Deliberate Ambiguity

A speech to the Quality Students of the Tonawandas

Note: I was asked to give a short speech to the Quality Students of the Tonawandas on March 22, 2012.  I decided to ask them to call the notion of "Quality Student" into question and come up with their own definition.

Congratulations on being named a Quality Student of the Tonawandas.  Many years ago, I was a Quality Student, so I am honored to speak tonight to this illustrious group: surely many of you will go out into the world and make a significant impact.

I worried my parents by studying philosophy in college.  As a consequence, I often ask undermining questions, not because I’m a contrarian, but I find that skepticism often engenders a better understanding of the concept in question.

 

The question that was on my mind in preparing for this speech was: what exactly is a “quality student”?

 

When I was a quality student, I was surprised to see some people in the room – they didn’t fit my notion of quality.  But even worse, I was sad that some of my friends, whom I considered to be of supreme quality, were not in the room.  Take a look around you right now – not to judge – but to ask yourself the question: who isn’t here that should be?

 

Since I was coming back to my hometown, I also tried to channel a younger Mark Johnson from high school.

 

Back then, numbers and awards were disproportionately important to me. I knew my rank in my class.   I knew the rank of my university stood in US News & World Report.  I knew my IQ, my SAT scores, how many AP classes I took… heck, I even knew my GPA to 7 significant digits.

 

Numbers gave me a sense of comfort, as if the world were patting me on my back and telling me, “You’ve done a great job, Mark,” or, in my more arrogant moments, “You’re better than other people.”

 

Luckily, life has disabused me of my unhealthy focus on numbers.  I’m a math and science nerd, so I can’t escape the notion that numbers do shed light on the world, but they don’t tell the whole story.

 

If you’re sitting in this room, you probably know a lot of the numbers that relate to you.  I’d like to question how accurately those numbers reflect reality.  For example, class ranks were announced today at NTHS, so think about that number: do you consider everyone above you in your class rank to be smarter than you?  Everyone below you to be dumber?

 

Being smart isn’t about IQ or grades.  It’s about what you do with the intelligence in your head.  One of the reasons I was so excited to get out of high school and into college was that I wanted to be in a classroom of people who wanted to learn, not a classroom of people who wanted a grade.  In the working world, intelligence is prized, but only insofar as it allows you to make an impact on your coworkers and product.

 

Tonight I’d like to suggest to you that quality – whether to a student, a parent, a teacher, or a CEO – is something that is subjective, personal, and difficult to quantify.  Though you’ll often find yourself going back to numbers as a guide to quality, when you look into the mirror and judge yourself, no numbers well help you feel better.

 

The world is full of extrinsic judgment: people telling you that something is bad or good, or that you should do this or that, or that some people are “better” than others.  The easy way out is to use society’s view of quality to guide your life.

 

It’s not easy to define success in life using your own internal system of judgment – just as it’s difficult to define happiness or love – but the rewards are great.  You’ll feel a sense of satisfaction with your own life that you’ll never get by using external factors.  Let’s face it, there’s always going to be someone richer, smarter, or more successful, but perhaps you can still be happy and feel successful, even if you aren’t “the best.” You can only do this by justifying to yourself, by your own high standards, that you are successful. 

 

Tonight is a time where you can feel excited that a community has come together and given you collective pat on the back.  I join them in saying, “Great job!”  But, it’s important not to spend your life looking in the rear view mirror.  The real challenge for you is not only to enjoy being a Quality Student tonight, but also to wake up tomorrow, figure out what “Quality” means to you, and tireless spend every day working to become a Quality Person.

 

Video interview with me at the Wall Street Journal

A great interview with me at the Wall Street Journal.  To be clear, I never made a comment about the purchase price of Zite, but I was asked a number of interesting questions about the transaction.

Video with Mark Johnson + KC Estenson discussing Zite + CNN

Below is a brief video I made with KC Estenson (my new boss at CNN) talking about how Zite will improve over the next year under the wings of CNN.

