Tonight I saw Adam Lashinksky speak about his book Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works. As he was describing how Apple would erect walls inside its offices to keep projects secret , I realized this extreme level of secrecy solves a core part of the The Innovator’s Dilemma. It becomes impossible for one part of the company to impede the disruptive innovations of another when the first part has no idea what the second part is doing. Other pieces of what Lashinksky described about how Apple operate,s including having being functionally organized rather than having multiple business units, helps keep Apple innovating rather than getting mired in protecting its current businesses. But I’m wondering if the secrecy that was designed to keep information from getting outside the company also prevents Apple from getting it in own way.
Author Archives: Mike Chowla
Is streaming video a disruptive technology?
Reaction to Netflix’s decision to spit streaming video and DVD rental into separate business has ranged from awe to bafflement. Clayton Christen who is the oracle when it comes to disruptive innovation says:
The conclusion I've come to as well via @businessinsider Netflix Splits Itself In Two To Avoid The Innovator's Dilemma http://t.co/M7f3UAlr
— Clayton Christensen (@claychristensen) September 19, 2011
And while it’s always worrisome to disagree with a luminary like Clayton Christen, I’m not buying that streaming video is a disruptive technology for Netflix. The key element of a disruptive technology is that it’s performance is much poorer on some attribute that the incumbents dismiss it. Let’s looks at attributes of streaming vs. DVD:
| Attribute | Streaming Video | DVD | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to content | 30 seconds | minimum 2 days | Streaming |
| Content Consumable in Month | More than anyone should watch | Limited by DVD mailing time | Streaming |
| Video quality | HD – depends on bandwidth | Full 1080p with Blu-ray | DVD |
| Equipment Needed | Streaming enabled TV or Blu-ray player, Broadband internet | DVD or Blu-ray player | DVD |
| Payment model | Subscription (or pay per at competitors) | Subscription (or pay per at competitors) | Draw |
| Cost | $7.99/month | $7.99 and up, depending on number of discs, Blu-ray | Streaming |
Streaming’s instant access alone means most people find it superior. Given the choice of the same content library and same price, most consumers (at least the ones with solid broadband connections) would opt for streaming.
Many would argue the content available on DVD is far greater so that’s a strong advantage for DVD. However, that’s not an advantage of DVD technology itself but rather an artifact of US copyright law. As a matter of technology, DVD and streaming are both capable of delivering the same content. And the limitation on catalog is not an issue for content producers who want to enter the streaming video market.
Incumbents like Amazon and Apple embraced streaming video quite early on. The TV studios have gone so far as to create their own service, Hulu. Television networks like ABC, NBC and HBO, all offer their content via streaming through their websites and iPad apps. Cable companies like Comcast offer extensive video on demand services. I’m hard pressed to think of an incumbent in the entertainment space who did not see streaming video coming and enter the market. Retailers without the resources and technical know-how of Amazon are the only ones I can think of.
Looking at the combination of streaming technology not seriously lacking in any performance attribute and most incumbents in the entertainment space already entering the streaming market, I can only conclude that streaming video is a sustaining technology and not a disruptive one at least when it comes to Netflix’s existing DVD business. The cable and satellite TV business models of expensive packages of channels will experience declines as streaming grows and the reluctance to give up the large revenue streams that channel packages provide may cause the TV providers to move less aggressively into streaming content which is a disruption story.
Netflix’s decision to break streaming and DVD into separate brands services is a risky gambit due to the impacts I outline in my last post. The rational for separating the pricing makes plenty of sense as content licensing costs will grow as Netflix expands it’s content library and as Bill Gurley points out, licensing costs may be driven by the number of subscribers. But given that the disruptive technology story does not fit for streaming vs DVD, it’s hard to see how side-lining the DVD business is good move for Netflix’s customers or investors.
Netflix’s Huge Gamble
Ever since Netflix announced its new pricing structure, I thought the structure odd as there’s no discount for subscribing both to DVDs and streaming. The resulting subscriber loss erased 2.8 billion is market value between Wednesday’s market close and Friday’s close after new subscriber projections were announced. 25.6% of Netflix market cap evaporated over two days even as the S&P 500 rose 2.3%. Today, Netflix announced that it’s renaming and separating the DVD business. This move is a stunning gamble as it will likely lead to further subscriber erosion and is the underlying reason for the new pricing structure which is leaving money on the table in the short run.
