Category Archives: Technology

So now that we know KISS is easier said than done, it’s time to take a stab at the more important question: how to strike the appropriate level of simplicity? I believe there are two ways to get it right to a large extent. First is by creating a facade. A lot of simplicity can be obtained by creating a mask to hide the details. A customer does not need to deal with the inner functioning of your system. There is a big difference between knowing the inner functioning exists and dealing with it. Driver of a BMW knows that a great deal of engineering excellence goes in developing that engine for the car, but need not have to deal with it. Knowing that makes them pay for it, and not dealing with that makes it easier for them to use it. Similarly, if you are dealing with marketers in search of sophistication, you need to make sure you explain the system and the wealth of engineering sophistication working behind it, and as a special treat to them, they have got a simple personalized interface to deal with it.

This brings us to the second point – personalization. Having personalization as a required feature in your product or service can make even a highly complex product get the traits of simplicity. You want to serve every customer out there and extend the reach of your product. But every customer does not want everything you have to offer. The customer should know that you have all the check-boxes checked when they are choosing between offerings, but they do have a specific set of requirements that need to be fulfilled at this time. Cater your product to meet those needs. Think of Amazon as an example. Amazon has more than 50 stores selling things varying from books and electronics to bags and shoes. But they personalize the website with focus and recommendations based on your needs and past shopping experience. In a very similar fashion, you got to personalize your offering to meet the needs of the customers and make it easier for them to discover the supplemental offerings if they ever have a need for it.

KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid –  is easier said than done. It is ironical that to keep something simple is not that simple to do. Though KISS is a software development principle which states that design simplicity should be a key goal and unnecessary complexity should be avoided, it can pretty much be applied to any business in almost any field. 

What comes in way of KISS? I think it is the urge to do it all. We want to do everything and serve everyone. We don’t want to miss a single customer. We keep adding features till our product or service is complex enough to need a simple list of instructions to explain how to traverse through the maze, and often times in the process throw simplicity out of the door.

I believe checkbox features play an equally significant role in killing simplicity. These are the features you got to have to make sure you match your offering with your competitors’. This is something like a necessary evil to retain and attract customers, but the way we do it sometimes kills the simplicity of the offering. 

Another thing that prevents from keeping something simple is the notion of value that thing provides. A general understanding is that the amount of sophistication is directly proportional to the amount you can charge for it. We embrace sophistication. Marketers love the idea of sophistication. Well if something is this simple, why do you expect me to pay so much for it? So we take the easy route, make it look more complex than it’s got to be and attain the goal.

The list of reasons and excuses can go on and on. In a nutshell, KISS is easier said than done!

1) Blog feeds: Blogs have become mainstream source of information for everything from news to articles. Many people read tens of blog posts a day and something like a book a month making blogs a must have on an electronic reading device. Amazon can develop a web-based blog reader which will remain in-sync with the feeds on Kindle. Having blog feeds in Kindle will also provide an opportunity for Amazon to monetize through contextual ads next to the blogs.

2) Chat client: There’s no question about the importance of community around a product. Having a Kindle-to-Kindle chatting client will allow book clubs to use Kindle as their primary device of communication. People will be able to discuss sections of a book, send around bookmarks and do so much more if they can communicate from right “inside” the book.

3) “Serial” book: Kindle digitizes the books. So an interesting feature for Kindle will be to have a “serial” book, i.e. get an installment of the book every week. Wouldn’t it be great to get a chapter of the new novel from your favorite writer every week way before the novel is out for publishing? The excitement of this for die-hard followers of an author will be just like that of a 24 fanatic watching Jack Bauer traversing through an hour a week in 24.

Technically, all these features are possible. Kindle’s got a wireless connection that enable users read daily newspapers on it. It’s got a full qwerty keyboard for people to search books and browse through Wikipedia. It’s true that none of these features will do an Oprah for Kindle, but they will definitely make Kindle more wannable and pull some customers towards it!

Recently while brainstorming an idea, we tried to find out who our competitors are and what our differentiating factor is. Our differentiating factor boiled down to the fact that most of our biggest competitors in the field are targeting someone else as their primary customer, changing the entire design of their offerings. And as expected, our biggest fear becomes the competitor which is targeting the same primary customer base as we are planning to go after. To identify the primary customer base, and strategize the product around it is as important as anything else in a business.

Consider two blogging platforms as an example. I use WordPress to blog. WordPress provides bloggers a great set of tools to make blogging easy. A decent editor, excellent reports about the readership of the blog and great way to customize the blog makes WordPress an attractive choice for bloggers. The bloggers are the primary customers of WordPress, and WordPress focuses its resources towards their needs.

On the other hand, consider some other platform that provides a whole lot of services along with blogging, but with no special tools to help bloggers. For that platform, bloggers are not the primary customers. The primary customers may be social networkers, communicators or for that matter anyone else, and they might be serving them with excellence. The important thing is to have one and to know who that is. There’s nothing wrong in offering secondary services to your primary customer base because that might serve some of their needs and help you retain them. 

The point to note here is, you must know your primary customer base and work to serve their basic requirements first. I believe having a niche as the primary customer base to start with will increase your chances of being successful. Reason being you will have a really focused group and you will know where to allocate the resources…after all, great strategy is all about allocating the resources in the right way.

Here’s another installment of the strategy series: Dell and Apple.

Disclaimer: This analysis is based solely on the strategy discussion in Jack Welch’s Winning.

Two companies that are pioneers in selling computers and other electronic items in the world have completely opposite strategies. Dell, with its online store and customization engine, makes buying a computer all about how much memory, hard disk and USB slots you need on your computer. Apple on the other hand sells you much more than a computer or personal music system iPod. It sells an experience primarily through those wonderfully designed Apple stores. Unlike Dell, Apple provides customer with more pre-customized boxed options as compared to customizing that box (Apple computers are customizable as well at Apple.com).

If we look at Dell’s model of selling computers, what Dell is doing is selling an assembled box of all the different parts that makes a computer. Customize-ability of the computer plays a big role and design takes a back seat. The distinguishing factor is pretty much the price and support. Dell’s strategy, in simple words, is to commoditize the computers. Make buying computers as simple as buying any other home or office supplies. The strategy works great with corporate customers who care more about price and support.

Apple does not sell computers, it sells an experience, a membership to an exclusive cult and an entry to the Apple product ecosystem. Design plays the central role in all Apple products. Apple’s strategy, opposite to Dell, can be stated in simple words as de-commoditization of all the products it sells. As in any typical case of de-commoditization, price takes a back seat and customers get attracted to the product itself. Apple’s strategy is crisp and clear, and Apple implements it with perfection in any industry it enters, be it the computer industry, music industry or mobile phone industry.

These are two companies selling the same things with completely different strategies and execution plans. The debate will go on for ever on which company has a better strategy, but the success of Dell and Apple asserts the point that there’s no one strategy that is good or bad for your company. Your success depends on how crisp the strategy is and how well you are implementing it.