Newsletters as a Podcast = More Choice

One of the most requested things, when I started this newsletter, was an audio version for those that don’t enjoy reading long articles like those I write, or those who simply prefer to listen along during their commute. I’m pleased to announce that this is exactly what I’m doing.

Substack, the platform that hosts this newsletter, has provided essential tools for podcasting since April of 2019, and it was something I’d intended a long time ago. It was part of the initial brief for the newsletter. However, at the time was not possible without a significant technical and/or financial investment. I’d hinted about this coming in the 2019 review issue:

I wrote back then:

I intend to carry on writing and plan to do a few new things next year.

On to the issue.

NaaP: Newsletters as a Podcast

I'm being a little silly with this subtitle, I know. But I thought it was amusing and intriguing, not least as I’ve seen an uptick in people releasing their newsletter with a podcast element. Venerable publications such as the Harvard Business Review and The Economist have put resources towards producing their magazines in narrated form. Early results measuring adhesion and usage rates are encouraging.

Podcasts, as in the traditional sense, were generally complimentary to newsletters. They often centred around discussing in detail the central ideas written for the newsletter with a friend or industry expert, often with fascinating discussion resulting. Traditional podcasts required two or more people to make them exciting and attractive to listeners.

This new wave is a little different. It is a narrated version of the newsletter that replaces the need to read. Some prefer different content types, and it is wise to provide choice for subscribers. I’m an avid reader myself, devouring tens of thousands of words a day, others are more aural or visual. I’m not sure a YouTube version of this newsletter would be relevant, so that’s why I wanted to produce the podcast version.

I’m releasing this as an experiment, and I am eager to see what happens.

Who is this for?

Subscribers that prefer to listen to the content, or those who wish to multitask while walking/running, driving or commuting.

When will each episode come out?

I will try to publish the audio version shortly after the text version - you’ll get an email with the audio version of this issue. Although, I haven’t fully worked out exactly when yet, as there are several possibilities to release the audio podcast, I’ll try several options out and see where it takes me. Let me know what you prefer over the coming weeks.

How can I listen to the podcast without opening the email each time?

I will publish an RSS feed — that’s technical jargon for a subscription link — for you to subscribe using your favourite podcast players like Overcast, Pocket Casts, or the built-in podcasts apps on your devices. The link included in the email is platform-independent, and you’ll be able to subscribe from Android, iOS and even on your desktop operating system. Listing in Apple's podcast directory is in progress.

If you don’t find it there yet, you can use this direct link.

Why now?

If I’m honest, the recent release from one of my influences (Stratechery) got my backside into gear. As I said in the introduction, it was part of the original brief of this newsletter, but a combination of fear, laziness and technical challenges delayed the production.

Can I help?

Things like these take a lot of time and are often a labour of love. Writing each issue that averages over 1800 words per week is difficult even without adding the voice-over work. I would love it if someone could help out with the editing. Any other suggestions are most welcome.

For now, I hope you enjoy this addition to the text version, and I hope you find it as useful as the newsletter itself. Let’s see where this experiment takes us.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in digital technologies and how they affect business. I hope you can forward it to people you feel are interested in the subject. If this email was forwarded to you, please don’t forget to subscribe for yourself. You can sign up here:

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A Show Report

A slightly different tack to the issue today. A quick report back on the Microsoft Ignite The Tour London conference.

On to the update.

Image: Microsoft

As a long time attendee of conferences and particularly Microsoft conferences (with thanks to a previous employer) I am concentrating on giving feedback on a recent meeting I was at in London earlier in January.

Microsoft’s future directions in Digital Transformation

To summarise briefly, the main subjects and points of focus for Microsoft when we’re talking about Digital Transformation, it would come down to three things; Collaboration, Automation and Artificial Intelligence.

Collaboration

While I spent my time on the first day furthering my interest in AI and Automation (see below), the second day was primarily related to collaboration and the human side of technology.

One of the first sessions on the second day, called Intelligent Communications in Microsoft Teams, focused on the possibilities of better meetings, device and telephony integrations. Microsoft Teams focuses on meetings, chats, calling, files and App/Workflows neatly integrated into a single interface that is both efficient and enjoyable to use. Microsoft is setting aside substantial resources to improve the environment and capabilities of the Teams platform.

I’ve written briefly about Teams and how it fits in with Microsoft’s vision of Digital Transformation here:

Which brings me to the state of collaboration today. What we see today is specialised collaboration and productivity being developed that take us away from the general-purpose collaborative apps we have now. There are myriad applications for collaboration, but the two most popular and most known are Slack and Microsoft Teams. If you want to know more about them, search for reviews online. Suffice to say that both claim several millions of Daily Active Users (DAUs).

