Ken Norton has a great write-up on Tivo’s marketing challenges. He addresses something I often wonder — how is it people live without Tivo? I appreciate his analysis.
I think Netflix has a similar issue. They seem to believe their pause button is “no late fees” and Blockbuster seems to agree. (They responded with the most confusing campaign ever that claims the end of late fees.) I’m not sure I agree. I think their pause button is “always have a moving you want to watch.” When I explain Netflix to people that is where I always get them. “You mean I just keep them until I watch them? So I always have a movie ready to go?” It is the queuing and the amazing movie selection that are the true value but I think not having to go to the movie store when you want to do dinner and a DVD is the hook.
I would say Jotspot’s pause button comes from its Wiki editor. “Edit the Wiki without learning that crazy Wiki mark-up.” Yet the value comes from how they have married structured data with organic Wiki content and the tools they offer to build applications.
I would say our pause button is “living workflow” although it doesn’t really click with people until we demo the product. It usually goes something like:
“You can assemble a process using a drag and drop workflow and presto! You have yourself process automation.”
“You mean I can build a process like I do in Visio?”
“Well, yes. Kind of. Except this workflow can be used.”
“Used?”
“Yes, you can print a Visio document and give it to somebody they have to follow the process manually. After you define the process you define the data you want to capture.”
“Like in Excel?”
“You know what, let me show you.”
Does requiring a demo mean it isn’t our pause button?
I don’t think it is our pause button. Unfortunately, I think the term “workflow” is now a commodity in the business community, even though the technology that drives it is not (yet). I’d say it’s more like our “hard drive”, which is the less sexy part of Tivo that really enables the whole thing and makes the pause button possible. Of course, consumers/execs don’t buy because of the hard drive, they buy because of what the hard drive/workflow lets them do. I think our pause button is actually auditability. Along with maximizing monetary output per worker, I think auditability is the big driver of c-level thinking these days. Workflow puts names and timestamps next to decisions on IT processes that used to be free-for-alls, thus lessening the propects of underlings doing sketchy things that execs “knew nothing about, I swear your honor”, since it’s now all on the record.
I don’t know who frisbeememex is but I basically agree. Oddly, I am reminded of bplug saying “visibility and control” but I do think that’s it. The idea that you can see what’s going on and potentially react to it is so powerful. Workflow, Projects Management, and most the other features are to track the stuff that helps you figure out what is going right and what is going wrong. Then you react. That’s powerful.
Oh, and I disagree about the pause button. I think Tivo and NetFlix have the same “Pause Button” (to use a term I just said I disagreed with - really we shoudl call it a “killer feature”). A queue of stuff you actually want to watch waiting there for you. That’s it. The power of both these services to me is to make the time I spend in front of the TV better. And the queue aspect helps make it so stuff doesn’t slip through the cracks. I identify things I want to see and I put them in my tivo queue or my netflix queue then I know I will eventually get to those things I identified as worth seeing.
Incidentally, I have found that more and more I also end up putting movies that have been in my netflix queue a long time into the tivo, then after the tivo grabs it off HBO and I watch it, I remove it from my netflix queue. When NetFlix and Tivo combine to make one interface for getting stuff I want to see, that will be sweet.
Net-net the synergy makes me feel laser focused.