaper, and the trust gap has been rapidly closing with the younger generation now considering newspapers and blogs on par.
In a very real sense, the print journal readership is dieing off, and as those in their 60s, 70s and even 80s take their subscriptions to the grave, they aren't being replaced with new readers. Holding out even this long to make basic changes to their business model has put at risk the very foundations of their business, namely the relevance and brand recognition that could sustain a future.
My partner at The Disruption Group, Mike Urlocker, has written extensively about disruption of traditional print media, so I will simply refer you to the lengthy list of analysis of this phenomenon that we've already done on the subject below:
It has been inconvenient for me, as a blogger, precisely because the WSJ stories often offer better information than other sources and a different take on the news, and so although I've referenced them, links to their articles have only been available to those who already had a paid subscription or who were willing to pony up to read that article. But yesterday, that all changed in a brilliant stroke of business strategy between an old titan and a new one.
Digg Makes Wall Street Journal Online Edition Free
As of yesterday, the Wall Street Journal now adds a Digg widget to the end of all their online articles. And, any article that gets 'dugg' will be available to read for free if you go through Digg's site to get there. The online journal is still a pay-to-read site, but this loophole ensures that anything I want to reference will be available to my readers, because all I have to do is Digg it. Ultimately, that means the online WSJ is now free, as long as every article gets dugg at least once. But, it also means that Digg gets a huge wallop of credibility and traffic thanks to the Wall Street Journal, and a whole new business audience. And, the Wall Street Journal maintains some vestiges of its walled garden, but will have sudden street cred and accessibility with bloggers because of Digg. Wow. I wonder if this deal has anything to do with Murdoch's pending takeover of Dow Jones -- it certainly is one of the smarter and more aggressive plays for a traditional media player to finally enter the new world.
This is a classic example of what Christensen labels "cramming" in his discussion of disruption theory. Basically, incumbents often ignore disruptions until it is too late to do anything about it, and then make valiant attempts to "cram" the disruptive innovations into their existing offering to try to forestall or block the disruption. This can be accomplished through a purchase or merger (e.g. when Time Warner and AOL conjoined), or as in this case, by incorporating the new thing into the old in a way that is a bit kludgey, but offers a strong mutual benefit and breaking down of the walls.
Most crams eventually fail. The disruption either still wins because the business models are incompatible, or they eventually subsume the old business into the new and the vestiges of the old simply die off. AT&T, for example tried various crams (buying NCR, buying cable networks, starting and then selling a mobile phone business, etc.) before selling each off and destroying hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value. AT&T very nearly died in the process, and it was only the merger back into its former spin-off baby bell that saved the AT&T brand from extinction. And, it still may not survive.
This cram, however, makes big sense for both sides, especially as an important signal by the Wall Street Journal that it will be a significant social media player. Still, it will depend on what they do next. Print, and the capital that is tied up in buildings, printing presses, distribution networks, and massive staffs (most of whom aren't necessary in the new blogging world) is an albatross that makes all newspapers unable to effectively compete against the low-end disruption of blogs. Even the venerable Wall Street Journal with its quality, brand and history can't survive forever if its subscribership continues to decline and advertisers either go elsewhere or demand lower rates or both. They still need to fundamentally rethink their business model and make much more significant changes in the very near term, or this could also be a signal of the beginning of the end.
But I think Murdoch is smarter than that, and I look for more exciting and surprising changes to come.
Significantly, there is no mention of this deal to be found in the Wall Street Journal itself (strange that they said nothing, but let every other major news outlet report it), or I would have dugg the article so I could insert it here to show you, however, the folks at Digg didn't ignore the news.
That's a rhetorical question. But, in a sense, the answer is yes. At least for me.
A few weeks ago I managed to break my foot by doing nothing more extraordinary than walking on it. I wish the story was more exciting, but I can't imagine a more dull and uninteresting way to break a foot.
There I was, packing for a business trip to Toronto when I stepped towards my suitcase and heard a loud, sharp crack, like a good-sized branch breaking, and next I knew I was on the floor in a lot of pain.
So, we went to emergency, spent about 4 or 5 hours to have a nurse practitioner confirm after looking at x-rays -- "Yup. You broke it", and then bring me a pair of crutches and a goofy looking styrofoam shoe, with instructions to see a foot doctor in the next two days. And, for all their trouble, they sent me a bill for over $2,000. Now, don't you wish your product or service had demand that was so inelastic that you could charge virtually anything for doing almost nothing? That is a business in serious need of disruption!
On to Toronto
So, I got home around 2:30am, and still had to finish packing to get to the airport first thing in the morning. You see, it wasn't just that it was too late to call anyone and postpone the trip, but it was an important strategy meeting, and people were coming from Ireland, so it would have been very costly and aggravating for everyone to cancel. Anyway, it gave me an excuse to do what I thought was the right thing.
I'm going to skip the gory details of travelling with a broken foot that isn't in a proper cast yet, because I'm going to have another post just to talk about the incredibly miserable service I got from an assortment of airlines (not just to Toronto, but in a subsequent trip to Portugal as well), and how poorly people with a handicap are treated. It was a real eye-opener, and I'm quite fortunate that in a few weeks, I'll be back to normal -- for many this is a permanent way of life. I had no idea how frequently the needs of people with handicaps are either simply ignored, overlooked and disregarded, or, that there's a seamy underside that looks to take advantage of people who need help. More on that in a future post.
So, in Toronto I learned to use the crutches, and narrowly avoided a face-plant on freshly cleaned marble floors thanks to the strong arms of two guys that were walking with me. Strangely, although marble is one of the most deceptive and slippery surfaces when wet, the cleaning staff apparently didn't see the need to put out signs warning that the floors were wet. Hmmmm. Basically, Toronto was a dry run for what it would be like flying to Portugal the following week to do a keynote address at the International Marketing Congress. I survived with the sponge slipper for a couple of days, and didn't break anything else, so we'd have to say that was a successful trip. Oh yes, the meetings were good too.
And then Portugal
As soon as I got home from Toronto, we got to a doctor and had the foot looked at. Surprisingly, he too confirmed that the foot was broken and charged me an additional $360 for that information. He wanted to put me in a full cast right away, but when he heard that I needed to travel to Portugal, he shook his head (I think in disgust and disbelief -- obviously he thought it was a mistake and that I should simply accept my fate and be immobilized for 6 weeks right then and there) and offered a temporary Air-Cast, which for all the world looks like a Robocop appendage. See picture. Oh yes, and another $250 in the meter for that. Neat contraption, in that it allowed me to deflate the airbags inside and/or loosen the straps as my foot and leg swelled on the plane. They advised me that if I didn't do this, there was a good chance my leg would need amputation by the time I got to the other side, and that was the reason not to put a proper cast on at that time. When all was said and done, we'd spent another half an hour, and another approximately $800 for almost nothing. Who needs the mafia when we can simply visit a doctor?
