This book -written by a London, New York based Online Marketing specialist- is a nice short introduction into different Online Marketing topics.

In case online marketing has been a bit cryptic to you up to now, I can recommend the book as an introduction. It does not, of course, contain sufficient detail and depth to enable you to set up an Online Marketing plan. For that more first-hand expert know-how is required. But it does show you why to do it, and what can be achieved.

In the tech business environment there's nearly no day that we are not confronted with our most famous presentation tool: Microsoft PowerPoint. Even if you opted to use a different presentation tool such as Keynote (Apple users) or OpenOffice.org Impress (free as the name suggests), the same approach is typically used. This is to put together a presentation with slides showing a list of bullet points, with some supporting pictures, tables and graphs in between. The bullet point lists are supposed to help the audience to understand and follow our presentations; but they actually do the exact opposite. They distract the audience from the talk since they read the bullet points and will try to understand them. In addition they - as Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, remarks correctly, in my opinion - lead to an "atmosphere that is formal and stiff, and relaxed discussion stops. It's almost as if bullet points take aim at whatever is interesting and lively in a room and silently kill it". As you would expect the book is approaching things without those bullet points and is doing so by taking lessons from Hollywood. Cliff Atkinson is using three basic steps - borrowed from movie making - to create focused and interesting presentations:

1. Write a script to focus your ideas.
2. Storyboard your script to clarify your ideas.
3. Produce your script to engage your audience.

In order to round things up, the author aligns the book with scientific research by following findings from one of the most renown educational psychologist's, Richard E. Mayer (professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara).

Although the book is published by Microsoft Press and uses PowerPoint for examples, it is generic and a highly to be recommended book for all of us bullet point tech business fanatics! The hope is that from now on our presentations get more interesting once we read the book... thanks Cliff!

We interviewed the author of our last book review "Future Hype", Bob Seidensticker.

Bob:
"It's great to hear from a Swiss company. I lived in Lausanne for a couple of years, leaving (a long time ago) at age 12 -- a delightful and important experience."

What are you working on these days?

"I'm working to promote Future Hype. As you know, publishers don't do much to promote a book, leaving that to the author. For example, I did a radio interview this morning and have a book store appearance tonight. I'm also speaking to companies and organizations about technology change."


What motivated you to write this book?

"I've been an engineer for 25 years, and I'm a big fan of technology
-- technology applied correctly, that is. I grew up with nuclear power and men on the moon and supersonic airplanes. Moon bases and HAL the computer and electricity too cheap to meter were just around the corner, right? Not quite. As I progressed through my career, I saw more of these failed promises plus a number of high-tech myths (products are adopted faster and faster, the Internet changes everything, and others). I'd read an article that began "We all know that technology change is exponential..." and I'd disagree after the first sentence. My motivation was a desire to set the record straight -- to help technology adopters (business and consumer) see technology change correctly. After all, if we can't see it correctly, we won't be able to apply it correctly."

How was the reaction from the public and critics so far?

"Overall, quite good. I've spoken at Microsoft and Amazon and got a good reception at both. I think that people in the industry understand much of what I'm talking about -- that technology overhype is a concern, that any particular technology isn't inevitable (despite what Marketing says about it), and so on. I've had reviews in Fast Company, US News and World Report, and many others. Most of the press I've gotten is listed on my web site (www.future-hype.com). I've also spoken to consumer groups. Here, I try to put technology in perspective and say that, no, things aren't just getting faster and faster. One segment that I had in mind as I wrote the book is the senior segment. It seems that the prevailing hype tells them, "Whatever technology you went through decades ago counts for very little -- if you want real change, look at all that the PC and Internet are creating!" Of course, it's ridiculous to look at history from, say, 1930 and dismiss as insignificant the changes we've seen in cars and airplanes, radio and TV, the spread of electricity and telephone, dams and skyscrapers, nuclear power and space travel, and so on."


You mention it took you 8 years to write this book. Is that indeed the case?

"Did I say 8? It was actually 7. I was at Microsoft for 8 years. I left to try to develop home education software on my own (lots of fun; not much success). After that, I began working on the book roughly half time. I hope that all that time paid off in a book that was at least well researched!"


Do you see technology over-hype as hurting or is it sometimes even necessary to at least speed up the adoption process?

"I see the marketplace as a chaotic place -- an inherently chaotic place. Users complain about "feature creep," when the next version of software contains lots of stuff they didn't ask for. And yet, the most revolutionary products are those they never ask for -- the iPod or Walkman, for example. Unfortunately, companies can't know what products will succeed and must release a new product knowing that success is far from certain. How do we navigate this environment? I feel that technology adopters should demand that new technology to prove its worth first before they buy. In other words, I don't want companies to work out their version 1.0 bugs using my time and money. Of course, you could respond that someone has to be the early adopter. That's true, but if I don't have to be, I don't want to be. I want to be further down the adoption bell curve. And if that means that there aren't enough early adopters for the product to be a success, then so be it. The hard truth is that most new products fail. I don't want to be the one who bought the Beta VCR or videodisc. Obviously, there's another side to this issue. There can be benefits to being the early adopter if it gives you a significant advantage over a competitor (and that advantage outweighs all the costs). If you sense one of those opportunities, go for it. Just do it with your eyes open."


Has over-hyping of current technology hurt its development?

