Category Archives: Strategy

What Made Facebook Special

Posted on by
Reply

Why did people join Facebook; what made it special?* This is a though I have so often, it’s become funny, but my answer has never been precise enough, “critical mass.”

Critical mass doesn’t tell you anything, except that they manage to get enough people to use it, and as more did, it became almost invaluable to the rest. The problem with such a simple, and ignorant response is that doesn’t really help to understand how they generated that critical response anyways. That’s the real question that needs to be answered.

We all know about FaceMash, and the exclusivity presented by the college email restrictions in the beginnings. I think through every phase of the company it has held momentum by voluntarily limiting growth, and strategically raising the level of suspense, and necessity via critical mass in various markets.

One quote paraphrased as I remember, “When we went to add Baylor, they wouldn’t allow us on campus, so we went to all of the surrounding schools, and added them to the network. In effect, we built the demand within Baylor by adding most of their friends from other schools to the network, and then expanded to Baylor.” [Editorial Remark: It was from The Facebook Effect. The paragraph was about the “surround strategy.” Also, I originally thought it was BYU, and not Baylor.

I find that brilliant, they built demand in the market, before releasing in the market. The same can be said of Mark’s original FaceMash, which provided him with enough notoriety and acknowledgment within Harvard to release Facebook, as well as providing access to a tool that helped to keep up with your friends.

The whole reason I brought this up is I started thinking about how my friend made me create a new account** when I got to WVU, ‘because everyone uses it.’ I find it interesting that it had created such a critical mass at that point in schools, and it seems to have managed to maintain critical mass among it’s markets this whole time, I find it simply amazing.

Notes:

* = More general “Why did/do people use/join/verb X Company?” I ask these type of questions all the time.

** = I had one for a week or two in HS, because I got tired of fighting the school admins with proxies to get to myspace, and couldn’t remember how to access it.

(Original written January 29th, 2011)(Last Edited March, 17th 2011)

I Can’t Say I Can’t, But I Could If…

Posted on by
3

With the beginning of a new year, I plan on taking several realizations and things I discovered momentarily, last year, and try to make them permanent. The first is to stop saying, “I/it can’t…,” with the exception of when used in conjunction with, “… but I could if.” The second is, “third-person introspective.”

Some time in September or October, I had an epiphany of how harmful, “I can’t,” is; it allows for excuses to be provided so easily. It allows you to just shuck your responsibility, without fully thinking through the problem, or trying to find another way around the problem. My solution is to only allow myself to say the phrase, “I/It can’t X, but I/it could if x.” It is a simple method, that can be used recursively, to find the starting point, if you can’t do x, then substitute it for X and start again. Ultimately, I feel that it is a great way of breaking a problem down, and avoiding excuses.

Third-person introspective, now this idea is a little less approachable, but personally more fun. I allow myself to escape, and critique myself on all of the actions I make as though I had someone following me around, looking over my shoulder. I tried this for about a week, and while it’s odd at first, it has some pretty interesting results,  you self-inhibit as though you weren’t alone, even if you are. The one issue that I had with it is that you have to be able to maintain two-levels of consciousness simultaneously, which can be difficult, particularly when you’re tired. I assume once one becomes adjusted to it, the second consciousness could become controlled subconsciously.

I’m hoping that implementing both of these, along with my recent purging of  stuff that was weighing on my mind will help me be more active, and engaged in the now. I still have a couple more things to get out of there, but for the most part, I’ve put everything I want behind me, and I’m starting to truly move forward for the first time in two or three years. Hope your year is going to be as wonderful as mine.

Budgeting on Variable Income

Posted on by
Reply

The three main things that need to be taken into account are:

  • Definite Expenses
  • Estimated Income
  • Savings required to cover deficiencies between Income & Expense

Defining Expenses

  • Write down all non-variable monthly expenses (e.g. Rent, Utilities, Insurance, etc.)
  • Estimate all recurring variable expenses for the month(e.g Food, Fuel, etc.)

Add these together and multiply them by 1.10 -1.20 to provide yourself with a buffer  in case of any upward fluctuations of variable expenditures. Excess at the month should be saved  or split between discretionary spending and savings, with only 10-20% going to discretionary, at most, the remaining 80-90% saved.

