Business astronauts
or how to hype your weaknesses

I got the astronauts concept from these two Joel’s great articles: “Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” and “Are the Groove Designers Architecture Astronauts?”.

Actually I use it a lot in my everyday life because it describes so graphically the whole scene when people suddenly realise that they’re saying something smart and then they start to build on and on, their heads inflate and inflate and you see them going up and up until the gravity (common sense) leaves them and they wind up finding themselves out in the space and there’s no oxygen and no pillar (reasoning) to sustain them, so either they asphyxiate or they fall from a great high.

Today’s price for the business astronauts of the year goes to … openBC, not only because they’re Germans (and we all deep inside hate them, don’t we? Ok, not me personally but some does it, either because they started two world wars or because they manufacture the most awesome cars in the world, who knows? ;-P). Neither because it is a Yet Another Social Networking site (I still have some hope for them, even after reading this great paper). But just because of this email I received today:

Estimado Sr Ruiz,

Probablemente sabrá que Skype es el servicio gratuito de telefonía en Internet, mensajería instantánea e intercambio de archivos que está experimentando el mayor crecimiento en la actualidad.

Al igual que openBC, Skype le permite interactuar, consolidar su red de contactos y comunicarse con sus compañeros, colaboradores y clientes a lo largo de todo el planeta - en todo momento, desde cualquier ubicación y de forma gratuita.

Por este motivo, openBC y Skype han unido sus fuerzas, openBC es la primera plataforma de networking con integración comprensiva de Skype. Como usuario de openBC, puede descargar ahora la última versión (2.0) de Skype directamente desde la plataforma para complementar su herramienta de networking y facilitar enormemente el mantenimiento de su red de contactos.

[… following instructions about how to download it and a list of features …]

[For the whole English version history, please go here]

I will start with the second sentence in bold “OpenBC and Skype have join forces”. I don’t really think Skype wins anything in all this, ok it is true that OpenBC has one million users but how many of them were actually using Skype before, even OpenBC mention this in the email, and let’s be fair how many people knows Skype? And Open…what?
I just wonder what eBay managers and investors have to say about this new strategic partner they now indirectly have thanks to the Skype's German Market Manager. What could have been the deal between Tim von Toerne and Lars Hinrichs?

The nicest part is the first sentence in bold “The same as OpenBC, Skype allows you to”. Yeap, you got it, and you didn’t need to assist to Strategy & Management class with professor Karamanos. “The same” as in the same services with the same functionality and features though much, much, unbelievably much better. “The same” meaning that it’s a substitute product for half of the things we provide to our premium members. “The same” like if the establishment of this new close partnership with our nemesis was an armistice. Delusions of grandeur or just plain bullshit?

It is crystal clear that they have followed the classical “If you cannot beat them then join them” but they have even improved it because reading the press released it looks like Skype contacted them because of their valuable pool of business users. Do business astronauts think that people are foolish? Ok, sorry, stupid question, of course they do believe that, but it’s time to change, remember Nigel Piercy’s model of the new customer.

Not happy with that they have followed at the same time the savvy advice of one of my dear former bosses, and still friend Frank Bergmann, about big impact with minimum effort. Which in its essence means to spend very little time developing some simply and nice feature that works, to gain more time for the guts of the beast which is real hard work.

Piece of code necessary to add a link to the Skype download page:
<a href="http://www.skype.com/go/getskype">Download Skype</a>


(Although they just uploaded the file into their system, not too smart if you want to instantly offer the last version of Skype to your clients on the next release)

Piece of code necessary to initiate a Skype call / chat inside a webpage:

<a href="skype:name.of.your.contact">Call name.of.your.contact</a>
/
<a href="skype:name.of.your.contact?chat">Chat with name.of.your.contact </a>

So, to sum up, total amount of work: 1 hour/man (ok if Toni does it only 5 minutes ;-P records a la penya de Vic!). While to design and developed the internal message system is about 5 days/man (I had to do the estimation when designing a new version for the www.ehrms.com site and I’m a damn fast developer, ok well I _was_ a damn fast developer)

Brilliant move you may think, so now all the CEOs of SMEs over the world should make a great song and dance about their close partnership with Amazon (just for placing a link to Amazon to sell their own books), Google (when you use its free webSearch) , Yahoo (when you create a new yahoo group to share all pictures with your colleagues) or even with every single company that is showed in your page through adWords. They are really good partners because they give you two thinks you would kill for: prestige and state-of-the-art functionalities.

Who knows, maybe the next step in OpenBC strategy is to create a new alliance with Google for the site’s search engine. The thing is that Google is so damn good that maybe one can retrieve the desired contacts much better than using the advanced search filters available only for premium users.

But no, they are not that silly, their business is to offer access to friends of my friends with the hope of finding your future partner, employer or employee within a trusted group of people bigger than your own contacts’ network. Not a bad idea if it wasn’t because “trust” is a word too big to cage it in a computer server and because strong relationships are developed in your house living room or in the closest pub not in the matrix. This fact degrades them to the Yet Another Employment Website where competence is even much more fierce.

However they can always take the luxury path because some people still would like to be a premium member just because of the social status that this gives them. In the end is the same reason why people buy Louis Vuitton, Burberrys, Gucci, etc and also why something like the Master in Luxury Brands Management here at ESSEC exists. And the same reason why in come countries is so foo expensive to play golf while now here I’m taking classes for 7,5 EUR per hour.

I just read the OpenBC blog about the , I love this part from Bill Liao: “I have to say Tim von Toerne from Skype Germany has been working overtime to make it work”.
Lol lol lol … the only reason why I still like them it is because they support FON.

Once again I will appreciate your comments about this article. It is not real fun if there is no one to argue with ;-)