In the series of 5 sessions dedicated to Teams — of which Intelligent Communications in Microsoft Teams was te second — the introductory session was just as interesting and useful.

Albeit a rundown of new features in Teams, as I stated earlier, Microsoft is putting many resources towards the development of Teams, and in some cases, it is hard to keep up with all the changes. This session neatly exposed the newly released functions like Private Channels (something I had requested over a year ago) and cross-channel posting, enabling one post to touch several channels simultaneously.

Another feature that raised a lot of applause was Live Captions. Currently available in test and only in English, Live Captions displays, in realtime, the conversations in the current meeting. This is an excellent enhancement for those hard of hearing, or people attending meetings conducted where English is their second or third language. More languages are planned for the future. Note: captions are not saved and hence not searchable for the moment — recorded meetings are searchable and you can literally search for your name (for example) and the results will show you the timestamp of the video where your name was mentioned!

The new functions coming “soon” were additionally listed; pinned channels, multi-window support, Outlook integration, Yammer integration and Tasks. These are all additions that make sense and enhance the usefulness of Teams to the point that the platform becomes the place you start and end your workday. 

It is this that intelligent collaboration is becoming. It is a wise move on Microsoft’s part, as not only does it make work more efficient for business but it also slowly builds a moat around the Office 365 business that Microsoft has judiciously built over the last five years or so.

Something that I find fascinating as a long time Microsoft expert, is that, unlike the Microsoft of yore, they are listening to their users and trying to implement JTBD theory in all their public-facing applications.

Automation

Automation featured heavily in this tech conference, understandably. We’ve seen nothing short of a revolution in automation over the last few years with pioneers in the democratisation of tools, like IFTTT (If This Then That), Shortcuts on iOS and Zapier a more professionals oriented system.

Microsoft’s answer to this is a previously available product that was both underused and underexposed by itself, namely Microsoft Flow. That has changed in the last year. To demonstrate Microsoft’s renewed focus on the product, Microsoft has renamed it to Power Automate, leaving no doubt in its purpose; to powerfully automate business processes.

As part of the Power Platform, Power Automate allows the linking and automating of processes from different applications, and this is not limited to the Microsoft ecosystem (a clear signal that things have very much changed in Redmond). The session entitled “Intelligent automation with Microsoft Power Automate” laid-out the return on investment seen by McKinsey, recorded as 5-10% cost savings in 18-24 months and 30% long-term.

A McKinsey report highlighted the opportunity for businesses to investigate automation in their operations:

60% of all occupations have at least 30% technically automatable activities

Almost half of work activities globally have the potential to be automated using current technology.

Collecting and processing data are among the activities with the highest automation potential.

By focusing on this potential, Microsoft has developed its Power Platform to target this specifically. The Power Platform presents itself on two levels, the user-facing applications; PowerBI (Business Intelligence and Visualisation Tools), Power Apps (A DIY Application Development Tool) and Power Automate; the underlying back-end to connect data to the upper level with data connectors to over 250 applications, AI Builder (see below) and the Common Data Service to provide almost everything needed for automation in a low-to-no code environment.

Being Microsoft and being squarely aimed at enterprises, areas such as distribution, security, governance and compliance are integrated by design. Additionally, it is essential to remember that this functionality is built right into the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform, making it easier and better for deployment to non-developers in organisations.

Start here to learn more about the tools in the Power Platform.

Artificial Intelligence

One of the very first sessions of the conference centred on the use of new AI tools with little to no programming, to extract value from unstructured data. While the scenario was a bit contrived, the session did an excellent job of showing how it is possible to use these tools easily to construct useful information.

The scenario was an invoice database that had been deleted and not backed up, but a copy of each invoice in PDF format was available. Using Azure Cognitive Services, the presenter was able to reconstruct and populate a new database using the PDFs from what is termed “dark data”, i.e., data that is human-readable but not machine-readable (easily).

Training a simple AI model with just five invoices allowed the extraction of relevant data (invoice number, date, product, quantity, price and others) in a structured format that was subsequently used to populate the previously deleted database.

It was a nice example of how multiple thousands of data points could be worked on automatically — the case study had nearly 150000 pdf invoices — and in around 24 hours, the data accurately extracted. Take a look at https://aka.ms/AIML10 for further information.

Further sessions went into more detail about the use of these new Cognitive Services in Azure. One session used the pre-built AI models in Azure to further outline the usefulness of the product in saving time and investment in specialised AI development.