Estimating Income

  • Average your past 6-12 months of income. Avg. Inc. = (Total income/months)
  • If possible also average your highest and lowest monthly levels of income. H&L = ([Highest + Lowest]/2)
  • Average both of these numbers to come up with a good estimate of your monthly income. Est. Inc. = ([Avg. Inc. + H&L]/2)

* You can also add in quarterly averages, if you’ve seen a recent change in your income up or down, such as change in employment status.

Savings

Take 10-15% of your estimated income and try to save it, and any excess after your budgeted expense, for handling monthly deficiencies. You can use a portion of this as discretionary spending, or rainy day fund, to help maintain your personal happiness. Also, set a baseline for a buffer in your bank account, which you can check against, say $200 dollars, and you can raise this as you progress.

*You don’t have to place it in a savings account, the interest rates are horrible currently anyways, just so long as you try not to overuse these funds.

These techniques aren’t perfect, but they do provide a very good starting line for determining how much you can reasonably spend per month. I used these basic ideas as a set of tools, slightly modified for my personal usage, and managed to pay off $1800 in student loans and save ~$1200 on a variable income that ranged between $500-1400 over 13 months. My average monthly expenses were $400 and my average monthly income was $750. I also managed to maintain a fairly consistent spending, about $50 month, on entertainment.

Microsoft Needs Vision, Here It Is

Posted on by
3

I’ve been thinking for a few weeks about Microsoft, and what they’re doing wrong. What are they doing wrong; quite a bit, but what if they’ve managed to set up an integrated platform, under our noses. They could easily bring us something that no one else can, in short order. No competitors can catch up, not Google, not Apple, no one, if they take the proper path.

Microsoft has before it a golden goose, it’s up to them to decide whether to continue starving it or to feed it. The first step is to look at where they have already invested: everywhere, from the enterprise through to the cloud and mobile systems. They have a wide base and a tall hierarchy, but they aren’t capitalizing as successfully as they could or even should be.

Why are they failing? It comes down to 3 reasons: horrific marketing, horrific web presence, and lack of integrated focus.  The one I’m primarily wanting to touch on is their lack of integrated focus, because without it they are gone, but I’ll touch on the other two.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft released an update to their Office Live system, something that has been around for nearly 3 years, and yet many people still have no clue about. Why; why doesn’t anyone know about this? It is common for people to bash Microsoft, because they don’t offer a cloud alternative for the desktop Office Suite, but it’s simply not true. Who’s fault is this? It’s the marketing department, they haven’t bothered to promote the platform; it’s also partly due to how confusing Microsoft’s web presence is, it’s anything but simple. Their presence exists in two ends of the spectrum: a mangled mess of links to variations of systems on their main domains and a group of domains that can be hard to find, because of a lack of directions to them. So what they need is a simplified interface, and user direction, from both marketing and a user experience standpoint.

Microsoft, regardless of their poor marketing and website design, has a unique opportunity. Microsoft, is the only company to have an operating system on 4 platforms(enterprise, desktop, mobile, and consoles), a web presence that includes search, email, and cloud systems(enterprise & consumer), high-quality desktop software, and near-universal hardware support. The one thing they are missing in integration across all of these levels, and it makes them look like they are wandering aimlessly. The need to figure out what to focus on, and how to make the entire system more seamless.

My first recommendation to them is to start with the future of the desktop, quick boot systems that allow near instant access to the internet. I propose that they provide a hybrid-OS offering using an instant-on system, that provides access to a browser and several other basic applications. The next recommendation, is one I’ve already made, clean up your web interfaces to make them more user-friendly, and make your cloud systems more prevalent. After you’ve dealt with these issues, you’re ready to more actively promote systems like Live Mesh, that will allow you to integrate and sync cloud data, across multiple systems; I recommend purchasing DropBox to help with this.  The should continue to work on integrating Office and their cloud systems, during this.

In the foreseeable future, the majority of what we will be doing, will be on the internet, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t need our fully developed operating systems. Using a hybrid-OS approach, they will be able to provide both instant-on support for average use case, while still providing the ability to switch over to the full system for heavier workloads. This is what we need in the next few years, ChromeOS can match you in the first, but not the second, except via remote-desktop support. One issue with instant-on systems, is trying to get universal support, but Microsoft is at an advantage as it’s already worked with low-level compatibility, are there going to be hitches, I’m sure, but they should still have some ability to solve this problem, along with manufacturers.