Zite and CNN Interview from zite.com on Vimeo.

 

Becoming the CEO of Zite

Today, Zite announced that I will be joining the company as CEO. I wanted to write down my personal thoughts about this transition: how I came upon the opportunity and my vision for the company.

How I became Zite's CEO

I've been an advisor at Zite for almost two years.  When I started, the company was still called Worio.  Though the product needed a lot of work, I saw some great technology and an incredible vision.  Being an advisor was a fun diversion from my day job at Microsoft and I didn't expect to join Zite full-time.

A little over a year ago, I helped to pivot the company from Worio to Zite, shifting focus from contextual discovery to a personalized magazine.  The first version of Zite was a web application with lots of rough edges.  With the rise of the iPad, we realized that the way people consume information was changing, but that information was still trapped in silos and search hadn't addressed the discovery problem.  Conveniently, the 6-year history of Worio gave us a strong technology underpinning for a new type of product.  Thus, Zite was born on the iPad.

About four months ago, Ali (the Founder of Zite) asked me if I wanted to take the reins form him and lead Zite into its next phase.  I know this must have been a very difficult decision for him, since his leadership kept the company alive for over 6 years and his vision made Zite possible.  I feel humbled by the trust he's placed in me.

For me, being a CEO will be a new challenge, but not unfamiliar. I was told by a mentor many years ago that being a product manager was the best training for becoming a CEO.  Though I'll have a slew of new responsibilities, the core skillset of a product manager -- influence, prioritization, getting things done -- will serve me well in this next phase.

I'd like to give a brief shout-out to Microsoft and not just because Softies are more likely than Googlers to become CEOs.  I've been able to work for an awesome product, I've been challenged by brilliant colleagues and I was given the opportunity to lead a team.  Three years ago, I'd have called Microsoft a "dinosaur" with the rest of the technorati. After spending a few years in the Borg, I am confident in placing a large portion of my IRA in MSFT.

Where does Zite go from here?

What excites me the most about working on Zite is that, for years, I've wanted something to solve my own personal information overload (and, as ERS wisely noted: the greatest products come from scratching a personal itch).

RSS doesn't solve it: I don't have time to sort through the hundreds of stories that come through my feed.  Social curation doesn't solve it: even following a smaller group of friends can prove incredibly noisy.  Search doesn't solve it: I only search for things when I know what I'm looking for.

The only way to solve information overload is to turn browsing on its head and to learn what you want and deliver more of it to you, without losing an element of serendipity.

I liken where Zite is to the early days of search: everyone loved search engines because they allowed us to sift through the rapidly growing web, even though most searches ended up in failure.  Similarly, Zite's personalization isn't perfect, but we've made a breakthrough advance.  Our challenge over the next few years will be to:

• Improve significantly the quality of our recommendations
• Maintaining a sleek, user-friendly interface
• Give publishers new opportunities for revenue so that they continue to create amazing content. 

A tall order, to be sure, but a challenge that must be taken on.  I can't wait.

Keep your laws off my Algorithm: Reply to the NYT Editorial on Google

The liberals at the New York Times are again calling for the regulation of something they don't understand: search algorithms.  Google, on the defensive, offered a hackneyed response, allegedly attributed to Marisa Mayer (analysis here from Tom Krazit at C|Net, since I don't have an FT subscription).

Concern about spammers gaming search results is valid, but, as a search insider (I work at Bing), I want to clear up some common misconceptions about the fabled search "algorithm" and offer some other salient reasons why regulators should stay away from search engines. If it feels like I'm repeating material from Death of the Search Startup, well... I am =)

A clip from the NYT editorial:

Still, the potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses.