The Air-Cast did make me a little more mobile, and certainly protected my foot better than the sponge slipper, but it was truly a hulking and inconvenient thing to have to wear.
Of course, the whole point of this story was to get to Portugal. It was my first trip there, and despite the foot, it was an immensely enjoyable visit. The people were great, the food was great, the wine even better, the seaside was great, my hotel was nice, the culture was very comfortable, my hosts were gracious and welcoming. In fact, the only downside was the whole airport experience. Another industry in serious need of disruption, although not so much on the cost-saving low end -- this is already a well-served space, and the corners being cut are apparent everywhere. Oh well, as I said, a future post.
Disruption Point
Appropriately enough, the conference title was The Disruption Point, and my keynote put forward the thought that Disruptive Innovation doesn't happen without Disruptive Marketing, using some case studies and graphed results from The Disruption Group's disruption scorecard tool. That's something I'll be exploring here in more detail in the coming months, so I won't dwell on that now, but I thought as I was delivering my talk how ironic/appropriate it was that I was delivering a talk about innovation, marketing and disruption while I was disrupted in a wheelchair. And, how unique. I don't recall ever seeing a keynote address done from a wheelchair before, although I'm certain someone has at some point, if only at a conference for those bound to them. I suspect many speakers would have cancelled, but I had put a great deal of thought and effort into this and wanted to see how the audience reacted. I also wanted to go to Portugal, so the location definitely benefited the organizers.
What was especially interesting for me was to get a European view of disruption and innovation. The growing strength and especially the single market opportunity for the EU seems to have spawned a new spirit, willingness to take chances, ambition to grow, recognition of opportunities at home and around the world. In short, European capitalism seems to have new life and there is some great energy over there, and desire to learn and try new things.
In contrast, the US seems to be a litte bit on the ropes in comparison. I think we are weary of the Iraq war, the falling dollar and rising prices, especially for oil, fighting terrorism, dealing with airport hassles, the hangover from all the corporate fraud and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, the failing mortgage market and the toll it is taking on banks and homeowners, encroachment on freedoms that we have always taken for granted in the name of "enhanced security'" (an oxymoron if ever there was one). Basically, virtually everything is in the dumps at the same time. We need a good recession and some political and economic housecleaning to clear out the fog and get back on track.
But, I digress.
Again, in a near future post, I will give a review of some of the other interesting Disruption Point presentations at the International Marketing Congress. Suffice it to say that I was pleasantly surprised at the depth and quality overall. Although there were the obligatory sales pitch presentations from a few, overall this was a much more informative and well-assembled conference than I often see stateside. I really enjoyed meeting a number of the other speakers, and I think we will stay in touch and continue to share insights. It definitely helped build out my network some.
I especially enjoyed chatting with the president of the French National Marketing Association, Francois Laurent. He is a crusty guy with a train of thought at least equal to the controversy I cause, as you might discern from his blog and upcoming book title "Marketing is Dead". Here's what he had to say about the conference (automatic translation to English version here). I've been invited to write a guest post on his blog, and I'm hoping he will do the same for me. We'll let you know when that happens.
My presentation was well-received and despite the disruption, the trip to Portugal was very worthwhile.
Home of Disruption
So now I'm safely home, have a full cast on my foot, and am already chafing to get rid of it. It's certainly no fun trying to do anything from visiting the restroom, to going up and down stairs, to getting dressed, to bathing, to going out anywhere. As I said in a recent email, I can't believe that we can send miniature cameras inside someone's heart and do robotic surgery controlled by a doctor 1,000 miles away, yet when it comes to healing a broken bone, we still have this archaic and inconvenient 150 year old technology to fix things. I could have arthroscopic knee surgery, or laser eye surgery, and be back to 100% in a few days, but break a bone, and your life will be disrupted for at least 6-8 weeks.
Consider me broken and disrupted.
October 06, 2007
What I thought about on my summer holiday?! Of course, I'm way overdue for a post, even for a "what I did while I was away" post. As usual, thank you to my loyal readers for your patience. I have a backlog of ideas percolating, and hopefully I will have time to get to a few of them in the near future.
To get back into the swing, I thought I would recap some observations and thoughts from my time away, and direction I intend to be going over the next few months as a result.
It's funny, but when things slow down, and you simply observe and think for a while, some things become obvious that were always staring you in the face, and things you've previously observed and thought (and written) about either prove themselves true, or new insights percolate to the surface.
The Never-Ending Circle
In the category of "proving themselves true", predictions about the popularity of the iPhone and its likely success were pretty close to bang on, with Apple announcing 1 million sold just 74 days after the initial release. While many may have expected more sold, this is about the top end of what one would expect for a disruptive product. The usual pattern is to seep into the market relatively slowly and then really take off as subsequent versions add features and correct problems, becoming good enough for more and more people until they reach the tipping point and explode into mass market consciousness. With the unparalleled hype about the iPhone, it's not surprising that it was strong out of the gate, despite many noted complaints about all the ways it wasn't up to snuff (also very common for new disruptive products).
We also discussed the likelihood of a family of mobile handhelds using the iPhone platform, and already we have the next generation iPod, which not surprisingly is an iPhone without the phone. Along with that new product came a brilliant move of partnering with Starbucks to offer free Wi-fi access at any of their locations. It's actually pretty smart for both sides, because the days of charging for a Wi-Fi connection are almost over, and this is a way for Starbucks to be a bit ahead of the curve and benefit from the glow that surrounds the iPod and iPhone.
Watch for iPhone Sr. coming soon to an Apple store near you -- I expect it will be outfitted as a true business-oriented handheld, with connectivity to corporate systems, better security, more horsepower, a suite of office applications (note that Apple's iWork product was also upgraded over the summer to offer a spreadsheet tool for the first time and integration with Office 2007. With the "holy trinity" of word processing, presentations and spreadsheets now covered, the Mac becomes a lot more viable as a PC replacement, and will suddenly be "good enough" for many who've been waiting for a real Microsoft alternative, and the iPhone also gets closer to being a viable substitute for the notebook, especially for road warriors tired of airport security hassles. Don't know if we'll get it before Christmas, but I promise, the writing is on the wall.
Microsoft is probably wondering about some of the horrible mistakes made in Office 2007, such as imposing the "Ribbon" interface on power users who not only don't need it, but find that it slows them down. Personally I don't like it because it is a big keystroke waster, makes it hard to find all the things you knew, and it wastes a ton of screen real estate. Not offering an option to use the old menus or the keyboard interface was a really bad idea.
