Blogmatic

It’s that time again, DemoCamp time that is. DemoCamp reaches its half dozen Birthday on September 24th. Sign up page is on the wiki at:

http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/DemoCampOttawa6

15 minutes of fame and feedback. Fun, Friendly and informal plus a great way to meet and mingle with the Ottawa area start-up community.

cheers,

Ian Graham

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My life coach Jeff Eisen told me an interesting story the last time we met. According to Cherokee wisdom each person has two wolves that live inside them. Not literally of course but more in spiritual sense.

A Cherokee Grandfather was explaining to his young grandson that there are two wolves that live inside every person. One wolf is very dark and brooding representing; fear, distrust, anger, jealousy and many of the other darker feelings and emotions of people. The other wolf is light and represents joy, caring, accomplishment and many of the more positive feelings we have. The two wolves are constantly fighting with each other.

The young boy asked his grandfather “Which wolf wins?”.

“That depends on which one you feed.” replied the grandfather.

Have a great weekend.
Ian Graham

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I have noticed that Microsofts LIVE search engine continues to generate an increasing number of hits to my website. While still a relatively small percentage compared to Google I do notice that it is on the rise. Could this be the Microsoft entity to help challenge Google’s search  engine dominance? 

The LIVE search engine itself is very simple and plain much like the early Google engine. Time will tell but certainly another arrow in the quiver for Microsoft when Google hunting.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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Based on all the reading I have done the defining moment in the battle for Home Video dominance came in 1977. This was the year that Matsushita signed up RCA (and many others) as a distributor in the US. About one year later RCA signed a deal with Magnetic Video Corporation (MV), the primary producer of home videos in North America. In 1978 RCA included two free videos with every VCR it shipped. The net result was that MV produced considerably more VHS tapes than betamax in fact the ratio was 2.4 to 1. This turned out to be a key contributing factor to why VHS videos had a greater selection than Beta. When the Home video market took off in the mid-80’s VHS was the medium of choice and selection was a major factor.

So there you have it. The battle between VHS and Beta is one that is highly complex and difficult to boil down to a single identifiable factor. However, you could say that tape length was the tactic that won the battle, but Matsushita’s partnership strategy is what won the war. So both Alec Saunders and I are correct.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I receive quite a number of hits to my blog with the search term “Rogers MY5” and I thought it might be worthwhile to have a look at the various Fab 5 packages from the top three service providers in Canada (Rogers, Telus and Bell).  So here are the results of my observations of various forms of advertising and a quick web search of the BIG 3. The comparison is largely from the perspective of how the three market their services, although there is a bit of consumer information as well.

All three service providers have major advertising campaigns underway to promote their version of the X-5 plan. Rogers and Telus are aggressively using the television media to get their messages out and Bell does to some extent. Bell is much more prominent on the air waves, at least on the radio stations that I listen to. All three are using print media and the web. The big question is, “who is winning the battle for the minds and wallets of Canadian youth in the wireless market?”Here is a closer look at the three participants.

Telus is aggressively marketing their My Faves offering. The first time I realized the brand name for their “My Faves” was when I read their website. Their TV and print ads, in my opinion, do not do a good job of making the name sticky. While I think the “Telus” brand and image is well done their actual wireless service branding is weak. Their website was the best of the three that I looked at for the wireless plans. The information is really easy to find and laid out in a clean and concise manner. In terms of product offering I think Telus is the leader.They have three easy to distinguish offerings; My Faves 25, My Faves 30 and My Faves 40. Their weakness is in their feeble attempt at social networking. They have some online fishbowl thing where you can add fish to your tank to represent your 5. I think their fishbowl social networking totally misses the mark, but what do I know I still don’t understand the fascination with facebook. Telus has a strong offering but with significant room for improvement.

Rogers is marketing their “Rogers MY5” brand. In terms of brand recognition for their wireless offering Rogers is well ahead of the others. They have a strong, as expected, presence on TV and their other forms of advertising help to reinforce their brand. The brand is hip trendy and in my opinion will resonate with the youth market. Their website and product offering are bad and incoherent. The site makes it really difficult to figure out exactly what you are buying with MY5. The package is part of the Mega Value plans which make it difficult to compare with Bell and Telus. I am not sure if this is inadvertent or not. Rogers has the best social networking offering of the three and are integrated with myspace. Rogers is selling on brand more than product offering and I think doing a good job of it. They are also branding themselves as the “Most Reliable Network”.

Bell seems to be lagging the other two both in terms of branding and product offering. Bell’s product offering is Fab Five 25 and currently only available in BC and Alberta. Their reluctance, for whatever reason, to launch nationally with the Fab Five 25 will probably cost them market share. The actual product offering is almost identical to Telus. The product was difficult to find on their website. No evidence of any sort of social networking to compliment their offering. Bell is a bit of a laggard in the race for the youth market.

The battle for the youth market is being hotly contested between Rogers and Telus, unless Bell starts to move a little faster they could miss out. I think what would really differentiate one vendor from the other would be if they came up with a FaceBook interface.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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You don’t have to go to Africa to take part in a Safari. While doing some searching on the weekend I cam across this great site for e-reference material. The site is called “Safari Books Online” and is a great resource for Computers, IT stuff and Innovation (my search).

http://safari.oreilly.com/home

Here is the description from the site:

What is Safari? Safari is an e-reference library where you can search across thousands of books from O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press and more. Read books cover to cover or flip directly to the section you need in seconds.

I found the material related to my search very helpful.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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Another dash of politics;

I read an article in the Ottawa Citizen today that said Moose were very bad for the environment because they produce a lot of methane. Really, … this is the truth, right there on the front page “Moose: Methane Machines”.

