Watching the Uber/Lyft fight against the Hillsborough County PTC has been a front row seat to the old guard refusing to change.
The music industry died in 5 years. Blame it on Napster, but it was more about the Kingpins not wanted to change. Movies and TV are facing this, but seem to be adjusting better than the music industry did.
Newspapers blame Google and so much else on the fact that they just didn’t want to figure out a service model. What they need is a newspaper subscription service like Rhapsody for Music or Amazon Prime for News. Micro-payments that get you into a dozen or so news outlets. Not enough people are going to subscribe to one newspaper, especially when the news is free on another site. If a bunch of newspapers got together, they could make it work. The Tribune Co or the Garnett company or Ziff-Davis or Time-Warner just haven’t gotten out of the old product line thinking. It isn’t about Time magazine. It is about the entire catalog. Just a thought.
CB Insights has this article about the 62 start-ups picking apart the hotel industry. AirBnB is Number 1. But once the hotels loose conventions, then it is over for hotels. Sites like eVenues and more events taking place at non-hotel locations will have an impact. [And when you pay $38 topark for a night in Atlanta, you start re-thinking that whole downtown hotel thing.]
Much of it is arbitrage. Uber and AirBnb are effective because (a) people need to earn more money and (b) people want to save money, even in the face of the uncertainty. That is arbitrage. It killed the long distance business.
Craigslist’s free ads killed the classified business. Arbitrage.
When I mention innovation, I don’t mean buy LinkedIn. I mean, adjust to the new sharing economy.
When Slack comes along and hits 2 million users daily in 24 months, any responsible executive in the UCaaS space HAS to investigate that. Use it. Try it. Incorporate some of that into your next version. Or lose.
The big problem that most software faces is that it is not as easy or as good as the iOS. That was what prompted Consumerization of IT and BYOD. This created havoc in the business world. All because most software deployments suck, fail, and are not adopted by users.
In this autopsy of the failure of Coin, Product Risk is big, which is why you need a Product Manager, someone who owns the product and is driving it to be competitive, relevant to its users, easy to use and more. Most products lack a Product Manager.
Newspapers lack more than a Product Manager. They lack a business model. They lack utilizing technology. Why is there a single front page? When I login why isn’t it more like Amazon or Google News – and by that I mean relevant to me? Why aren’t they curating stories along with social media like Storify? The St. Pete Times does an epic job when chasing a Pulitzer – like here, just a beautiful Medium-like layout for the story.
It seems we are all in a race for revenue, but forgot that to make and keep a customer, you have to offer a product that they want, trust and use.
Tags: conference, economy, innovation, strategy
Related tags: music industry, product manager, product, business, industry, music
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