Author: Uyen

Last week I finished the Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson and this week I’m finishing In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes our Lives by Steven Levy.*

The similarities between the two are startling and if Isaacson were to forgo the beauty in simplicity mantra of Apple, he may have had a similar tagline.  Both books are written with a journalist touch, trying to tell an objective comprehensive story citing multiple direct and indirect sources but at the same time a clear sense of fascination permeates the text and the sense that they were witnessing something really great.

Reading the books back to back gave me an interesting sense of the awkward relationship of Google and Jobs. From Jobs’ perspective it was unequivocal that  Google had been evil in entering into the smartphone business by stealing iPhones magic while the Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board and while Jobs was mentoring Sergey Brin.  From Google’s perspective they never admitted to such outright deception but  made it pretty clear that it was a natural evolution and if you were smart enough, you should have seen it coming.

This difference, seemed to get to the heart of how two companies that are so often compared to each other are so different. Apple is a deeply personal company that believes that their magical leaps forward are just that, magical and hence of and belonging to the magician (Steve Jobs) and wouldn’t have been created without him.  Google, on the other hand,  lives in an optimized mirror world where logic rules and the seemingly magical leaps are a natural evolution of lots of small things smartly coming together and scaling out (e.g., they just execute better).

I’m almost finished with In the Plex and will follow up with another posting. Some reflections in store about Apple and Google  will be on the nature of creativity ? What motivates more challenge of problem solving or vision? Really interesting stuff! Stay tuned.

* a shout out to TED who sent me the book as a must read!

There is a lot of excitement about the speed and opportunity in the mobile space. Mary Meeker in her Web 2.0 Summit clearly shows the mobile trajectory is on fire! More people in the world have wireless coverage than electricity (84% vs 80% of  world population). Smartphone penetration will likely go from 15% to 30% in the next year. Mobile app market is a $12bn industry with mobile ad market adding another neat $3bn+ (most of which is Google citing a run rate of $2.5bn). All of this makes the internet revolution of the 90’s look like tricycles on the autobahn.

So with all this excitement, at whose expense will mobile dollars grow from?  I personally don’t like the thinking that in order for something to grow, something else has to shrink but in the world of ads there is a very strong case.

1) Unlike search who came onto the scene and converted local SMB with a easy self serve performance based product, mobile will not be introducing new ad buyers to the mix.

2) We are facing tough economic times and marketing managers are likely reallocating their budgets vs. growing them to include “shiny object” projects.

3) With each new platform, ad dollars were repurposed from something that look like the less effective substitute. Search/Craigslist replaced classifieds and flyers. Social Networking replaced parts of PR budgets. So with mobile – direct mail looks like the less effective substitute and to some that’s a $60bn US market, equal to ad spend on TV.  I can see search and social networks being cannibalized by mobile — or more accurately I see them shifting  their wares to the mobile platform.

Click on my US Ad Spend Estimate by Platform to guess where Mobile Ad Growth will come from. http://wp.me/P1Wcgu-j

 

The digital media “industry” is moving fast and  fusing itself into other traditional industries. The former categorization of device manufacture, content development and software seems to all be mixed up and jumbled — and then you add the mobile aspect and it’s hard to say what industries are what and how you size it and understand what is relevant.

I have always been a fan of Mary Meeker and came across her recent presentation of the state of the mobile world. Attached are her 50+ slides that is well worth the read.