from Delicious/network/earth2marsh http://www.delicious.com/network/earth2marsh 1. Current Mobile Strategy: Apps Best 2. Future Mobile Strategy: Sites Best 3. When Will the Strategy Shift Happen? To conclude: I do believe mobile sites will win over mobile apps in the long term. But when that will happen is less certain. Today, if you are serious about creating the best possible mobile user experience, my advice is to develop apps.

Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight.
—Public Enemy (sampled from Thomas Todd), Fight the Power

Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were going to give it away for free. This might not sound so bad, but we had just gone public three months earlier with a story to Wall Street that said, “Don’t worry about Microsoft giving away the browser because we will make money selling servers.” Oh snap.

I immediately went to work trying to move the playing field and pivot the server product line to something that we could sell for money. The late, great Mike Homer and I worked furiously on a set of partnerships and acquisitions that would broaden the product line and surround the web server with enough functionality that we would be able survive the attack.

As I excitedly reviewed the plan with my engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, he looked at me as though I was a little kid who had much to learn. Bill was a long-time veteran of battling Microsoft from his time at Borland and understood what I was trying to do, but remained unconvinced. He said: “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.” Oh snap.

As a result of Bill’s words, we focused our engineering team on fixing the performance issues while working the other things in the background. We eventually beat Microsoft’s performance and grew the server line to become a $400M business and we would never have done it without those lead bullets.

I carried that lesson with me for many years. Six years later, when I was CEO of Opsware, our toughest competitor Bladelogic started to consistently beat us in large deals. We were a public company and the losses were all too visible. To make matters worse, we needed to win those deals in order to beat the Wall Street projections, so the company felt tremendous pressure. Many of the smartest people in my company came to me with ideas for avoiding the battle:

“Let’s build a light-weight version of the product and go down market.”
“Let’s acquire a company with a simpler architecture.”
“Let’s focus on service providers.”

The issue with their ideas was that we weren’t facing a market problem. The customers were buying; they just weren’t buying our product. This was not a time to pivot. So I said the same thing to every one of them: “There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.” They did not want to hear that, but it made things clear: we had to build a better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no backdoor. We had to go through the front door and deal with the big, ugly guy blocking it. Lead bullets.

After nine months of hard work on an extremely rugged product cycle, we regained our product lead and eventually built a company that was worth $1.6B. Without the lead bullets, I suspect we would have ended at about 1/10th that value.

There may be nothing scarier in business than facing an existential threat. So scary that many in the organization will do anything to avoid it. They will look for any alternative, any way out, any excuse not to live or die in a single battle. I see this often in start up pitches. The conversations go something like this:

Entrepreneur: “We have the best product in the market by far. All the customers love it and prefer it to competitor X.”
Me: “Why does competitor X have five times your revenue?”
Entrepreneur: “We are using partners and OEMs, because we can’t build a direct channel like competitor X.”
Me: “Why not? If you have the better product, why not knuckle up and go to war?”
Entrepreneur: “Ummm.”
Me: “Stop looking for the silver bullet.”

There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”

"See, I’ve heard a lot of discussion about MailChimp’s success with freemium, but it’s scary that people would want to model their companies around us. I say it’s scary, because they don’t know our history, and they don’t know our motivation. I came across this article recently: Why Free Plans Don’t Work. They actually mention MailChimp in a positive way, but the discussion in the comments show that people really need a little insight into what drove us to go freemium. So here goes…"

"Get a CEO peer group to bounce ideas off of as soon as possible. Gail learned from a fellow CEO that calling free trial-ers would lead to a doubling in their “trial-to-pay” conversion rates. Trying this was the difference between a model that she thought was failing miserably and one that has built Constant Contact into a publicly traded company (see #3 on giving experiments enough time). If your product is strong enough, people do not need to be sold. Focus your sales teams on being coaches, not salespeople. This means focusing salespeople on making prospective customers successful, and not on near-term revenue maximization."

awesome excerpts from a Quora post

Was controversial when it was published, but still very interesting.

One of the best posts of 2010: "The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, though a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on. Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost."

part II

"Sean Ellis recently sat down with us and explained how to bring products to market. You should listen to this interview for ideas on how to get to product/market fit, how to measure fit, and how to survey your users so you can improve fit."

tips for blogging

" the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business."

Collection of blog advice. Most of this is well known, but this collects a lot into one place.

"Monetizing Social Networks: The Four Dominant Business Models and How You Should Implement Them in 2010"

Good breakdown into "1. Online Marketing, Outreach Strategies & Building Brand Visibility 2. Public Relations 3. Customer & Technical Support 4. Product Development & Quality Assurance 5. Sales & Business Partnerships 6. Internal Web 2.0 Ambassador 7. Reporting 8. Goal Setting & Professional Development"

"We tried charging for our API without much success.  Then we paid developers to use it and it took off. It is such an interesting move to make on the market. In the case of TACODA, they initially built a powerful behavioral targeting solution for publishers to segment their audiences and sell them to advertisers. They sold the technology to about twenty large online publishers. But the sales cycles were long and the license fees were smaller than they needed them to be. "

"When you are at the top of the world, the most powerful nation on Earth, the most successful company in your industry, the best player in your game, your very power and success might cover up the fact that you're already on the path of decline." That question—how would you know?—captured my imagination and became part of the inspiration for this book"

"The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time. […] What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”"

"Stack Overflow was built on what Spolsky calls the nine "building blocks" in an effort to create a site that was anthropologically correct and would encourage people to behave in a way that would work. He also pointed out that every single one is copied from somewhere else. Voting, Tags, Editing, Badges, Karma, Pre-search, Google is UI, Performance, Critical Mass"

Michael Lewis writes his moneyball for basketball

"aims to create a fully browser-based application development platform." AFAI can tell, Big Blue is trying to shift to a enterprise grade web-based OS, which makes sense as the future IS people working together. Oh, and it's open...

"The Israelis have a term for this type of thinking, "Embracing the Meshugganah," which literally translated means, embrace the craziness, because the crazier the plan, the less likely the adversary will have thought about it, and thus, not have implemented a counter-measure."

big list of corporate presence in sns

Inside the Obama campaign, almost without anyone noticing, an insurgent generation of organizers has built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people's organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.

excellent overview of why Google's business is a bit unlike any other's.

The budding Community Manager industry holds 4 tenets; these values resonate as a common thread within the role. The include community advocation, brand ambassadorship, online communication skills, and product requirements gathering and improvements.

find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

Nokia is in the position today where maybe the Ford Motor Company was in the 1950s or 1960s. The product has revolutionized society, penetrated the whole market base outside the developing world, and become part of life’s invisible backdrop.

Three players enter a room and a red or blue hat is placed on each person's head. The color of each hat is determined by a coin toss, with the outcome of one coin toss having no effect on the others. Each person can see the other players' hats but not his

My other interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt