Tesla!

I just had a glimpse at the future and had to share it. Thanks to a great friend, I was able to get behind the wheel of only the second production Tesla on the road. The other went to the company's CEO. My friend just took delivery on Friday and I took it for a spin on Sunday.

What a fantastic ride! The experience was marked by two contradictory experiences:
1. Accelerating at breakneck speed
2. The eerie quiet of an electric car

Now, I own a Prius, so I'm used to how quiet a car running on an electric motor can be. But on the Prius, the electric only powers the car when you aren't rapidly accelerating. The Tesla is electric only, so it's quiet during those times when you don't expect a car to be quiet -- when you are flooring it. You can hear the road, the wind, and even the pops and cracks of the car jiggling as it moves down the road. The only accompanying motor sound is a low whine.

As I was zipping up a hill and around twisty turns, this feeling came over me that I was experiencing the future. Here's a car that provides an amazing driving experience, without the gas and the pollution. Afterwards, I got a little irritated. What's taking the big automakers so long to produce compelling electric alternatives? I know -- I've read the articles, seen the movie, but we should all be frustrated that it took Elon Musk and a bunch of entrepreneurial folks in California to create Tesla and make this exhilarating experience a reality. Here's to hoping that this match lights a gigantic fire and sets the entire car market ablaze.

Hillary for Veep

Last night marked the unofficial end to the primary season. Obama's the man now, and the next big topic is VP. I'm honestly not sure why there's a legitimate debate on this subject, because the choice is so obvious: Hillary Clinton. Here's a quick rundown on the main reasons that there isn't much of a choice:

1. Who is best prepared, in the minds of the VOTERS, to be a heartbeat away? This is not even a close call. Sure, Bill Richardson has a great resume. Sure, Chris Dodd has served a long time in the Senate. But let's get real here. Hillary trounced them in the primaries. One thing that isn't debatable is that Hillary would be "ready on day one" in the minds of the voters. And this is the single most important qualification for the role. If you were a fresh, new face running for President, wouldn't you want your first public decision to reassure voters that you knew what you were doing? Also, if your whole campaign is predicated upon an argument for change and rejecting the politics of the past, shouldn't you use your first big, public decision to show that you will pick the most qualified person?

2. Who brings the most votes to your ticket? This is probably the easiest question to answer. Hillary got nearly 18 million votes in the primaries. Regardless of how you count Michigan, Florida and all the caucuses, Hillary is singularly unique among primary runner ups. No one has EVER come anywhere near the vote totals that Hillary amassed and not been the nominee. I don't have the figures, but I'd be shocked if a runner up ever got half the votes she won. And this year, no one in the party (except for maybe Al Gore) can hold a candle to the voting power she would bring to the ticket.

3. Who moves a swing state into your column? This one also is not a close call. Hillary doesn't help with just one state. She brings votes in probably a dozen swing states, including Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada, West Virginia, New Hampshire. Even the biggest Hillary hater wouldn't attempt to argue that she makes Obama stronger in those states. And the Democrats need to carry the vast majority of those states to win.

4. Who best pads the bank account? Again, this is an easy call. Hillary wildly exceeded every historical fundraising benchmark, save for the amazing numbers posted by Obama. She would bring incredible dollars to the ticket, all of which would be incremental to Obama's network of contributors.

5. Who agrees with you the most on the issues? This is a more difficult call. Obama and Clinton didn't have much policy daylight between them, and this would be true for many of the leading contenders for Veep. You'd have to call this one a draw.

6. Who's got skeletons in the closet? Yes, people can worry about what Bill might do, but the reality is that Hillary is the most vetted candidate of our lifetime. No other choice has been scrutinized with anywhere near the tenacity that the Clintons have endured. The risk of something completely new popping up at this point would be much higher for any other candidate. Alright, I'll give you that Al Gore would again be in the conversation here, but all indications are that he's not interested in more years as VP.

6. Who augments the central themes of your campaign? At face value, Hillary is not the best fit here, and this is the most common argument invoked when someone doesn't want her chosen (see: Ted Kennedy). The argument goes something like this: Obama stands for change and a new direction. Hillary represents the politics of the past and the politics of division rather than conciliation and collaboration. Also, picking Hillary would highlight that Obama isn't strong enough to face down Hillary and proves he's not strong enough to lead the country. This point is debatable, but it is genuinely felt among some Obama supporters. I would counter, however, by pointing out that you can't unite the country if you can't unite your own party. If you can't work closely with the second most powerful person in your party, how can you hope to work those across the aisle? Wouldn't a true break from the past be to pick your strongest rival, your fiercest opponent? Wouldn't it show true strength to chose such a strong willed person for your running mate? Also, what better way to brand yourself the change candidate than to pick a woman as your running mate? Who could argue that you represent historic and unprecedented change with Hillary as your running mate?

Lastly, there is one argument invoked for not picking Hillary that needs to be addressed. It has been said that Hillary and her husband would not play ball and would work to undermine the President when it suited them. Well, maybe the people making this argument should look at the two presidents after whom Obama most closely fashions himself: Kennedy and Lincoln. Kennedy picked LBJ, the most Machiavellian politician of any era (who also said "better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in"). And as for Lincoln, did anyone read "Team of Rivals"? Obama did, and he quoted it on the campaign trail in response to a question about choosing a running mate.

And, at the end of the day, if Obama can't trust her and can't connect with her on a personal level in private then all these other arguments don't amount to anything. I'm betting, however, that both of these individuals are big enough to swallow their past disagreements, look each other in the eye, and see their common destiny.

A-Rod Contract -- More Evidence

So Brian Cashman, GM of the Yankees, came out and said the obvious:

"How can we? We lose all our money from Texas..." Here's the full article.

Why this wasn't obvious to all the sports reporters, I don't know. But it demonstrates part of the point I was making in the previous post. A-Rod is not going to opt out unless he can't reach a deal with the Yanks and gets a better offer elsewhere. Otherwise he loses the Yankees as a bidder and stalking horse.

A-Rod Opt Out

I realize that baseball does not fit in with the themes of this blog, but I feel compelled to comment on baseball in this case. I'm a Yankee fan -- a huge Yankee fan, and the sports reporters continue to miss the point about Alex Rodriguez's plans for opting out of his contract.

The prevailing wisdom is that A-Rod will opt out of his contract to get more money in a new contract. But this thinking misses a fundamental point about his contract situation. A-Rod will never exercise the opt out before negotiating a new deal. He has until Nov 10 to opt out. Once he exercises his opt out, he is basically kissing off the Yankees as a bidder for his services. Why would the Yankees pay him as much or more money AFTER they lose the subsidy from the Texas Rangers? Clearly, their bid will be higher before A-Rod opts out, because they can just pile money on top of the Rangers’ subsidy. So if he opts out, he’s kissing off $30MM in Ranger money that the Yanks can pay him.

Additionally, why would A-Rod's agent, Scott Boras, kiss off the $30MM subsidy when it could even be used by another ballclub. Here’s how: let’s say A-Rod gets deal terms with the Angels and Boras tells the Yanks to trade A-Rod to Angels for $15MM and some minor leaguers. Then Angels sign extension with A-Rod and the Rangers keep paying the subsidy. Everybody wins, except the Rangers (which have no negotiating leverage in this context).

Finally, if A-Rod opts out, he signals to other clubs that the Yanks are no longer a viable stalking horse. Why would the Angels pay top dollar if they know the Yankees aren’t bidding for his services as well? The Angels may be the only other club that would offer as rich a deal.

As a result, I can imagine A-Rod waiting until the end of the season, NOT opting out, but negotiating with all comers, then deciding whether he can get traded to preserve the subsidy or opting out if he doesn’t get the best deal from the Yanks. In fact, since the trade then sign scenario is probably unlikely, the most likely outcome is that A-Rod stays a Yankee because the Yanks are the only team that will have $30MM extra (of Texas Ranger money) with which to bid.

