Google Games?

Someone sent me this job listing. 

Product Management Leader, Games

I was the guy who led the team that launched and built Yahoo! Games into the number one online gaming site. It's not my focus these days, but it is what a lot of valley people remember me for. I have some experience integrating gaming into existing online services.

The way this job is outlined seems to reveal a certain strategic direction and plan. I infer from the language that Google wishes to internally create hit games. This is not the strategy I think Google will find successful. The games business is funny. The popularity of games, even hit games, is ephemeral. Most games are not hits.  

The reason Y! Games succeeded is because we combined Y!'s brand recognition and distribution with the brands of established games (blackjack, backgammon, poker, chess, spades and so on). I was able to add community around those games (ladders and tournaments and the like), back in the baby days of social media. Once we had built this audience, we were able to start creating new games. Popular games are a hit or miss business, and we missed as much as we hit. Building a brand for a new game is expensive and difficult. Even if you're wildly successful, the game will have a brief shelf life.

I would recommend Google do something similar, but take it a step further (what I would have done if I had stayed at Yahoo! longer). I'd love to see them acquire one (or several) gaming engines and basically open source them (Yahoo! acquired a one person game company called classicgames.com which provided the basis of our efforts). Create a core set of Google branded games with these tools, but internally only spend resources building a suite of games that come with built-in audiences and brands. Just this will create a significant gaming audience. Do these essentially as reference designs. Make sure your reference designs show off the platform capabilities. Give away a powerful gaming development platform, and then let developers create terrific games. 

I wouldn't take development and brand building risk of new games myself; I would allow third parties to do that. Give away an awesome tool set. Own the enabling technology. Own the distribution channel. Own the platform. Own the transaction services (both in-game and out). Own the monetization channels. Own the metrics. When something starts to get traction, promote the hell out of it. Allow advertisers to skin games easily. Allow the developers to share in monetization using one of Google's most significant strengths -- advertising driven by user data.

Users think of Farmville and Mafia Wars as Facebook games, not Zynga games (greatly to Zynga's dismay). Zynga may have a terrific valuation, but I bet Facebook makes more money from Zynga games than Zynga does. How many of Zynga's broad catalog of games provide anything more than de minimis revenue?

Google should not be aiming to get into the game business.  They should get into the gaming platform business.

GO is my favorite board game. Pure strategy built from nothing. A great game for any founder.

On Product Design...

I read this on Twitter the other day:

-"ha.. my iPaq still lives after 3 years and does most of what the iphone does" 05:46 PM September 27, 2007 from web

-"function without hype" 05:46 PM September 27, 2007 from web

The poster is right in a naive sort of way, the iPaq (and the Treo, and a host of other devices) have had the entire feature set of the iPhone for several years now. In many cases they have even more functionality than the iPhone. Nonetheless, these devices are badly designed. This tweeter(?) shows a fundamental (albeit common) misunderstanding of what's important in designing and building a consumer product.

Product design is not about filling out the feature list on the spec sheet. Product design is about how the features you implement work together as an entire user experience.

Fox News Radio

We were approached recently by the Fox Radio News people about carrying the hourly Fox News updates (and other Fox Radio programming) on Foneshow. We happily added their programming (hourly news, Bill O'Reilly, and some other stuff) to our database (you can subscribe here if you like).

An hourly news show brings up a number of challenges to our user experience. Clearly, most people don't want to get notified 24 times a day at the top of the hour that the news has updated. Another issue is since we allow an individual user to define certain times of the day during which they are not notified (black out periods), we need a new way to handle coming out of a black out period for certain series. If you're blacked out on notifications from 11PM to 7AM, you don't want to get the 7 notifications you missed overnight at 7AM.

Essentially we're talking about a different class of series where a new show supplants the value of an older show. The easy answer to this is fixed DIDs, like podlinez, you fix a phone number to a series. But that is an inelegant solution and it doesn't scale well. A better answer is some kind of hybrid of our current dynamic DID system and a fixed did system. If we combined that with more flexibility to the user for handling notification messages then we've got something pretty neat.

We're excited to be working with Fox news on this project and look forward to honing our platform to support the ways in which programmers want to use it.

