Monthly Archives: February 2012

Selected Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-27

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  • It's a classic – but still the best overview I know: SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters http://t.co/4iwf8Hra #
  • Mobile device market shares by country: http://t.co/zWbS1ejC #
  • Facebook commerce is not as straight forward as it appears. Customers want discounts brands think it's discovery http://t.co/k4FOTFgv #
  • Great interview with Dropbox founder: "making it work" without bothering the user is really their core mission http://t.co/47b1o0G5 #
  • If you want to build a tech business, you should understand technology. Frankly,I dont think we should be debating this http://t.co/xUuZ4E5d #

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Selected Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-20

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  • Monkey Island creator raised 1m on kickstarter for his latest game. Cool! http://t.co/CcS0kZl3 #
  • The slow rise of the SoMoClo OS http://t.co/uAWmZksI #
  • SAP/Oracle: Acquiring cloud companies doesn’t make you one any more than buying a Giants jersey makes you Eli Manning http://t.co/OtmuQaQL #
  • I’ll be doing a workshop on how to create a pitch deck at Munich Venture Summit. Would be cool to get the room packed! http://t.co/tbr022tG #

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It’s time for the market place 2.0

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Floating Market Thailand

 
 
 
 
 
 
… and it will look distinctively different from Amazon Marketplace and eBay…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In recent weeks I had several really cool discussions about attractiveness of marketplaces as a business model.  In summary I would say that we agreed on the following:

  • High margin
  • Relatively easy to implement technically
  • Critical is to overcome chicken and egg problem

 However, there are also a couple of challenges:

  • Combination of high margins which attract competition and low market entry barriers
  • The larger your platform grows the more you are in danger that a competitor re-segments the market and focuses on one specific niche: eBay as all-purpose platform for example has been challenged in the German speaking market by Chrono24 for watches, mobile.de for cars, immobilienscout.de for real estate etc

As a result this seems to put a limit on how big eBay as the most successful marketplace company can become. The entire company is currently valued at USD 43bn on the stock market. However, a substantial part of current and especially future business belongs to the PayPal business line:

Without going into too much detail, I would suggest it’s fair to assume that 50% of the business value is actually contributed by marketplaces which would put the current market valuation at roughly USD 20bn. Not bad right? Well, compared to the valuations of businesses with other business models this does seem to leave some room for improvement:

  • Amazon, e-commerce: USD 81bn
  • Apple, high end consumer hardware & software: USD 460bn
  • Google, search & advertisements: USD 196bn
  • Microsoft, b2b and b2c software: USD 257bn
  • Oracle, b2b software: USD 142bn

So how could the marketplace business model evolve?

In my eyes the best way to start is by expanding the value chain.

  • This allows  you to capture more of the value generated for your customers which essentially means increased revenue potential
  • It increases market entry barriers because you are more entrenched

This is especially interesting in a b2b context where complex workflows exist. Here, there is a great opportunity in integrating directly into the workflow of your customers.

Let me make an example:  A marketplace like 99 designs which allows to get e.g. a logo design done, could offer a SaaS product extension for quotations of design tasks. A project manager could then use this to decide whether to make the logo in house or externally via the 99 designs.

And there are countless of extensions that you can think of! On the supply side for example, you could offer a SaaS solution for printing companies which allows them to fill “empty space” when they are going to run a print job. Taken to the extreme this extensibility can evolve into a full blown platform where apps serve special use cases on top of the marketplace.

Besides of increased revenue potential due to more “products” that you offer you also have the advantage of increased market entry barriers because once you are integrated into corporate processes you will be much harder to be replaced. Also you can truly differentiate yourself and can compete on a innovation / premium product strategy as opposed to a commodity marketplace functionality.