Bundle Pricing
The lack of bundle pricing is costing both revenue and profit today. A quick thought experiment illustrates how: First, figure out the highest price you would pay for Netflix’s unlimited streaming service. This what economists call your reservation price. It’s the price at which one penny more would cause you not to buy the service. Next, figure out the highest price you would pay for Netflix’s DVD service. Now assume that you already have Netflix’s streaming service. Either someone gave it you or you purchased it. Now what’s the highest price you would pay for DVD service? For most people, the reservation price for DVDs falls if they already have streaming. People already have so much demand for entertainment and once they have some options, the value they place on additional options falls.
This substitution effect between Netflix’s two services is easily addressed by bundle pricing. A discount for subscribing to both services would have meant less canceling subscribers as some customers would have found the bundle to provide enough value even though buying both separately did not. The customers who are closest to their reservation prices are likely to the DVD customers who turn over their DVD’s the least often and are thus the most profitable, as costs in the DVD business primarily driven by postage. Not offering bundle pricing loses customers and reduces both revenue and earnings though higher subscriber loss.
Brand Equity
The Netflix brand has enjoyed a very strong reputation. The DVD business being renamed means that DVD business will lose the benefits of the brand. Building a new brand from scratch is a difficult, long-term, and often expensive endeavor. In the customer’s mind, offering both DVD and streaming both fit within the brand. Separating the brands, doesn’t provide any business value today.
An Impaired Product Experience
The integrated streaming and DVD website provided a great experience customers who subscribed to both services. Ratings a movie improved recommendations for both services. Searching for a movie shows both the streaming and DVD options. Separating the two services means users have to rate on two different sites to get recommendations and search for movies they want to see twice. This is a degraded user experience and one customers have been quick to point out the Netflix blog.
A Huge Gamble
Given all the immediate negatives for the business Netflix has today, the move to separate the streaming and DVD services places a huge bet on it’s streaming service. And while it’s clear the growth opportunities are in streaming business, what’s not clear is where to capitalize on the streaming opportunity required forgoing a substantial immediate value in the DVD business.
Most great companies can handle multiple related lines of business. Apple didn’t marginalize the Mac business to capitalize on the iOS opportunity. Other than the management challenges of managing related lines of business, there’s no external reason that Netflix could not have kept multiple integrated services under one brand. It will be quite interesting to see how this gamble turns out in the long run. I suspect the Netflix stock will be in for a rough ride in the short-term.
A Better Way to Price Hot IPOs
LinkedIn stock’s large price jump following it’s IPO last Thursday has caused many to comment that LinkedIn was “ripped off” by its underwriters by pricing the offering too low. LinkedIn used the standard offering process where the its underwriters, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, offer the stock to their clients and set the offering price. Most of the commentary has missed the underlying economic fault in the traditional offering process which is having individuals price anything especially when they have competing incentives is asking for a poor outcome. The underwriters benefit by giving their best clients a big instant return on a hot IPO as they extract part of that gain through high fees on those clients. Pricing too high will lead to a failed offering which the underwriters will be blamed for.
There’s a better way as Google demonstrated in its 2004 IPO. A modified Dutch auction will set a market price for the IPO and maximize the value the company and the shareholders participating in the offering receive. For those not familiar with the procedure, a modified Dutch auction is pretty simple. Everyone interested in buying shares makes a bid saying they will buy X shares at a price of Y. The auction prices at highest price, called the clearing price, that will sell all the shares on offer with everyone biding the clearing price or higher getting their bid filled. The US Treasury uses the process to sell Treasury Bills and Bonds so it’s empirically proven in addition to being a theoretically sound.
To compare the two alternatives I normalized the offering prices of LinkedIn and Google to 100 and looked at the relative returns over the first 3 trading days. Google returned 18% over its offering price versus 109% on the first day for LinkedIn. Much more money could have ended up in LinkedIn coffers if they had priced as close to the market price as Google did.