So please, sports reporters, for the love of Pete, please stop talking about A-Rod and his opt-out like you have a clue. You clearly don't.

Westly Takes Control

The die is cast. No need to read the tea leaves anymore. The Field Poll has Westly pulling away:

Field Poll story

And the thing of it is, he's a better general election candidate than a Democratic Primary candidate.

Also, the Westly site has quite a bit about the campaign and the blog is quite active. Check it out at:

RallyCA.com

Next Governor Indeed

Don't look now, but we may have reached the tipping point in the Governor's race. Interesting post from
Bill Bradley from the LA Weekly, confirming early signs that Westly's campaign is beginning to turn the electorate and having an effect on his opponent. When the perceived early leader does an about-face and agrees to a debate he's been dodging, you know something big is going on.

It's also becoming clearer that Westly is the man Arnold doesn't want to face. Check out this post on the California Insider in the Sacramento Bee. Daniel Weintraub is a Sacramento Bee Columnist and a very sharp observer of State politics. He's basically outing the understanding of insiders: Westly is the better general election candidate.

The Next Governor?

Marketing a politician is more difficult than marketing a product. The shelf life for knowledge and experience is short, and the episodic nature of campaigns means that what you learned last time around may have little bearing on the coming election. Also, your competition is hyper-aggressive about highlighting your negatives to the market. Even though business competitors are committed, they often don't end up running ads focused on the negative attributes of the competition.

So it is always with great interest that I follow election cycles. Right here in California, my backyard, we have one of the most exciting and expensive elections of 2006: the race for California Governor. Everyone knows who the current Governor is, and most are aware that his hold on the job is tenuous at best. Approval ratings in the crapper, a legislature emboldened and polarized.

But what most people don't yet know is that we've got an extremely competitive race for the role of challenger. The Democratic primary pits Steve Westly, the California Controller, against Phil Angelides, the Treasurer of the State.

If you live in CA and have a TV without a Tivo, you've probably seen recent commercials from Westly and perhaps Angelides. They are spending millions and it's only March (the primary is in June). What's got me interested is the advertising strategy.

Angelides is positioning himself as the chosen candidate of traditional Democrat power bases, with an on air endorsement by Boxer and support of the CA teachers union. Westly is positioning himself as an innovator and a "different kind of Governor", referencing his experience in building eBay and his remarkable success with a tax amnesty program as Controller where billions of additional tax dollars were collected. He's also spent a lot of time in the commercials sharing biographical information.

Angelides is positioning his candidacy as the favorite of Democratic primary voters and Westly is trying to be an innovative outsider. Which vision will win over the voters? My sense is that Westly will emerge victorious. Voters are sick of Arnold, but they don't want to go back to a traditional pol like Grey Davis either. The hackneyed "I should get your vote because Barbara Boxer thinks so" doesn't fly as well as an approach that educates the population on who you are as a person and what you believe in.

Additionally, Democrats are most concerned with removing the current Governor. Choosing between Westly and Angelides is less important to Democrats. As a result, the primary voters are open to picking the candidate with the best chance of winning in the general election. That candidate is clearly Westly, since he's more of a centrist and less of a liberal nut.

Another big factor: money, the mother's milk of politics. Westly and Angelides are both wealthy and successful fundraisers, but Westly has the cash to keep his ads running straight through to the primary. Angelides has already had to pull back. This spells serious trouble, especially in a primary race that is expected to go negative. Responding to negative ads will be expensive.

So here's my primary prediction: Westly by 4 points. What do you think?

Digital Magazine Growth Continues

In the Spring I wrote about a report that Zinio published showing dramatic growth in the popularity of digital magazines. Given I'm an employee of Zinio, I'm happy to share the news that this growth has continued and even accelerated over the past six months. We just published the latest version of our Digital Publishing Report, based on statistics from the independent audit bureaus that authenticate magazine circulation. We also reveal information about the growth in digital magazine use outside the USA and the use of multimedia in digital magazines. You can download your own copy of the study for free by registering here.