Microsoft's Office 2007 "ribbon". Seriously, someone thought this inelegant, productivity-sucking mess was an improvement! Click for a larger version if your stomach can handle it.
Although the XML underpinning was a great idea, it also makes it easy for someone like Apple who is better at tools to eat Microsoft's lunch, and with such a huge change in the interface, there's plenty of incentive, and what has anyone got to lose by giving Apple's products a try? It's a classic case of overshooting the users' needs on the one hand, and not fulfilling them on the other. And, it's the kind of arrogant decision that could only come from going so long without real competition. Ripe for disruption indeed!
It's also been noted that Apple's first OS upgrade for the iPhone turned some people's hacked toys into iBricks. I will be addressing that in a future post.
Relationships
For many, summer is a time to re-connect with family and think about relationships. Of course, we did that too, and got to attend that rarest of events -- my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Even more amazing, my wife's parents celebrated their 50th a couple of years ago. How many people can say that their parents and in-laws are not only still all alive, but have both managed to stay together for 50 years? There must be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow somewhere.
And, check out the picture. Gotta love the skinny people and skinny ties. They just don't make them that way any more.
In the category of "growing realization of the obvious", there's another sort of relationship that comes to my mind. Namely, the relationship between marketing and disruptive innovation. With a couple of decades of technology marketing experience behind me, and a current focus on disruption, you'd think I would have spent more time considering the connection. It's a relationship that's lived in my head without expression.
Strangely, Christensen comes close to alluding to it a few times in his books, but never really addresses it. In fact, it's almost as if all those innovations that he describes were so obviously fantastic products that they grew to dominate markets without anyone making the smallest effort to target the right niches and make them appealing to customers.
I've been developing a theory about that relationship, and looking for the evidence to test it. It's a simple but profound notion. Namely, that disruptive marketing is the secret sauce that takes the potential of a disruptive innovation and turns it into a reality. Yes, there are accidents along the way, and occasionally disruption happens without intent, but it's become increasingly clear to me, both by looking at missed opportunities for disruption, and at products that succeeded in turning the tables, even against the odds, that disruptive marketing is a necessary component.
I will be delving into this idea in more detail over the next several months with case studies, examples, definitions, and description of how disruptive marketing works. I hope to elicit a healthy discussion around this idea and get "war stories" from marketers about how they did it, and what disrupts versus what is plain vanilla.
Upcoming Presentation
Carrying on with this idea, I will be making a keynote address to the International Marketing Congress in Lisbon in a few weeks. The conference theme is The Disruption Point, and I will be addressing the connection between Disruptive Innovation and Disruptive Marketing. This will be the first public forum where I will be presenting my theories and observations, and I'm looking forward to a great discussion and debate.
More Books
Several books crossed my desk this summer, and I know that I fell asleep reading at least three of them. Lot's of good stuff to talk about there too, but, for now, here's a list -- click on any of them to find your own copy at Amazon.
This note is mostly for my regular readers who might not notice small changes I've made. I want to draw your attention to a new feature I've just added to my blog that you can link to from the sidebar. For quite some time I've told people that I would be reviewing important books that I recommend, and a couple of you have actually written to ask what books I think are important in a given subject area.
Unfortunately, doing a proper review takes a lot of time, and I haven't added any in several months. Given that there are dozens of books that I've meant to tell you about, this is definitely a case where a good solution is better than a perfect solution, so I've created a page with almost all the recommended books (more will be added in the near future), and any books that I've mentioned in postings, and made it easy for readers to order them if they're interested.
You'll see the Anti-Marketers Bookshelf icon at the top of the sidebar. Each listed book has a few lines of mini-review/recommendation so you can decide if the book is of personal interest to you, and link to Amazon if you want to find out more. For your browsing pleasure, I've also organized them by category because it's quite a long list.
If you do decide to read any of these recommendations, I'd love to hear what you thought about them. I will still be doing occasional full-blown reviews, but they'll be only selected items with important content that is relevant to themes I'm writing about.
iPhone Debut Rivals Harry Potter Mania, But Will It Last and Why?
Two days before the official launch of the iPhone, the pitch of media, pundit and public anxiety over perhaps the most anticipated new product since Windows 95 has reached a level only Steve Jobs could properly describe -- Insanely Great! And here I am, contributing to the noise, raising it even a decibel louder if that's possible.
How loud is it? As I finish writing this post, Technorati says that there are nearly 189,000 blog postings (in English -- there are nearly 305,000 in all languages) that talk about the iPhone. Compare that with 39,170 that mention Motorola's RAZR, a phone that was the previous biggest smash hit and which literally put Motorola back in the cell phone business after years of decline. Nearly 6 times the level of mention of a phone which has been exceedingly popular, a design hit, has been in the market since 2004 and which exceeded all other flip phone sales within one year of its release. And, the number of postings that include mention of the iPhone has been rising by over 1,000 every 4 hours today, and you can count on it growing even faster until the pent up hysteria is released at 6pm on Friday. And, the chatter certainly won't stop then.
Every major media outlet has weighed in. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, every computer or telecom related industry trade journal has reviewed it. Virtually everyone who's been privileged to receive one of the media samples for review has said it's cool -- so cool it almost lives up to its hype. Like the mania for video game consoles or Harry Potter books, prospective customers started waiting in line outside flagship stores in New York Tuesday morning. Unprecedented for a phone.
Think about it -- the entire country seems locked in a heat wave, with most major cities experiencing temperatures in the mid 90s or higher. Yet, people are so lustful of being one of the first to own an iPhone, that they will camp outside a store for 4 days in the sweltering heat to lock in to a 2-year service commitment from AT&T, the worst service provider in the business (more on that later).
So, does all this mean runaway success -- the game is already won? Or, will there be an equal and opposite reaction when possibility and excitement about the future gives way to reality, and inevitable issues with service, availability, bugs in functionality and unfulfilled expectations?
Apple fanatics say it will be successful because it is ultra-cool, easy-to-use, a breakthrough in design elegance and software sophistication. Naysayers say nothing could live up to this level of hype, and that when things die down, sales will appear lackluster no matter how good they are. Virtually everyone notes the stupidity of getting into an exclusive deal with AT&T and warns that this could be the albatross around the iPhone's neck. Almost all of the speculation and predictions are based on visceral and emotional reactions, and influenced heavily by the reality dispersion bubble that surrounds Steve Jobs, and by the majority belief that "better" wins.
But if we run with that notion reductio ad absurdum, what exactly does 'winning' mean? Assuming that the consensus is that the iPhone is a better phone, does it have to achieve market dominance as a late entrant the way the iPod has in the MP3 player space? Surely it doesn't have to match iPod's 80% market share within 5 years! There are over a billion mobile phones already in use around the world. Is a 10 or 20% market share strong enough to be considered successful? (The RAZR's share is only around 5%.) Is this even the right yardstick to use?