There are too few examples of high demand IPOs being Dutch auctioned to do a statistically significant comparison. However, the available evidence suggests it’s a much better pricing mechanism and economic theory is solidly behind that conclusion. I doubt Dutch auctions will become anymore common though. For non-hot IPOs, it’s not clear would be enough bidders. The underwriters will be opposed since it both marginalizes their role in the process and reduces the amount of value they can capture for their clients and ultimately themselves. Underwriters can not be eliminated from process since the securities laws require them. Corporate executives aren’t likely to clamor for it either. While a Dutch auction will benefit their shareholders, doing something unconventional always carries more risk of negative personal repercussions if it goes wrong. It’s lot easier to blame the underwriters for a unsuccessful IPO if their advice for traditional offering is followed rather than actively discarded.
There’s only going to be two winners in mobile OS
Jack Welch had a famous rule that GE would only be in businesses where they can be number one or number two. In the industrial businesses GE was in, the scale that biggest players could achieve gave cost advantages that allowed for much higher profitability than the smaller players could achieve. Software is a world away from GE’s businesses but for platforms and operating systems, the number one or number two rule applies but for very different reasons. Operating systems with small share can not attract the third party developers needed to make the platform successful.
The personal computer era showed how minor platforms do not make it. Windows dominated the landscape for two decades with the Macintosh being the only viable competitor. Many others came and went like OS/2 and BeOS. NeXT which would later show itself to have the right attributes to be successful didn’t perform well in the market till Apple bought it and transformed it into OS X.
Android and iOS already have huge leads as application platforms. One of them could stumble but with the momentum both have, this looks unlikely. Even though the spoils are likely to be meager, there are several competitors for third place: Blackberry OS, WebOS (Palm/HP), and Windows Phone 7. Nokia had the good sense to take Symbian out of the race but made the peculiar choice of of Windows Phone 7. Both RIM (Blackberry) and Nokia would be be better off switching to Android as it would would put them on a platform where there’s already a wealth of third party apps. Neither RIM nor Nokia has ever proven themselves to be world class at mobile software. RIM’s entire success was based on email and they could salvage their market position by bringing their email system to Android.
These kind of strategic mistakes always puzzle me. I wonder if RIM, HP, Nokia and Microsoft have all convinced themselves they can become number two or if they believe there’s a profitable path as number 3 or 4.
Thoughts on Facebook’s rumored entry to email
Image courtesy of husin.sani
I’m a bit surprised that Facebook is (rumored to be) entering the email market. Partially my surprise is that consumer email feels like a mature market and I expect Facebook to be concentrating on areas where more innovation and value creation is possible. The rest of my surprise is why Facebook book wants to enter a space that’s not a great business for any of the incumbents. EMail is essential to Yahoo and AOL for the recirculation opportunities it provides to better monetizing channels but in and of itself, email does not move the needle for anyone today.
Here’s my take on the pros and cons for Facebook entering the email market:
The Downside
1) Free consumer email is a tough business
Being an email provider is expensive because you have store to an ever growing amount of old emails essentially forever even though they are rarely, if ever, viewed. Being rarely viewed means it’s impossible to monetize those petabytes of messages eating up storage space in the data center. In the old days before GMail changed consumer expectations forever, storage space for free accounts was sharply limited and additional space meant highly profitable premium revenue.
Compounding the problem, email page views monetize poorly compared to other types of content. Partially this is because the incumbent providers (Yahoo, AOL, Windows Live) with exception of GMail do not target using email content. My suspicion is even targeting off of email content does not help that much anyway. Advertising is valuable either when the purchase intent is high (where search is king) or there’s value in brand affiliation (full page New York Times ad). Email has neither of these characteristics and is likely getting worse on purchase intent. No one emails anymore to ask which camera, laptop, cell phone they should buy since it’s easier and hipper to ask in a Facebook status.
2) EMail does not fit well into the walled garden model of Facebook
Facebook messaging today is an unpolluted stream where messages are almost certain to have been sent by person. There’s no outside spam. EMail is the exact opposite both due to its history and the expectations around it. EMail started off with no way to verify sender identity and thus invites spam and scams. There have been some technical fixes (DKIM, SPF) but at the end of the day you really do not know who is sent a message. It’s also expected to be ubiquitous and completely interoperable thus removing the option of excluding bad actors from the system.