Selected Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-13

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  • Interesting idea – viewing pinterest as the next gen amazon aka as personalized ecommerce http://t.co/lvqPu3AU #
  • Wow iPhone 3GS had already the same CPU performance as Playstation 2 #casualconnect #
  • Mobile fragmentation from a game perspective:
    resolutions, texture processing, etc -> min 10 major configurations #casualconnect #
  • Google is rumored to launch a cloud storage service a la dropbox with 1/10 of costs in the coming weeks http://t.co/8cacORL7 #
  • Mark Suster with some good points on negotiation, he just forgot to mention ZOPA – Zone of possible agreements :-) ) http://t.co/fc7mHuYw #
  • Oracle's challenged by new generation of b2b startups. I dont think Oracle is doomed though they can just buy them :-) http://t.co/GmoODYYg #
  • Don't implement command & control structure if you hire super smart people. Joel Spolsky on organization: http://t.co/4NejO5jj #

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If you re-segment a market by price you better be sure it’s big enough

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The Red Hat Challenge

Innovations which allow drastic cheaper prices by e.g. delivering digital media files instead of physical DVDs or harnessing the power of open source software have huge impact on the market these innovations disrupt.
Take the market penetration of Linux systems as an example. Linux replaced Sun Solaris in many webservers because you could achieve more or less the same for a fraction of the price. While this seems like an obvious observation, this has a very important implication: In order to make 100 million in revenues, e.g. Red Hat had to capture 1 billion in market size of the Solaris / Unix market.

If you can’t expand your market, take somebody elses’s

The alternative to shrinking the market is that the new price allows tapping into new customer segments which were previously not buying because of a high price. There are many markets like books or TV, however, which already have a pricing affordable by nearly everyone. So any price reduction will directly affect the market size and the amount/size of companies the market can sustain.

If Netflix streaming subscriptions or Amazon e-books are going bring us cheaper prices, which I think they have to because otherwise somebody else will, this means that they are forced to cannibalize themselves. When they start scaling through the early majority the correspondingly large increases in subscription numbers will needed to sustain growth on a base of already significant revenues as well as making up the decrease in subscription rates. So, after a successful market introduction revenue growth will be difficult to maintain. Amazon chose to expand their role in the value chain and to take over the role of a publisher to make up for the drop in prices. I wonder how Netflix will react to this threat because I think it will be much more difficult to act as a publisher in the movie industry.

Developers, the next round is about you in the mobile platform war

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A (brief) history of computing platforms

The guys n gals over at asymco.com created an awesome chart which shows the incredibly short time period in which mobile computing platforms rose head to head in unit shipments with Windows PCs.

Annual Computing Platform Shipment

Can Apple sustain a pure premium segment positioning?

When Steve Jobs announced at the launch of the iPhone that Apple probably has a 5 years head start he was probably spot on: It took Android about 2-3 years to surpass Apple in units shipped, but one can argue that the Android ecosystem is less developed and that revenues on the platform are still catching up with Apple.

But there is also another story – one that Apple is too familiar with. Walled gardens usually only last for so long and taking a 30% cut of revenues on a platform won’t work forever. Think about it this way: Except of Rovio no company has gotten really big on the iOS platform. Huge companies, however, have been built on the Windows, Unix and Linux platforms.

Apple should have learned in the original Macintosh days that there comes a time when the network effects of an ecosystem with complimentary players outpace vertically integrated firms in the software sector. You can already see how Android is having more momentum even though it is the fast follower and by no means first to market.

Or is Android the new Windows?

Android’s biggest strength is also its biggest threat, however: The speed of the Android catch up is only possible due to the degree of openness of Android, that it can be adapted to Amazon Fire tablets as well as to a Samsung Galaxy phone. In order to create a tipping point where the Android platform is so much more attractive for normal consumers that they don’t want anything else Android will need to be developers’ choice #1 and this requires a manageable technology stack. The stack however is threatend by a possible fork if the the diverging forces become too strong. I think it could well be that at one point Android will need to be maintained by an independent organization such as Apache.

Let’s get ready to rumble

Oh, and then there is the original platform heavy weight champion: Microsoft. Will he make a comeback?

Pass the popcorn and get ready for round #2 in iOS vs Android