The iPhone Will Be a Disruptive Winner
iPhone will be successful regardless of the metrics used. It will be successful beyond the expectations of the most enthusiastic pundits. It will be successful beyond what Steve Jobs thinks. It will be successful in spite of the apparent deficiencies that have already been noted in the reviews. It will be successful despite partnering exclusively with a single carrier, and the one most despised in the industry -- although this will be the biggest road bump the iPhone faces. It will be successful because it will change the game -- actually, it will change many games, and therein lies the secret of its success. It will do all this because it will be disruptive.
But, predictions are dangerous. And, mine disagree with those of many people whose opinions I respect and whose theories I borrow from. Even though I'm siding with the majority who believe the iPhone will be a big winner, how do I arrive at that conclusion and what exactly makes it disruptive?
Who Disagrees With Me
Before explaining what the highly respected experts are missing, let me first say who some of them are and try to summarize their positions.
Innosight
Innosight is the consulting company formed by Clayton Christensen to sell management services around disruptive innovation. Clay developed the original ideas and theoretical framework that underlies disruptive innovation in his series of books - The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution and Seeing What's Next. Saying he (or his minions) have it wrong is like saying that the pope isn't Catholic.
Cingular (now merged into AT&T) is incapable of providing the same high quality, seamless user experience that Apple customers expect
iPhone won't work on 3G high speed data networks -- only EDGE or Wi-Fi is supported -- so there won't be anything unique or distinctive about the wireless service
the deficiencies plus high price point will prevent iPhone from finding a market sweet spot
the approach of Apple is a "sustaining strategy" (i.e. incremental innovation of the cell phone), not a disruptive one, positioned against deep pocketed, long time industry incumbents who have a lot to lose if Apple wins and will fight fiercely for share
He reaches his "not disruptive" conclusion while still finding many things to like, such as lack of keyboard, design beauty, novel interface, thinness and coolness factor.
Mike Urlocker
My colleague, and the CEO of The Disruption Group, has a stronger technology, industry and investment background when it comes to the iPhone, having been the original analyst at UBS to identify the RIM Blackberry as a disruptive product and the first to recommend RIM as a strong buy. Mike has worked for and advised software companies on marketing strategy, and at UBS he was executive director and member of the global technology and telecom teams.
In his Disruption Scorecard evaluation of the iPhone, again shortly after the original announcement in January, Mike rates it a B-, and labels it likely a hit, but not very disruptive. He reasons that the product appeals to people who want status and high design (the coolness factor) and are willing to pay for it, but that it doesn't have much potential to change the game like Blackberry did, or upset incumbent rivals such as Nokia, Motorola or Samsung.
Laura and Al Ries
Branding and positioning experts Laura and Al Ries (Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote the original book that defined the concept of positioning) take a different tack, identifying the iPhone as a "convergence" product, and the iPod as a "divergence" product. The concepts of divergence and convergence come from Evolution Theory -- basically, the idea is that there is a common origin to all species, but that over time the "tree of life" diverges as natural selection creates specializations to adapt to the environment.
Similarly, Al and Laura (and other pundits too) argue that the natural trend for all products is towards divergence and specialization to better suit consumer needs. They claim the iPod was successful because it was a divergence product. Moreover, they argue that most "convergence" products fail -- convergence being when multiple feature categories are combined in a single product (in iPhone's case, an iPod, cell phone and PDA).
Their position is that consumers prefer products that are optimized to do one task well, rather than a lot of tasks poorly, and they further claim that the iPhone has been over hyped and most over hyped products fail to live up to expectations, therefore the iPhone will be a failure.
Hmmmmm.
Most of the others who claim the iPhone will be a failure base it on their own personal biases rather than what the market as a whole is likely to do and why -- "I'm not going to get one because . . .". Name your complaint here. Price, lack of keyboard, slow data network, AT&T as carrier, touch screen keys too small to hit accurately, it will have bugs in version 1.0, etc.
So, what are they all missing, and more to the point, what is Steve Jobs really up to?
The Label Problem
One of the problems with evaluating anything analytically is that we get hung up on labels rather than thinking about what the labels mean and why the rules of thumb associated with them usually work. In the case of the iPhone, there are many labels and definitions being applied that are throwing people off the scent of what's really happening and my belief is that this is deliberate. Yes, Steve is trying to fool the experts and fly below the analytical radar, ironically while mounting one of the most pervasive and successful hype build ups of all time.
To start with, the name iPhone is a mislabeling. While iPhone does indeed have phone capability in it, it is not a phone. Suspend disbelief for a second, walk with me a little, and it will all make sense soon.
Is your laptop PC a phone because you can make GoogleTalk or Skype calls using it? If not, why not? Does it matter that it isn't the only thing you do with it? What if that was the most important thing you did with your PC, because you make a lot of calls to India, and free long distance service is worth a lot to you? Still not a phone? Well, if your PC isn't a phone, is it a typewriter? I know that the primary purpose for my PC is typing documents, blog posts and html. I print a lot of those on paper. Mine is definitely an evolved typewriter. Or maybe your PC is really a gaming console, or a mobile email device because you use it at home, at work, at Starbucks and at hotels and other wi-fi hotspots around the world to send and receive emails. Or, maybe it's just another example of a highly unsuccessful convergence device? Or, do you still think your PC is something else?
The iPhone is Definitely Not a Phone
So, if you were willing to suspend disbelief and suppose that the iPhone might not be a phone, what is it then? Let's start with why it's called an iPhone. iPhone is both sales positioning and a ruse. iPhone is positioned as a phone because Apple knows that in that niche, the market is sorely lacking for a stylish, easy to use, fun, visual, well-designed and well integrated device. It is a first if only because of its elegance. Don't believe me? Then why isn't it really an evolved iPod? One with a really big screen, beautiful graphics and music navigation, and by the way, it includes the ability to make phone calls?
The reason is because Apple believes this is the purpose that you will understand out of the starting gate, and for which it can convince people to shell out $500 or $600 to get the most stylish and coolest gadget on the block. Therefore it is positioned as a phone, and that's the basis on which everyone is analyzing it, and writing glowing reviews, but it isn't a phone. It's also a ruse, because Mr. Jobs has a much higher goal in mind than selling the world's coolest phone. But this is an effective way to divert attention from the real disruption that is happening until it's too late.