Microsoft clearly thinks this is an area of clear advantage to its partners and end-users ultimately. We see AI creeping into everyday products like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint. Microsoft Word will now create a basic resumé from your LinkedIn profile and suggest enhancements based on the cognitive models it has developed over the last couple of years and the metadata available through their ownership of LinkedIn. Note: this is opt-in, and no information is used, to my knowledge, without consent. Powerpoint can suggest styles, shapes and overall design of a slide just by looking at the content. For the artistically-challenged, this is a great help.

AI is also extending itself across the collaborative platform, Microsoft 365. Users can be configured to receive emails from the platform entitled “MyAnalytics | Wellbeing Edition”.

This email gives you an overview of who you have been working with regularly, how much times you’re spending in meetings, the time you’ve been collaboration and what it calls Focus Time (time free from meetings on your agenda), along with suggestions on how you can improve your wellbeing at work. It is relatively rudimentary, but a start and in some cases, I have found it useful.

We can expect more to come.

Humanity in IT. The other side of the conference

Microsoft left much space in the agenda catalogue for initiatives around IT being a more humane discipline, something that has not traditionally been the case for big tech. One could argue that the big tech companies are anything but concerned for human wellbeing and only concerned about monetising humans for every last drop of information, often termed Surveillance Capitalism.

Microsoft’s renaissance has been powered by a profound change in its corporate governance. Out went the macho, stormy, loud character that was from a bygone era, Steve Ballmer, and in came the more considered, empathic and reasoned disciple of Mindset. It’s a good read, I recommend it.

Suffering personal difficulties, Satya Nadella has not hidden from addressing the need in IT to be more inclusive and more empathic to the people whose lives it touches daily. Looking at some of the titles in the session list gives you an idea of where Satya wants to take Microsoft; “Practising Kindness in Tech: 5 Steps to Build a Culture of Giving Back and Helping Others in the Community”, “Imposter Syndrome Banishing Spell”, “Learning from Failure” and “Creative Technology - Bringing the Human into IT” (session not recorded).

It’s a list you would more likely associate with penny store wisdom books rather than a tech conference, but hold judgement for a moment and reflect on why subjects like these are important.

Much of Tech today has an existential crisis, as users, the world over discover the extent to which lives are surveilled. Usage statistics on the proliferation of ad-blocking technology alone speaks of a world that wants the conveniences but doesn’t want the downsides.

This cognitive dissonance only fuels the attitudes that have invaded civil discourse on the Internet on forums and micro-blogging sites like Twitter. A few years ago, it was widely joked that the quickest way to come to the conclusion that humanity was doomed was by reading the comments sections on the Internet. Fortunately, we haven’t got there yet. Yet!

In Practising Kindness in Tech: 5 Steps to Build a Culture of Giving Back and Helping Others in the Community, Dux Raymond Sy outlined a simple framework for IT professionals to use their skills and knowledge to help out in their immediate communities. Setting up PCs for a local group, supporting IT problems for local non-profits, the list of possibilities is endless. And it’s a virtuous circle too. Not only does someone get to benefit from your work, but you get to feel good for doing so.

I’m currently a bénévole (volunteer) for ADIE; Association pour le Droit à l’Initiative Economique, where I help advise underprivileged startups build their business. I am also on the list of entrepreneurs that visit schools to talk about my experiences in business, through the initiative called 100000 Entrepreneurs.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

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The failed newspaper in the FWI made several strategy mistakes, but what could they have done?

After writing many words on the failed newspaper business model, I want to write about what could have been done to save France-Antilles and hopefully develop a simple framework for other publications across the Caribbean. Regardless, I hope this promotes discussion. What’s your take?

You can comment directly from the email by clicking the comment icon next to my profile picture.

On to the update.

Missteps and a lack of strategy

In The long slow demise of France-Antilles and Newspapers in the Caribbean, I wrote:

The Flawed Business Model

“Information wants to be free” a phrase attributed to Stewart Brand who founded the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s. He argues that technology could be liberating instead of oppressing and at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, he apparently told Steve Wozniak (one of the three co-founders of Apple):

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

The prescient point of his argument was that information’s cost was getting “lower and lower” and that is the situation most publications find themselves in today. Much of the information provided in newspapers today is widely available online from multiple services, and here’s the sting in the tail, for free in many cases.

But what is most important in the statement above, is the fact that he identifies that information has value and is hence, “expensive”, and it is precisely here that most newspapers fail in their strategy. Much of the information is provided in “filler” articles that have been scraped up from wire services such as AP (Associated Press). These articles have literally no value virtue of the fact that every news outlet prints what is, for all intents and purposes, the same article.

