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IIS Breakthrough Recap: Titans of the New Information Order Chasing Each Other

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

What do titans like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and possibly Twitter have in common? Of course, they offer platforms where users access and share content. As titans, they also aspire to become each other – while currently delivering different value from their platforms.

During the Information Industry Summit, key publisher and digital leaders offered clear-eyed views of these companies and their intrinsic rather than market value. “There are more interesting things than making a ton of money in the last quarter,” declared Esther Dyson, EDVentures principal.

The titans were not getting judged by form factors, such as the computing, mobile or operating systems. While that’s important to the companies and shareholders, the IIS leaders focused on how titans should improve their connections to users.

Sell people a mirror

Most of the titans know they should personalize their offerings and “show you what you didn’t know you wanted to know,” said David Kirkpatrick, Senior Technology & Internet Editor at Fortune. It comes down to algorithms based on their platforms.

Of course, Facebook leads in capturing social connections and friend links. Google is trying to keep up through its own G+ social circle. Yet they are challenged by defining relevant content. Friend or content sources may be throttled or controlled through personalized Facebook feeds or Google search results.

Will the titans succeed in selling mirrors? Will these mirrors show relevant content and connections? Esther Dyson wondered “how far these companies can go before they start annoying their customers.”

Use commercial insights

Google, Apple and Amazon bring powerful, highly-scaled advantages due to their search, shopping and/or buying functions. Google’s search and online advertising hegemony not only creates value for consumers and businesses, but also keeps those shopping behaviors tight to its vest.

Meanwhile, Apple and Amazon bring their own online retailing powers. Apple makes so-called razor sales, offering media and other apps through its operating system. Amazon makes money from its blade sales, along with enterprise efforts. It will be interesting to see how these titans take further advantage of their “big data” capabilities regarding buyers, products and services, and credit cards.

Future of the titans

All the titans grew with their founders at the helm. While some, like Apple and Microsoft, have next generations in charge, Amazon, Facebook and Google are run by their founder entrepreneurs.

Dyson voiced her concerns about the titans’ abilities, explaining “they’re all really badly managed inside.” By contrast, Forbes CEO Michael Perlis felt the titans would continue “making each other better. They all have aspirations to [become] each other.”

Thomas Glocer, ex-Thomson Reuters, wasn’t sure how the titans would work together or with other content providers in the future. He asked, “who’s in front, behind, the Trojan horse?”

Impact on publishers

Perlis, from Forbes, explained that consumers aren’t that interested in who wins. As a publisher, he has different content distribution or advertising relationships with all the titans. “We have experienced collapse, avoided relapse [and] don’t relax. You can’t just coast,” he cautioned.

Glocer shared his concern about living “in a world at multiple speeds including repressive regimes, and platforms. I do worry about the lowest common denominator where the platforms [have] content geared for wherever.”

“Everyone will have to constantly re-evaluate paths,” said Fortune’s Kirkpatrick. “The pace of change requires every [publishing] company to think of themselves like a software company. Be unbelievably curious and not afraid.”

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Debby Richman spent her formative years at D&B, leading the reference business from print to online and web offerings. She has since held digital leadership roles at Overstock, About.com, Looksmart, Starz, Collarity and Zions Bank.

 

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Jobs battled tech giants, secures place in history

October 6, 2011 By

With all of the tributes to Steve Jobs written in the past day, it’s clear that Steve was a remarkable individual due to his vision, and his ability to turn that vision into game-changing products.

With every bold person whose short life we honor, it is interesting to consider how the world would have been different if that person had never lived. Take your pick:  Franklin, Edison, Ford, Einstein, the Wright brothers, Berners-Lee, etc., etc. They have all enriched our lives in many ways. What makes Steve Jobs stand out in such rarified company?  It’s Steve’s impact on so many products over one-third of a century.

Apple was founded in 1976 and popularized the graphical user interface and low-cost, easy-to-use computing. But Steve had second, third, and fourth acts to come.  He has at least six and as many as 10 major game-changing products to his credit.  What makes his inventions unique is that they revolutionized existing products against hulking competition.

He battled Microsoft for the desktop.  He took on Sony for the MP3 player.  And unbelievably, in 2007 he had the courage to take on Nokia, RIM and Palm with the bold claim that he could create a better smartphone. And in his spare time, he revolutionized animation by turning a small graphics company into Pixar (which he sold to Disney for $7.2 billion).

I had the pleasure of meeting Steve six or seven times over the past 20 years.  Most memorably, Steve spoke at an SIIA event while he was CEO of NeXT.  He spoke about the great product he was working on—the NeXT computer, and then told the audience of 600 or so that he wanted to give everyone the greatest product his company had produced so far—and promptly distributed 600 colorful NeXT T-Shirts. I still have mine!

Steve will be missed by the thousands of people who got to know him, and the millions who use Apple’s products every day.  His legacy lives on at Apple, and at thousands of companies he inspired to “think different.”

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Online subscription models: Will new Apple and Google plans woo publishers?

February 21, 2011 By

For those interested in selling premium electronic content, the week of Valentine’s Day this year was filled with hearts, flowers and, potentially, some candy boxes with pieces already missing. Recent back-to-back announcements by Apple and Google unveiled plans to support premium subscription sales, leaving many publishers surprised, puzzled and a little stressed out as to how to react to these offerings. Should they give these new plans a fat, wet kiss, blow kisses from afar, or send them back with a note saying “address unknown?” By week’s end, many publishers were still searching for the right reactions.

The problem that content publishers face with these plans is that they are in some ways quite radically different, both in their structure and their implications. The opportunities and stark choices that publishers face now are underscored most by Apple’s announcement of their subscription plan. Used so far only by Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily news app for Apple’s iPad and announced with no apparent preview to major media companies, the new Apple subscription plan seems to have been received by most publishers with a hushed surprise.

At its core the Apple plan is fairly simple, but not necessarily easy for media companies to stomach. Apple will take a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenues generated by sales through their iTunes app store, though publishers selling subscriptions through their own e-commerce services may sell apps and take 100 percent of the subscription revenues. However, if they do sell their subscriptions for apps outside of Apple’s e-commerce facilities, publishers must use their own technology to validate the subscription on Apple platforms. Moreover, from within a subscription-supported Apple app a publisher may not link to other content or offers outside of the app, and the pricing for the Apple subscription must be no more than any other subscription offer outside of the Apple e-commerce stores.

The economics of the Apple plan are restrictive enough in many ways, but even should publishers opt in to all of these requirements, there’s no guarantee that they’ll know who their subscribers are. Apple will release information about apps users obtaining content via a subscription only if they opt in to share it with them. For magazine publishers used to being able to share demographics with advertisers and marketers as one of the core of their marketing efforts, that tends to put a rather large chink in their typical expectations for media sales. [Read more...]

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