Outlook gripe

While sitting with my blogger friend and sharing gripes about technology (of which we have many, even while we love it all), I mentioned a particular issue I have with Microsoft Outlook that is a real thorn in my side. I just can't help myself any longer -- I've got to make this one public. Maybe someday, someone from Microsoft who works on the Outlook team will see this post and will push this feature into an upcoming release (keep your fingers crossed).

My beef involves traveling for business. Imagine you work for a company that uses Outlook for calendaring. Let's say you are based on the West Coast. Then you travel to New York for a meeting next Wednesday. On that day, you've got a couple of con calls that are already booked in your calendar for that day with folks back in the West Coast office. You begin booking meetings with people you are meeting in New York as well. The problem comes in when you realize that the meetings next Wednesday are in Pacific Time. In fact, your whole calendar is in Pacific Time because the time zone setting is global. This means that if you have someone in your office in NY try and schedule a meeting for you, they will see your calendar expressed in West Coast time. If you try and place a meeting you have in NY into the calendar in NY time, it will confuse things thoroughly. So you end up trying to translate every conversation about time for NY meetings into Pacific Time, booking it in your calendar that way, and having to constantly translate. All your alerts get pushed to you in Pacific Time, and you are just simply screwed if you want to easily look at your calendar and understand your schedule. If you travel to multiple time zones on a trip, this process becomes impossible. Ugh.

I guess this is what happens when a monopoly builds the software. No need to fix real problems for customers when there is no real competitive alternative.

Inspirational blogger

I just had coffee with a friend from the go-go Nineties (ah yes, the good old days). He has taken a hiatus from life to travel the country and blog about his experiences. He does a terrific job of integrating the blogging process into his life experiences. You get a real window into his life and feelings. I'd strongly recommend checking it out at: radicaladventure.blogspot.com. If you are debating whether to produce a blog and how you might make it a meaningful personal pulpit, this blog can give you some inspiration.

Digital Magazines are Here to Stay

Let me start out by saying that one of my jobs is to run marketing for Zinio Systems. The company works with magazine publishers to produce digital replica versions of their print magazines. We also help sell subscriptions on our web site and distribute them to over two million readers in 95% of the world's countries. So I'm biased on this topic.

Having said that, we recently produced a research report which shows pretty clearly that digital magazine readership is growing really rapidly. Depending upon the measure, the industry has grown anywhere from 25-40% over the most recent six month reporting period. That's impressive growth, especially in the context of an overall magazine industry that is basically experiencing zero growth.

The report is available for free by registering through this link.

My favorite Oscar Moments

Ok, so the Oscars are not a fitting topic for this blog, but I just had to share. My first favorite moment was just after the winner of the Cinematography award dedicated it to his Mother, who was in the hospital for 45 days. The music they walked him off stage with came from "Terminator".

My second favorite moment was during the presentation of the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing awards. To present the awards for recognizing the best work in sound, they picked two people whose english you can bearly hear, Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek.

Oh, the irony...

What can tech companies learn from realtors?

My wife is a world class real estate agent, working for Coldwell Banker in Burlingame. As a guy with marketing roots, I've been helping her with marketing initiatives. First, let me tell you a little bit about her practice. She covers most of southern San Mateo County and some of northern Santa Clara County. This includes towns like Burlingame, Hillsborough, Redwood City, Redwood Shores, Belmont, San Carlos, San Mateo, Foster City, Pacifica, Portola Valley, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos and Woodside. She focuses on residential real estate, including single family homes, town homes and condos. If you are curious, her web site is located at http://www.heidizinman.com.

In the process of helping Heidi, I've learned a great deal about what constitutes state-of-the-art in residential real estate marketing. There is much that technology companies can learn from the real estate business. I'll cover one area now and get back to this in subsequent posts so this doesn't turn into a white paper.

