Answer Guy Central

I’ve mentioned Paul Krugman before. He’s one smart guy, and I’m not at all embarrassed to admit that he’s operating in an intellectual space that I’ve not only never visited but don’t even have an apt name for.

And Obama-administration-adviser-and-New-York-Times-Economist Paul Krugman says we’re in a Depression. Not just a recession, you understand . . . a full-blown depression.

The Status quo is broken. Change is here, and the only question is whether you’re going to enact business change fast enough and well enough to remain a “have” in a world more and more frequented by have-nots.

Let me begin by saying that just because Paul Krugman says we’re in a depression doesn’t mean it’s so. But if we look at the evidence he cites and conclude that he’s right, or even close, we have no choice but take swift and serious steps. So if this is a depression, what should your business change be?

HEADS UP: what follows can sound like a commercial for The Computer Answer Guy, PC-VIP, and Virtual VIP. And by definition it is. But that’s coincidence. It’s tough being smart!

In Paul Krugman’s depression-addled world, business is changing. In fact, everything is changing, but let’s focus on business. Sure, the big guys will find ways to leverage their positions, and a good number of them won’t have to adapt any more than they do in times of prosperity; they make the calls, and we all get dragged along.

But the little guy is facing something different. When every step you make has the potential to have huge impact on your success, you have to re-think the way you operate your business and the way you move.

You have to cut costs, even as you expand.

If that means farming out work, you do it. If that means traveling less and still communicating, you do that.

It means you have to change.

With free videoconferencing so easy to set up and use the traveling less part is easy, of course, and anyone who’s ever traveled on business will tell you that doing less of it is a win, not a loss. And despite the US Government’s newest attempt to make it harder, farming out out your work can be easy too, but you have to think about what that means.

Hiring good contractors is even harder than hiring good employees. Virtual VIP et.al. make it easier, and save you from many of the consequences of the pending new employment law. And All Of That Is About Efficiency. Use a cliché like “work smarter, not harder”, if you like; the point is that if a depression really is here, and people really are going to see the kinds of changes that Paul Krugman is warning us about, then business change is unavoidable.

Jump in. Business Change may not be easy or fun, but it’s your friend. And in this “Third Depression”, it’s more important than ever.

This weekend news broke that the existing security laws in Finland making it a crime to leave your Wi-Fi signal open and unencrypted might be in on their way out.

Not being from Finland or an expert in their legal goings-on, my reaction was predictable: That’s ILLEGAL There ?!?!?

Yesterday, Starbucks announced that their semi-free Wi-Fi is about to become completely free. My first reaction was “it’s about time”. McDonalds figured this out last year, and others have known that the extra business gained by encouraging people to stay at your store is a no-brainer for quite some time. Sure, the Wi-Fi at Panera Bread is unreliable, but at least they have the good sense to offer it.

And then Starbucks upped the ante.

Soon, when you stop by everyone’s favorite coffee shop and use their Internet connection, you’ll get a bonus with your burnt cup o’ Joe: free access to paid sites, including The Wall Street Journal.

This is huge.

It’s huge business change for WSJ, which up until now was “pay only”. It pretty much ends anyone’s chance of charging for Wi-Fi. And biggest of all, it signals a clear adoption of the idea of coopetition.

I’ve been telling you that in the new business world there are only partners; nobody’s a pure competitor any more. Coopetition is the word for that, and Starbucks, the Wall Street Journal, and the other companies that are jumping on this bandwagon are bearing it out.

Of course, unless it’s legal in Finland, none of this will matter, right? <wink>

What do you do once your business gets so big that you have to branch out to continue growing? If you’re Google, you try new things like making mobile phones, and hope for hits rather than misses. Or you can go the way Apple went, taking the iPod Touch, making it really big, and calling the iPad something “new”.

Or you can buy one competitor’s product to become more of a force against another competitor. While not strictly coopetition, Google enacted yet another business change last month when they bought DocVerse.

DocVerse is a great idea, and I applaud the guys who built it if for no other reason than it was a pretty obvious acquisition target. The Internet-based document collaboration service lets you share Microsoft Office files with others and work on them on-line, and Microsoft should have been smart enough to buy it before Google did.

Sadly, Redmond has fallen behind Palo Alto in forward thinking, and it somehow didn’t occur to Microsoft that buying DocVerse would have been cheaper than doing all the Office Online development themselves, and even more importantly would have kept this jewel out of Google’s hands.

