Tag: initial stage

The Trouble with Orkut

Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t been replying to your messages on orkut any more. I still exist there, but am not “active” by any stretch of imagination. I check my account once in a long while, when I’m feeling really bored. And make a conscious decision not to reply to scraps there, since doing so will invite more scraps, which I don’t want. I haven’t deleted my account since I’m told that doing so will remove from my GTalk friends list those people who’ve been added because of Orkut.

Speaking to other people, I find similar stories. Most people have either deleted their orkut accounts, or just let them go dormant. Of course this doesn’t include people who occasionally scrap me over there. Oh, and btw, most people are still around on facebook. I  know one guy (POTA) who deleted his facebook account but apart from that, most people are still around. So what exactly went wrong with orkut?

1. Fransips: Orkut allowed you to send messages/scraps to whoever you wanted to, irrespective of whether they knew you or not. In the initial stage, when people were rediscovering themselves and their networks, this was a fantastic facility. But once that got completed, it was used by random fransip-seekers, which drove most women away from orkut. And once the women went away, the “good guys” followed them out.

2. Random names: Orkut allowed people to change their display names very easily, and this turned out to be a huge problem. Some day, you’d get a scrap from someone with first name “going to” and second name “california” (with lots of periods and exclamations punctuating the name) and it would take a huge effort to figure out who had messaged you. It is easy dealing with standard nicknames but when people start naming themselves after something that doesn’t make any sense, and hten proceed to change their names every few days, it does get disconcerting.

3. There was nothing to do: Once the initial network-rediscovering face was done, there was nothing one could “do” on orkut. Yeah, about a year back they introduced the concept of applications and stuff, but that was more in response to facebook after the latter had drawn away most of Orkut’s users. Orkut allowed you to write scraps on friends. It allowed you to write rediff-level comments on discussion boards. It allowed you to find random women and seek franship. But that was that. Nothing to do on a sustainable basis.

4.Lack of privacy There was absolutely no privacy on orkut. Everyone could see what you did, who you talked to, what photos you put, where you had been, and in essesnce your entire life history. This, combined with the fransip seekers meant that people “shut down” on orkut. Away went the interesting pictures. Scraps would get deleted. Everyone suddenly became “committed”. People basically started lying, and hiding information. There was no way a forum that encouraged this could help sustain “keeping in touch”.

5. Spam Orkut stupidly allowed some stupid scripts to be run, and so on new year’s day 2008, i had a hundred messages on my scrapbook, all of them having been generated by some stupid script. Orkut had ceased to be personal. You could write a script which would write “hello world” on all your friends’ scrapbooks.

Once the balance had tipped towards facebook, there was no looking back towards Orkut. Orkut tried some themes, which ended up making people’s pages very gaudy indeed. The photo tagging tool was added, but navigation was tough. They tried to introduce a friend feed, but most of the feed was taken up by random thrid party apps. Over the course of the last one year, orkut has kept getting progressively worse.

If you look at it, some of hte features of orkut that enabled it to fail recently were what made it so popular in the early days (2004-07). In that golden age for orkut, people were busy reconnecting. Finding lost friends and relatives. You would crawl through entire friends’ lists in order to find that special friend who you had lost touch with. And you found dozens of them every day. It was incredible. People who you hardly talked to in school suddenly became close “orkut friends”. New relationships were built. New bonds were made. And then you realized that you had gotten back in touch with practically everyone you’ve known. Orkut was of no use to you any more.

I think there is a business school case study waiting to be written over here – about what made and broke Orkut. And it can be used in that session in corporate strategy class where they teach that your greatest strengths can turn into your greatest weaknesses.

Fighterization

The story begins with this slightly old blog-post written by Ritesh Banglani, a guest faculty at IIMB. Banglani writes:

In the first class of my course at IIM, I asked students a simple question: What is strategy?. The most interesting response came from a rather cynical student: “Start with common sense, then add some jargon. What you get is strategy”.

I didn’t say so at the time, but that is precisely what strategy is not. If anything, strategy is uncommon sense – making choices that may not appear intuitive at the time.

The cynical student in question mentioned this during a conversation earlier today, and I thought the discussion that followed merited a blog post. I thank the cynical student for his contribution to this thought.

Innovation happens when someone gets an insight, which, by definition, is a stud process. The person innovating, naturally, is a stud. For a few years after the innovation, the idea is still in development, and it is still very tough for other people to do what the pioneer stud has done. The first wave of people to do what the pioneer has done will also naturally be studs.

However, after the idea has been established, the market for it grows. The pool of studs that are then involved in the idea won’t be able to service the entire market. Also, being studs, they are prone to get bored easily with whatever they are doing, and will want to move on. The increased size of the market as well as the gaps left by the leaving studs will attract fighters to this idea.

Now, fighters are not natural when it comes to generating insight. However, they are excellent at following processes. And once an idea has been developed beyond the initial stage, it makes itself amenable to processes. And thus, a set of processes get established. Soon enough, thanks to the processes, the fighters are able to do a much better job of implementing this idea as compared to the pioneering studs, and studs get driven out of the industry.

This generalized process that I have just described applies to all fields, or “domains” if you would like to call it that. Let us now leave the generalization and come to one specific profession – strategy consulting. Strategy consulting started off as an insight-driven process, a stud process. Industrialists would go to consultants in order to get insights, and out of the box ideas, in order to take forward their business. Soon, the business became profitable, and the consultants, like any good capitalists wanted to expand.

There was one problem, however – talent. It wasn’t easy for them to attract similarly insightful wannabe consultants to work for them. Similarly insightful people would either not want to work in strategy consulting, or they would start their own consulting shops. Thus, there was a need to bring in the fighters into the mix.

It was to facilitate the entry of the fighters that the various consulting models and frameworks came into being. A large set of processes were drafted, and all that the fighter consultants had to do was to identify the appropriate processes for the situation and then implement them along with the client. Insight and out-of-the-box thinking were thrown out of the window. Hourly billing became the industry standard.

Strategy consulting has come a full circle now. It has been “fighterized”. Clients nowadays don’t expect insight. They expect processes. They expect to be led down the “correct” path, and they want to make sure they don’t make obvious mistakes. And thus, the “strategy” that the consulting firms offer are mostly common sense which has been appropriately packaged. And this has percolated down to business schools. And so the cynical student’s cynicism is valid.