Newspapers are a business built on assumptions from a bygone era. Firstly, the sales and advertising arms of the newspapers require a lot of staff. There is Sales, there’s Account Management, there’s Graphic Design and of course Operations Management. Those are huge fixed cost to deal with for just a pretty advertisement, and only profitable for premium advertising (of which there is less and less as outlined above). Newspapers also operate on the assumption that the bundle of services, is in and of itself, valuable. That was true, but is no longer relevant for readers.

Couple this with the very real fact that the business model of the newspaper business took a serious hit when Facebook and Google cornered the market for advertising, with very grave effects on the price and availability of advertisers willing to spend on printed ads. The protected environmental factors have prevented newspapers from listening to reality. I find it all the more surprising given that here, in the FWI, there is no real competition, which proves the point about external factors playing the central role in killing these businesses.

What should France-Antilles have done?

Firstly, I need to state that I, personally, am not happy with the end result and that I understand that an available and free press — free as in not politically aligned — is essential for a thriving democracy. Newspapers, journalists and investigations are healthy for a country or state, even if they are sometimes difficult conversations. So, to put it succinctly, I want a newspaper in the FWI to flourish out of this debacle. And I want to see the same across the region. For the simple reason that nationalism is currently spreading around the world, and we are not immune from its disease, and one of the first ways nationalism gains ground is through the press. Be vigilant!

(/end.rant)

The crux of the problem for FA and local newspapers is that they are not valuable anymore. Or to put it another way, the content sold has lost its value, and is, in some cases is utterly worthless. Be careful not to confuse interest and importance with procuring value that can be sold against advertising or to the public. It is evident that the newspapers are essential (see above), but the fact that their value has decreased is the reason the current business model is unsustainable.

As I wrote in The long slow demise of France-Antilles and Newspapers in the Caribbean:

Unnecessary Costs

In printed newspapers, there are many fixed costs that render the finances difficult to balance. Printing presses cost phenomenal amounts of money and require trained and dedicated staff to operate them. When you are competing against virtually free digital distribution to get the same information out to your audience, these extra costs are a major burden, and I would suggest, unnecessary now.

Not only that, but the costs of the raw materials required to physically print — i.e., paper and ink — add to the operating budget in a non-inconsequential way. Paper, by the way, is not getting cheaper either due to environmental concerns. Ink is expensive and it is also toxic. Atmospheric fumes from inks are noxious and large costs associated with the handling, processing, usage and disposal of ink are apparent. 

Then there is distribution. Without going into any detail, it’s obvious to conclude that distribution of reams of paper has associated costs. Those costs being elevated by the fact that, as a newspaper and the importance on getting to the outlet early in the morning, entails higher-than-standard-hours wages.

Adding high costs and low sale value together, it can only lead to one outcome — the one we’ve seen played out at FA over the last few years.

The first thing FA should have done is use its brand value and monetise that instead of trying to monetise using simple advertising that, as we’ve noted, enters less and less in the coffers. Using ad networks like Facebook and Google might be an option, but they shouldn’t have relied upon those either. Those networks' payout rates are dropping significantly too, as pressure from competition and the way ads are valued (new channels of advertising are more effective — influencers, etc.). Still, they are also suffering from the accelerating backlash from their surveillance capitalism tactics that the public is coming around to understand better. Monetising their brand value takes the form of using something like a direct-to-customer subscription aimed squarely at digital use (one could consider options for print too, but as a secondary channel). 

Many will note that FA had a digital offer, but it was flawed in several respects.

For one, it was considered too expensive as it was priced equivalent to the physical newspaper. The physical aspect imbued value for money, you can’t do that with a URL or email. Considered too expensive was not its only flaw; it was principally a PDF of the paper version originally, and it was downright hostile to use.

Digital has to offer the same thing with less friction and for less cost. FA did not. Thirdly, being a clone of the paper version, all the adverts printed in the paper version were also visible in the digital version, offering FA zero scope to monetise differently based on context. FA could have essentially double-dipped by providing advertising based on print and digital for the same text article. Digital affords the possibility to micro-advertise on each item, something that is unsupportable for the reader on paper.

As noted earlier the content itself is the source of difficulty for newspapers and was for FA. Competing with not only freely accessible online publications, but trillions of written words of quality (like these 😀) that are freely available, has made it difficult for newspapers to differentiate themselves. 

Full disclosure: I fully intend to take this newsletter to a paid publication in the future, as I state in the second paragraph of the about page.