Remember that the name of the game on the Internet is keeping people engaged as long as possible in as many ways as possible, and Google already has people giving up on Microsoft Office in droves, in favor of storing and working on their documents “in the cloud” using Google Docs. DocVerse adds to that dominance and renders much of Microsoft’s work on the about-to-be-launched online version of Microsoft Office look like a waste of time.

Where’s the coopetition angle? Google is:

• using Microsoft Office’s heretofore dominant position in Office documents creation for their own gain
• making a success out of a small company by acquiring DocVerse
• giving anyone who can write further extensions to the system an opportunity to do so that Microsoft doesn’t make nearly as easy
• extending their reach as the world’s largest advertising agency

Business Change comes in many forms. Coopetition — knowing when to join with someone instead of trying to beat them — is a business change that can be used effectively by both the large and the small.

Are you practicing coopetition? Let The Answer Guy show you how.

Ever wonder how your favorite television programs come to be on Hulu? Think about it: the studios that own the rights to those shows don’t like giving them away. They sell episodes on iTunes, they sell DVD collections of their programming, and they sell advertising on the networks that carry the programs, so why give away programming and let Hulu have their content for free?

The truth is, they don’t. When you watch a program on Hulu it carries advertising. Hulu sells those ads and some of the revenue from them goes to the owners of the programs.

It’s Coopetition at its best. And last week Comedy Central decided they didn’t want to play the coopetition game any more. They’ve pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from Hulu. You can still watch the programs for free over the Internet, but now you’ll have to come directly to the Comedy Central website.

Just as putting the programs on Hulu was a business change, media companies taking the shows back and selling their own advertising is a business change, too. Wasn’t that fast?

It makes sense for big companies to do this. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. They have a sales force in place, so why pay Hulu to sell ads (the question is rhetorical)?

Remember, though, that Comedy Central produces their own programming. One company makes the show, owns it, and broadcasts it over their network.  Generally, networks buy the right to air programming produced by others, who retain ownership rights and need companies like Hulu to do sales at the next level.

Business Change is situational, and often time-constrained. The people who watch Comedy Central’s programming might not like having to make an extra stop to find it, but going to another website is really no different than changing channels on your television. And Comedy Central wants you to program them in directly.

Let us keep you up on these business change issues without having to make an extra stop at Answer Guy Central. You can have updates sent to you automatically through the Answer Guy Central iPhone App, or  the Answer Guy Central RSS Feed.

This week in Barcelona, Spain a conference called Mobile World Congress is happening. The attendees are employees of some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies: AT&T, Apple Computer, Motorola, Google, Microsoft.

Their goal? To consolidate the market for the software that runs on SmartPhones. Summing it up if you’re from Apple, you might say: “there’s an app for that, but only if you use an iPhone”.

So let’s see: Apple, the undisputed leader in the SmartPhone market (but losing share quickly to Android), would like everyone’s software to run on everyone else’s phones? And Microsoft, who have released yet another version of their phone software, is looking to be cooperative with their competitors?

Yeah. This ought to work.

Yesterday, this article in The New York Times explained, correctly, that the market for SmartPhone Apps is fracturing in much the same way that the personal computer fractured. Apple Macintosh sucked off a small portion of the market from Microsoft Windows, Windows became “the standard” in businesses, and it took decades before Macintosh became a worthy competitor, market-wise. Mobile World Congress’ goal is nothing less than to stop that kind of thing from happening again.

Now if only a group of large companies with more to lose from coopetition that they have to gain would cooperate and create  . . . what? A single operating system?

Mobile World Congress has an admirable goal. But it’s unattainable. Large companies don’t make changes of that sort easily. And they sure don’t make them proactively. Verizon and AT&T have just started allowing data-based voice software like Skype to run on their phone networks, after years of fighting to keep them out. They enacted that business change only when they realized they had no choice and were better off doing business with their previous “competitors” than pushing the proverbial rock of refusal up the proverbial hill of “good luck stopping them”.

What’s Apple’s incentive for playing nice with Google and Android, or Microsoft and Windows Phone? Theoretically, being the leader of the pack will look appealing, but not for these guys.

Mobile World Congress is a big waste of time. Which is too bad, because I sure do wish I could run the Answer Guy Central iPhone App on my Droid.

