Danke Wuala, ganz toll!

Am 17.8. verbreitet Wuala die folgende Mail an seine Kunden:

Wir kündigen heute an, dass wir beabsichtigen, den Dienst Wuala Sicherer Cloud Speicher einzustellen. Bitte beachten Sie die folgenden wichtigen Termine:

17. August 2015	Keine weiteren Vertragsverlängerungen und kein weiterer Erwerb von Speicherplatz
30. September 2015	Der Wuala-Dienst stellt um auf Nur-Lese-Betrieb (read-only)
15. November 2015	Der Wuala-Dienst wird beendet und alle in der Wuala-Cloud gespeicherten Daten werden gelöscht

Diese Mail ist, kurz gesagt, eine Frechheit. Jeder, der Wuala im Unternehmenseinsatz hat, hat jetzt ein Problem: 2 Wochen Zeit um eine Alternative zu finden, zu evaluieren, einen Migrationsplan zu machen, umzusetzen, zu testen, in Betrieb nehmen. Wenn man da ein paar Terabyte hat - viel Spaß.

Aus dem weiteren Text der Mail geht hervor, dass man für einen anderen schweizer Anbieter ein Migrationstool geschaffen hat, was darauf schließen lässt, dass Wuala selbst schon länger von der Einstellung wusste. 

Die Abschaltung erfolgt ohne weitere Begründung, ohne Vorwarnung, einfach so. Vielen Dank. So schafft man Vertrauen für Cloud Angebote.

Unten die Mail im Originaltext.

Customer Annoyance Tool: DO NOT REPLY

I have found a new category of tools in the marketing & sales area. I call them Customer Annoyance Tools. These tools do exactly the opposite of what the customer expects as a good customer service. The tool we focus on today is OWC - One Way Communication. . In the field of so called "Customer Care" this is the king. His name is No-Reply.

It all starts with a friendly grafical button pretending that you mightget help you with your demands. Let's say you just have booked a long distance flight and forgot to book your special food. With a little piece of interaction this problem could be fixed. You fill out the form, where they want you to describe your problem, and they ask for your email address. Minutes later you got new mail, and you look forward to friendly an responsive service. But what do you have to read?

"Please do not reply to this e-mail. It is a post-only message.",

which in fact means "Dont call us, we call you.". Thank you! This is the typical one way communication style I guess everybody hates. It is like someones enters a room in the offline world, says whatever he or she thinks is worth telling, and leaving room without any interest of what the recipients think or like. How can anyone think this is a good style?

Why spend billions in marketing and conversion, when the most simple rules of communication are ignored? Anyone having any idea why? Shouldn't we take any chance where a customer talks directly to us? This could be the moment where we can convert customers to fans, and then get a "NO REPLY". A similar effect is using no-reply addresses for personalized newsletters. They know your name, your gender, you last sales, and they want to talk to you about some new offers. So far, OK. But you will find out very soon that they dont want to talk (which might include some interaction of yours), they want you to listen and buy, no to reply. Sounds stupid, but thats the way it is mostly. Dont ask me why, I wont reply;-).

Web Zombies I

The web is full of zombie companies, which are unable to live and unable to die. From time to time I like to watch some of these living dead.Here is our "web zombie of the month":

Once upon an time there was a company.  A famous one, almost everybody knew it. It's estimated worth was $ 580 million at its peak.  In early days the platform even was a facebook competitor, which overtook it in 2008 - regarding user numbers.

But in just 6 years the company managed to loose 90% of its value (or shall I say - was managed to loose?). The platform finally was sold for $31 million (a dollar per user, more or less). In the last years the involvment of a well-known celebrity from the music business might have helped to win some users back. But the truth is, that this extended only the time of its undead existence.

Today the platform is truly "out". No current usage statistic is provided by the company. Nobody needs it. Nobody wants it. It seems that the crowd moved on. Game over. I am talking about myspace.

Web Zombies:
The web is full of zombie companies, which are unable to live and unable to die. From time to time I like to watch some of these living dead.

