Making Microsoft Cool

Like a lot of people who’ve had chance to work with Microsoft it comes as no surprise that they’ve realised it’s time to deal with their image problem in the market place. Check out the musings of Red Slice, for example. In ‘Can Hotshot Ad Guy Alex Bogusky Make Microsoft Cool?’ this dilemma has fallen to an ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusk, which has been handed a new $300 million consumer-branding campaign.

When I skimmed the article in Fast Company (the link url reads nicely ‘\believe-it-or-not-hes-a-pc.html) last night on the way to the Nlab dinner in Leicester I was intrigued by how great a challenge it is:

“To try to be cool is to not be cool. To chase cool, you’re chasing something that already exists, which means you’re always going to be on the wrong side of it, you’ll always be following.”

“I think we’ve learned that when you take on these kinds of odd relationships with big companies that need a kick start, the motivation to overcome those suspicions is a lot of the fun.”

“I suspect what Microsoft would most like to instill in people’s minds is they are innovators and leaders, and that’s what they think of as being cool.”

So good luck to them. I asked the gut on the train up who had a Mac what he thought was cool about MS and he said XBox. As an older nerd I would say the simplicity of Windows 95. And I suggest playing with the bad haircut theme noted at the launch of Windows 95.   Continuing the bad haircut theme, the original MS team from 1978, and updated, left to right.

The difficult task of valuating web 2.0 products

What if you were asked for your opinion of how to provide a valuation of a web 2.0 product? There are no easy answers and the cases of over-valuation are easy to find. For example the purchase of Skype by e-Bay for $2.6bn in 2005, e-Bay later admitted in 2007 it had overpaid by a clear $1bn.

So what are some of the pointers to help when it comes to your turn to speak at the boardroom pow-wow? It’s a question I asked recently on the ICAEW’s IT Counts social networking community. A couple of starter answers below:

1. Bodycount — use a traditional web measure such as number of visitors.  Downside: Traffic is a great measure, but without a business model it’s not enough. With Skype the number of active users, as opposed to registered users, fell well below expectations.

2. Fast growth potential – the ability of the site to allow users to upload their online address books and link to their own contacts quickly, then create networks among these users. Plus the ease in extending the network to mobile devices. (So helps if it connects easily with a big player like Facebook or Myspace.)

3. Average single user value — work on the basis of what a single user might generate in revenue with simple predictions. Eg: the more time on average a user stays on your site the higher the potential revenue for example.

Maybe I’ll need to make this into a conference session and see what other ideas are out there, for sure you can reduce it to ‘the price is what the market can support’ but there has to be more to help guide valuation?

Or to put in another way ‘Is LinkedIn really worth a cool $1bn?’.