Why This Makes Perfect Sense
Let's get a historical perspective to make a little more sense of this. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and tried to sell his patents to Western Union in the late 1870s, how do you think he described what it was? No one had a framework to describe how revolutionary the phone would be as a communications tool. If you wanted to talk to someone, you went across the street, knocked on their door, and if they were at home or in their office, you could talk. Initially, outside of the securities industry, people couldn't even understand why they would want a phone. Especially since the first version could only work over short distances due to signal loss on the wires. There was no network, there wasn't any need for communications to be sped up that much and nobody else had one, so how much use was it?
Bell considered the telephone to be a way to transmit voice over the telegraph, and that's why he thought Western Union would buy his patents. Bell viewed the telephone, perhaps one of the most disruptive technologies of all time, as an incremental ("sustaining") innovation over telegraphy. (Western Union viewed it as being worth less than $100,000 since they rejected the offer to buy the patents for that much, although they later tried to buy them for $25 million.) Do you consider your telephone today to be a highly evolved telegraph? If you can imagine that, what about your cell phone, or is it different because it's mobile? What then of the iPhone? Just a space age telegraphy device with no keys or dials?
The important thing to note here is that in the early days, it is difficult to imagine the application and importance of disruptive innovations if they really are, because no one has a framework to understand its value. That's why the car was positioned as a horseless carriage. That's why TV was radio with pictures. That's why the first computer was called ENIAC -- or the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. That's right, it was a calculator that cost 200,000 man hours to build, $486,804 in 1946, and used $650/hr worth of electricity to sit idle. Some times the original naming belies the importance of an innovation. If not for the need to calculate missile trajectories more quickly and accurately during the war, the first computer might never have been built.
And what of convergence versus divergence? Most consultants and branding experts will tell you that convergence as a strategy almost always fails, because the more things you combine into one, the more compromises you have to make in design, and each individual function is sub optimized at the expense of the whole. In disruption theory, a parallel idea says that as companies continually add sustaining innovations to better meet the needs of mainstream consumers and/or differentiate their products, they eventually overshoot the needs of most of their customers. Convergent products usually exceed the needs of all but a small minority of any prospective customer base. After all, who needs every tool on a Swiss Army knife?
That's the theory, but the reality is that when you try to apply simplistic labels to categories or products and then assign attributes or success factors based on those labels, you can miss the forest for the trees. In the case of convergence versus divergence, this is especially true, since which bucket you assign a product to varies based on whether the combined elements are truly synthesized in such a way that they cannot be separated and provide the same benefit, or whether they are just bolted together and not really integrated to optimize overall performance. Ask yourself whether the combination of radio technology, speakers and a cathode ray tube to make a TV represents convergence or divergence? Is it the evolution of radio, or are the elements synthesized in such a way that they create something truly new? If I turn on the TV, but listen to it from another room, is it still a TV, or is it a radio? Did the TV fail because several technologies converged? What about personal computers?
So what is the iPhone, and what is Steve really up to?
It's a handheld one of these
The iPhone is disruptive because it isn't really a phone, or for that matter, an iPod. If it was either of these, then as cool and elegant and nicely designed as it is, it would still just be an incremental or "sustaining" innovation.
Remember that the iPhone has a complete version of the Mac's OSX operating system embedded, plus it lacks a keyboard and has a truly novel interface with seamless integration between different functions. With all that, it can be considered as the first truly personal handheld entertainment and communications computer. It can also be considered the first handheld business computer powerful enough to replace a notebook for road warriors tied of lugging all their paraphernalia through airport security. In other words, it competes in a different class of products -- not as a phone, not as a smart phone, and not as a computer.
It serves the un- or underserved need for lightness, simplicity, ease of use, true integration and is simple enough that my mother could use all the features without thinking about each being a different application or device. Competing against laptops, it doesn't yet have all the applications my PC has, but it is "good enough" that many will be ready to give it a try. And, there are already numerous applications you can download to enhance the functionality for your needs, and many more business applications (especially things like bluetooth connectivity to a real keyboard, document editing, spreadsheets and presentation capability) which will run in Safari are likely to come. And, when compared to a laptop, it is disruptively inexpensive. Analogous statements are true if you evaluate it as a personal communications and entertainment computer.
This is, I think, what the huge excitement is about. People innately sense that this is much bigger than a phone, they just aren't yet able to articulate what is significant about it, and how we'll look back on Friday June 29, 2007 as one of those days when everything changed.
And, it looks really cool and I desperately want one.
Steve's End Game
The iPhone is a trojan horse. Steve lost the first battle between the PC and the Mac because he was less sophisticated as a business person in those days, and didn't fully appreciate how difficult it would be to convince the masses that they needed an expensive personal computer before they had even used one at work. In 1984, the Mac exceeded the needs of most potential customers, and looked like a toy to business (unless your business was about graphics or publishing). The DOS-based PC was the "good enough" disruptive innovation of its time because it catered to mainframe users used to buying computing equipment from IBM and used to looking at green-screen character-oriented terminals.
This time it's different. Almost all of us use PCs daily. And, most of us are tired of the now clunky-seeming interface which isn't much different or easier to use than the initial Mac interface of more than 20 years ago. And, we desperately need a single, small pocket-sized device that can handle all our business needs while on the road and enable us to leave our 10 pound paperweights at home. Something that's easy to get through airport security, and makes my life less complicated.
Moreover, at the price point of $500 or $600, this is something that every road warrior can afford today, if only as a style accessory. So, the decision won't be made or inhibited by corporate IT departments. Sure, they'll try to block connectivity to their servers on security grounds -- they always do, because they think computers are about them, not about the users' needs. Of course, the iPhone includes VPN connectivity, and most have already got their heads around that. But so many executives will have these that just like the Blackberry before it, corporate acceptance will be very fast. And, once you've adopted the iPhone as your traveling computer, how much of a jump will it be to make your next notebook/desktop for office use be a Mac?
My Prediction
As a phone, the iPhone will be exceedingly popular. If production can keep up with the demand, I believe that Apple will sell more than 2 million before year end 2007 -- if they can scale fast enough and have a new version out in time for Christmas, maybe as many as 5 million. Steve Job's stated target is 10 million sold by end of 2008. Given that there will probably be at least 2 more versions of this product before that, I believe 10 million is a very low estimate, set so that expectations can be smashed -- again, it will depend how fast production can gear up to handle demand and support several different models, but 20 million should be easily reachable.
As additional business applications start coming online, probably early to mid-2008, expect sales to really take off. We will no longer be judging the iPhone as a phone when that happens, but as a true micro-mini sized PC which revolutionizes the entire tech industry and rejuvenates innovation throughout Silicon Valley. At that point, the iPhone will disrupt Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft, Samsung, and maybe even Nintendo (to name a few).