Next step is to make their web presence more coherent and simple.  Promote your integrated services together, rather than splitting them across different domains, you have two live office platforms, three email services, and a search engine, and none of them are connected in a highly sensible way. You’ve also failed at promoting these from your main website, because of the kludgy method of navigation and association among your many many products. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. It’s all about simplification so that your users can find what they are looking for; help them out.

Now, you’re doing okay on this next thing, you’ve got Skydrive and Live Mesh, as well as Office 2010 integration with Office Live, but you can still do so much more to make it simple. Google is kicking your ass as simple collaboration, you need to get this right, and make sure you’re doing it better than they are. You need to get syncing to both the cloud and to other devices down, that’s why I recommend you purchasing DropBox, it would provide a great starting point.  This is going to be one of the key changes you need to get right, and get it right, now. The sooner you get people  using your system and having it seamlessly integrated between the desktop-mobile-cloud the better you will be.

Maybe they’ve been working on this in the background, and they’re just failing to compile the parts, or they have failed to have vision as to what they actually have, and how it can be connected. Either way, it seems that Ballmer is stumbling in providing his teams the ability to create a fully integrated system, either he has the vision or he doesn’t; I’d go with the latter. Now, is when they need to make the move, get to work on bringing your teams together, so they can create a seamless experience, and hire new marketing people.

15 Minute Education Plan

Posted on by
3

The US public education gets worse and worse, whether it’s class sizes going up, or layoffs due to lack of funding; our pupils just aren’t learning anymore. We face lower standards of return, even though grades continue to rise, this is a problem, it either means that pupils are being trained to be pattern recognizers, that don’t understand why the pattern is, or that the teachers are blatantly lying about pupils competence with curves. We need a new way to get the key skill for maintained learning: understanding. Here is my suggestion for understanding based learning, fit into 15 minutes.

Normal class times are generally in the 45-90 minute range, depending on how the school defines it’s periods, I’d prefer a 45 minute course daily. Working with 15 minute intervals makes it simple to repeat the process and to make sure pupils grasp and understand concepts. The key to understanding is simplifying to a key point of information that you want them to understand. This is particularly necessary in Elementary schooling, to build up a foundation of understanding, and problem solving skills.

Minutes: 1-3

Prepare the topic with the pupils, so that they have a basic idea of the concept, you are working on. Provide the pupils with a couple test problems, non-multiple choice, to test their understanding.

Minutes:4-8

This is time for  the pupils to work through the problems to show how much they understand.

Minutes:9-10

Check pupils responses to this work, so you can see  who had issues, and where the issues were. Make sure you are interacting with all of the pupils as a group, and as individuals.

Minutes:11-14

Have a class discussion calling on those that did particularly well, and unwell, to help gather learning concepts that some pupils gathered and others did not, this will help in the future.

Minute:15

Take those that did well and partner them with those that didn’t do as well.

Repeat this process until the end of class or until all but possibly one or two pupils grasp the concept, if they do this give them a 5 minute break, and an example problem for tomorrow’s concept. While most of the class works on this, you should interact with the remaining pupils, that don’t grasp the concept, and help them to understand that concept, as well as the new concept in advance, to help prepare them for tomorrow’s work.

If you can’t get a child or even an adult to understand a concept within 15 minutes, then the problem is most likely with you, and not the pupil(s). If there is a problem, you need to look at how your teaching, what they don’t understand, and what you can do to improve. You have all the data in the work the pupils did, so you can go through and check for where they might be missing the connection.

One benefit to this, is you aren’t overloading the mind with brand new concepts simultaneously, this helps prevent the pupil from feeling overwhelmed.  A second benefit, is that you get to interact with the children one-on-one this is something that is lacking in most classrooms, and likely why the parental influence is a so much greater determining factor. Another benefit is that it is quick, it lets you know if there is a problem that you need to focus on or not, it is also quite fluid.