Most importantly, relationships are everything in the real estate business. Most people find agents through referrals. So how do you build a clientele from a standing start? How do you get people to recommend you to others? These are fundamental questions, for a realtor or for a start up. Realtors accomplish this by using direct marketing (print and online) to establish a regular dialogue with their referral network. They also write a lot of notes and constantly send gifts of value to reinforce referral behavior. We all know that these activities are useful for tech companies, but few start ups engage in them effectively. Why not?

Why is Yahoo on the Social Networking Sidelines?

What is Yahoo thinking? Well, first a little background. Social networks are proven viral growth engines. They connect people with each other and facilitate the creation of user generated content. Most of the leading social networking sites, including Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn and Tribe, all had to reach a critical mass of users to establish the value of their networks. The externalities all had to be created from scratch.

Yahoo, on the other hand, already has a ton of the basic building blocks for a successful social network. They've got:

==> Users: last I heard, their user base was the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS. Now that's critical mass.

==> Social networking data: Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Address Book and Yahoo Instant Messenger already contain the world's largest social network. Everyone that has an email address stored in their Yahoo address book, or email addresses in their Yahoo Mail account or buddies in their IM buddy list has already shared with Yahoo information about their social network.

==> Community tools: My Yahoo, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Briefcase, Geocities, etc. All have the basic community building functionality any social network needs. It just needs to be tied together in a new interface.

==> Daily interactivity: People visit Yahoo daily to get essential information, including news, entertainment and communication with others online. Adding a social network would constitute a trivial adjustment in the relationship with users.

==> Monetization: Yahoo already has the sales channel and the expertise to monetize the value of user generated content from a social network, perhaps better than any other organization on earth.

So what's the hold up? It's ok for Yahoo to be follower, given their significant ownership of users, but how come they are so far behind? One can only speculate, and here are my observations.

Compare to Google. Google has Orkut, which was launched a few months ago. It only got off the ground because Google nurtures entrepreneurial and creative activity, however. If Google didn't allow engineers to spend 20% of their time on a creative endeavor, and one engineer over there hadn't devoted his creative development time to this project, Google would still be on the sidelines as well. I suspect Yahoo's culture is nowhere near as innovative and flexible. Launching a social network will demand that someone in Yahoo champion the effort and lead a drive to allocate resources to the activity. For a public company being driven by quarterly results for the last several years, even a few extra bodies can be precious. If you are public company and you don't have tight controls on this kind of activity, things can get out of hand. Still, this is why people leave big companies in favor of start ups. Plainly said, you can just get more done with less effort.

Bottom line: I'd predict that we will see a Yahoo social network by the end of 2004. Also, if Google can keep costs contained and their organization focused, they will be a powerful innovator in the Valley for years to come.

A Press Release is Not Positioning

I've had way to many conversations with start ups recently where I've had to explain what positioning means, so I'll post a brief description here. First, what positioning is NOT. Positioning is not a press release. It is not an FAQ. It is not a list of key messages. It is not a competitive landscape. Positioning is statement which describes:

==> to whom a company is selling (if b2b that typically includes industry/title/responsibilities, if b2c that typically includes demographics/psychographics);

==> the problem you are addressing, as the target customer would characterize it;

==> how your product/service uniquely addresses this solution, including how it is different from the competition.

Once positioning is agreed upon, then an organization can develop messaging, which are the words that the company uses to communicate externally. The best way to do this is to develop a messaging bible which includes various descriptions of the company, including a press boilerplate, 50 word description, 150 word description, elevator pitch, etc.

So how many of your companies have written positioning statements and a messaging bible?

Why a blog?

Have you ever gotten into a conversation that shook you, woke you up, motivated you? What's better than a great conversation that creates energy for the people involved? Few people have these conversations often enough. This blog is an experiment to see if I can make it happen more often. I'm hoping to discuss company strategies, marketing and technology, and current events in business. I hope to read your thoughts as well. After all, I'm looking for CONVERSATION! :-)