The NYT seems to be under the horrible misconception that there is an "editorial policy" guiding algorithm tweaks.  Misleading articles about Google's algorithm have propagated a viewpoint that there's a Google Editorial Committee lead by Udi Manber that looks at side-by-side search results and decides which looks better.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  To change the ranking of results, search engines use a potpourri of techniques from machine learning, to graph theory, to hand-tuning of features.  Remember that any change to the algorithm affects somewhere between thousands and millions of queries.  That means that if you measured improvement by looking at how a few results changed for the better, you might be ignoring potentially millions of results that got worse.  To measure the algorithm's progress, search engines use a complicated matrix of human judgments and click data, all analyzed by a bunch of smart PhDs and statisticians. 

Does anyone seriously think a government regulator is going to be able to add a lot of value to that process?

Now, a valid question might be: what if search engines are editorially changing their search results?  Neither Google nor Bing has a lot of content even to put in search results.  Beyond MSN and Knol, search engines just don't produce original content.

It is certainly true that SERPs (search engine result pages) are getting richer with many "answers."  I just did a a search for Britney Spears on Google and got the following 3 answers, which support three different Google properties.

As someone who works on the UX of the SERP, I can tell you two few things: 1) The coolest, most interesting, and most useful innovations coming up in search are going to be with rich content on the SERP and I'd hate for the government to stifle us 2) Search engines are incredibley worried about rich elements on the SERP that take users away from a satisfied click.

Imagine this: Google puts huge, garish maps/images/news/video answers on every SERP.  Either users will hate the new interface and abandon Google for a competitor OR the new elements will add value to the users and they'll enjoy the new experience.  Google would be shooting itself in the foot if it sent users to pages they didn't like, even it it provided a short-term bump in Google's overall page views.

My comments about the "algorithm" (I loathe to take it out of quotes) and answers suggest something inherent to search engines: we are naturally self-regulating because any changes made to the SERP or results will change user behavior.  Because search engines want to optimize for user satisfaction, there's no choice but to be agnostic to content that's shown on the page.  Therefore, I admonish regulators to keep out of search until there seems to be a demonstrable problem.

Of course, there's a great libertarian argument to keep the government's hands off search engines, but I won't go there and will simply let Reason speak for me.

Oh, and if you're worried about a Google monopoly, then try an alternative.  Simple as that.

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[Obligatory note: the opinions expressed above are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, Microsoft.]

Death of the Search Startup

Death of the Search Startup

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(note: this is a post based on a talk of the same name at Ignite SMX West)

Search is hard.  Really, hard.  As a veteran of three search engines, some might call me jaded.  However, this post isn’t just an attempt at apologetics.  I’ve learned something from those three experiences that I’d like to share with you.

If you’re looking to start a profitable business, it’s reasonable to wonder: can a startup ever pop up and beat Google?   As entrepreneurs, we always think that there’s a way to innovate our way out of a problem.  I’m going to argue that no amount of innovation can feasibly compete with Google or Bing.  Though marketing concerns like switching costs are certainly a problem for a search startup, I’m going to focus on an even deeper problem: the mighty greenback.  When it comes down to it, building a search engine is an incredibly expensive proposal.

In order to make some calculations, I created an equation that has two major components: hardware and people. I’ll give some explanations for each of the components and, in the process, show you how complicated and expensive a search engine is to build.

 