What do you do when your partner becomes your direct competitor?

You could stick your head in the sand, but I promise that won’t work. You could sue them, but unless you’re an attorney and in that business it isn’t a long-term solution. Or you could employ coopetition tactics.

Guess which one I recommend?

Proctor and Gamble has decided to start selling products directly to US consumers. Count on international expansion soon (hint, hint).

P&G is one of the world’s largest consumer products companies, and this announcement will create business change that many small retailers just won’t know how to deal with. Imagine you sell Tide detergent in your brick-and-mortar store and the company from which you buy the stuff for resale makes it so the people you sell to can get their soap direct, without visiting you.

What if they sell the product at a price lower than you do . . . or even lower than you can? You’re done.

You won’t be done immediately, of course. P&G doesn’t want you out of business tomorrow, but let’s face facts: over the long term if they can keep a greater piece of the retail price of everything they sell instead of letting you grab a share, then they will. And with companies like Amazon.com doing their distribution at an extremely low cost, P&G can get goods to consumers for a few cents less than they now pay at retail and realize a tremendous profit growth.

As I said above, you might try suing P&G to prevent this, but I’m guessing you’ll lose unless you have some contractual “we won’t do that” clause. And let’s face it; you probably don’t. And if you do, P&G will simply out-wait you as the legal process runs its course. You lose.

So what to do?

We preach two things here more than anything else: Business Change, and Coopetition. Business Change is something you’d rather create than wait around for, and coopetition is something you embrace as a whole new form of doing business; for many, it is the ultimate business change. So:

Maybe it’s time to start reaching out to your suppliers and offering them distribution solutions. And do it quick, because you aren’t the only one reading this!

That may not be easy, and you may not have thought of yourself as being in that business. But unless you want to subsist on the people who just can’t wait for shipping (there will always be some of those), or do business only with people who won’t buy on the Internet (a dwindling group), this is one business change you’ll undertake.

You can even ask us for help. Business Change ‘R’ Us, you know . . .

I’ve written about Coopetition a few times. It’s one of my favorite topics when business change is on the table, and depending on how you view it, coopetition is either very easy or almost impossible to understand.

In a nutshell, the idea is that you don’t really have competitors any more. Now, coopetition has created a business environment where you find a way to work with others who formerly looked like competitors, but are now viewed as collaborators—even if there’s a zero-sum game for your shared potential customers.

Coopetition isn’t all that new an idea, but it’s the Internet and our new incredibly short attention spans that’s finally brought it to an easily explained place. I mentioned last week that CNet Managing Editor Jon Skillings had actually asked me to read their material and take the extra time needed to comment, but not to identify myself. Ridiculous. In adding (invited!) opinion to a post you add value to it both by expanding the readers’ minds and by keeping the readers on the post’s web site longer.

So here’s the next step: there’s a piece of code that can be added to Internet content that tells Google and other search engines that they should ignore links. That code is called NoFollow, and I can’t think of a good reason to use it.

OK, I can, but it doesn’t work when business change and coopetition are brought into play. NoFollow doesn’t stop a link from working, so if you comment on something you find on the Internet and include a link to back up your opinion that link will still do what you expect. But it does enable the site adding NoFollow to links to make your opinion “not count”.

And of course the reason to do that is to maintain a position of superior influence. In cases where you’re trying to cut down on SPAM, NoFollow could have a place, but there are other tools to handle that and I promise you every big web site uses them. And they work better than NoFollow

I’m all for winning. But NoFollow isn’t creating a long-term win, and as people come to understand that and call its users on the fact that they are saying “we want your opinion here to make us look important, but it doesn’t count” it’s going to backfire.

NoFollow: Don’t use it. And don’t stand still for other who short-circuit business change by doing so.

Using an iPhone, but prefer the Microsoft Bing search engine? There’s an app for that.

In the latest proof that Business Change is about coopetition, Apple has allowed Microsoft to put a search application in the iTunes store. What’s next, a Bing application for Google Android?

Since unlike Apple, Google and Microsoft both have search engines they want you to use, that seems unlikely. On the other hand, Google doesn’t have the kind of rules for their app repository that Apple does, so if Microsoft wants in they can get there.

The question is . . . do they?

The Answer Guy says ‘yes’. Microsoft has nothing to lose by trying to grab the attention of their most formidable competitor’s customers, and with no real barriers stopping them from doing so making an Android version of the Bing application is a no-brainer. So the next question is: why bother?