Jerry is Back

Jerry Yang is back in charge of Yahoo!. I've seen a ton of blog commentary in the last few days, some of it good, some of it incredibly misinformed. The best comment I've seen is from Jason Calacanis

Jerry should rebuild the management team to focus on product and forget about hitting numbers for a year or two. The focus has to be on making better products than Google--not an easy task.

Jason is totally correct. When I started at Yahoo! everything was about the product. Get it out, iterate it, and integrate it with the rest of the network. That was the mantra. Somewhere in late '98 or early '99 it stopped being all about the product. We had beaten Excite, Lycos and Infoseek and Y! was in cruise control. The focus turned inward. Y! built a campus. Office politics became rampant. They opened a Santa Monica campus. The focus was off product. People got scared to take product risks. Lots of new hires were in "vesting-in-peace" mode from day one.

And along came Google and they kicked Yahoo!'s ass. They did it by building a better product in an area that Y! had long been neglecting; search.

Now Jerry is back and his mandate is clear, take on Google.

I don't think taking Google on in search will be successful even if Yahoo! does search better than Google does, there's just too much momentum. Incremental improvements are not enough, you'd need an order of magnitude improvement. That won't happen unless Google eases up on search technology and rests on their laurels (unlikely in my view, there are lots of ex Y!'s at GOOG who know first hand what happens when you do that).

But Google is vulnerable in other areas. Mobile is one of them.

Right now mobile is where the web was in 1995. It's wide open with a huge market just opening up. Yahoo! can win in mobile using the same techniques they used to win online in '96-'98.

Yahoo! won online by addressing the big audience. Yahoo worked the same on every OS and every browser, no plug in needed. The pages were lightweight and loaded fast. They need to do the same in mobile. They need to be carrier and handset agnostic. They need to build apps that don't require 3G. It's not about distribution deals. You need to end-run the mobile carriers. Y! did countless distribution deals (MCI, HP and countless others long forgotten), I don't think combined they amounted to a hill of beans. Distribution is not their problem, good product is. If you build a good product that works consistently across all platforms you will win.

I'm pulling for you Jerry.

Being Defined in Terms of Others

It is human nature to define something new in terms of things one already understands. As more people see what Foneshow is working on (both the public stuff and forthcoming products) they define us in their own ways.

I heard our media publishing platform defined as:

"Mobile Tivo for audio"

Several people who have seen our groups product (now in alpha) have referred to it as:

"Twitter for voice"

Both of those similes are accurate and show a good understanding of what we're working on. Both of them help us think about what we're doing in new ways.

Use Your Own Product

Duh, but a surprising number of entrepreneurs don't.

Also use (but don't obsess about) your competitors services.

Foneshow Enhancements

We've added two new features to the core functionality of the Foneshow listener experience. Both of these features help with shows that run a bit long.

The first is high speed playback. The listener gets into high speed playback mode by pressing the 6 key on their phone. When playing back in high speed, the audio is played 25% faster than normal speed playback. We pitch-shift the sound down so that it doesn't get all "mickey mouse" on you. Pressing the 6 key again returns playback to normal speed.

There are many times when a listener wants to scan through a show. Sometimes the host is a bit too wordy. Sometimes the host speaks really slowly. Sometimes the listener just wants to get to a particular part of the show. The fact is most people can process listening to audio at a much higher rate than many people talk.

The listeners we have testing this feature use it all the time and the feedback has been great. There is some sound quality loss in high speed play; we're working on improving that.

The second feature that went live last week allows a listener to pick up where they left off when they dial into a show for a second time. This allows a listener to break up longer pieces of programming into shorter chunks that they can consume over multiple calls. This makes consuming longer form programming far more appealing on the Foneshow platform (especially combined with high speed playback). This also means that if you are interrupted and hang up in the middle of a show, you don't have to fast-forward through the whole show to find your place again.

Make it a Conversation

We're sneaking out some new features in Foneshow.

We've added the ability to reply to, or comment on, a show. If you hit the "7" key on your handset during a show, you'll get a prompt to record your comment. When you're finished, just hit "#". The show's owner will have access your audio comments online. He or she can then download them and mash them up into future shows. It's a kind of asynchronous talk radio. Soon we'll also be adding the option for the show's owner to make the comments public on the show page of the Foneshow site. Down the road we might even make the comments on a series available as a unique series.

