Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Viacom is suing Google subsidiary YouTube for gabillions of dollars.  You probably also know that in the latest round, Google has been told it must hand over “massive amounts of user data to Viacom… That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube.”

And the rumor mill has it that the Googleplex is going to comply.

Ay caramba!

So in the spirit of being a real blogger and offering an opinion where none was requested.  Here’s what I think Google should do.

Google should grow a pair and mount a hostile takeover of Viacom.  Their market cap right now is about $17B give or take, and unlike other famously large acquisitions by Google, Viacom actually has lots of assets worth money.

Imagine a world where everything Viacom owns was legitimately available on YouTube and tell me that doesn’t make online video a real alternative to cable & satellite… and change the video marketplace forever.

C’mon Google.  You’ve got the cash.  Grow some and let’s have some fun!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what the heck Viacom owns anyway, here’s a list (apologies for the caps — lazy copy ‘n’ paste):

BET NETWORKS, BET, BET J, MTV NETWORKS, ATOMFILMS, ADDICTINGGAMES, CMT, COMEDY CENTRAL, GAMETRAILERS, HARMONIX, LOGO, MTV, MTV2, MTVN INTERNATIONAL, MTVU, MTV TR3S, NEOPETS, NICKELODEON – NICK JR., NICK AT NITE, NOGGIN, PARENTSCONNECT, QUIZILLA, RHAPSODY, SHOCKWAVE, SPIKE TV, THE N, TV LAND, VH1, VH1 CLASSIC, VH1 SOUL, XFIRE…

And one or two tiny film studios… PARAMOUNT PICTURES, DREAMWORKS STUDIOS, MTV FILMS and NICKELODEON MOVIES

C’mon. Smells like a bargain.  And Spongebob Squarepants on YouTube is surely a future we all can believe in…

Categories: Old Posts
201No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2008/07/14/google-viacom-the-big-g-should-grow-a-pair/Google+%26+Viacom...++The+Big+G+should+grow+a+pair...2008-07-14+13%3A05%3A21NickN

This post was inspired by a conversation with Pete Warden, one of the smart cookies I met while trying to start disruptorMonkey. I should say “smart biscuit”, since he’s a fellow Brit, but back to my post…

We were discussing the oft cited concept of “building a better mousetrap”, and Pete is one of those rare engineers that understands that building a better mousetrap does not equal building a successful business.

One of the local CEOs I admire, Steve Wiehe of SciQuest, once asked me the following question:

“If I buy this thing, who can I fire?”

His point being: is this a nice tool to have that will make “things” get “better” or will it deliver significant and tangible benefit to my business.

In old school sales lingo, this is the “soft need” versus a “hard need“. Or if you prefer, the difference between “nice to have” and “have to have”. If you have heart trouble, a pacemaker is probably a hard need. If you like some of the features in Outlook 2007, buying the upgrade is a soft need.

Products that meet hard needs are great as they’re easy to sell (you have to have it, and not just in an “I want my iPhone 3G” kind of way). But relatively few software products meet hard needs… And a soft sell is a whole different kind of beast to wrestle to the ground.

Back to mousetraps… In the big scheme of things, the mousetrap itself is almost irrelevant. You can have a great product in the wrong market and get nowhere. Equally, you can have a truly shitty product in exactly the right place at the right time and do very very well.

If you’re trying to sell the One-Touch DeathTron 3000 mousetrap in the hamster/mice section of Petsmart, you won’t do well. But grab a sturdy 2×4, head to the nearest rat infested grain barn & hang your shingle and business will boom.

Which brings me to my point: It’s not about the mousetrap, it’s all about “location, location, location”.

Don’t focus on an elegant solution to an interesting problem. Instead, figure out where the ideas you are excited about can have a real and meaningful impact. If you apply your magic widget to scenario X for company Y, who can they fire and how much money will they save.

So in Conclusion:

1. The person with the most dead mice wins
2. It doesn’t matter how the mice get squished
3. You need to be squishing the kind of mice that people don’t want around… not their favored pets

p.s. As ever, I’m focused on B2B, not B2C. Crazy consumer apps are a whole other bag of dead rodent metaphors…

p.p.s. This was one of several things we didn’t do well enough at disruptorMonkey, so I speak from experience…

Categories: Old Posts
200No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2008/07/10/when-building-a-mousetrap-learn-from-a-realtor/When+Building+a+Mousetrap%2C+Learn+from+a+Realtor...2008-07-10+05%3A05%3A55NickN

Back in the days of disruptorMonkey, I remember one of the first people to contact us was a Dell sales rep.  I don’t mind that in principal — the guy was just trying to do his job.  But as time went by, it became obvious that Dell had some kind of mechanism set up to identify leads from press coverage.

I was reminded of that practice this past week. I’ve been doing some consulting for Shoeboxed, and their CEO was getting similar emails.  But the thing is that they are sent in the guise of individual emails, without any kind of “unsubscribe” link.

Okay, that’s not so offensive, I suppose.  But Dell also automatically subscribed the CEO to a bunch of
Dell newsletters too.  And while those do include an unsubscribe link, at no point did the CEO actually request to subscribe.  Under pretty much any definition, that would be classed as email spam.

But wait! There’s more.  After finding Taylor, Dell scraped the website and grabbed a bunch of other names too, including mine.  Not only did I get a 3 or 4 salesy emails, I was ALSO subscribed to a bunch of crappy Dell newsletters.

Now in the past, I’ve been a fan of Dell.  I’ve bought a lot of gear from them both personally and professionally.  Most of that was before their widely discussed customer service problems.  Despite that debacle, they would still have been one of the first vendors I’d look at if I wanted a desktop PC.

But not now.

I hate spam.  It’s the unflushable turd that’s clogging our series of tubes and I have zero patience for it. It amazes me that a formerly respectable company like Dell would be so clueless as to engage in such a stupid practice.

And now that Dell has declared itself a dirty spammer, they’ve lost me forever as a customer.

I hope many other potential customers feel the same way.

Categories: Old Posts
196No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2008/07/04/dell-winning-hearts-and-minds-with-spam/Dell%3A+Winning+hearts+and+minds...+With+Spam%21%3F2008-07-04+17%3A38%3A40NickN