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Rolf Skyberg - pattern hound

musings on the web, the future, eBay, and humanity

optimization is the enemy of innovationOctober 24

Innovation is exploring the “new”; and by definition, the new is unoptimized and inefficient.

Optimization is the enemy of innovation. Or should I say, innovation and optimization usually inhabit opposite ends of the strategy spectrum.

Innovation is the process of identifying the possible, constantly changing and expanding upon what is currently achievable. Optimization, on the other hand, is the process of refining existing processes, cutting them down to the more and more essential pieces for greater efficiency.

Earlier this week I presented at and attended the Innovation Immersion conference in Phoenix. There, my eyes were really opened up to what other organizations call “innovation”. It seems there are as many implementations of innovations as there are different company structures.

While preparing for my presentation, I looked back on our Disruptive Innovation team, and how it fit within the grand scheme of eBay’s organizational structure. While we were far removed from John Donahoe’s statements about disruptive innovation of the organization, I believe we played a small but vital role in the end.

One conclusion I came to was that the desire to have an “innovation team” is a direct response to a perceived lack of internal innovation capability. Whether or not internal innovation is really lacking, perception is reality.

I then sat down and re

a solution for email spamSeptember 26

My inbox has a fundamental flaw: every email is treated with the same level of “respect” or priority. It contains both forwarded urban legends, and highly critical information related to my banking and financial condition

The problem of phishing happens expressly because there’s no easy way for me to separate legitimate emails in my inbox from illegitimate ones.

My solution comes from a game I regularly play with magazines or catalogs. When I sign up, instead of giving them my first name, I use their company name. For example, when I signed up for a subscription to Wired magazine, I gave my first name as “Wired”. Now, when any mail comes to “Wired Skyberg”, I know exactly who sold their subscriber database.

Here’s my proposal for a solution:

1. all email providers become OpenID or OAuth providers
2. whenever a 3rd party is asking me for my email address, they must authenticate via my provider
3. each sender receives a token which grants some type of access to my email account
4. I, as a user, can manage these tokens in any way I choose, via my email provider

This allows me to control who is able to place emails in my inbox, or various other folders of my choosing. It may seem like a lot of overhead, but it would be devilishly easy to manage if done right. The nice part is that the “overhead” can be handled either in-the-moment or entirely in the background.

Here’s a use-cas

platform wars: a brief historySeptember 22

Last week I had the pleasure of attending O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 EXPO in New York City. In addition to meeting many interesting folks and letting them know about eBay’s developer platform, I also got to give a presentation on platform wars. In it I explore some notable platform wars, explain where the wars come from, pitfalls of being caught in one, and how to identify bad platforms overall.

Here’s the session notes and presentation:

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. VHS vs. Beta. PC vs. Mac. AC vs. DC. As long as platforms have been a valuable resource, wars have been fought to control them. Eventually, either through trickery, persistence, or legislation, all wars come to an end. By understanding these wars, old and new, we’ll be better prepared to survive the next.

Posted in ebay, platform, slides      

surveys give a false sense of directionSeptember 16

Mark Earls over at Herd recently made a post which comes along the same lines of two of my recent posts. In his post “Preaching Against Survey Data” he speaks out against the traditional ways of collecting market data via surveys.

I recently posted about “sampling myopia” — the idea that it’s unlikely you’ll get a “good” answer from any type of survey or study you create, because you don’t know the full context — and also about why leadership based on bad data or too little data can be disastrous.

In his post he captures the essence of the two posts and my feeling towards the data in general:

…which I’ve always thought a bit harsh: I’m in no way a “touchie-feelie”, “it just kinda feels right”, “crystals will tell us” kind of marketing thinker. No, I think disciplined and evidence-based stuff is the only sensible way forward - we just need better (and perhaps less) research approaches which harness what we now know about human beings and not more and more of the same old stuff

So… are you seeing true, positive progress from your marketing and leadership, or more of the “same old stuff”?

leadership does not mean optimizing for ROIAugust 28

Choosing projects based on projected ROI is a dangerously simplistic way of running your business.

If you take a look at the actual acronym: “ROI” return on investment, it seems like a perfectly logical way of directing your business activity. After all, who wouldn’t want to invest in the things that bring them the greatest returns?

The unfortunate simplification in action is that “return” is generally taken to mean revenue or cashflow, which is but one of the important aspects of running a business.

The problem here is that while revenue can be easily counted, recorded, multiplied and divided; other intangible dimensions cannot be. How do you quantify “trust”? How do you measure “excitement”?

What would an ROI of 20% on trust actually mean? Because the intangibles cannot easily be typed into Excel, they can’t be utilized on pivot charts, or factored into equations.

And because MBA’s live and die by Excel, anything you can’t count, doesn’t count.

ROI based on revenue or other “quantifiable” metrics prove to be an overly blunt way of looking at the world, missing the nuanced and very real ways that vectors like “image” and “brand” profoundly affect your bottom line. If you only have one “real” data point, you tend to optimize to increase that value.

This starts you off making very poor business decisions. Take, for example, 3rd party advertising on your site. Investment i