KnowsJack

Many have assumed that Steve Jobs pretty much handed tiny Flip Video it’s lunch last week when he announced that Apple would provide the same capability in the new iPod Nano for free. Some might mourn the little Flip Video as yet another piece of promising Consumer Electronics Roadkill whose soon-to-be sun-bleached bones will remind us of  Zune, Palm, Windows Media Center, and the many anonymous and strangely-colored MP3 and media players now buried in unmarked graves along the Road To Convergence.  A closer look reveals a different story, and before we go to that, some congratulations are in order.

CONGRATULATIONS, Little Flip!

You have been mentioned by the biggest name in consumer electronics during the month’s most-watched event.  Steve Jobs not only just mentioned you, but 57 minutes into his comeback tour event, he shared the stage with you and acknowledged that you had nailed it!  This is big!

Really big.  Everyone in sales knows you never mention your competitors unless you absolutely have to.  And even if you mention them, you never — and I mean never — give them a complement.

Steve didn’t mention Android, Zune, Microsoft, nor the PC during his presentation.  He didn’t mention Palm nor Nokia, either.  Just you.  Nice job.  Steve even gave you some well-deserved props, calling you, “…a very popular one.”  And you looked fabulous!  Better than Steve, some might say.

Dear reader, if you’re not familiar with the Flip Video, click here for a nice review and iPhone comparison regarding our little celebrity, Flip.   A key factoid is that Flip has been a screaming success, selling two million-plus units over the course of two years. And now, Little Flip, you’ve been mentioned by Mr. Bigger. Than. Big.

Celebrate This – You Are in Rare Company.

And after the parties have wound down, your Monday morning arrives with strong black coffee and the realization that Steve also said, “…and we’re going to lower the price from $149 to free.”

So, what now, Little Flip?

And one more time, why did he mention you?  Is it because you are now Apple Roadkill like some lame MP3 player?

Or,…could it be because Steve sees you as one of the first really credible threats to The World According to Apple?

Well, not just you, Little Flip, but your bigger, richer, more powerful step-father, Cisco Systems.  This year Cisco bought Pure Digital (Flip’s daddy), adding to its rapidly-growing stable of consumer-facing technologies.  (disclosure: Cisco Systems has been a client of mine).  What you may not be able to do alone, Little Flip, you may very well be able to do now that you’ve become part of the Cisco family.

It might also be that you’re stylish, both physically and in your user interface.  You’re also stylish in a way that might actually make Steve worry a bit…the Out-Of-Box experience.

Sweet!  How did a young kid like you you learn to do that?  Oh, that would be your CEO, Jonathan Kaplan, and his team.  And it appears that Jonathan will now be running Cisco’s Consumer Group (largely comprised of the still-dominant Linksys and a few smaller acquisitions).

C’mon, you say.  Cisco a threat to Apple?  That depends.

Certainly some industry pundits seem to think that Cisco might not be a great competitor in the consumer space.

But my money is on Steve Jobs having realized that Jonathan Kaplan is one of those CEOs who didn’t succumb to  the The Apple Effect – the zombie-like response to Apple’s success that has left us poor consumers with so many pretty-but-clueless-and-brain-dead CE devices over the last five years.  (Try the new Blackberry Storm or the new Palm, if you need an example.  Actually, go into a mobile phone store close your eyes and grab any phone.  Open your eyes.  My point exactly.  Unless you picked up the iPhone, that is.)

Don’t you think that Steve Jobs may have noticed one of the few Silicon Valley CEOs with an eye for style is now running the Consumer Group at a $130 billion dollar firm just down the road?  I’m guessing yes, he probably noticed that.  He’s good with details, I hear.   If Little Flip is up on the Big Screen at the Apple Event, Steve knows who is behind it.  He’s gone after the PC, now he is going after Little Flip.

Jonathan Kaplan has put up some Steve Jobs-quality numbers.  Granted, Flip has only sold 2 million units or so, about 1% of the 220 million iPods sold to date.   Slightly more impressive would be that fact that it sold at a level equal to 10% of the number of iPhones sold.  Even more impressive would be that it sold around 15% of the number of iPod Touches!  I think that last point may have gotten Steve’s attention.

