August, 2011

Design / Greylock / Mozilla / Web/Tech — 8 Comments
15
Aug 11

Google & Motorola

Very very interesting news about Google buying Motorola Mobility this morning. It’s got so many implications it’s tough to take in all at once, so wanted to capture a few thoughts quickly.

First thing worth pointing out, though, is this: we don’t actually know the shape of the whole deal at this point. Will Google keep the MOTO hardware business? Keep the patents and sell the hardware side? Keep both? It’s hard to know how their internal evaluation went, and what they’ll do from here, so a lot of this is really hard to speculate about.

Having said that, a few thoughts:

– it’s another instance in a long history of software (and now Internet) business devouring the previous generation’s hardware businesses. Internet business are inherently more leveraged: distribution power trumps almost everything else, especially in a phase where the technology portion is maturing.

– along those lines, it’s interesting to think about what happens next for Samsung, RIM, HTC, Nokia, but I’m way more interested in what the software players do. All eyes in that regard are on Microsoft, but I think the more interesting long term questions are for Facebook and Amazon.

– 2 things it’s clear that Google didn’t buy MOTO for: its margins or its ~20k employees.

– seems like Google definitely wanted the IP portfolio.

– and it seems to me that, assuming they keep the hardware business, that they want Motorola because it gives Google full control over the hardware and software stack, which is the only way that they’ll ever be able to even approach the excellent UX fit & finish of the Apple offerings. I feel like that’s one of the top drivers, and maybe the most important one over the long term.

– One other thing that this merger is decidedly not about is distribution — if anything, Google’s distribution power with respect to Android is somewhat weakened, at least in the short-to-medium term, as they’re undoubtedly going to cause some grief with partners Samsung and HTC. Feels like Google has calculated that control over getting the experience right trumps any distribution help they might get from their handset partners.

All of this lines up pretty well with my post about Screens, Storage & Networks last week — the last 60 days have seen Google push hard to get in the top tier on Screens (MOTO) and Networks (Google+).

My most esoteric point I’ve left for last, though: one of the unfortunate consequences of this development is that I think it will move perceptions of big corporations building open software (and in this particular instance, I’m specifically talking about open source software) at least a few more notches towards the cynical. The question that everyone will ask anytime a company tries an open experiment like Android in the future, the inevitable line of questioning will be: “Sure it’s open now, but for how long?” Whether premeditated or not, the path of Android has been from wide open to asserting more and more control — and this is another data point on that path. I’m not criticizing or indicting anyone for this — I think it’s essentially just a natural evolution and response to market conditions that require tighter integration. I think in a lot of ways it’s inevitable in technology networks for this to happen. (And I’ve written about it a bit before.) My only real sadness here is that it’ll move cynicism on corporate open source efforts up one more notch, and that’s not good.

Overall, though, fascinating day, fascinating time. Big moves!

Design / Greylock / Mozilla / startups / Web/Tech — 1 Comment
9
Aug 11

Design like you’re right…

It’s impossible not to think a lot about data these days. We’re generating it all the time, constantly. On our phones, on our televisions, on our laptops, in public spaces. And increasingly the best startups and Internet giants are using data to make better and better product decisions and designs.

Today at Greylock we announced that DJ Patil is joining us as Data Scientist in Residence, as far as I know the first time any VC has had a position quite like that. It’s a huge addition for us, and the expression of a bunch of deeply held beliefs about the state of the art in designing great products.

But as I talk about using data for design, I find that there’s a lot of misunderstanding about it — some people have the sense that it somehow makes designers less powerful, that you’re basing decisions based purely on mechanical measures rather than designer intuition and genius.

In my view, however, data is what makes designers not only strong, but primary. It’s what turns designers from artists into the most important decision makers in a company, because it’s understanding the data that lets you understand what your users are doing, how they’re using (or not using) your products, and what you can be doing better.

It made me think back a bit to my own training as a UX designer (we called it HCI then) at Stanford in the mid-nineties, when the field was just starting to develop. We would spent a lot of time on ethnography, need finding, doing paper prototypes and then doing basic mockups and user testing. And we’d get 80% of the way there then go and build it.

Nowadays, the state of the art is to still do need finding and some mockups early, but to get to a working prototype as quickly as you can, that’s instrumented so that you can tell what’s happening and figure out whether you’re on the right track or not.

I think that’s generally the right approach, but it’s worth noting: instrumented prototypes can really only get you to local maxima — they can help you find ways to tweak and optimize the basic design you’ve got, but they can never help you find a radically different and better solution.

So when I talk about using data — and I talk about it a LOT — what I’m talking about is a mixture of the artisan/designer-led designs along with using data to figure out what’s best.

Thinking about it the other day, I was reminded of one of my favorite sayings that I learned from Bob Sutton: “Fight like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong.” Bob’s an organizational theorist, and what he means is really a paraphrase of something that I think Andy Grove said, which is that he wanted all his people to have strong beliefs, loosely held. In other words, he always wanted people to come in with a point of view — a design, as it were — but to be willing to moved off of that point of view in the face of data.

So the modern, design oriented framing is this:

“Design like you’re right. Read the data like you’re wrong.”

In other words, you should always design the product you think/believe/know is what people want — there’s a genius in that activity that no instrumentation, no data report, no analysis will ever replace.  But at the same time you should be relentless in looking at the data on how people actually use what you’ve built, and you should be looking for things that show which assumptions you’ve made are wrong, because those are the clues to what can be made better. We all like to see all the up-and-to-the-right happy MBA charts, and those are important. But they don’t help you get any better than you already are.

I wish we taught more of this blend, because all of the products we use would get better.

So: design like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong.