Outside Innovation

What Can We Learn from the Huffington Post? How to Engage Your Co-Creators!

I have to admit that I was disappointed to hear that Arriana Huffington has "sold out" to AOL. In less than six years, The Huffington Post became an admirable, vibrant, and profitable ecosystem in one of the industries that is most under siege: newspaper publishing.

The Huffington Post is a classic example of how to innovate correctly! Start with a clean slate. Make different assumptions from those that incumbents are making. Deeply understand the motivations of all of your stakeholders—including the members of your ecosystem you are counting on to create value.

Arriana Huffington was the first publisher to truly understand that there’s a group of influential and insightful people who are eager for an audience and a dialogue. The Huffington Post was carefully crafted as a platform to attract powerful and articulate voices.

The HuffPo's success as a profitable and influential online newspaper and media magnet is impressive. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that the HuffPo's brand has gained a respect and a cachet among newsmakers that is equivalent to that of news organizations that have been in business for decades, even centuries.

What Are the Chances for Nokia + Microsoft’s “3rd Ecosystem” Bet?

How’s that “burning platform dive” working out for you, Stephen Elop?

After Nokia’s CEO made his controversial burning platform speech and dove into the arms of Microsoft on February 11, 2011, Nokia’s stock price dropped precipitously and is still falling, its developer and customer community rebelled, and 1,000 Nokia employees staged a walkout.

Nokia does not seem to be doing a very good job of creating a buzz around the benefits of supporting what Elop calls, “the third ecosystem,” by which he means having a Microsoft/Nokia mobile phone/application ecosystem to compete with the Google/Android ecosystem and the Apple/iPhone ecosystem.

Granted, change is hard; cultural change is very hard, and you often have to cannibalize your current offerings in order to evolve to a next generation. But Elop’s handling of this planned transition will go down in management history as one of the worst SNAFUs ever.

Nokia’s oh-so-public trashing of its existing software platforms, and, by extension, all those employees and developers who have invested in it, was badly done. When you need to make a transition to a new platform, you should do so by making it seductive and a “no brainer” for customers, developers, and partners to transition, not by telling them they are stupid!

You (our readers) were quick to pick up on this gaffe…. Among your comments, I found Aussie, Peter Horne, to have the best analysis:

"Nokia is a large and powerful Finnish company, influenced by founder stakes and is a huge employer, which means that"

"1) The company won't leave Finland"

"2) It will make local decisions (see 1)"

"3) This guy [Elop] will have to live amongst the people he is dangerously close to insulting."

"It is not unusual for x-pat U.S. execs to talk to their new companies as if they are U.S. employees, only to regret the fact that they didn't take some time to work out the Real Politik. This guy looks like an idiot to me..."

~ Peter Horne, Patty’s Pioneer

Microsoft’s Unpopular Coup

What smells the most to me is the fact that Microsoft is clearly the master puppeteer. Microsoft didn’t acquire Nokia, but they might as well have. Microsoft is buying Nokia with billions of dollars of investments in R&D because Microsoft needs to establish a beachhead against Google’s and Apple’s ecosystems. I don’t believe that this approach will work. You can’t “buy” an ecosystem. You have to grow it, organically. If you build it, they (customers and developers) won’t necessarily come, even with bribes.

Nokia's Burning Platform: Which Ecosystem will be Best for Nokia's Customers?

On February 8, Endgadget published a memo that was sent from Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop to all of Nokia’s employees. In this “Burning Platform” memo, Elop sets the stage for the announcement he’ll be making on February 11th, 2011, about Nokia’s shift in strategy. I believe that Nokia will jump into the arms of Microsoft (Elop’s most recent former employer) and that this was probably in the wind when he was recruited from Microsoft’s Office division to become Nokia’s president and CEO in September 2010.

Microsoft badly needs a strong mobile device partner to make Windows Phone 7 viable. Since October 2010, Windows Phone 7 has been available on phones from Dell, HTC, LG, and Samsung from 60 carriers in 30 countries. But all of these phone providers also support Google’s Android OS. It may be that Nokia will espouse the Microsoft OS and eschew Google’s Android. Nokia may well walk away from its own software technology to become a Microsoft-only phone supplier. In order to do something this radical, Elop has to convince his Nokia employees to throw away their own intellectual property and to follow his lead into Microsoft’s arms. Hence his already famous “Burning Platform” memo.

What interests me about this move by Nokia is not just the likely Microsoft/Nokia alliance, but the assumption that Elop makes that, in order to be successful in mobile phones, you have to be part of a winning ecosystem.

Quora Crowdsourcing

Last week I spent entirely too much time exploring Quora, a crowdsourced Q&A site that seems to be taking off. Quora will never rise to the primacy of Facebook nor Wikipedia. Yet it's a platform that has done enough things right to seduce a lot of pundits, experts, and savvy tech entrepreneurs to be willing to share their expertise with anyone who asks a really good question.

I think that Quora may have legs. It's definitely worth watching and understanding. In my opinion, it's most appropriate for business people and professionals—not so much for consumers.

As an author, consultant, and publisher, I'm interested in the possibility of syndicating and curating selected Quora feeds to be able to add value to you, my audience, by pointing you to answers and resources that I could never come up with on my own.

I'm going to be really interested to watch:

1. How long will people continue to contribute to Quora's knowledgebase?

2. How long will Quora prove useful to a growing number of people?

3. How will Quora monetize itself?

4. Once it goes commercial, will people stop participating?

5. How will the Quora ecosystem evolve as people begin syndicating Quora content?

Why should you care about Quora? It might be the easiest and fastest place to get the answers you need to get something done!

Why Quora Is Useful (and Addictive)
Crowdsourced Q&A Community Builds a Knowledge Repository
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, February 3, 2011

Egyptian Revolutionaries Aided by the Anonymous Net

Even before the Mubarak government shut down Internet traffic to and from the country, many Egyptian dissidents were taking precautions by communicating via the "anonymous net." The anonymous Internet is a parallel network of peer-to-peer servers that relays your information (and your applications) anonymously. The purpose is to keep government officials and commercial entities from being able to track who you are and what you're saying. This is particularly important if you are concerned about having your civil liberties infringed or being thrown in jail because you are speaking your mind in ways that are unpopular to the regime.

"There are many people wanting to record your Internet traffic and browsing patterns; from governments to commercial advertising networks. There are many ways to defeat the threat of traffic analysis; from simple proxy providers, virtual private networks, and distributed peer to peer solutions. Only some of these offer anonymity along with circumvention."

From the Tor blog: Circumvention and Anonymity

Many of Patty's Pioneers have been predicting an increase in the use of anonymous peer-to-peer networks for some time. These people aren’t political activists. But they are tech-savvy businesspeople who aren't excited about having Google or Microsoft, or any government or any commercial entity tap into their private communications.

The open source Tor program provides anonymity and circumvents wiretapping of your online information by relying on a network of volunteers who are willing to put up Tor servers. (This is not a trivial act of defiance—a few people running Tor servers have been arrested!)

During late January, as the Egyptian revolution began to unfold, it was fascinating to see the spike in anonymous peer-to-peer networking that occurred via Tor.