Pure Digital was the antithesis of Microsoft.  No big budgets, no huge marketing organization, no platform synergies (okay, MSFT has rarely been able to exploit these anyway).  But Microsoft’s huge multi-hundred-million-dollar investment in Zune has netted it about 3 million units sold – only 50% more than the Flip!  (Yes, there is a new one coming out and blah, blah, blah…now go back in your cave.)

And I know what you’re thinking: Microsoft can screw up even the best of products.  Yes, true.

But that a startup like Pure Digital can show up and nail it, says something about the startup.  And when you combine Pure Digital with Linksys, the ubiquitous home router, and a few other pieces of Cisco’s consumer portfolio that include media storage devices, set-top boxes (they own Scientific Atlanta) and synchronized media players, then you might just start to have something.

And then you can add in WebEx, which is one of the top videoconferencing providers, and a handful of other technologies, and all of a sudden Little Flip is not so little and (mangled metaphor warning!) not really roadkill, but rather, the tip of an iceberg.

Consider this: as easily as Steve Jobs added video to the Nano, Jonathan Kaplan could add music to the Flip. I’m guessing that he could lower the price to free as well.  Adding an audio port is easier than adding a camera.

And there’s more for Steve to worry about.  The real battle is not about devices, nor about content, but about something much larger: virtualization – putting your content and your life on the web and in the (computing) cloud.  It’s easy to forget that the endpoint on the Road to Convergence does not look like an iPhone or a Nano.  No, that final stop, if and when we ever reach it, looks like all devices, everywhere, supporting you and me and our life-content.

Did I mention that Cisco powers the Internet?

Welcome back, Mr. Jobs.  The game is on.

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KnowsJack is my new blog site for what is really a very old (hopefully you read this as “wise”) consulting business.  I wanted to do something a little bit different than a traditional consultancy site, and the name — I hope — gives you a sense of who I am, how I think, and what it is like to work with me.

We all know the phrase, “He doesn’t know jack” in which the final noun is often left off and meaning that one doesn’t even know, um, much at all.

But most people don’t know, nor pause to think of, is that the opposite of that phrase, “…he knows jack”, means pretty much the same thing.  It is a yin-yan of unknowing — either way that phrase is said, it suggests ignorance.  And over the years I’ve learned a lot about ignorance.  And the more I’ve learned about it, the more I’ve come to like it.  It is a religion of sorts for me, spelled with a capital “I”, Ignorance.

Far from being equivalent to the practice of stupidity, Ignorance has amazing powers and is very difficult to practice.  Here are a couple of examples.

• Suppose you are a product manager for a large company.  You’re doing well, developing and marketing your product, but always wish you were doing better.  Of course.  Your head is filled with knowledge about specifications, designs, research, feedback, and a million other factors that you must handle every day.  And yet, which one of these pieces of information will help you take your product to the next level?

• Or let’s say that you are a small business owner and you spend much of your day ensuring that everything is running well-enough…and yet you know that you and your company could be doing much better.  You know a lot about your business, but some of what you actually know is far more important than the rest of what you know.

We all know people in these situations.  How often do you hear someone lamenting that despite how well they are doing, they could “…do much better if only….”?

So what they don’t yet know is pretty valuable, even if they already know it but can’t pick it out.  And there is more.  There are things that they don’t even know that they need to know, things about their customer, their product, their business…all of that, and often they are the things that are among the most valuable to know.  They are the game-changers.  They are the sources of transformation.

This can sound like a bit of a logic game, but it isn’t.  It is just something that we don’t really stop to consider.  It is a very sharp two-edged sword, this ignorance.  By being able to practice Ignore-ance, we allow ourselves to focus on those things we consider most relevant.  But most of our potential for growth lies in those things that we do ignore or are ignorant of.

And getting to know them starts with the Discipline of Ignorance.

Forget What You Know…and Become an Un-Knowitall

Ever noticed how getting away from the office, home, whatever for a few days, seems to clear your head and give you some fresh perspective?  That’s Ignorance in action.  Its effect is directly proportional to how much you “forget about everything”.  We don’t use that phrase by accident and we usually don’t realize what we are actually saying: our best insights often come as a result of changing our practice of “ignore-ance”. I’ll submit to you here that the more you can become an “Un-Knowitall”, the more you’ll learn,  succeed, and find enjoyment in what you are doing.