And, what about AT&T? Well, that truly is the fly in the ointment and Steve's Achilles Heel. AT&T is brutish about customer service, slow to innovate and slow to reform. They will try to extort every possible advantage in pricing and contractual obligation that they can. AT&T knows nothing if not how to exercise a monopolistic advantage.
Moreover, AT&T lacks the broadest service coverage, and no single carrier (in the US, at least) is right for everyone. We all know that signal strength and dropped calls vary based on where you spend most of your time. So, if you live in an AT&T dead zone, tough luck. Their EDGE network is slow, and they don't have anywhere near complete enough coverage with their 3G services (which aren't built into this version of the iPhone anyway).
It's hard to understand why Job's wouldn't let the market decide if he wasn't going to lease his own service. With a single carrier that many will be unhappy with, Apple will take the brunt of service complaints -- if I could go anywhere, I'd blame the carrier, not Apple. Verizon has the best coverage and fewest dropped calls. T-Mobile has the best customer service, best rates, and happiest customers. Maybe AT&T (Cingular at the time) was the only one willing to play ball on the technology changes that Steve wanted.
Regardless, if service complaints and customer mistreatment stories start hitting the press, expect a negative backlash that could take a serious bite out of sales growth and long term success. On the other hand, wide scale Wi-Max is a technology whose time may well have come -- it would make perfect sense for independent Wi-Max providers to bathe cities in their signal, and then AT&T could become almost irrelevant in the equation (if Wi-Fi VOIP capability exists).
I've been asked by a few people who've sent me emails exactly what it is that The Disruption Group does, whether our services would be of benefit to their organization and how to engage with us. My posts to this point have mostly focused on the causes and effects of disruption -- case studies and analysis that people might find generally useful, instructive and interesting. Today, I'm going to take a time-out and actually do a bit of selling. I promise it won't hurt.
The reason that everyone wants to create disruptive innovation is that it catches competition off guard, and leaves them without adequate response. A quote which is famously attributed to Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever, to explain why he intuitively was always in the right place at the right time (the quote was actually coaching advice his dad Walter gave him when he was a young boy on the backyard rink) is applicable here. "Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is."
The trouble is, how do you know where the puck is going in your industry, or in your business? And, if everybody thinks they know where the puck is going and goes to the same place, how is that better than going to where the puck is now? Apart from the natural resistance that many have to stepping out of line and being different, this is what is so challenging about disruptive innovation. Regardless, to be disruptive, you have to hit the competition "where they ain't" (see "Wee Willie" Keeler), and do it in a way that isn't possible for market incumbents to match easily.
The principle benefits of applying disruptive concepts in your business that our clients have identified include:
creation of new revenue streams
faster time to market
much higher than average margins
And, if you achieve those things, you also create the positive perception of being a trendsetter, an industry leader, and a supplier who is better able to serve your customer's needs.
To give a little more insight into the first two questions posed at the beginning of this article, namely what we do and whether our services would be of benefit, I've inserted a YouTube clip below which is excerpted from a presentation that TDG's CEO, Mike Urlocker, gave at a recent Conference Board change management conference. In it, he discusses warning signs of disruption to look for in your business, and looks at the direct benefits that can be achieved by anticipating or creating disruption.
The 3rd question, how do you engage with us, is pretty straightforward. We've created primer workshops on disruption that we can deliver to your business. You'll find them of immediate value as you learn to understand innovation from your customer's perspective, and gain an appreciation of which innovations are valued and which aren't. And these are excellent ways to get started and evaluate whether a bigger custom services engagement would be of benefit. The two options are:
two day workshop (pdf 37.2K) which will boost your organization's competitiveness by identifying disruptive opportunities, creating new ways to get closer to customers and steering clear of fatal pitfalls
Ok, I'll admit it. I too have guilty pleasures. American Idol is one of them.
Back when AI first began, I studiously ignored it. My wife got hooked by the third or fourth show, but I thought the whole idea was dumb and never bothered. The first show I sat through was the finale of the first season, which I thought was pretty pathetic. I hated both singers. They were too amateurish, and although Kelly Clarkson was clearly better, that was only because her competitor was soooooo bad.
Then came the second season. My suspicions confirmed by the first season finale, I ignored the first 5 or 6 weeks. Then for some inexplicable reason, probably boredom, I sat through a show because my wife was watching it. Then I got hooked.
It was still like watching a train wreck happen for many of the below average contestants who couldn't sing in tune or remember their words, but the Ruben - Clay thing was kind of interesting, and I enjoyed seeing the bad singers get voted off one by one. I think that was about when AI started to become the ratings juggernaut and pop star-making phenomenon that it is now.
So, I haven't watched every show since then (not a total addict), but I have come to anticipate my regular fix.
Becoming "The Establishment"
Over the past several years, American Idol has grown in strength, kicking the butt of every show that dares to go against it. America got more and more hooked. Viewership for some regular season shows now approaches Superbowl ratings, and the finale has become so big that it completely encapsulates pop culture. Prince's appearance on last year's finale confirmed the acceptance of AI as part of the establishment and TV royalty. Other than the Superbowl and Y2K New Year's Eve party, what other shows has Prince participated in in recent memory?
Pop stars line up to release new songs or new albums or rejunvenate dead careers on the show. Other TV shows covet the spots before and after AI's time slot, and all FOX has to do to create a new hit is let it follow AI for a few days. New movies are released by offering boondoggles for Idol participants. Actors with new movies out show up in the audience just to be seen. And, they'll pay anything just to secure a seat in the studio audience if they haven't got something to promote. The Today Show, the leading morning Infotainment program routinely reports the previous night's Idol results as one of the top three lead news items of the day -- results from a competing network's "reality" show! Virtually every major media outlet now announces the American Idol results on a weekly basis.
Yes, American Idol rules the roost, but trouble is on the horizon.
The Sweet Sound of Disruption
So, with all the money and star power and publicity and seemingly ever-increasing ratings, how can I say that American Idol is being disrupted? Simple -- the best pure singer the show has ever had, with a voice equal to any pops-topper of the past 40 years, was voted off last week. Amazing. How could this happen?
Why I Might Be Wrong
Many will say that the voters are always right. If the two left are the ones who collected the most votes, then they must be the best, or the most exciting, or have attracted the best following. Especially with over 60M votes being cast -- more than the totals for any presidential election ever.
But realistically, is that possible? Or more to the point, why did Sanjaya last so long? Clearly he forgot words, sang out of tune, and was often just ridiculous. Yes, lots of little girls liked him. Yes, he had a built-in core demographic of Indian voters who had never had one of their own to vote for before. But would that have been big enough to keep him aloft into the top 7?
So what explains it then? An unholy alliance. The crying little girls were part of it, and so was the Indian demographic. So was a group who truly found him entertaining and refreshing and thought he as a good singer. But the influence that tipped the balance could only have come from a blog which encouraged its readers to all get behind the very worst performer left and try to keep them alive week after week.