"The Internet Bubble is the best example of this. The industry made claims it couldn't keep, and there was a backlash as reality returned. We should have seen it coming -- we've had high tech stock booms with different technologies du jour all the way back to the Industrial Revolution. Even the Tulip Bubble of the 1630s tells the same story. One interesting way of looking at how the hype changes is to find the word or prefix that every product or IPO (initial public stock offering) tries to grab. Now, "pod" seems to be hot. Recently, we've also had ".com" and the "e-" prefix. In the past, we've seen "-tronics" or "air" or "electro-" as hot words. And in the future, we'll be getting hype if "nano-" or "bio-" are the hot but largely meaningless words. I must admit that it's hard to know whether the harm outweighs the good. For example, the US now has a glut of fiber optic communication lines due to overenthusiasm during the Internet Bubble. But cheap long distance communication may fuel growth in other industries to compensate (the irony, of course, is that the companies that subsidized all that fiber won't be the ones profiting!). The Chunnel is a similar example -- the initial investors didn't get the return they expected from their investment, but consumers and shippers benefited. A cautionary tale is Iridium, the satellite phone pioneer. Just a few years after it became operational in 1998, the project was sold for less than one percent of the $3.4 billion that had been invested in it. Try to avoid the hype."


What is the biggest over-hype currently out there and why? Overall good or bad?

"Tough question, since every industry has its examples. Artificial intelligence is probably the most interesting overhyped technology. I'm a big fan of AI (my undergraduate thesis advisor was the head of my school's AI lab), but it has consistently failed to meet expectations. Sure, there are successes (Deep Blue beating chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, for example), but they are always later than predicted and less important than expected. And now, we have futurists like Ray Kurzweil (a successful entrepreneur and an engaging writer) to continue this hype. Don't get me wrong -- this is exciting stuff. I just think that history teaches us that AI predictions are almost always overoptimistic."


Do you plan to write another book soon, possibly building on this one?

"You noted in your review that the book needed to give more of a prescription. That is, given these technology myths, what do we do about it? And you're right. I did address that in the last chapter, but I didn't hit it hard enough. I'm trying to do a better job in the presentations I give. As I mentioned, I love technology. I have no immediate plans for another book along these lines, but that may change. I have a lot of notes that didn't make it into the book, and I'll be starting up a blog and a column in an online magazine soon as an outlet for this material. One thing that most excites me about the blog is getting input from readers. Writing is a solitary business, and getting feedback (thumbs up, thumbs down, additional examples, and so on) will be great."

Future Hype - The Myth of Technology Change - by Bob Seidensticker, is an interesting read although not one that will excite you and keep you reading until you reach its end. It is an anti-hype book that addresses the issue of over-hyping new technology development and its market adoption. For all the professional over-hypers in this world, this book must read like a nightmare. But due to what it is - a critical book - it will probably not end up on the bestseller lists. This is also due to the fact that while it does a good job in finding logical reasons why so many technology statements are wrong and why we tend to get them wrong, it does not also try to develop conclusions or even guidelines how to do it better. It criticizes (for good reasons) but then ends there.

Maybe Bob Seidensticker has another book in the works that will (at least partly) give the tech marketers their smile back. It remains a fact also that he must have profited a lot financially from his time working at Microsoft during its (hyper) growth years and has now had the freedom to travel the world and spend eight years (as he says) on this book. Lastly it would be probably quite embarassing for him to have a bestseller book that became one because some folks hyped it up. This of course will also not happen because I don't know who would promote this book since he also criticizes the press who, intentionally or not, always like to overyhype new technologies.

To give you a quick taste of his writing, here e.g. the 9 High-Tech Myths that he identifies:

• Change is exponential
• Technology is inevitable
• Important new products arrive ever faster
• Today's price reductions are unprecedented
• Products are adopted faster
• Invention gestation time is decreasing
• The Internet changes everything
• Moore's law really matters

I personally like the book (also can confirm most of his findings) and we will try to get an interview with him for this blog site.

I am reading this biography, which carries the subtitle “The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business”.
The first half of the 300+ page book describes Steve Jobs in his years up to age 30 or so. While he built Apple Computer during this time, lots of his major failures happened as well. According to this excellently researched book by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, Steve Jobs was -to summarize it in a simple way- quite a jerk both personally as well as in business. His early success made him arrogant and his capability of sensing next wave technology developments was both a blessing and a problem. Convinced about himself, he thought he was able to rely on his instincts only and avoid market research entirely. Some infamous examples of his subsequent product management failures at that time were:

• The first Macintosh lacked software applications (only Mac Word, Mac Paint and MS Word were available); also the internal memory as well as hard disk drive capacity were too small, requiring users to constantly use the floppy disk drive. This was dubbed the “Disk Drive Olympics” within the Apple Mac team.

• Another major failure was the Apple internal project Lisa, which never managed to develop a product that had a market acceptable price.

• Infamous, too, was his first venture NEXT Computers, right after he left Apple. No clear customer target group in mind, endless product development, and again way too high product price, which ultimately lead to its failure.

• Most of us know of Pixar as being a success story in the animation movie. Have you ever heard of Pixar Image Computer? Steve Jobs had it in mind –in retrospect quite amusingly- to market the customized computer system that the Pixar group, which he bought from Star Wars Star Trek inventor George Lucas for a cheap 10 million USD, used to create their cutting edge animated films. Jobs tried to sell this computer system to hospitals because he thought that the image processing capabilities would be of great use in analysing X-ray or MRI pictures. Of course that environment cannot accept complicated-to-handle tools, which is what their system was. And the price was once again way too high. This is yet another example where Jobs did not analyse market needs prior to a product development launch.

While the above gives the impression that Steve jobs was by no means the genius so many think of, please note that this summary is only based on one half of the biography. I assume I will read about some more human side and also a more business savvy side of him in the other half, which I plan to write about as well.

Also, the above examples lead me to a book I intend to read next. It is called Why Smart Executives FAIL – and what you can learn from their mistakes.