The fluidity, is the final benefit, which allows you to do a weekly, biweekly, monthly, recovery of knowledge quickly, by recovery I mean returning memory. Memory degrades over time, but if it recurs even slightly enough to re-jog it, it becomes wholly new again, and will last longer, this is the forgetting curve. Following the concept of the forgetting curve, you can cover 4 concepts a week, and still fit a day for recovery for all four concepts into your plan, to help increase retention. Another benefit is that you get to gain more data into how the pupils have retained the concepts, so you can better predict when you’ll have to cover the information, again.

This post is complete conjecture, and isn’t based on any significant facts.

The Halting Point

Posted on by
2

I’ve hit a point where I have to halt the majority of what I do, and shift focus to current matters at hand. Sadly, this means that I must drop my project, there are multiple reasons, that I’ll get to in a second. I have to figure out my five year plan, as well as my  three month, six month, and annual plans. The rail I’m currently on is running short, and if I don’t switch tracks now the future goes up, I can’t ignore and put off any longer.

As for what I’m referring to, is my current situation, financial, physically, educationally, and “professionally.” Financially, I’m done, I have about 2 months left to handle my bills, which also places me in a position, where I can’t risk it all on the web, the risk to see a turn-around that quickly, isn’t feasible. So in the upcoming months, the blog might shift, sites will go away, but they won’t die or be lost, I have contingencies in place. Physically, a few months ago, I had doctors tell me that I needed to get my thyroid checked out, because it was enlarged, and I had lost close to 20 lbs. in the course of  six months, I failed to make that appointment, and two months later, I’m down another 12 lbs. I’m not a big guy, I’ve never been over 150, so this is a bit of an issue.

Educationally, this has stalled as well, even though I constantly learn something, it’s becoming more and more of a struggle to learn something that is actually of value. I need to make a change, and become more focused in my learning, this is probably my biggest issue, I research topics, as doing so I follow tangents; which is a very interesting way to learn of a new thing, but it doesn’t help with actually learning. Another issue, is I have very broad interests, one second I can be reading up on Accounting or Marketing, the next I could be reading a text on Algorithm Design, or just doing Calculus, this obviously leads into the professional situation.

I don’t have a clue what I want to do professionally, I know what I wanted as a kid, I know where my interests lie, and I know what I’m good at, but that doesn’t help me figure it out, it just makes it murkier. As a child I always wanted to work with computers and robots, I never thought that I’d step back from this position. My interests over the past five years have been in programming, cryptology, economics, finance, business, and design. What I feel at least somewhat competent at is financial analysis, and architectural design.  This of courses, raises issue with what I should do, because I, honestly, don’t have a clue, finance or trying to make my childhood dream work. I don’t know, but I’m leaning toward the financial aspect, and letting the programs slip to the side, which brings me to the project.

The past two years, I’ve focused into  understanding how to analyze data to create semantic content, one of the biggest moves in my thinking was to take the initial load off of the machine, and place it in the hands of a human, the biological entity that understands the semantics of an item. Let the user build the connections, let them do all of the heavy lifting, and then use these seeded inputs as an ever expanding learning set for the machine. This meant making something usable  for a user to interact with, first it was an RSS Reader, then it was a URL shortener, that handled multiple links, then the idea grew into a distributed network of bundled connections. All of these I’ve managed to fail on in some way, except for the last, I’ve just hit a wall as far as I can go on it, with my understanding.

I thought hard over the past week, about seeking a more technical person, or just releasing the current source of the project, after it’s cleaned up a bit. The first way would have the possibility for a good return, but I oddly feel bad about it, it makes me feel like I failed. So I’ll be working to clean up the code, write out lots of the mental documentations I have, as well as collect and clean up the digital and physical documentation, so that others can take the idea to the next level. Currently, there is already a working model of what I saw it being about three-months down the line, at BagtheWeb, they did some things better, mainly having a fully functional product, not just a prototype, but their product is still in early enough stages that it could be caught and surpassed. I just don’t have time, with having to deal with these other issues, to devote  wholeheartedly to the issue.

So I apologize to the people who did play with the project, and provided quite valuable feedback, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to what it is, even as little as it is without you. It won’t be going anywhere for now, but I also doubt updates for the indefinite future. I just have stuff to sort out first, maybe one day I’ll come back to it, with the passion I had, when I was creating a research tool, with a semantic future.