If you think I’m kidding about this, just playing with words, then please stay tuned for future installments.  I can tell you now that the smartest people in the world are practitioners of this very discipline, and it is, at its roots, a tenet of Bhuddism.  This is not Forest Gump.  Think empty mind.  Ignorance is powerful stuff, but not really part of the usual business vocabulary. In a world where every day we are called on to be knowledgeable, in charge, in control…forgetting about everything is not really an option and being called Ignorant is not something most of us aspire to.

And hence the slightly tongue-in-cheek name, KnowsJack.  Much like I work with my clients to help them discover what is unknown and hence most valuable, I’ll work here in this blog to take us to the outer banks of unknowingness, where we don’t know what we don’t know.  And we’ll come back with solid gold.  Contrarians, for sure.  You will see what was not visible before.  It’s not magic, though it can seem that way.  But it does take practice and years of experience.  It takes an unwillingness to ever be happy with an answer — a desire to be ignorant rather than knowledgeable.

So here on KnowsJack.com, or working by your side, I’m dedicated to taking this journey with you.

What KnowsJack Can Do for You

I would be remiss if I did not actually let you know what I can do for you.  I have four main areas that I work in: Executive Coaching, Company Positioning, Customer Understanding, and Business Development.

The Apple Effect is a corporate pathology.  A set of behaviors that consumer-facing companies engage in, largely in response to perceiving their product and marketing inferiority when compared to Apple.  The Four Key Drivers of this success are very visible:

• The Industrial Design of the Apple product line is strong and reflects a tight integration of form, functionality and aesthetic.  Apple’s products have often become fashion statements.
• The Interaction Design of Apple’s softwares, including its website, iTunes store, iPhone OS, and OS-X operating system also set standards for usability, functionality and aesthetic.
• The Loyalty of its Customers is extremely high as evidenced by a fanaticism, advocacy, willingness to invest in an Apple-based lifestyle and their willingness to pay premium prices despite blatant time-discriminatory pricing.
• The Ecosystem of Services and offerings that includes the Apple Store, Genius Bar, iTunes content services (movies, music and books, for example), and the massive 3-rd party content networks that the platforms have spawned – podcasts, iPhone applications, OSX freeware utilities, etc.

Apple is so iconic and its role in our lives so significant now that we can easily forget that before the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes, OS-X, etc., Apple was just one of the many technology companies that hoped to accomplish these same things and more. Those other companies were larger, with more money, more market share, more partnerships and more access to content and the consumer.

And the Four Keys are what they do, but they are not how they do it.  Having worked with many of the large CE and computer technology companies over the last two decades, I can say that I have rarely seen management in these companies actually understand how Apple accomplished these feats.

Lacking that understanding, companies often try to create the one or more of the four key drivers above through diktat – “We need a sexier product ID”, or “Let’s get some content partners”, “Update our website” or “We need that feature too.”

That is what I call the Apple Effect.  It is a very normal human reaction to what is essentially business envy, “Hmmm, they have one…so we need one too.”  Often, and probably more often in technology companies because of their tendency to compete through incremental feature additions, someone or some team is given the assignment to bring the company back to parity or near-parity with Apple in one of the Four Keys.

These companies are also responding to (now) being a follower – in many situations one need only replicate what the leader has done to achieve parity.  We see this happen in many device categories, where price or feature competition, or even just better marketing helps usurp the leader.  Yet in the five years since the middle of 2004 when the iPod gained more than 50% market share, and despite a hoard of contenders competing with different and better features, lower prices, greater compatibility, etc., it has been game-over and Apple never even looked back.  In the Apple Effect, often the faster one runs to catch up, the farther behind one gets.

My observation (and I think the evidence of time as well) is that this approach does not work.  Competing with Apple or (better yet) competing as Apple does is better done by understanding how Apple created and now maintains a level of supremacy – what the organization did to, um…yes, Think Different.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll fill out this thesis with more details.  Stay tuned.