Marcelo Calbucci

Not sure if you heard about this, but there is an official Quit Facebook Day happening on May 31.

Obviously, there is a website behind it and, surprisingly, this is getting quite a bit of media attention. I'm not quitting Facebook, although I've been vocal about them using slime privacy strategies.

However, this movement made me ask this question: Can I quit Facebook? In other words, how much would I lose in my personal and professional life if I just quit Facebook? Turns out, I don't lose much. I have very few pictures uploaded to Facebook. None of the data I have there matters much for me. My entire social graph can be easily re-created and already exist on Twitter, LinkedIn and my email contacts.

So, Facebook does have a retention problem in my view. Yes, they are soooo big, and growing sooo much, that any retention problem will be just a small leak in a very large bucket. Yet, it's there. Every business has a churn rate. Facebook is no different. But as they approach market saturation point, the churn starts to matter.

Once you are "it", not only you have to battle your competitors who will be pointing their guns at you, you'll have to battle yourself. It's the problem with Microsoft Office of yesteryear being the biggest competitor of Microsoft Office of today. Once you reach market domination, you actually have to speed up the rate of innovation. It's easy to do that early on, because it's easier to go from 500 to 1,000 freakin' smart engineers creating cool new stuff. But then it becomes harder to go from 1,000 to 2,000 engineers who can be creative and innovative to maintain the same pace of innovation. And it becomes near impossible to keep up the recruiting rate necessary to keep yourself on top. Your internal process changes, engineers become less productive, the company starts to fear change and the culture becomes like… Microsoft – and we used to say that about IBM in the 90s.

Quit Facebook Day is pretty important to Facebook, not because of the number of folks who'll quit, which should not be enough to see a dip on the growth chart, but because you'll give lots of folks a perspective that Facebook doesn't have that much sticky value, and they can tell their friends (using Twitter). It's not like dumping your email address, or your phone number, or burning all your pictures. Leaving Facebook and coming back, it's almost like you never left.

Marketing campaigns for big brands sometimes puzzles me. Companies sometimes hit it right, sometimes fail miserable. Microsoft has more than their fair share of failures, and the new Hotmail campaign is one of those failures.

I saw this campaign for the first time last week and I can’t remember exactly where, but it was a footnote on someone emails or on some banner on some website. All that it said was “Hotmail – Tools for the new busy”. To which I replied in my head “What?”

As a big brand spending millions of dollars on marketing, Microsoft marketing understands the value of using multiple means of taking the message to the end user. Email, web, TV, radio, movie theaters, buses, print, etc., they will do it all for sure. Just a day later from seeing that footnote for the first time, I heard an ad on NPR “brough you by Hotmail, tools for the new busy”. And I go “what?” again.


Telling it twice


The worse thing that can happen on any marketing campaign is for people to misunderstand the message. That’s really bad and is a situation that is as rare as a medium-sized meteor hitting the earth. It happens, but just about a few times a year. That’s not the case for this Hotmail campaign. Users cannot misunderstand the message, because no one can understand what the message  is to begin with, which I call the “what” effect.

You really know you have a bad marketing message when the first thing people say is “what?”. Picture this: You’ve seen a commercial presented to you by your spouse who works at Microsoft marketing. You ask her “what?” and she explains what they’ve meant by that and you go “oh, I see”. That’s bad.

Go for the How

Advertising and commercials should be self-contained and self-explanatory. In other words, you should always say “I get it” and decide to either move on or to learn more. In other words, someone sees your commercial on TV and the first thing that comes to his mind is “How?” That’s a great thing. You caught them.

Let me give it a try. I’m not saying this is great, but what do you think of this campaign: “Hotmail – Tools for less email”. That’s a How-moment. That will get people curious because email overload is a problem for everyone. I know it’s not sexy filled with buzz words, but it gets one point across and make people move to the next stage, to learn how they can get less email.

And just to be clear, I’m not picking at Microsoft, I’m picking at the Hotmail campaign per se. I think every once in a while Microsoft does have good marketing campaigns (“Bing & Decide”),  but most of them fail (“Vista – Wow”, “I’m a PC”, etc.)

My first disclaimer is that I love Adobe’s product. I’ve used Adobe Premiere for the first time around 1994. I wish I were better with their product, because it allows me to unleash ideas from my brain into the screen. And that’s how Adobe has branded itself: a “creative empowerment” company. And here lies the problem with Apple and Flash. Apple doesn’t consider Flash good engineering. Adobe is offended and disagrees.

Let’s make it clear, Adobe has been directly (through Flash) or indirectly (through Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) responsible for the most amazing websites designs to date. But the technology has grown and the delta between what was possible with and without Flash is about to switch, in other words, you’ll be able to achieve more with HTML5, CSS 3, Canvas, etc. than with Flash.

The Engineering Part

Some companies, despite what the end product is, think of themselves as software engineering companies. Microsoft makes Word, Xbox and SQL, but they don’t think of themselves as word processing, gaming or database manufacturers. They think they are applying hard software engineering to make people’s life more enjoyable and productive. Amazon is the same thing. They don’t see themselves as retailers (despite what Wall Street labels them), but as software engineers solving retail problems. And Google is probably the most software engineering driving company there is (it could be their shortcoming in the future, but that’s another post).

On the other hand you have companies like Adobe and eBay. They do make amazing products, solve some hard world problems, but they are not thinking like engineers. eBay believes engineering is a commodity and enabling commerce is what they are about. Those are not mutual-exclusive, but they choose it to be this way.

Flash/Flex Shortcomings

Most of the critique of Flash/Flex has existed for a long time. I was never an expert on the topic, but other developers and entrepreneurs were always complaining to me about the limitations and performance issues of that platform. Yes, it gave you beautiful graphics and freedom to do many things, but the trade off was a slower time-to-market, performance issues, re-inventing the wheel, etc.

It’s not easy for Adobe to fix those because they don’t have the right kind of engineers behind Flash. They have engineers who are more like me, who like the end application aspect of it, instead of engineers who admire the beauty of the language, the framework and the platform. It’s a trade-off they’ve made (likely involuntarily) a decade or more ago, and it’s too hard to change it now.

Flash/Flex is not broken. It was designed to do something else. Developers don’t want that anymore.