I love the concept of of making it a conversation by replying in kind. Being able to reply in the same media is really the ultimate of democratization of the media and the key to building community. A passionate community is the key to building critical mass audience.

The challenge here (as it usually the case) is UI. We only have 12 keys and we don't want to make them modal.

Entertainment needs to be Entertaining

(rant on) Yahoo! Entertainment is reinventing itself again. You can read about it here, here, here and here. In my opinion, this effort will be a disappointment.

Way back at the dawn of time when I ran Yahoo Entertainment I had a mantra. Online entertainment has to be entertaining. Online entertainment has to engage you emotionally. Online entertainment has to be fun.

Do you know what is far and away the most successful Y! Entertainment property?

Yahoo! Games.

Do you know why?

Y! Games is entertaining. Y! Games is fun. Y! Games engages you emotionally.

Yahoo! Movies is not an entertainment site, it is a news and information service about movies. The movies are the entertainment. Yahoo! TV is not an entertainment site, it is news and information service about TV (it's barely that since the "improved" version was released).

Now Yahoo! is launching little branded worlds around popular culture icons. That is not entertainment. That is news, information and community wrapped around existing entertainment distribution channels. The Nintendo Wii is a device that delivers entertainment. The Yahoo! Wii site is a page about a device that delivers entertainment. These sites will do OK, but they won't be the home run entertainment product that Y! has been searching for. It's news, not entertainment.

ET is entertainment news.

The Office is entertainment

The key is emotional engagement.
(end rant)

MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge

Foneshow has been invited to present at the demo lunch at the Brave New Web Conference put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. It looks like an interesting conference. If you're in Boston/Cambridge on February 7th you should come and hear the speakers, have some lunch and see our products. Nic and I would love to meet you.

Down in NYC the Rest of the Week

There's tons going on with Foneshow. New features. New products. New partners. I'm booked pretty tight with meetings, but if you want to get together, let me know and we'll see if we can make some time.

It's going to be an exciting 2007.

Choose Your Team Well

The most important decision you need to make when starting up a company is who is on the team.

The idea that your company is based upon is completely irrelevant without the ability to implement it. Your team is what gives your company the ability to do what they want to do.

What makes a good startup team member? A laser-like focus on the product, the end user, and the problems that the company is trying to solve. An appreciation of the elegance of your solution. What are the red flags? A focus on the exit. A focus on job titles and perks. Big talk with no tangible results.

Ideas are incredibly overrated. If it's a good idea, someone else is working on it too (how many companies are doing podcasting over the voice channel now?). Your company's value is found in the ability of the team to execute on the basics, to totally nail the details, and in its ability to adjust to misassumptions, the unknown, and the unpredicted.

You cannot afford to carry what one of our advisors once called a "dud founder." A dud founder is someone who, for any number of reasons, cannot execute on their responsibilities. Big companies can afford weak team members; startups cannot. Identifying startup team members can be difficult because big company success is not a reliable indicator for startup team suitability. The political office skills that are useful for getting ahead in a large organization are a destructive force in a startup. A sales or a biz dev person whose experience is solely at well known "hot" companies, may well have just been an order taker. Their impressive track records may not have been based on their skills, but merely on the company having a great brand. Your startup doesn't yet have a brand.

Friction

What is friction? Friction is "user hassle".

When I first came up with the concept for Yahoo! Games back in 1997, the guiding principle of the product was that it required the user to install no software. Lack of friction in user adoption drove everything about the product, from the selection of classicgames.com to the games we chose to implement. It was this lack of friction that allowed us to go from launch to number one gaming site (where it's been ever since) in less than four months.

There is a very real danger that friction will kill podcasting. There's no question that it is greatly slowing growth. Where is the friction? RSS subscription is not as straightforward to the naive (mainstream) user as it should be. Sharing and forwarding podcasts is a big hassle (there goes viral growth). The iPod is only a connected device via a wire. Getting feedback to the author is a hassle. Keeping a portable device filled with timely content is a hassle. Notifying a listener of new content requires work on the listener's part. It's even worse on the phone -- add software handset installs and data plans into the mix, and growth is totally mired.

At Foneshow we've worked hard to eliminate these friction points. I think we've succeeded.