• Storage/Crawling (SC) – Two years ago, Google estimated the Web to be over 1 trillion documents and it’s growing every day.  A search engine needs to crawl and store the entire Web and keep frequently changing pages up-to-date.  Plus, your index is bigger than just Web pages.  You’ll be storing all sorts of metadata for the page: anchor text, outbound links, and any kind of interesting data you’ve extracted or created.
• Relevance (R) – At bare minimum, your search engine will have to have results as good as Bing or Google’s.  To achieve this, you’ll need servers to run relevance experiments, servers to store vast amounts of click-data, independent judges, and a big team to deal with all of the irrelevant/spammy sites out there.  And don’t think you’re done if you’ve just created 10 blue links.  Users have come to expect lots of other services: image search, stock quotes, weather answers, and news search, just to name a few.  You’re either going to have to license content or build verticals of your own. Both are expensive propositions.
• Runtime (RT) – When you do a search on Bing, you get a list of just 10 relevant results in fractions of a second from a set of possibly billions of Web pages.  How is that possible?  The short answer is: lots, and lots, and lots of computers to calculate your results.  Search engines typically use some kind of divide-and-conquer methodology, which means that whenever you issue a search, hundreds, or possibly thousands, of computers are involved in bringing you back results.
• People (P) – It’s unlikely, if not impossible, that you’re going to build a search engine with your buddy from college in a garage.  Worse, you need really expensive employees: PhDs in computer science, machine learning experts, statisticians, search engine veterans, infrastructure geniuses, etc. I estimate that it takes a bare minimum of 250 people to build a search engine. Yikes!
• Time (t) – Even with the smartest people, it’s going to take time to get everything running properly.  I estimate at least two years to get all of the components working together.
• Johnson Coefficient (Ĵ) – No equation is complete without an eponymous component.  However, I didn’t just stick in Ĵ because I love my last name.  The Johnson coefficient is a real concern for innovative search engines.  It’s all well-and-good if you’ve created a search engine that is equivalent to Bing or Google, but usually you want to make something better.  Unfortunately, better usually translates into more data and/or more processing . . . which translates into more machines.  Thus, the Johnson coefficient is the “tax” that innovative companies will pay for their innovation.

When you add it all up, my guesstimate for the bare minimum cost of a search engine is $100M dollars and could be as much as (or even more than?) $300M dollars.  Numbers like that, for a business that still hasn’t figured out how to switch people away from Google and Bing will terrify investors.

I have two case studies: Powerset and SearchMe.

Powerset can’t be seen as a complete failure, since Powerset was acquired by Microsoft.  At Powerset, all of our linguistic processing caused our index to be at least 10-20x bigger than a standard search engine.  Plus, the linguistic processing and matching we did at the runtime was much more expensive than typical search engine retrieval.  With about $25M injected into the company and 60 people, we were only able to index 2.5M documents of Wikipedia.  To have indexed the whole Web would have been much, much more expensive.

SearchMe was a search engine whose gimmick was to show thumbnails of Web pages in a fancy cover flow interface.  Imagine the cost of processing, storing, and serving all of those images.  It was no surprise to me when SearchMe shut its doors, since it claimed it needed another $50M in capital (!!!) to survive.

However, I encourage you to Keep Hope Alive!  Though I don’t think that another general purpose search engine could compete with Google, there’s a lot of opportunity on the periphery for special purpose search engines and vertical search engines.  And heck, if you’re lucky like Powerset, you might get bought by Bing or Google!

The moral of the story is that, next time you hear someone proclaiming how they are going to be the next Bing or Google, smile and nod, and keep your hard earned money far away from an investment in that ill-fated venutre.

The Fallacy of the Rising Tide

The Fallacy of the Rising Tide:

1. Something positive is happening.
2. I am part of that something positive.
3. Ergo, I caused that positive change.

John F. Kennedy famously used the phrase, "A rising tide lifts all boats," to suggest that a growing economy benefits everyone.  It's a handy phrase that can be used in lots of situations, e.g., your boss just got promoted or they just built a Home Depot next to your sleepy hot dog stand.  The fallacy comes when, instead of thanking external forces for benefiting you, you believe something internal caused this wonderful change.

For example, when I looked at my stocks this morning, I was pleased to see that everything was up.  In fact, since I started investing in January, all of my stocks are above water.  Should I pat myself on the back and congratulate myself for being an oracle?  If I had done this, I'd be committing The Fallacy of the Rising Tide. It turns out that the entire market is up since the beginning of the year, so it's no surprise that my portfolio is looking good.  Am I better than chance?  Would throwing darts at a chart of Dow Components have yielded me a better return? 