Vote for the Worst was a little subversive blog site that started in 2004. Having all the right qualities to grow with viral explosiveness, it now has a readership that at its peak this season averaged 500,000 hits per day (coincidentally, that peak occurred in the period when Sanjaya seemed to be invincible, and the media started questioning why such a bad singer was able to survive week after week, while better singers were being voted off.
The graph above clearly indicates that votefortheworst.com had the intended affect, and was responsible for ensuring that Sanjaya survived for several weeks past when he should have. So, they had their good fun, and with the vote distributed between lots of candidates and those near the bottom being particularly vulnerable, a small boost in vote is plenty to alter the result and keep the weakest contender alive. But that doesn't explain the ouster of Melinda, clearly the best and a strong judges' favorite. As the vote totals rise, and the number of finalists goes down, shouldn't that increasingly favor the best?
Moreover, what proof do I have that the vote was close?
The extra information we need comes from DialIdol.com. DialIdol provides software which enables avid voters to speed dial their Idol votes from their computers. In addition to helping fanatical young voters get the maximum number of votes recorded for their choice in the allotted time, DialIdol also records how often a busy signal is obtained when trying to vote, and uses this to predict the most likely winner and loser on the theory that the more often the number is busy, the more people are trying to cast votes for that individual.
Close Voting Favors the Disruptor
In the week that Sanjaya was voted off, DialIdol accurately predicted the bottom three, including that Sanjaya would be loser. In all preceeding weeks, he was safely in the middle. Last week, as the graph above indicates, the voting was too close to predict vote ranking for anyone. So, either the audience didnt agree with the unanimous assessment of the judges and most observers that Melinda knocked it out of the park, or something was helping the poorest singer to stay alive.
Impact of AI Disruption
FOX network at first denied that VFTW was having any impact. Then, when it was clear that they were having an impact, FOX called them "hateful" and "mean-spirited". Ironic accusations from the show that deliberately calls out the most delusional and sometimes mentally-challenged entrants to callously make fun of them in the beginning-of-season reject shows. But mean-spiritedness is surely what the FOX execs feel who rightly understand that the long-term health of the franchise is at stake, and that the sham that American Idol built upon is being exposed and therefore the business model threatened.
What sham?
American Idol is positioned as a contest to find the best undiscovered young (amateur) singer in America, thereby "discovering" them and making them into a star. But that basic idea is a lie. The audition process is not designed to find the best singers, but the best contestants for a reality show.
Of course, the producers want a decent singer to win at the end, so they put "judges" in place to try to guide and influence the public voting. In any given year, there are about 3 or 4 who are actually good enough singers to deserve a recording contract, so as long as the show eventually whittles down to 2 or 3 of that group still standing, and generates a built-in fan base and familiarity to sell records they've won. In the mean time, the show needs to provide entertainment, and a pure singing competition would get awful boring awful fast. Admit it -- we all watch because we like the train-wrecks, because there are crazies who make things funny, because we like to see bad singers insulted by Simon, and we like to see them insult Simon back and then take their medicine by getting voted off.
But, and this is a very important 'but', it isn't a real singing competition until all but the last 2 or 3 have been eliminated.
Here's another way of looking at it. Does anyone really believe that out of more than 100,000 auditions, there are only 4 or 5 people who can carry a tune moderately well? In the general population, there are at least 2 or 3 per hundred selected at random who can sing. If those 100,000 were selected randomly, there should be a couple of thousand potential contestants. But they self-select, which means they either believe they have some talent or just want to be on TV, but that still means that the ratio should be more like 4 or 5 out of 100.
But, the audition process skims most of the crowd, looking either for good personalities for the finals, or oddball personalities for the "audition" rounds, which are highly staged for TV. Either way, it is TV presence that matters, not singing ability. After all, out of 15 to 20 thousand people in any given city, only about 10-15 get on TV, and most of those get the TV spot so we can laugh at how bad they are. But the show would have us believe that outside of the few who are picked for Hollywood, everyone else is mediocre or less.
VFTW exposes this sham. They recognize that American Idol wants train wrecks in the final 12 to keep the show entertaining while we get to know the "real" finalists. Which is why there are so many in the top 12 who can't sing. VFTW agree that it's funny, so they want to keep the train wrecks on as long as possible, and in the process they are slowly but surely eroding the premise that the show is based on by exposing the lie that it really isn't about finding the best singer. And, they need almost no resources, no money, little time -- just a small blog to undermine the show's foundation.
That's why poor Melinda lost last week. That's a personal slap at her, but it may end up being the straw that broke the camel's back as far as the show is concerned. AI didn't care who she sang against, but everyone wanted the best singer to be in the final.
So, the real cost of disruption is that America starts to realize there is a wizard behind the curtains trying to manipulate them into picking who they always wanted us to pick, and once we realize we've been fooled, we lose interest, they lose their star-making machine and the billions of advertising dollars and promotional opportunities that the show has spawned.
And the outcome may be that VFTW forces a change in process which makes the show more honest but less interesting. That's a real world example of the power of disruption -- either way it costs and it may kill the target if the response to the threat isn't met successfully.
Nobody said that all disruption was good.
Food for Thought
Could FOX or American Idol's producers have anticipated this?
How should they have reacted to the disruptive threat?
Is there anything they could still do to neutralize it before next season?
How would you know if the crown jewel of your business was about to be disrupted?
Can you deliberately create disruption like this to upset your competitors (in an ethical and legal way)?
Lest anyone doubt that YouTube is disruptive, I was reminded again of how much a couple of weeks ago when I received an email from a cousin I haven't seen in 20 years. What struck me about the email was that it was so mundane, so commonplace in the new web world, and something that couldn't have happened just a couple of years ago.
I'm not talkiing about the ping from a long-lost relative. I get those (and have sent some) from acquaintances who are trying to reconnect after 5, 10 or 20 or more years on a semi-regular basis.
Rather it was the attachment of a YouTube video which not only provided me with the update that he is now an actor, but included a sample of some TV drama work that we could easily forward to anyone that we might know in the business. And I just thought how remarkable it was that it was so cheap and so easy to send out a video resume for someone in his line of work.
Shawn's demo tape
I'm sure that actors have been sending out video tapes to studios and agencies and in advance of commercial auditions for years. But think about it. To get just a couple of hundred tapes professionally copied and then couriered out would have been a minimum of a couple of thousand dollars. Although necessary, it was hardly within the budget of a "starving actor".