FA is competing with articles that are on the newswire (national and international), blogs, Facebook pages and tweets more locally and often available faster and they’re trying to bundle all that together into a value-added package to sell to the user. So their costs, their suppliers and the distribution is all tied to a business model that no longer makes any money, and by extrapolation, no longer makes sense.

A business model based loosely on what I’m trying to do here with this newsletter would have better served FA. A newsletter-type publication with richer content, more personal and better targeted to the audience — following the Jobs to be Done model, i.e. hyper-local news in detail with analysis and context, hyper-local sports news with more detail and more context and the odd super-detailed investigative work about a local issue, Chloredecone anyone? (1)

So what does this model fix that the old one couldn’t? For one, distribution. It costs much less to distribute digitally having few fixed costs that are exponentially degressive with an increase in subscribers. Secondly value, or as I put it above, reduced expense. 

With this model, production costs (printing should be outsourced) together with the distribution costs mentioned above, are drastically reduced: no trees harmed. More importantly, there is perceived value.

A bundle of scraped articles from the newswire (worthless) packed between low-value simplistic reports of local happenings (we don’t need to know that a dog in a far off town soiled the garden of his neighbour), ended with brief sports results with zero opinion or analysis (also of little monetary value to the publication). I'm a little harsh here, I know. It is not that far from the truth, however!

Why? There used to be value in being informed of a local event; this is no longer the case. Facebook and Twitter tell you about every activity on your Island, and the world, reducing the value of being informed. It's free on Social Media, why would you pay to buy a paper that prints it? It's madness. Virtually every event has its Community Manager dedicated to getting the word out using all the online platforms.

The fix for publications is to concentrate on informing readers in a more personal manner, with longer more informed and better-developed stories helping the reader understand the impact for him or her. It could include a quick light list of international news to inform, leaving the reader to further delve into the subject using the media better suited to the job. A modern publication also needs to provide an amount of free content — one day a week seems to me to be the sweet spot — and by doing so, they build trust and showcase their best journalism to hook subscribers and capture new converts.

On the Internet, people pay for what they care for. Developing that feeling between the publication and the reader is all-important to driving long-serving readership and ultimately profit. And when people care about their town, Island or country, they are inherently more willing to pay for quality content that both sustains those publications and allows them to feel they are contributing to development. They are participating in society, tout simplement.

Footnote:

(1) Chlordecone in English is Kepone - a significant health scandal in the French West Indies currently.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

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Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

Explaining Disruptive Innovation and asking the question about its relevance in our markets.

I had a great weekend and got a lot done for once. I’m still writing up the show report from my visit to the UK, but the week’s events turned my attention to a different topic.

On to the update.

Disruption Theory

Since the death of Clayton Christensen, I’ve been spending a little time looking over his works and particularly the theory of disruption, or Disruptive Innovation. The theory describes a repeatable mechanism whereby small newcomers to a market provide a good-enough product or service, often cheaper, that gains initial traction, enticing those same users away from the incumbent. As time passes the improvements to those less-costly products and services develop to rival the large corporations’ offerings such that the corporation can no longer compete, thereby forcing the incumbent to search higher up the market. This cycle often repeats itself, with the disruptor eventually being disrupted itself.

To explain the theory better, let’s look at a couple of examples; Mills in the Steel Industry and Uber.

Steel Mills

Christensen goes into much more detail in his book The Innovator’s Solution (recommended read), but the basic premise is that large-scale integrated Steel Mills were forced to look up to the higher-end of the market to continue to make the profits and achieve the growth required when faced with the low-end disruption provided by small-scale minimills.

Until that point, large steel mills were the suppliers of most of the world’s steel in installations that reacted the ingredients (ore, coke and limestone) in large blast furnaces. A process that was first industrialised not too far from my place of birth in 1709 by Abraham Darby, birthing the industrial revolution. The fact that mills cost enormous sums of money to build kept competition at bay. Minimills melted scrap metal in electric furnaces and can produce steel 20% cheaper than traditional mills. Minimills attacked the notoriously competitive rebar market, something the large mills left alone due to the decreasing margins. By producing steel at a 20% cheaper cost, the minimills’ margins were attractive compared to the large mills. As the margins plummeted in the rebar market, minimills moved up the stack to attack what was the large mills’ domain, having left the rebar (strengthening rods used in concrete) market to the minimills. But by having a 20% cheaper cost structure, minimills having innovated to produce competitive steel, they then attacked this market too, pushing the large mills further up the chain, and so on.