In contrast, Facebook can kick anyone out of their network. The Stuff White People Like article on Facebook is humor but its underlying point resonates with me. The nice, safe neighborhood feel of Facebook is a key part of its success. Most people over 30 were never going take to the generally messiness of My Space. Opening up your Facebook account to email, is almost like inviting the world to come by and litter on your front lawn. And there’s no way to “de-friend” someone sending you email. None of this is to say email is not an essential method of communication in the modern world. I just don’t see adding email fits with the positioning that’s made Facebook so successful.
The Upside
Facebook does have several things going for it in the email market:
1) Capability to run large scale operations at low cost
Facebook has the operational know how to run a email operation at lower cost than most of the incumbents other Google. A cost advantage is always a huge competitive advantage in a low margin market. It’s harder to leverage though in email since pricing to the consumer is already zero. The price of an email account is really the amount of ads and Google has been able to effectively exploit their low costs through less intrusive advertising.
2) Good targeting data
Facebook already knows so much about their users they do not need to use email for targeting. How valuable this makes email to them is a function of how much excess ad inventory they already have. If Facebook ad inventory is already selling out at least for certain segments, adding email will be valuable simply by boosting ad inventory. If they are already swimming in inventory which is going for fire sale prices, there’s not a lot of money to be made.
3) Keep younger users away from Google and Yahoo
Although the kids of today do not have much use email, they will get older and need to start interacting with the grown-up world which still largely runs on email. At that point, they will need an email address. Providing them though Facebook keeps those users from deepening or even creating their relationship with Google or Yahoo which may benefit Facebook in the long run. However, that benefit is mitigated by the Google and Yahoo’s failure to be at all competitive in the social space.
4) Social Graph
Facebook’s biggest advantage in any area they enter into is their owership of all that social graph information. Maybe they have found a clever way to leverage it with email. I’m a bit skeptical because of the inherent identity problems with email.
I’m curious to see what Facebook has come up or if the rumors are even in the right ballpark. However, I doubt I’ll be creating myself a Facebook email address. GMail serves my needs really well today.
Meg Whitman Wants to Be President
Meg Whitman’s has spent what seems to be an insane amount of her personal money in her campaign to be Governor of California. The Sacramento Bee reports that she’s already put in over $119 million:
Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman became the biggest ever U.S. campaign self-spender yesterday after putting another $15 million into her campaign, bringing her total contribution to $119,075,806.11.
Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government. I don’t want to move boxes around; I want to blow them up.
Now, here is what we need to accept. Our economy is 21st century and our tax system is 20th century. It is stuck in the wrong century.
Email Is Not Dying
Image courtesy of husin.sani
This week Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg claimed email is probably going away. This claim is more self-serving marketing fluff than a serious prediction that’s likely to be realized. However, it does point to an important shift in electronic communication: the center of gravity of personal communication has shifted away from email and instant messaging to social media and text messaging. The providers of email and IM including Yahoo, Google and AOL will be hurt by this shift as users pay less attention to the older mediums. However, email is not going to disappear anytime soon.
The primary shift is in personal communication. Status updates substitute for emails or IMs. Picture sharing is easier and more satisfying by Facebook than by email. The broadcast nature of social media means it takes less effort to keep friends and family up to date. And even when person-to-person communication is desired, the context rich nature of the social media means a Facebook message is often preferable to an email. Some of the best evidence of the size impact is Neilsen’s recent study in the UK showing that instant messaging has has dropped from 14% to 5% of internet usage time.
Email is not going to disappear though. Email is an asynchronous messaging medium thats private, addressable to a particular person and ubiquitous. Such a medium provides enough value that it won’t disappear without one with similar properties taking its place. EMail is needed for notifications for everything from my credit card bill is ready to there’s a sale at my favorite retailer. Conceivably these could move to another mechanism with similar properties like Facebook message but then my Facebook inbox would be just overflowing as my email inbox. Today, part of the value of social media messages for person-to-person communication is that the channel is free of spam and relatively uncrowded. If Facebook opens up it’s messaging to these business-to-consumer communications, it becomes just another crowded channel and while I may care what my friends are up, I really care very little about what bank did today so the inherent advantages of the social mediums no longer matter.