The fallacy runs rampant in the business world often takes the form: "Since I worked for/with [company x] and [company x] was wildly successful, therefore I am a brilliant businessperson."  Now, it certainly may be possible that you were critical in hockey stick growth of your company, but it isn't necessary.  Hence the fallacy.

I think I just coined a phrase! w00t!

Any great examples of The Fallacy of the Rising Tide?  Leave them in the comments.

Update (4/29/2010 @ 12:24) Robert Gentel noted that The Fallacy of the Rising Tide is a subset of a post hoc fallacy.

Zite: Your Personal Web Filter

I can't keep up with my RSS feeds.  At one time, I'd get over 500 articles a day.  Even after pruning my feeds, there's still far more than I can read.  And, I might be subscribing to feeds I find interesting, but what about the stuff that I'm missing?  I want to find those gems in topics I'm interested in, from Aristotle to Zugzwang.  Wouldn't it be nice if I could subscribe to topics, instead of RSS feeds?  Wouldn't it be great if a system learned about what I'm interested in, instead of just presenting the latest or most popular?  It's all about me! 

That's why I'm so excited about today's launch of the closed-beta of Zite.com.  I've been advising Worio (parent company of Zite) for almost a year now and I've been an avid user of Zite from its earliest alpha stage.  I am addicted: Zite is my primary source of interesting articles every day.  I've tried out other recommendation systems, but the never found any that consistently deliver high quality articles.  I usually test a recommendation system with an obscure topic to test recall (usually "taxidermy") and an ambiguous topic to test precision (usually "product management").  In the case of taxidermy, other systems tend to recommend almost nothing, whereas Zite's huge index keeps me abreast of the latest in the world of stuffed animals.  In the case of product management, other systems tend to give me press releases with a quote from VP of Product Management.  Zite does an incredible job of understanding the aboutness of an article, which creates high-quality recommendations.

Not only does Zite do a great job of recommending me topics that I want, it also learns about me by what articles I like or don't like.  In other words, the more I use Zite, the better the recommendations get. I like to tell people that it's like a Pandora for the Web.

Since Zite is built on a powerful base of technology, there are some other cool features enabled.  For example, when you start off on Zite, you don't need to enter in a bunch of topics.  If you give Zite your delicious bookmarks, your twitter feed, or your browser info, it will try to figure out topics that are interesting to you.  How cool is that?

Want to try it out for yourself?  If you want an invite to Zite, just leave a comment on this post and tell me what your biggest beef is about the way you currently consume news.

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The PR Blame Game

A friend recently was complaining to me about having trouble with her PR firm.  "What's the problem," I asked.  "Well," she huffed, "They just aren't getting me the coverage I want.  I just don't think they're working hard enough.  At Powerset, SHIFT must have had it so easy.  Your story just told itself."

I didn't have a decent response at the time. Powerset did have an amazing story. To convince someone that natural language is a better search interface than keywords is a piece of cake.  Additionally, our product was cool, innovative, and solved user problems.  We spent a lot of time getting the message right, but it was more about perfecting the words to communicate our story than perfecting the story itself.  On the other hand, our PR team worked their butts off, turned around some from doubters to believers, and got us an insane amount of coverage.  What was the secret sauce?

After reading Julie's post about firing a client, something important struck me: my was just playing the PR Blame Game. My friend's company had a mediocre idea and a lame product.  It's not the PR firm's fault that coverage was spotty.  Instead of jumping down the throat of her firm, I think she should have taken the following steps.

First, maybe it's not your product that's the problem, but the way you're telling the story.  Instead of pitching more reporters, go back to your product messaging basics. Figure out who your audience is. Understand what their problems are and articulate how your product solves those problems.  Communicate that message in crisp, clean, simple language.  This kind of strategic PR can be time-consuming, but it's something that your PR firm should be able to help with and will make subsequent pitches much easier.