The Influence of Homogeneity on Choice and the Web

Posted on by
2

One thing that consistently occurs in markets is a trend towards homogeneity, it’s nothing new, it’s been happening for millennia. The occurrence in the web is a bit disturbing, however, because of time and focus. Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself, I should probably talk about the various forms of homogeneity, that occur naturally and in our daily lives.

Homogeneity, in nature, it is as common as a step in the evolutionary process. As species adapt, the mean difference, across the whole corpus of the species, becomes smaller, and the species pick up both positives and negatives, that affect the species future. The huge negative for homogeneity is that the corpus, minus the mutated(outliers), is that susceptibility to a common tragedy. A tragedy, by contagion,  can be common, if a disease does infect one entity, it can easily spread to those that are also susceptible, though the entities with mutated genetics, assuming theses genetics, increase resistance or provide immunity to the disease, or any common tragedy.  If the tragedy is large enough, it can cause the mean difference to go up, or even hit an maxima,  which it comes back down from in favor of the  mutates.

Homogeneity, in business and our daily lives, occurs quite frequently, and it is an influencing factor over choice. To look into the idea of choice and homogeneity, you don’t have to look further than skin deep, or in this case clothing. Every one of us has a desire to fit in, and this desire results in us commonly grouping, even, subconsciously with those who are like us. From this desire, we find ways to look, sound, or interact the same way; our desire also has a side effect, it removes the necessity of thought in many circumstances, just go with what everyone else is doing. Of course, there will always be a few who don’t want to be classified, or collated with others, sadly they create their own group, through these actions: non-conformists.

To see the corporate side of homogeneity, look into the restaurant/fast food industry, or supermarkets. Mom & Pop’s have been gobbled up by the McDonalds and Wal-Marts , because the layperson doesn’t know what they have to offer. If you go with one of these household names, you have a good idea that the food is going to be decent, or that the store will have what you’re looking for within its doors. This homogeneity, decreases local competition, but it’s okay, because it saved the average consumer time and money, because these chains get reductions for ordering extremely large amounts of goods. Of course, some people will stick to the Mom & Pop’s, to be contrarian, or because they know it just as well and it has become ritual.

When it comes to the web, however, the steps toward homogeneity become much easier, but there is even fewer checks and balances, than in any of the other cases. We interact with the web on a time basis, and this time is limited, so we find a subset of sites to stay in constant contact with, normally staying within a triumvirate: search, networking, and news-history. However, the common solutions for these problems are reduced to a common set of sites, there are alternatives, but it requires more rigor on part of the consumer. So what do we do, we choose, by what provides the most tools, where are my friends, and how can I find out more.

What happens when you’re playing this zero-sum game of choice, Louis Gray says there is no zero-sum game?  You end up selecting those that might not be the best, but save you time and trouble. Want to use e-mail, read blogs, or just IM with friends, you can go use any random email host, any old RSS-reader, or link walk the sites, or anyone who offers an IM service, OR you can just use Google, and get all of these services simultaneously, plus several dozen other services.  Do you see what just happened? Multiple services where just reduced, they were hit by a common tragedy, and now there is one hyper-efficient service provider, which most people are going to use because it’s simple, and they don’t have to think about where they are going to go, or what they are going to do.  Where can I share images, discuss things with my close friends and family, and provide a set of personal information for people that people can use as entrance sources? Well there are a large number of services that will let you share images, and any number of places and ways to share that information, but to truly access everyone, without making them do work hard, and that site is becoming Facebook. The case is you don’t see a corresponding 1-1 gain loss, gains are primarily individualistic, while losses are primarily distributed, there are cases where the inverse occurs, but they are few and far between.

These companies are becoming goliaths, that are going to harm the web, if they continue to grow, it won’t happen immediately, but even now Facebook is trying to change the rules. And you can say all you want that there are other services out there, I’ll admit that, but when you’re playing a zero-sum game, based on how much time you spend interacting in different locations, you have to focus on where you’ll get the optimal return.  There will always be alternatives, for those who truly want them, but for the general public, they don’t mind as far as they know, everyone does the majority of the same things on the web. Until, something happens that causes the homogenous species, to see what the mutates have already seen and adapted for we’re looking at an interesting ride for the next 2-3 years.