This is where things get interesting. As a Droid /  Android user, I’m not that interested in a Bing application. I already have all the functionality it offers built into my Droid, and the only business change that Bing on my Droid offers me is the need for a new learning curve. But Bing is different enough from Google that its fans will jump even if they use a phone running on the Google Android software.

Look for Bing for Android soon. Even if you’re Microsoft, getting more eyeballs more of the time in small incremental chunks matters. Grab that long tail. It’s the most important business change you can make.

I Love My Droid. It truly simplifies my life and makes me more productive. As mentioned before I don’t love SplashID for Android, but I use it.

Err . . . or at least I did, until the Android 2.0.1 software update arrived and broke WEP-encrypted Wi-Fi.

Oddly, neither Verizon nor Motorola seems to understand this problem exists, nearly a week after the software update was rolled out. Google wrote the operating system, so . . . well, I don’t even know who to ask for help!

When does the spirit of business coopetition break? When no-one is in charge.

Droid, the first SmartPhone good enough to garner a recommendation from The Computer Answer Guy, includes Wi-Fi for those times when you can’t get a decent cell signal, or just want a faster connection. Or, as in the case with SplashID, when the only way to make the software work is by connecting through a network you control. So really the Wi-Fi isn’t that important and the Verizon / Motorola / Google triumvirate can be forgiven for not knowing about this problem for so long. Nevertheless, it went out, and there’s no fix. Yet.

By the way: if you’re using a Droid and the update comes down, by all means install it; the improvements far outweigh the problems, and I’ll bet that if you use Wi-Fi at all it’s under conditions that aren’t effected by this problem. But . . . there’s really no excuse for something as careless as this; Big thumbs down to . . . someone.

Who do you work with? Who’s your enemy? The correct answers, in order, are:

1. Everyone
2. No-One

In another sign of competition yielding to CoOpetition, Zoho, the not-quite-Google of on-line document editing and storage, has integrated their service with Google Docs. Is this business change, business as usual, or an attempt to “steal eyeballs”?.

The answer is “Yes”.

If you click on the above link to Zoho’s announcement, you’ll leave here, and go to a page on Zoho’s website. That’s the way the Internet works. But what’s the cost of that to The Answer Guy? Have we lost you? What if you never come back?

To protect against that a little bit, we make the link open a fresh window in your browser so instead of leaving here when you click you’re left with a trail back. And we do that not only to “hold on to you”, but because we know how frustrating it is to lose you place in the middle. We’re cooperating with Zoho, and you.

Because we’re not in the same business as the folks at Zoho, (see, there it is again!) CoOpetition is barely in play. But what if you’re Zoho and want to make it easy for your users to see their Google Docs documents right inside Zoho? What are you doing then?

An even better question: what will Google think Zoho is doing?

Google holds such a strong position that I’ll bet they’ll think Zoho linking the two companies’ competitive services is fine. But what if one of your competitors wants to do this to you? Maybe they’ll negotiate a deal, and maybe they’ll just do it.

Don’t wait for that. Be the company that makes the links. Initiate business change instead of waiting for it to come to you.

I don’t get to quote people who occupy such exalted positions as Paul Krugman very often. Frankly, while I like to think I’m a pretty smart guy, the world that Mr. Krugman occupies is one filled with beasties and monsters that I just don’t understand. But this weekend he broke it down in a way that made me go <pop!>. And you should pay attention.

Speaking from his pulpit as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economics has advocated a complete re-think of banking and economic policy in the United States. It’s fascinating, and I think it makes sense.

Who says the dollar needs to be strong? For that matter, who says oil needs to be quoted in dollars rather than euros, yuan, or some other currency? Do Americans really benefit from those eventualities, or for that matter do non-Americans really suffer from them?

Now: in spite of having studied economics in college many years ago, I’m no expert, so if you take issue with my support of Mr. Krugman’s position, I’ll play, but let’s make the conversation about contrarian thinking, and not the minutiae of global microeconomic theory.

Look at your business and ask yourself whether “the way things are” needs to stay the same, or whether small — or even wholesale — business change is in order.

Start with how you look at competition. Is there any, anymore, or is this an era of coopetition in which success is determined by finding new ways to do things?

Don’t be afraid of change.