Welcome to 2012 where Skype is joining Microsoft’s management culture. If we hearken back a few years, was politics one of the problems Skype had with eBay?
Skype in early 2005 was a mostly European team. They held what Americans would call liberal cultural values. Once sold to eBay, they tried to work with an eBay management team overtly embracing a conservative value system.
eBay’s management team strongly supported the US Republican party when they bought Skype in 2005 and in the years leading up to Meg Whitman’s support for 2008 GOP presidential and local elections and her 2010 run for California governor. Meg personally held eBay town hall meetings for eBay sellers across America, pressing the flesh and honing her retail political skills before declaring her candidacy. Much of eBay’s language invoked the rhetoric of populist and free market capitalism, rugged individualism, and small hands-off government. Meg and her management team donated heavily to Republican candidates, institutions and causes and many left in 2009 to work on her campaign.
In contrast, Skype avoided politics. Its lawyers were wary of telecom regulators. Its leadership was conscious that local politics didn’t fit its transnational scope and worldly staff. If anything, Skype started off embracing non-partisan geek culture, with an anti-establishment (“we’re taking on the phone companies”) and universal populism (“talk to the world for free”).
I don’t want to overstate the differences. Both teams cared about success, both spoke business, self-identified as leaders.
Yet something went wrong.
Skype was never properly integrated with eBay. I look to Whitman’s narrow charge to Skype’s founders and the technology myopia that followed. As part of the purchase, Whitman dangled a billion dollar payout to the founders if they met a few hard-to-meet goals relating to adoption, activity and revenue. The founders reacted by stifling all business and development activity that didn’t directly and quickly support those goals.
A side effect: strategic Skype technology was proposed but never seriously funded. If you want to integrate realtime conversation into eBay and PayPal experiences you need web services like cloud platforms for non-Skype developers. Skype desktop integration would never work in an environment where more than half of all eBay transactions passed through third-party applications. Had Skype had been thoroughly blended into the eBay buyer and seller experiences, would eBay have sold Skype?
Aside from executives desperate to make their gigadollar payday, eBay did little to promote integration. In fact, integration and synergy, while promised to eBay’s investors, was never a priority. eBay never appointed a VP, director, or even a manager to oversee their side of Skype integration.
With Skype’s third sale, (first being to VCs, second being to eBay), management was free from eBay culture but had private equity culture imposed. Politics wasn’t in the air; just decisiveness in preparation for sale.
And now Skype is at Microsoft, a company whose management is relatively quiet about politics, whose expedient corporate giving supports incumbents, and whose memories of painful encounters with the US Justice Department and many European regulatory bodies left a bitter caution for even talking politics.
Will Skype and Microsoft blend well? Do they share common geek and corporate values over more partisan and nationalistic ones? What core differences in world view could keep them from partnering well together? Could Skype be better off in the dynamic, rapidly growing entertainment division where radical innovation is ordinary or in one of the slow, staid and stable divisions where Skype might shine by contrast?
Luis von Ahn presents the Duolingo project. Like Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood kids to paint his fence for him, Duolingo exchanges language lessons for help translating the web. Duolingo builds on predecessors like reCAPTCHA, which uses the free labor from proving you are human to translate old books, Duolingo addresses a massive task, breaks it down into small fragments, and aligns the task with a strong motivator. Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.
This design looks obvious in hindsight. I think it is harder than it looks.
Selecting the right problem from the universe of problems is hard. You need a problem that lets people feel good about participating, aligning with common values. You need a problem that is already understood by the public or that can be explained in a few words. Your problem should have measurable value in time saved or in money. And the problem should have a major component that can be solved by humans.
Breaking down knowledge work to 5 to 30 second snippets is a fairly new skill, although industrial engineers have designed simple repetitive snippets of work for factories for more than a century. Now we must learn to decompose to exploit what the human mind does well, leaving the rest to algorithms.
Motivation is the last leg of this triangle. We don’t have prior art or proven models to discover contexts that marry the human task to incentives. We have a few examples, like getting access to something valuable, learning a language, or running a cool screensaver. In each example the contributor benefits are immediate, in your face, and powerful enough for high completion rates.
The last project I saw that worked like this was 1-800-GOOG-411. GOOG411 was a directory assistance robot; you’d call for the phone number or directions of US businesses. It used caller voices and behavior to build a vast corpus of speech and search data. Google used the data to engineer its transcription service and to learn about mobile-local search. I loved it; it usually had better answers than expensive phone company operators.
Communication is well mapped and settled territory. So is telecommunication, video conferencing, and messaging. This means talk, in its many forms, is full of competitors that know how to string two digital tin cans together.
Collaboration is unmapped and unclaimed. People come together with common purpose, choose goals, and work towards those goals despite most systems, not because of them.
1994. The United States Department of Defense wanted to clean up sites where chemical weapon facilities had once operated. I was on Bechtel National’s bizdev team, helping construct our bid for the billion dollar job. The project manager brought in a facilitator to design workshops for a the managers and scientists who would lead the work. We were to uncover the risks and challenges inherent in the project, interpret what the contracting officer really wanted but hadn’t said. A complex, fuzzy problem with a hard deadline and big stakes. I saw strangers quickly become a team, focus on problems, feel safe enough to disagree and to think creatively. All in a few hours. This was my first experience with skilled facilitation.
I saw works similar to Gamestorming on Kaliya Hamlin’s bookshelf a few months ago. Decades of books and scrapbooks assembled by skilled small group facilitators. They approach team interaction like sports coaches, where the “other team” you’re playing against is the purpose for coming together. Different strategies for different opponents. Different techniques for different situations. A mix of roles that let the team go through what they must to reach their goals. Gamestorming’s playbook starts with a framework for group practices, a pattern pattern. The rest of the book catalogs 88 games, and many more can be found on the Gamestorming blog and wiki.