The other reason that email won’t disappear is that there’s no viable substitute for business communication. An email replacement for business communication requires both ubiquity so anyone can talk to anyone and the ability to keep the communication within an organization both private and secure. There’s nothing on the horizon that meets these requirements. Google Wave is a contender but the slow adoption thus far is an strong indicator that it’s going to be really hard to get people change their established behavior. Additionally, Google Wave’s complexity is hindering its diffusion outside of the earliest adopters.
Sandberg’s thesis is what teens do today is predictive of the future and since only 11% of teens check email daily, email is going to disappear. The flaw in this argument is that teens don’t have the needs that drive email usage. They don’t need to get notifications from their bank or cable or cable company that their bill is ready. They have no business communication needs. They only communicate person-to-person or person to small group and that’s the area wher the shift away from email has happened.
A big impact of the center of gravity shifting will be on marketers who have been effectively utilizing email. Without personal communication, the value of email to users is lower since it’s now all notifications or stuff that only might be interesting. Lower value means less of the mental attention that email marketers and advertisers on email services need to connect with audiences. It’s akin to the difference between scanning the news headlines to see if there is anything of interest and reading an article in depth. There’s less mental engagement and less time spent on a scan.
The long run solution for marketers will be the same one Sanberg advocates which is add social media to the marketing mix. But there won’t be a dramatic death of email, at least until there is something it supersede for notifications and business communication. The teens of today will start using email when grow up an have the need for it.
Why Do Unlocked Phones Cost So Much?
My two and a half year old Blackberry Curve that I’d subjected to a hard life finally died a few weeks back when it’s USB connector came loose and won’t charge. While I waited for my new phone that I bought off of EBay to arrive, I’ve discovered that hoarding old electronics some times pays offs since I can use my old 8700c as a battery charger. The process of buying a new phone got me wondering why unsubsidized phones cost so much.
I can buy a 8GB iPod Touch retail for $199 which has every component that’s need to build a smart phone minus the cellular radio and mic. 
Seeing as how a basic cell can bought in the third world for less than $40, these components can not be that expensive. Apple has some of the highest margins in the electronics industry. The latest teardown I can find for the iTouch is for the 8GB touch introduced in in 2007. iSuppli put the cost at $155.04 and at introduction that 8GB iPod touch retailed for $299 which puts the gross margin at 48.1%. In an accounting sense, the gross margin is probably slightly lower to transport and distribution costs which will appear under Cost of Goods Sold on the income statement. But as benchmark for makes a for a very profitable electronics business, materials cost at 48% of retail is a good one.
The 48% hardware margin is steady for Apple as the 16GB wifi iPad has a teardown cost $259.60 according to iSuppi which at $499 retail puts the gross hardware margin at 48.1% By comparison, Nokia which sells many more feature phones rather smart phones had a gross margin of 34.3% in 2008. This is company wide and is probably boosted by non-phones but as a rough benchmark it’s not a bad place to start. Apple is also making money from iTunes store sales so and iPad and iTouch are even more profitable but nonetheless, but 48.1% hardware margins is still indicative of a very profitable business.
The question that puzzles me is why new entrants to the smart phone market do not sell unlocked phones cheaper. The Palm Pre costs $138 to build which at Apple margins would put the retail price at $265.9 but off contract the Palm Pre was $549 at introduction. A similar story for Google Nexus One which has a tear down cost of $174.15 which at Apple margins would have a retail price of $335.55 but instead is sold by Google for $529 unlocked.
I have no doubt the off contract pricing is set by the agreements the device manufactures have with handset manufactures. However, I have to wonder to the wisdom about late entrants (or in the case of Palm, re-entrants) following the established practice of very high unlocked contract pricing. Palm only sold 400,000
for it’s Dec-Feb quarter and Nexus One sales are even worse.
I find Google’s decision to stick to the standard distribution model even more puzzling as Google has a history of upending the pricing and margins of the business it enters. Gmail’s 1GB of storage ended Yahoo Mail’s practice of charging for storage space over 4GB and forced the the whole free email industry to go to essentially unlimited free email storage. Google Map’s free API undermined the pay for access model that incumbent providers like MapQuest had built sizable revenue streams off of. Perhaps since Google’s number one goal to sell as many Android units through multiple handset manufactures as possible to establish Android as major mobile platform, it makes sense not to poke the cell phone carriers in the eye. Palm had no such motivation. Granted Palm probably got great terms on it’s exclusive Spint deal but those terms didn’t stop the meltdown Palm experienced which only ended with their sale to HP.