We know the phenomenom from the startup scene: a great idea gets some funding, but after some time of enthusiasm, or even visible success, the company either reaches its limits, fails to create a business model, or both. But instead of being kill and buried, it  becomes a living dead. Why? Too much money has been spent, too many emotions are involved, too many reasons seemed to provide a vivid future.  Everybody knows some of these "nice-idea-didnt-work-out" companies. And in many cases one would have wished they have failed earlier and letal, instead of hanging around in the internet basement, waiting for a miracle or someone to kill it, finally.

Take your data and go to Switzerland?

We have found a new holy grail of privacy. It protects us from NSA and even from Britannia with their extensive surveillance systems. And it has decades of experience in making a business from what other people want to hide. But today it's not the usual black money from sport stars, soccer managers, mafia or autocrats to hide. Today it is much more political correct to go to switzerland with your data.

It's a common thing in capitalism that desasters foster creativity and profit, so nothing is wrong about offering i.e. a mail service in switzerland. It might be a clever idea for companies to host their data their too, if they are in fear of spying. But there is one thing I  just do not understand: why shall I feel save in switzerland? Because there is nothing in the news yet? Because they need a court order to access your email and data? Does anyone really know what this means? Is it difficult or even impossible to get this order? Is it public when an order is issued? And if it is save today, how long will it be that way?

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate these offers, even if they are expensive (like everything in switzerland). What I do not like is the claim that everything is save just because it is in switzerland. But maybe mykolab.com - they offer a email service hoisted in switzerland- knows the answers. I tried to find out. Unfortunately the beware-of-the-nsa-campaign seems to work so well, that their servers are down (written at 15:33 CEST) . At least I hope it is for that reason.

Google, please!

Whatever one might think about using Google Drive in this times, there is another story to tell today, again.
If you have any interest in Open Source or Desktop alternatives to Win or Mac, you should join this petition.

More than a year ago Google has announced a Linux client for Drive, not only once.

Giant Google, what is your problem? Why are you so bad in customer response? You announced a Linux client is coming. But when? Why not tell us?

Google: your business model would not work without Linux, without Free Software. Why do you bite the hand that feeds you, the one that made you grow to world domination? Give us the respect we deserve. Give us a native Linux client for Drive. Thank You.

Consumers buy products, not a management structure

Not that a management structure is not important, steering a big ship needs some structure. But the structure is just one thing you need to keep a large group alive. Management structures tends to deal with themself, and managers tend to deal with themselves. The benefits of structual changes are overestimated.

 

It's the content, not the form that really counts.

Microsoft is a perfect example. It has had huge successes in the past. It still has strong market positions. It has billions of dollars. It seemed to be too big to fail. But in fact we can study a downward spiral in real time.

In germany we learned, that if our chancelor Angela Merkel says: "I stand fully behind my minister," it's time for him to go. In economics we learned that changing the management structure is the last thing the CEO does, before he has to go. 

So when we read about Ballmers desperate attempts after having missed to be a driver in  the last 3 big IT innovations (mobile, internet, cloud), we understand to well the unnamed Microsoft insider: "If this is all about an org chart and not how to build great products, it does not matter what org chart Ballmer presents. Consumers buy products, not a management structure."

It is as simple as it is true: Bye Steve! 

Business Model Generation

Business model generation sounds promising.Who would not like a generator which produces valid and working business models? Does that sound like entrepreneur's paradise? Yes, it does.

But don' t mix a business model with a business plan, which is ususally more like a fictional piece of literature, based on lots of hypothesis' described as facts and containing some cool charts. For this kind of literature generators are easy to provide But they do not create any business, just blabla and blingbling.

Alex Osterwalder defines a business model as " the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value." I like Alex' presentation style (and the the contents too). Especially when it is about two things which have my special attention: business models and innovation. Get it all in one presentation, which is really funny too, especially the part with the desperated record company guy, who has no idea how to face the download culture business threads. Enjoy!