But, there may be a deeper problem.  If your product sucks, no amount of product marketing will fix it.  Make sure that you're getting feedback from your PR firm about your product.  And, ferchrissakes, listen to it.  Your PR firm is on the front lines talking to experienced reporters who can give valuable suggestions for product enhancements.  Empower your firm with the ability to bring this feedback to your company and then act on it.  Obviously, don't forget your core strategy or your users, but you'd be remiss to ignore an expert opinion. 

Finally, if your PR is stagnant, the feedback you've been getting is largely negative, and you can't find an easy way to improve your product, maybe it's time to take a drastic measure: shift your monthly PR budget to product development.  This is kind of like "firing" your firm, but done with an "it's not you, it's me" realization. Your PR firm will appreciate the honestly and will likely be ready for you in 3-6 months after you've produced something marketable.

My friend was absolutely right that Powerset did have it easy. But, that's only because we had a cool product and a compelling story around it.  So, next time your coverage report isn't as rosy as you'd like, take a step back and don't play the PR Blame Game. If you haven't armed your PR firm with a great message about a killer product, you only have yourself to blame.

n.b., this post is a response to Julie Crabill's Fire a Client Today post as part of our ongoing dialectic.

The Feedback Lacuna

la-cu-na [luh-kyoo-nuh] (n.)

a gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument; hiatus

Much noise is made about the way that social media will influence products.  Whereas social media is beginning to collect huge amounts of customer data, this feedback is not yet making it to the right people: the product managers and developers.  Though I don’t have a simple solution to this problem, I hope to convince you that there is indeed a lacuna that needs to be bridged.

The Playaz

On one side of the lacuna are social media gurus and marketing types, who cheerily proclaim “Feedback from customers through social media will cure your product woes!”  They imagine that Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. are channels to listen to users in a brand-new way. They're sick of putting “lipstick on a pig,” and believe they have access to a feedback stream that will connect the organizations directly to users in a way heretofore unimagined.  The products resulting from this feedback will delight users.

On the other side of the lacuna are the product managers and the developers, who groan loudly upon hearing this advice.  After years of usability studies, user-centric design, log-analysis, and countless other techniques to get into the mind of the consumer they wonder, “What now?  They’re always cooking up something useless in that marketing department.  Why don’t they just focus on what they’re good at instead of trying to bother me?  I have a product to build!”

The Problem

Putting on my marketing hat, social media gurus are wrong if they believe that social media is the panacea that will solve all product development problems, but right in believing that they can deliver a new, important voice.  Putting on my product manager hat, I feel justified in being skeptical of marketing people who have never built a product, but I can’t deny that they have access to a fascinating new stream of data that I want to incorporate into my product planning and design.

The real question should be about how marketing/PR folks can get looped into the product development process and how product managers can partner with marketers to create the right product and inform the market about what they’ve (jointly) created.

Bridging the Lacuna

Assuming that we all agree that there is some signal in the noise of social media (right?) and that products could benefit from listening to it (yes?), the question is: how do you get that information to the right people in the organization?

Therefore, I propose a few questions that I’ll follow up with more detailed posts:

• How can we tell the difference between a prominent, whiney customer, and other problems that affect the more subdued masses?
• How should feedback through social media channels be communicated to the right people in an org?
• Why should product managers think about PR/marketing while they’re writing specs?
• (and the flip side) Why should PR/marketing demand to be involved in the spec writing process?
• How do marketers walk in the shoes of product managers without stepping on their toes and vice-versa?
• How should product management use social media to communicate with customers?
• How should marketers get more in tune with the product to be even more effective with social media?
• Why should PR people know about the product development process?

This list is really only the beginning and represents my product manager-focused view of the world.  I’d love feedback from marketers, developers, PMs, CEOs, and social media experts. As with any process, this is an evolution: techniques will be tried out and some will survive, some will fail, and others will be amended with improvements learned from trying.

Let’s work together to bridge this lacuna (see Julie's "Mind the Gap" response) so our products benefit from this phenomenal new source of customer feedback.

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