But now, it's not only free to reproduce and send, you can instantly send it to everyone you know, and by extension, reach their network of contacts as well, or be searched and seen randomly by anyone in the world. So now we have lower cost, broader reach, and persistence (doesn't get thrown in the trash). And, that doesn't include getting posted on my blog, where potentially dozens or hundreds of marketers and advertising specialists might see it and think he's just perfect for a shoot they have planned.
Not Aleksey Vayner
It's worth pointing out that this is not a tragic-comic self-congratulatory career killer like the famous Impossible is Nothing Aleksey Vayner video "resume". If you haven't seen this, I heartily recommend you watch it a few times, both for a good laugh and to study what not to do.
Aleksey's disaster
It's also not the goofy sort of bad job posting site like Vidrez.com. When you check out this site-provided sample, you'll know what I mean, and wonder why on earth anyone would do this and what value it adds. If you're desperate for a job, and considering this, all I can say is "Don't". Just stick with Monster and the traditional resume. For the life of me, I can't discern any good reason to pay these folks to be hidden behind the site's registration requirements, rather than simply doing it myself for free on YouTube (a key consideration for low end disruption). Besides, this is just too icky for me.
Perhaps the time is coming in the not-too-distant future when video resumes will become normal outside the acting business. That has huge disruptive potential, although It seems like if it happens, it will be critical that job seekers carefully consider the appropriateness of what they do. Is a mock interview a good idea -- or does it come across as boring and phony? If you're in the media or artistic expression fields, showing a sample of your work certainly makes sense. If you aren't, it's probably best combined with a blog (which shows off your thought process), and only with a sense of self-awareness, humor and humility. Then again, the persistence and accessibility that are a big advantage when you're young and broke could well come back to haunt you 20 years later when you're being considered for the SVP position at Bank of America.
The idea seems to have most potential for disruption when combined with other media, such as emailing links to friends and family, as Shawn did, or including a link on LinkedIn, or as part of a website or blog. It would also be a useful tool with judicious screening (no pun intended) -- if I'm an executive recruiter who's narrowed down a set of candidates to 5 worth presenting to an employer, and I've vetted the content, asking each to respond to the same 3 questions, it could well be useful to the employer to prepare and to save long distance travel expenses if one candidate is clearly inappropriate (a bad fit culturally, for example). Much hinges on whether we are mature enough as a culture to get over the "equal opportunity" objections that are inevitable, even though all the same objections could be raised about an in-person meeting. It sure raises interesting ideas about how something as simple as a public library of free and searchable video will change the way we are doing things in just a few more years.
. . . and go out on a limb with an aspirational vision of what the country could be?
Already i'm being sickened by the political noise from both parties for the 2008 presidential election. When did campaigning become the sole raison d'etre for politicos? When did the desire to win at any cost overtake the altruistic desire to do something useful for the common good?
If you're a democrat or republican, don't answer that. I don't want a dogfight on my blog about who's right and who's wrong or about who has degraded and debased the political process more. Everyone has. Perhaps there are exceptions, but I'm not sure where to find them.
Crossroads
I see the USA at a crossroads. This country dominated the 20th century, albeit for a time in competition with communism and the USSR. But we've squandered political, moral, economic, educational and research leadership in the past 20 years. We don't have a purpose, and China is rapidly catching our tail, with a capitalistic fervor not seen anywhere in the world since the the mid 1800s in the USA. So what happens when they catch us in material wealth, and are able to use that to pass us in military power? What happens when we no longer have the strongest influence because we have neither the economic or military might, nor the manufacturing base or technology leadership?
We are also approaching crises in social security, balance of payments, a demographic vacuum (what happens when the boomers all want to downsize their houses, sell their stocks, and consume their savings at the same time?). And, most of all quality of life. We all live in this world, but the majority of us act like the mess we create doesn't matter -- it's someone else's responsibility to clean the air, unpollute the water, solve the traffic nightmare, deal with the waste products of consumption (how many realize that we are rapidly running out of places to dump garbage?), etc. Or maybe we just have our heads in the sand and figure there's nothing we can do about it.
Now is the Time to Change the Debate
Now, I'm no moaner, nor a finger pointer. But I will say that we lack leadership, vision and the will to address these issues, all of which are solvable if we put our minds to it. Not only that, they're solvable without necessarily reducing our standard of living or pillaging our savings or working 3 jobs to make ends meet.
What needs changing is the nature of political discourse. We need not be about left and right, but about having a mission and solving problems.
What do I mean by this?
A few years ago, I wrote a policy paper discussing how a focused effort to create an economy around Industrial Ecology could propel us back into a position of moral world leadership, high growth, higher standard of living and higher quality of life. This is by no means the only way that America could accomplish these goals, but it is an example of the kind of discussion we need to be having, and our politicians, academic and business leaders should be prioritizing these things on the front burner, rather than assuming that the populace is too stupid to understand. We are starved for ideas, and I believe that anyone who came forward and took the high ground could easily win -- the average man on the street so wants to hear positive ideas, rather than negative bickering.
So, given that suddenly I have a lot of traffic coming to my blog, I thought perhaps it would be apropos to post this paper and hope it gets into the right hands. Now, as I said, I will not allow this to become an us versus them debate, and I will moderate comments as a result. I'm happy to have a debate about the merit of these ideas, or other alternatives, but no name calling or rudeness please -- I'll delete it. Also, while most of these thoughts still apply, please forgive dated references.
Click on the image to go to the paper. Enjoy.
Oh, and by the way, if you're in the running for the presidency, for either party, and your chances of winning look pretty bleak, you've got absolutely nothing to lose. This is how to disrupt the process, and give yourself an opportunity to win from behind. Moreover, if you win, you'll get a clear mandate for change. If you lose, you'll still change the debate, and that's kind of like winning anyway.
This time, the habit got broken when I started an intense contract that within a few weeks, quickly crowded everything else out. At the same time, I was taking Vicodin to help ignore my broken foot, which both made it harder to concentrate on work, let alone a blog, and made me fall asleep much too readily. I know -- excuses, excuses. To get back in practice, I've been posting some comments on other people's blogs, but now the juices are flowing and it's time to get back at my own.
My old guilty pleasure, American Idol, ended a few weeks ago, and I got to reflecting on the dynamics of the show itself and whether an article I wrote just before last year's finale would prove to be prophetic on review. I talked about how AI was being disrupted, and the producers were either ignoring the problem, or didn't get it. In my analysis of why, I offered some prescriptive changes that they needed to undertake to avoid an otherwise inevitable fate. So, how did I do?
American Idol rules the roost; as #1 rated show, it has become complacent and resistant to necessary change and highly susceptible to disruption
Appropriately enough, the conference title was 
, 
and 
. Saying he (or his minions) have it wrong is like saying that the pope isn't Catholic.
) take a different tack, 
The reason that everyone wants to create 
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