Source: HBR

The minimills used two advantages to the large mills, their lower cost structure and their innovative capacity to climb up the chain until they became a ferocious competition to the large mills. The large mills had no response because they were forced with either going upmarket or investing in the low-end that was the least attractive to them in terms revenue and profit, but the most attractive for the minimills.

Uber

Uber is often characterised as the archetypal disruptor, but the theory of disruption doesn’t quite fit. Disruptive innovation starts with the disruptor taking advantage of a low-end foothold in a market, providing just good-enough products and services and exploiting that opportunity until iterative and incremental improvements mean that product or service eventually competes directly with the incumbents’ offerings.

Uber hasn’t revolutionised the essential practice of hailing a cab. It has merely simplified and increased demand, attracting customers that would use alternatives (or substitutions to use Michael Porter’s terminology) rather than taxis. The initial beginnings of Uber in San Francisco served customers that were already used to hailing cabs. It started at the high-end and expanded downwards to increase its target segment.

Disruptive innovations are, as we saw earlier, considered “good enough”, or putting it another way, inferior to the market’s standards. Uber’s service was superior to the incumbents’, not inferior. Virtually no incremental innovative modifications to the core services of Uber have been made. Using Uber today is like it was at its inception.

What you should notice in these examples is that disruption is not merely releasing a product or service that is cheaper than the original function, that is targeting a low-end market with what is always a lower-quality alternative to the current choice. If you look at some of the cheap hotel chains like Ibis in Europe, or Travelodge in the UK, their product is not a competitor to the likes of Sofitel. Why? Because for Ibis to offer the same level of service and quality it would no longer be cheaper to provide. It would in fact cost the same as Sofitel. No disruption.

 I am aware that Sofitel is in the same group of brands as Ibis and many others, all being part of the Accor group. This goes to serve my point, in that Accor has divided up the market from low-cost to high-end, placing specific branded hotels targeted to the demographic they’re focusing.

When I think of this theory, I’m often lead to wonder if this is not something that we can capture to use in much smaller circumstances. The theory lends itself to the large companies or collectives, like taxis getting disrupted by Uber or the Marriott’s of the world getting disrupted by Airbnb. These are the disruptions that get media attention and have such an impact around the world as a whole. But are they the only disruptions taking place? If not, where and how do micro-disruptions take place and can we understand them to use them in our own business.

I want to look at two possible contexts for disruption; internal and external. But first, I wanted to see if the scale has any bearing on the outcome of disruption. If you work for an SMB and your market is measured in the thousands and not millions, is it considered disruptive if you manage to create an innovation that has profound effects on that market?

I would say yes. The fact that on a small-scale, a market changes as a result of a lower-end offering forcing the incumbents to search the higher-end proves the market is being disrupted in some way. Their search relies on the fact they need to look for margins and growth. As an example, I wanted to discuss a new entry into the mobile communications sector in the French West Indies, Wizzee.

Wizzee, a disruptor in the making?

As I write this article, I spent less than 10 minutes signing up for a new mobile contract for my son, who until recently had 1 GB of data per month on what is an out-of-touch mobile contract. He’ll now get 50 GB per month for 4 euros per month less than the current subscription. I save 4€, and he gets, for all intents and purposes, all you can eat data. Why is this important? For two reasons that I want to explain here.

The first thing that struck me from my initial awareness of the new Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) was that unlike Orange’s attempt at a similar strategy, it understood and offered a package that is aligned to how the younger generation uses phones today.

Orange’s offer was initially acceptable, in the sense that it offered a mobile subscription with a little data thrown in for good, for a very reasonable price. Few options existed to extend the amount of data, and each one was scandalously expensive. I’m surprised authorities allowed this to pass, but that’s a different discussion.

Millennials and the younger generation of users use their phones is very different ways to the older generation. In my study on the impact of digital in the Caribbean, I noted that around 40% of all Internet traffic was flowing through mobile phones and that this was steadily increasing. What I didn’t explain is why. These later generations are fuelling that mobile data growth because of their communications choices.

We grew up calling people and talking to them one-to-one. The limitations of this method are, of course, availability. It works when both parties are available, and consequently, when one is not, it doesn’t. The Millennial generation doesn’t worry about this as their chosen communications methods are un-linked from time and availability constraints. They prefer to use text or video/speech communications in WhatsApp and other popular services. These services are Internet-connected and mobile data-driven.

And so, a subscription that targets that generation has to completely flip on its head the model of mobile phone subscriptions by offering data with a choice of voice and SMS (Millennials don’t use SMS), which, as you have no doubt noted, opposite to today’s standard mobile subscriptions that are voice with data tacked on. Wizzee is simply aligned to the reality of the mobile market today, unlike Orange (including Sosh, its MVNO) and SFR.

Secondly, just look again at my opening statement; I spent less than 10 minutes on a Sunday morning signing up to the service. It was “Fingers in ze nose”, as they say in France. It’s a digital product and has successfully rethought the process of signing up from A to Z. Simple, efficient and quick. You do the setup from your mobile phone or on the website. I decided to use the phone. After downloading the app, you follow the clear, easy to understand and well-explained instructions. The process of transferring your number from an old subscription is simplified. The app additionally provides help where it is needed without you having to search for it.

Digicel has done the work necessary to develop the service in line with Jobs to be Done Theory. This is Digital Transformation! The question is, however, is Wizzee a disruptor, well, yes and no?

Yes, in the sense that the product is aligned with the modern era, that is it simple, accessible and digital by nature. It is a good-enough product without bells and whistles, and the business unit has the cost structure to ensure its offering per GB is less expensive than Orange’s, for example. Orange operates 25 boutiques over the French West Indies with a staff measured in the hundreds. Wizzee has 0 boutiques and a team of less than 20, I’m guessing!

However, it is not in the sense that Digicel is still only selling access to a mobile network and that has not fundamentally changed in tens of years, much like Uber hasn’t changed the service of hailing a cab. Additionally, nothing Wizzee has built would stop an incumbent offering precisely the same thing. Of course, Orange won’t, or at least they won’t be as generous in their offerings as the larger companies rely on the luxury of brand power and trust. 

Wizzee has no moat.

My thanks to HBR and Clayton Christensen’s books for the inspiration of this post.

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A personal journey with a truly disruptive product and person

The iPad has turned 10 years old; here’s a personal relationship with the product. Additionally, Clayton Christensen died recently. His influence will be felt for years to come.

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Photo: Apple

This week a phenomenally successful product turned ten years old. In January 2010, on the stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in California, Steve Jobs announced the iPad in what is oft-regarded as one of the best product introductions by a company in years. It doesn't quite top the iPhone introduction (“… an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator, get it”) but it is not far off. Just to give you an idea why I called it successful when virtually the entire media set doesn’t, is that currently, the iPad represents around 20 billion $ per year in revenue for Apple. It’s the same size as its Mac business, the same business that put Apple on the map all those years ago. Because we see revenues from the iPhone dwarfing this, we lose track of just how significant the other components in the Apple ecosystem are. (/rant).

It's such a good introduction and presentation of a product for the same reasons I recently wrote about the new MacBook Pro. It almost perfectly answers the jobs to be done questions and provides a simple solution to basic questions. Interestingly, I and many others feel that Apple have recently gone a little off the rails lately. I'll discuss that later in this article.

My personal iPad story

In some ways, my iPad story starts with the iPhone. The moment I saw the iPhone, I knew that this device, as limited as it was then, was to take over the world of mobile telephones. It was so evident to me that during a trip back to my native island, I had to get hold of an iPhone from the one Apple Store that existed at the time, in central London.

Immediately on getting back to my brother’s flat, I embarked on the witchcraft necessary to make the phone usable on my phone companies network despite it not being authorised for such use. A process that was known as jail-breaking — evoking the old westerns where then unjustifiably locked up villain is bust out of jail by explosives, horses pulling bars, any means necessary — that unlocked the phone from the shackles of its native network in the U.K.

It was a perilous process and one not without risk. If I remember correctly, it took two or three attempts and a sinking feeling that I’d “bricked” £500 worth of telecoms equipment. When it did boot and then connect via roaming to the network I was ecstatic, I had an original iPhone in working condition and was one of the first in my adopted island at the time. I still have that phone today... and it still works.

But back to the iPad. Having been completely smitten with the iPhone and many of Apple’s products since the original Macintoshes, I kept a close eye on the announcements and demos of their products. I’d created time in my calendar to watch what was, and then turned out to be, a seminal event. I encourage you to watch the demo for yourselves. If you have to present products and services in your day job, you could do no worse than learn from a master like Jobs.

The iPad was announced, and the world of tech was stunned. Not only did the device ticks the boxes for multiple use cases, but it was at a price that was almost derisory, $499 sans tax.

Through a stroke of good fortune and not the only one as you’ll learn, I was invited to a large conference for one of the most advanced and respected software companies in business software at the time. The conference was to take place in Las Vegas, a place I’d never visited and one I wanted to see for myself at some point. So I was excited from the bat.