I leave it to your imagination how they produce methane. If moose are bad for the environment then it stands to reason that moose hunters must be good for the environment because they limit the production of methane. Taking that one step further if you limit moose hunter’s ability to reduce the production of methane through things like the gun control or the gun registry then this is bad for the environment. Therefore gun control is bad for the environment.

This is the sort of non-sensical rationale that many environmentalist use to justify their points of view.

Back to some Lifecycle and Commercialization posts on Monday.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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VHS versus Beta is one of the classic product introduction scenarios. The Engineers at Sony had been working on Betamax for 15 to 20 years prior to its introduction in 1974. JVC introduced VHS products in 1976 and the battle for the home video market had begun. JVC essentially adopted a fast follower strategy.

Sony Beta is acknowleged as superior technology to the JVC VHS system with better picture quality. However, VHS emerged as the dominant Home video technology within 5 years of introduction. Why is that?

There are two primary reasons given for the success of VHS over beta:
- Partnerships and licensing
- Length of Tape

According to New York University case study “Betmax and VHS” the principle reason for the success of VHS was JVC more open policy for partners. While there is some merit to this argument I think that the tape length was a more significant factor. Much of the partnering and licensing wins occurred later in the introduction cycle. See below for introduction chart.

In my opinion, shared by many experts, the principle and defining reason for the success of VHS was related to a technical issue early in the introduction cycle.  I have heard different numbers regarding the length of tape for VHS versus Beta, however, the important fact is that the Beta tape was to short to tape a full length movie. The VHS tape could tape a full length movie. Therefore many of the big movie production studios selected VHS for recording their movies within the first year or two of product introduction. After this it was all down hill for Beta. Beta did increase the length of their tape record time, however, after the studios had made their decisions to use VHS technology. Within a few years Beta was relegated to niche status and VHS enjoyed the ride up the product lifecycle curve.
More on the decision surrounding the tape length tomorrow.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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I am feeling particularly free market and feisty today. I read Alec Saunders post regarding consumers and imposed standards and thought I would take the opportunity to provide a different perspective.  There just was not enough space in the comment field so I wrote this post.

I take particular exception to the line from the closing paragraph “Consumers are best served when commodities are delivered in standard ways.”   with the implication that government should be imposing the standards for consumers benefit. I can make my own decisions thank you very much and would rather have the free market determine which products succeed rather than the government decide for me.

But let’s start with the opening bit where Alec scratches the surface regarding VHS versus Beta. OK, in the VHS versus Beta battle he mentions that consumer interests were well served. Excellent point and I agree. The reason consumer interests were served in this case is that free market forces determined the outcome.  This is an incredibly interesting product life cycle example and one well worth further study. The cause of VHS’s triumph over Beta had less to do with Licensing and more to do with engineering decisions in the marketing domain. In line with the comments in Marc Goldbergs post about length of tape. Will have a post on the VHS versus Beta bit in an upcoming post.

The next case in point is where in the Canadian wireless market place has a couple of different competing technologies.  I believe that the government should regulate spectrum allocation, but that should be the extent of their involvement.  The technology to deliver services to consumers should be up to the providers.  The market place should decide which technologies deliver the best value. The state of the wireless market probably has more to do with North American pricing and service offering than the underlying technology which is essentially plumbing. The value is in the application and services to customers.  I always liked the term customer better than consumer.

Having the government impose standards in a private market place in fact limits choice, greatly improves the probability of corruption and has someone making decisions for others. Deciding now which wireless technology will produce a winner and loser scenario. Let the market decide who wins and loses not some government bureaucrat or committee of bureaucrats. In a free market customers vote with one of the most important ballets there is, their wallet. Give customers choice and let them determine who achieves market place success.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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My wife and daughter are planning a trip to New York City as part of summer vacation. I thought I would offer my assistance by helping to book the trip online. In this web 2.0 you would think a large company like Via Rail Canada or Amtrac websites should be a good example of web 2.0 sites, or so I thought.

In reality nothing could be further from the truth. While the look and feel of Via Rail website is OK, the actual booking a trip or finding information on schedule is horrific and anything at all ecommerce like is poorly designed. If you are in the IT consulting business sending an unsolicited proposal to Via Rail could yield you some business.

First of all I knew that I wanted to go from Ottawa to New York City and back. I know VIA doesn’t go into the US but thought they might be helpful in hooking up with the US trains. In Via Rails somewhat cryptic origin and destination box both Ottawa and New York City are valid options. There are also fields for departure date and return date that are mandatory. So you have 4 fields that need to match up to get a schedule. The unfortunate part of this closed system is that if even one of the fields doesn’t match you do not get a result. Something simple like being able to say Ottawa to New York and list the schedules would have been helpful but doesn’t seem to exist. After 15 minutes I couldn’t get a result.

I called the Via 1-800 number and talked to a very friendly and helpful lady (Jocelyn). She informed me that Via didn’t go to New York City but Amtrac did leave from Montreal.  WTF! Why is NYC even in the VIA destination box trip scheduler then?

AmTrac scheduler is clunky as well but certainly quite a bit friendlier than Via. Found most of the information I wanted and AmTrac’s 1-800 number.

So instead of booking a trip online, we will be phoning the 1-800 numbers on Monday morning. You would think that companies like Via Rail and Amtrac would want to make their online experience as simple and user friendly as possible. Particularly when you consider that a good portion of their business is likely derived from outside North America. Right now there is significant room for improvement in their web experiences.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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