This weblog is an experiment in developing a book online. I let it rest for a little while because I wanted to think about the feedback I was getting. A number of people seemed confused by some of the chapters — they felt the chapters were incomplete, or they weren’t sure what the point was.

I realized the problem was my fault. To adapt the book content to a weblog, I was taking the draft chapters and splitting them into digestible chunks, posting one chunk a week. Unfortunately, web posts are typically much shorter than book chapters, and have a different structure. In a book, a chapter is usually a fairly long essay. It constructs an argument in segments, like a gourmet five-course meal that builds from appetizers to soup to salad and so on.

A good weblog post is more like eating bon-bons. Instead of building a structured argument, it makes a single point concisely and then gets out of the way. By chopping the chapters into bits, I was giving you the worst of both worlds – you didn’t get the full argument you’d expect from a book chapter, but you also didn’t get the single clear point of a good blog post. Too many of the online chapters felt like fragments – because that’s what they were.

So I’m going to structure the writing a little differently in the future. Instead of trying to replicate book chapters, I’ll just write about the ideas that I want to cover in the book, roughly one idea per week. I think this will make the weblog a little easier to read, and I hope it’ll also encourage more discussion.

As always, I’m very interested in your comments and suggestions. Please don’t be shy!

I’m posting pieces of the book once a week, but in between I’ll occasionally post a comment on a related subject. Today’s topic is market research and the television show American Idol.

If you live in the US you’ve probably heard of American Idol, especially if like me you have a pre-teen daughter who asks you to call in votes for her favorite singers after bed-time. If you don’t live in the US, chances are you have a local version of the same show – Croatian Idol or Ugandan Idol or something like that.¹

In case you’ve been living in a cave or don’t have kids, here’s how the show works: A group of amateur singers performs every week, one song per performer. The audience votes, and the night after the performance, the person who received the fewest votes has to leave the show. It sounds deceptively simple, but the personalities involved are entertaining, and if you watch the show regularly you kind of get attached to the singers and it’s a wrench when one of them gets voted off and you realize you won’t ever get to see them sing again.

Mind you, I know all of this only from watching my daughter. I myself don’t pay much attention to the show, oooooh no, I’m too busy writing blog entries.

The central tension each week is the mystery of who will get voted off. Or anyway, that was the central mystery until a few weeks ago, when an online tool called Dial Idol hit its prime.

Dial Idol is a website and a software program. You install it on your computer and use it to dial your votes into the show, via modem. The program also reports your votes back to the website. This isn’t all that interesting – there are lots of American Idol polls online. But Dial Idol also tabulates the percent of the calls for each singer that generate busy signals. American Idol gets so flooded with calls during the voting process that it’s commonplace to get a busy signal – you might have to call three times to cast a single vote.

The genius of Dial Idol is the use of the busy signal. Any online poll that people can volunteer to take is plagued by self-selection errors. But the ratio of busy signals to total calls turns out to be an accurate predictor of who’s getting the most votes. It corrects for any bias in the people choosing to take the poll.

The website has been in operation for years, but just recently it reached some sort of critical mass. I don’t know if it was the total number of people using the software, or tweaks they did to their formulae, but the site is now turning out eerily accurate predictions of the outcomes of the voting. It has correctly predicted the people voted off for the last four weeks straight.

You may well be thinking, who cares? And in one sense this is all trivia. But to me, Dial Idol is a great example of the sort of interesting market research that’s being enabled by the Internet. We’re in a golden age of new market research techniques. They’re giving us more ways to understand people, at lower cost, than we’ve ever had before. Some day we’re going to look back at the days before the Web and wonder how we ever managed to do any marketing at all.

1. I thought I was joking when I wrote that, but then I looked it up and it turns out there is a Croatian Idol, called Hrvatski Idol. No sign of an Idol program in Uganda, although there is one in South Africa. You can see the full list of 32 countries here. (That’s yet another win for Wikipedia over Encyclopedia Britannica, by the way.) [↩ back]

Welcome to Stop Flying Blind, a blog on its way to becoming a book.

Everyone agrees that companies should focus on competing in the future rather than just reacting to what’s happening today. But how do you actually do that? How do you determine what a market’s going to be like when the market doesn’t yet exist? How do you predict what your competition’s likely to do before they even know it themselves? How do you spot the turning points that can change the rules of your industry, before anyone else sees them?
Most companies fly blind on these issues, but they don’t have to. By combining a variety of different perspectives — competitive analysis, market research, and advanced technology research — a company can map the possible futures, pick out the one most favorable to it, and help bring that future into being.

That’s what this blog is all about. I’m a consultant in Silicon Valley, and have been working in roles related to high tech strategy for most of my career, including long stints at Apple and Palm. I think most companies in high tech do a poor job of using external information in their strategic thinking. In this blog I’ll lay out my ideas on how to do it right.

Eventually this will all come together into a book. I’m posting new sections once a week, to gather comments and suggestions. Please tell me what you think, and what you’d like to see.
Thanks,

Mike

Note: This is one of two blogs I’m running. The other, Mobile Opportunity, is a look at the mobile and wireless marketplace and has general comments on high tech.