Apple’s announcement of availability coincided perfectly with my upcoming trip, so fate was sealed. I would grab one from the store whilst travelling, done! It turned out to be a little more complicated than that. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the world that wanted an iPad.

The journey from Martinique to Las Vegas at that time was not fast. Leaving the island at around 8 am arriving in Las Vegas at roughly 9 pm local time, I had previously studied where the Apple Store was — there was only two close by in 2010 — and how long it took to get there, what time it closed and the estimated time of arrival of my plane. It was possible but by the skin of my teeth.

I arrived in Las Vegas, tired and wanting to sleep after a laborious journey, but something in the air (Oxygen?) whilst walking through the Casino woke me up. The MGM Grand forces you to walk through the Casino to get to your room, like most hotels in Las Vegas I subsequently discovered. I checked in dropped my bags, ran downstairs jumped in a cab and hot-footed it to Ceaser’s Palace with around 10 minutes to spare before closing time at 11 pm.

I found a salesperson and requested an iPad, but to my dismay, they had all sold out that morning. It was back-ordered, but delivery was unknown. I gave up. But the salesman suggested I put my name on a waiting list. He suggested that even if I had left the country, it wouldn’t matter as it would get reallocated to the next one on the list.

I’m not a gambler, not even for 1 cent. WTF was I doing in Las Vegas? I was definitely out of my comfort zone to be fair. I thought it was a gamble and hence not worth it as I would lose, but something said to do it regardless. I guess the fact that it was free and had no harmful consequences I thought why not. So Sunday night at nearly 11 pm I added my name to a list of people waiting for an iPad, a list that was already more than 20 people long. It was a long shot and one I was convinced I’d never have a chance. So I promptly forgot about it and quickly mourned on what could have been.

The conference started Monday morning, and I was learning lots of great stuff. It will go down as one of the best conferences I have ever attended. Then on Tuesday morning, I received an email from Apple letting me know there was an iPad waiting for me if I wanted it, and that I had 24 hours to recover it. It didn’t take me 24 hours.

I got back to the hotel where the conference was staged, unboxed and booted up the iPad. Logged in through my Apple ID and went back downstairs to the conference, iPad in tow. That day, I took more notes than I had previously taken in all the conferences I’d attended. Something about the device was perfect for the way I worked at conferences and in meetings.

I have never been without my iPad in a meeting or a conference in 10 years.

The father of Jobs to be Done Theory (and others) dies

Clayton Christensen died last Thursday the 23rd January 2020.

From the FT:

Clayton Christensen, the management thinker who conceived and developed the idea of “disruptive innovation” and influenced generations of business students and entrepreneurs, has died, aged 67. Universally known as “Clay”, he passed away on Thursday as a result of complications from leukaemia.

Christensen was best known for the ideas he laid out in his seminal book The Innovator’s Dilemma, published in 1997, which described how incumbents who neglected the lower end of their market could be disrupted by new and innovative products. One core example was how “mini-mills” sprang up to challenge traditional steel companies.

This central idea — including the suggestion that companies should disrupt themselves to escape the fate of complacent incumbents — inspired Silicon Valley’s innovators.

I was introduced to his work through several sources at the same time, so I can’t credit one person in particular with the exposure. However, one person has been particularly influential in my ongoing discovery of his work, Ben Thompson (Stratechery). It was through his writing that I first discovered the Jobs to be Done theory that has been and continues to be so successful in helping businesses create value from products and services. I wrote about some of the subject matter in one of Christensen’s books, The Innovators Dilemma, in March last year:

This is a common threat when you are dealing with digital products and services. By definition, digital goods are easier to distribute and copy but more importantly, if your clients see a new product or service and that their sunk costs are sufficiently low as to avoid the sunk cost fallacy.

In that issue, I was trying to explain the democratisation of innovation and the reduction in risk in innovating with digital-only products and services. It’s worth reading if you haven’t as yet.

Jobs to be Done Theory is the starting point to innovation and something I use virtually daily to understand how well processes are working and develop innovative suggestions for my clients. Thinking about how something works starting from the “use” point provides insights that are so often lost when we overthink about the desired result.

Clayton Christensen concluded that Apple didn’t focus on profits when developing products such as the iPad, iPhone and others. Let’s not kid ourselves; profits are a big part of the desired outcomes for Apple. What is different from other companies is their restraint in releasing technology only when it is ready and when it can address the JTBD adequately enough to disrupt the early vendors. Apple is generally one of the last to use technology in its products, but when it does, they are so well-conceived that you feel it has always been this way.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

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