“There aren’t really good and bad people. We all have parts of both. What matters is what parts we choose to act on” -  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

How do you choose to act on?

What is your point of inflexion? How do you choose to act on to be one or the other?

Is it the opportunity? For many people to decision to choose to be good or bad (right or wrong) is influenced by opportunity, ambition, greed  or desperation. As I mentioned in my previous post When opportunity knocks the door….values often shut blind. I argued that for most ,  the decision to stay on one or other side is directly influenced by external factors and opportunity at the top of the list.   

Opportunity presents itself in two forms: time and price.

Is it the price? : Price is arguably drives most decisions. So some times people don’t want to pay the price to stay on right and look for opportunity to avoid it even though they might cross the line on the way. Software and music piracy are prime examples.

Is it the time? : Convenience or time  is another driving factor that influence our decisions either way. If it takes 6 months to process the right way and it only takes a month to go the wrong way, some may choose the wrong way.

or is it the pain or joy associated with choosing a way?

Read a thought provoking post on Seth’s Blog about the tacit honor system in our society,  the notion of 99% of people are good and only 1% of the people are actually bad. So if you treat everybody as if they belong to that 1%, you might loose the 99%.

Just about everything in civilization works on the honor system.

No armed guards at the local grocery store, no pat down as you leave the library. Most people cross the street without fear of crazed hit and run assassins.

Great marketers are able to deliver customer service because they’re willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. They tend to take your word for it.

Of course there are bad actors. One out of a thousand people will cheat on that test or rip off that store. When LL Bean or Patagonia offers a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, some jerks decide to buy an outfit, go on a trip and then return it all.

If you spend all your time worrying about these folks, you end up underserving the other 99% of the population. Take the write off. That’s what successful marketers do.

Though I agree to an extent to the notion of 99% on one side and the other 1% on the other side of any such argument, I believe that there is a great portion of that 99% actually will jump to the otherside when there is an opportunity or necessity.  Very few people will always stand up to their values.  And very few people will always be bad no matter what you do. Whatever we do, people on either extreme might not change a bit. But they represent a very small portion of any system. So to establish an honor society it is very important to install additional checks which will keep this ‘great portion’ of cats-on-the-wall in check. Atleast, create an illusion that there is such a system watching them.

An intersection with cameras (though not-working) will keep most drivers in check. Closed circuit monitors in shops keep most of those itching hands safe in pockets. Regular audits by IRS keep a majority of people report exactly what they earn. When nobody is watching, almost everybody act strange.

The code of honor rely on the security checks installed on the system.  Have an optimal level of those checks and monitoring systems and have a good insurance to cover the 1% bad guys.

Let them enter through the door heads high by closing down the windows.

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Seth Godin on ‘How to make a million’ says tyring to make a penny from hundred million almost never works. Instead try to make a dollar from million people.

One popular method is to make a dollar in profit from each of a million people. Or a penny from a hundred million. This is the China strategy. It almost never works.

It almost never works because the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great. It’s too risky and too expensive. Doesn’t matter that you’re only hoping for a dollar or a penny. The price isn’t the challenge, it’s the difficulty in spreading your idea.

Far easier to make a thousand dollars from each of a thousand people, or even $10,000 from a hundred organizations. You can focus on a small hive of people, a group that talks to itself. You can push through a smaller dip and reach a level of recommendation and dominance that makes incremental sales far easier.

And you can learn much earlier in the process if you’ve gotten it right or not. Because you’re making more per sale, you can spend the time necessary to figure out what really sells and modify your offering sooner in the process.

The irony is that many products and services that have reached huge masses of people actually have significant margins (Windows, for example, or a cup of Starbucks). They got the best of both worlds because first they focused on winning small communities over and that led to the larger market.

Apply this rule to today’s web2.0 companies and software development companies. I don’t understand where they are going.

• For most web2.0 companies, the only revenue channel is by showing ads. To make any marginal revenue out of those ads, you must server Millions of page views. Each page view paying a penny. And software companies like 37Signals does it entirely different. They only had around a Million customers. Not sure how many of them are paid customers, but they charge a minimum of 12 dollars a month for a paid customer. To generate 12 dollars in ad revenue if we go the ad route, they need a minimum of 20,000 page views. So when it comes to listening to customers and make changes in thier products, which organization is better.  In other words, if you want the organization to respond to you, you know which one to pick.
• Many companies used to sell their software by licensing it for a fixed number of servers or users or a combination. (Take for example Solaris Unix). And then they decided to offer the software for free. Motivation behind is to get more customers who pay $100 per support instead of having few customers who pay license costs that runs in thousands per license.

So finally, which one is better. Offer your product free and sell ads. Millions of signed up users to boast while you may not be making any profit. Or offer your service at a fee. You have only a few customers but you may make Millions in profits.

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Excellent visual showing almost all Apple products. I did not know most products. I haven’t even heard of most of them except a very few.  

Evolution of Apple’s Products | created by Edwin Tofslie

 

A visual I created to show the evolution of most all Apple products
created over the past 30 years.This was created to show the evolution of the
form factor and industrial design of the products, not to show every single
model or upgrade Apple has launched.
Click here to view big

Source: Apple Product Evolution

Another book on the block that is vehemently complaining about internet and its ill effects on Culture.

The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture  

I remember an earlier discussion about Wikipedia, complaining about its amateurish mob made content compared to so called validated and trusted expert content from famous encyclopedias. Whether there is any truth in that matter or not, first website I and most of my friends and collegues refer to when in doubt is undoubtedly wikipedia. On subjects we knew in depth, we compared the quality of content and found no truth in those allegations.   

Coming to key arguments made in this book, here are few exceprts (taken from 37Signals post, linked at the bottom of the page, highlights by me)

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” 

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper. Not writing as rebellion sounds bizarre—like a piece of fiction authored by Franz Kafka. But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.

The content on youtube and flickr may be naive and amateurish. But it is original, fresh and so refreshing. They are  lot better than boring and stereotyped TV shows and reality crap.

I agree that the more we personalize and customize we read only what we like and might miss a different perspective. But we do this kind of personalization all the time, even without web2.0. Not everybody read every page in a news paper, every page of a magazine or every program aired on 100s of channels. We choose  a certain channel, certain program or a certain series. Do you watch every basket ball game that is ever played? You choose your team. You choose your game. Do you listen every music CD that is ever released? Have you ever been to every restaurent that is open in the world? You pick one you like.

So personalization is nothing new and internet can not be blamed for that.

Everybody is an author.

Regarding everybody becoming an author, in a democractic world every citizen has equal opportunity to become the leader of Nation. Does that mean there will be no leaders and no followers?  In most parts of the world, everybody has an equal opportunity to own a business and produce a valuable product or service. Does that mean, there is no consumer and there is no meaning of business? 

Is it chaging/killing our culture?

Yes it is. For sure. But that is the essence of culture. Culture is an evolution of how we live. Not a static representation of a life style. Our culture is how we live, then culture is a post-martem representation of a lifestyle. Not the other way. Internet is changing the way we live, communicate and collaborate. Its a new culture. But an empowering culture.

Internet is providing an equal opportunity to everybody to become what they want. And in that aspect, internet is the best thing that has ever happened to the civilization. One that treats everyone equal and provides an equal opportunity.

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