If I had been able to buy an unlocked Nexus One cheaper, perhaps I would have done that rather than a Blackberry from EBay. I was not in the mood to take a new cell contract so I was in the minority of shoppers who didn’t want to trade low upfront pricing for a 2 year commitment. But perhaps there are more people in this situation than meets the eye. Anyone who loses or breaks their phone early in their contract is in the same situation. There’s really no good alternatives today for those who don’t want or are already in a contract since all smart phones follow the huge premium for an unlocked phone other than buying a used phone from EBay.
knowing things is over rated
A professor of mine has a recent blog post where he wonders why executives take risks that academic finance has known for decades don’t add value:
Whenever I meet a senior executive from a company that got in trouble because of too much leverage, I ask (nicely, I hope) whether they know MM, which implies that investment decisions should not be made based on capital structure. Most say no, but they are very interested to hear about it.
This is stuff that has been known for a long time.
This got me thinking about the value of the knowing things. My visceral reaction is that learning through study and research has to be valuable, but sadly my post-MBA experience has largely shown otherwise. And when I say valuable, I mean in a career sense since to me knowledge has high intrinsic value.
There are several reasons while I think “knowing things” is not valuable as it should be outside of academia:
1) People prefer (over) confidence
Knowing something could be unwise or dangerous gets in the way of being supremely confident. Those who have no inkling that a particular action could be problematic can advocate for it without expressing any doubt. The persuasive ability of complete confidence has always seemed like a cognitive bias to me but I’ve seen it work over and over.
2) Tail risk pays off in the short run. Or maybe more bluntly put: The incentives reward stupidity
Let me start by explaining tail risk. Tail risk is the negative impact from a “rare” event in the probability distribution. The formal definition is a 3 standard deviation event. It’s easy to make money most of the time on tail risk. One can write a way out of the money call or put option and pocket the premium. Until the rare extreme swing to the stock happens, this strategy produces a steady stream of money. When the rare event happens, the loss can be enormous.
Overlevering a company has the same effect. Most of the time a company can service its debts. But a particularly bad downturn or other unexpected event can push the company to bankruptcy court. Since in most years we do not experience a bad downturn, the company’s returns look good.
In reality, that bankruptcy risk is reflected in needing higher returns on the stock. The Modigliani-Miller theorem says the “savings” on the “cheap” debt is exactly offset by higher required return on the equity to compensate for the increased risk in other words: on a risk adjusted basis, there is no extra return for loading up on debt. Like all finance theories, there are assumptions like frictionless markets and no taxes that aren’t met in the real world, so in reality it’s not exactly offset and tax treatment favors moderate debt.
But in the short run, the equity returns look higher and these managers are likely to be rewarded for that.
3) It’s downer
Knowing what I just explained is a downer since most of the time everything is going well and voicing concern about over leverage, is not going to be unpopular. After all the risks pay off now most of the time, and explaining there’s no real value being created and those extra returns are not actually better in the long run just annoys those who don’t understand this. All this worrying about disaster sounds like Chicken Little.
The stories I’ve heard about the mortgages security practices in the great real estate bubble are even worse than this. The loan issuers and resellers knew the loans were extremely risky and a bad long run bet, but were making so much money issuing or trading them that they didn’t care. The resulting disaster was so bad that many of the businesses in this mortgage backed security chain went bankrupt in the bust due to their exposure to these assets they knew were bad. But when everyone is making huge bonuses taking these risks, anyone who points out the risks is probably making a career limiting move.
4) Over emphasis on prior experience
Both in hiring and in the decision process, most people over emphasize their past experience. The problem with this approach is that the experiences of a career span is not a full picture or as we might say in more technical language, a representative distribution. Even 30 years experience in a field is a short sample of possible risks. Understanding the full range of possible outcomes and thus risk exposure requires study, often of the academic kind.
The problem is even worse for rare events that don’t show up in the historical data since history based quantitative methods do not account for those risks either. To understand those kinds of risks, one must take an approach based on theory rather than experience.