While Gamestorming was built for in-person collaboration, most of the games can be adapted for teams working remotely.
If only so we don’t have a billion crappy, time wasting, unproductive meetings over Skype.
Only one company comes close to offering a software product for this space. Dive into GroupSystem’s ThinkTank for a feature list. Requirements collection. Brainstorming. Sorting and clustering ideas. Voting. Prioritizing. Analyzing. Visualizing. It’s a rational, logical, reductionist approach to decision making and consensus building. It’s the right-brain counterpart to Gamestorming’s left-brain support for creativity, discovery, insight, for problems with fuzzy goals and high degrees of uncertainty.
Collaboration is where Skype and Microsoft can create enormous value for every user.
And Skype needs to do more than execute on a “Skype Everywhere” strategy. Skype can be knocked off, even with Microsoft’s support. Networks of people migrate all the time. We were using the acronym YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service) as far back as 2003. Skype isn’t safe.
Serving collaboration raises an effective barrier to entry. Helping groups of people be productive together, a tool for synergy, creates a value much harder to abandon than simple communication. In choosing between two communication channels, we choose the network that makes you and your social graph more effective, more productive.
A “Skype for Working Together” strategy is not obvious, easy or fast. I’d love to work on this, one of my “dream jobs.” Where do Skype-based collaborations break down now? Why? What can be done to prevent breakdowns? Can you identify and measure team formation, flow and accomplishment through Skype interactions? Where are people going to do all the things Skype won’t do before, during and after a call? Skype can raise a new barrier to entry through deep understanding of collaboration problems and the many better practices for getting things done together.
P.S. Collaboration is not just for the workplace. Collaboration is how we get things done together in the rest of our lives. It’s how we find work. Plan vacations. Troubleshoot a child’s problems. Organize a protest. Run for office. Restore a community. And work out why our last romance fell through.
P.P.S. Does Skype really want PowerPoint’s reputation as a powerful tool to create mind-numbing meetings?
P,P.P.S. Oh, and the book is an easy, fun, insightful read. Pick up a copy.
Mobile operator Three partnered with design studio B-Reel to bring the high-touch experience of in-store selling to the efficiency of centralized service. Three Sweden calls the service 3LiveShop, a blend of call center software, CRM, video calling, multitouch user interfaces, heads-up display, and in-store retail culture. It looks gorgeous.
Conversion rates in retail stores are very high, and are painfully lower in online stores. The Fireclick Index reports 74% of online shoppers abandon carts with products before checkout; only 2.3% of shoppers buy. This adds up when the lifetime value of a customer is high and switching costs are low.
Three things inspire me.
That a large phone company executive gave real budget to such a crazy idea and let it come to market. Was this a corporate culture hack or the product of a vibrant innovation system?
That the design process focused on both users: the sales rep and the customer. Too often design favors one or ignores the other.
That the results found human eye contact and rapport were as crucial to success as navigating all the information overload. Video is the real value add, building trust and keeping attention. Touch means operators can respond quickly, within the timeframe of a live conversation.
Here’s hoping a future phase gives some of the touch-screen magic to the customer, for some deep co-creation and collaboration. And that the Swedes get the go ahead to roll this out to the rest Three.
P.S. They built the user experiences in Adobe Flash. Why not Skype? Skype is already a partner with Three.
First, Skype requires each party to a call to use Skype-provided identities. That just doesn’t work for walk-in-off-the-street relationships. Selling starts off anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) for both the customer and sales assistant until you are ready to pay.
Second, today’s Skype doesn’t offer a way to build a video call into a browser-centered retail experience. Even if the developers chose to build the CRM station with SkypeKit, the customer would still have to download a full Skype client or a customized SkypeKit app. That’s serious friction, an unwanted step.
Third, early versions of SkypeKit’s private beta license requires you to share business secrets with Skype about your use of SkypeKit, and give Skype veto power over release of your “Plugged-into-Skype” product or service. That’s a lot of outside control to cede when you can easily, cheaply choose other tools.
Jason Asbahr is CEO of iOS game publisher Monstrous Company. Design defects in Skype’s persistent chat drove his whole firm to switch back from Skype for Mac 5 to the older 2.8. Still has love for Skype’s group video chat and hotspot payment services.
If Salesforce made a Skype for intranets, it would look like Chatter. We’ll talk more about it in the days to come but here are some of their television commercials which aired during halftime at Super Bowl 45. The style is fun and enthusiastic. And, like Skype, Salesforce loves the blue skies, clouds, and rounded sans serif typefaces visual identity.
Most speculation about the future of work is straightforward linear projection; we all do it, it’s easy. The harder part, the thing I’m looking for, is insight into the ripple effects those changes will bring. New behavior patterns. Changed values and unmet needs. The conflicts sure to rise. The fragile points where disruption can change everything. Brittle assumptions. Some of the future will be exactly what we expect.
Skypeland has a kingdom in the heart of realtime communication. Skypeland is surrounded by larger countries, tribes, and cities.
Let’s start to the North, where we think the first Skypelanders started: in the Messenger Isles.
The islands are populated by tribes of instant messengers. Nearly all of them support voice over IM but some go further. If you look to the southeast you’ll find the Port of Unified Communications where they bring ornate enhancements to to simple messaging and calls.
Phil Wolff designs and positions realtime collaboration products, finds useful pivots, sees both both forests and trees. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.
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