The Tipping Point

eb2.0 & Automotive portals? wow..!!! As a passionate automobile enthusiast and a firm Web.20 believer, it represents the best of both worlds for me.

I have been following the auto portal scene in India from the late 90’s and have seen them evolve, stagnate and fade away. Have witnessed portals such as indiacar.com, cybeersteering.com, bsmotoring.com come and stagnate in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

When ‘AutoMartIndia‘ (now called ‘FirstChoice‘) was launched in early 2000’s, as an automobile enthusiast I was excited as it represented a paradigm shift in the way Indians bought & sold ‘used cars‘. In fact, the term ‘used cars’ came into existence — at least in India after that only. Previously ‘used cars’ were always referred to as ‘second hand‘ cars.

In the last one year or so, I have been very impressed by carwale.com. The way these folks have approached about building an auto portal is simply great. They put in one feature at a time, must have analyzed user behavior to ensure that it was working spot on, and then built on the simple web2.0 premises of usability & simplicity tied together and anticipating user needs. Once you looked at carwale.com, you realized — why the hell did other auto portals not think of it? This is exactly what I as a user wants.!! Features like used car prices to the granular level of models/city and mileage are a great boon to users. carwale perfected this with tapping into it’s user base to come up with city/model specific indicative pricing for used cars. There are a number of other features that one can go on and on about the value proposition that carwale.com provides — both to end user(car buyer) and car sellers (individuals & used car dealers).

Of late numerous auto portals that are replicas of carwale.com have come up. In my opinion, while this is testimony to the fact that carwale.com is successful and good, is also resulting in mee-too auto portals‘ whose value proposition is exactly same as that of carwale.com. While this can also be termed as expansion of market, this leads to stifling of innovation & new business models. These mee-too auto portals are doing exactly what the auto portals of late 90’s did — copy each other.

Don’t believe me: Just look at the home pages of three different auto portals(carwale.com, carazoo.com, driveinside.com). It would be very hard for a user to distinguish one from another.

In the ‘print’ media, auto magazines like Overdrive, Business Standard Motoring, Autocar, etc cater to the motoring enthusiast of the country and all of these are very successful print magazines. For years, these magazines have been the sole medium for the auto enthusiasts to keep in touch with the passion they are mad about — automobiles.

Similarly, in the ‘television’ space, literally every channel worth it’s name is having it’s own ‘auto’ show  — at times with tie-ups with the ‘print’ magazines. These ‘auto’ shows on television have their ‘experts’ who are very knowledgeable and respected in the motoring world and very often these ‘experts’ are also the experts/editors of the print magazines. These experts often do the following:

• Answer queries on issues/problems that viewers face with their  vehicles
• Recommend which vehicle to buy to their viewers depending on their needs
• Analyze the auto industry for happenings and trends
• And other things – like international motoring scene, product launches, motor sports etc.

In the ‘internet’ space, as far as ‘automotive business websites/portals’ go, there seems to be a vacuum w.r.t websites/portals that can be termed as successful and having a broad user base (with the exception of carwale.com – a late entrant).  Many of the internet websites/portals aimed at the automotive segment were even backed by big names of the tv/print media – autocarindia.com from the Autocar stable, bsmootoring.com from Business Standard, Indiacar.com, cybersteering.com, overdrive.in from the Overdrive magazine.

One can safely assume that auto experts were involved with these websites and they would have shared all their experience. Why were these internet websites not able to catch the users attention in India and become successful? All these websites seem to have the ‘obvious’ and ‘seemingly right’ set of features available to make them successful. Most of the websites offer the following:

• News from the auto industry & editorial articles
• Compare vehicles
• Buy & sell vehicles
• Road Tests
• Ask the experts
• Prices of vehicles

It seems that most of the print magazines don’t know how they can leverage the internet and create communities of auto enthusiasts. At most, these print magazines view their internet websites as the place to advertize about their print magazine and few other add-ons. These magazines are not taking a strategic view of how ‘building communities’ can increase the sales/subscription of their  print magazines. It can offer a whole new paradigm of distribution channels, business models and extremely great competitive advantage.

In a subsequent post, I will talk about a auto website/portal that is successfully ‘building communities’ and is perfectly poised to leverage the user community into a great competitive advantage.

Quite a few experiments, like counting the number of coins in a jar & guessing the weight of the cake have been conducted to test out the ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept. Recently I got a chance to conduct an experiment at a gathering of approximately 150 people — all software/computer professionals

We put up a jar filled with éclairs and asked the audience to guess the number of éclairs in the jar and note it down on a piece of paper and hand it over to us. Obviously, we were excited to know the results – if the experiment worked, did someone guess the correct number?

Here are the results:

We had responses ranging from 25 éclairs to 786 éclairs. The actual number of éclairs in the jar was 204. Out of the 134 responses, only 1 person got the number right. The average, the ‘collective wisdom’ of the ‘crowd’ was 161.4 – an accuracy % of 79.14.

The results have left me wondering as to why did the results not concur with the ‘wisdom of crowds’ theory. After all, the following elements of ‘wisdom of crowds’ were present in the experiment:

• There was enough diversity among the participants. even though all the participants were software engineers, they came from different project teams, had varying levels of experience, roles etc.

• Each person was making his/her own independent choice and was not influenced by any other member

• There was means for us to collect and aggregate the responses.

The fourth element ‘Decentralization — people being able to specialize and draw on local knowledge’ can be debated to be missing from the experiment. How can we assume that there were people specializing in guessing the number of éclairs in a jar? How could they draw on local knowledge?

In Galton’s experiments, there were people who were butchers and farmers who one can assume to be specializing in ox/cattle. In ‘Guess the weight of the Cake’ experiment, people could feel the cake in their hands, there were people who were traders and hence one can assume that ‘knowing the weight of an object’ was something that they were familiar with.

The ‘guess the number of coins’ experiment was an online experiment and had no option for people to see, to feel the jar, hold it in their hands. Similar aspects were present in the experiment we conducted – we just showed people the jar filled with éclairs. We did not have people holding the jar, touching it, feeling it. Could such seemingly insignificant things allow people to make more informed choice? I don’t know.

BTW, ‘Guess the weight of the cake’ experiment was 99% successful even though it had just 120 participants whereas ‘guess the number of coins’ experiment was just 88% successful even though it had 1760 participants. This indicates that while the sample size could be a factor, but it does not seem so in the above examples.

I am wondering if aspects of ‘cognition, cooperation, coordination’ are present in such experiments?

What about the sample composition itself – all software/computer professionals? Do they bring diversity or are software professionals just not the right sample for any kind of experiment?

In a casual conversation with a practice/business head of an IT services firm, I happened to ask her how she is seeing the adoption of Web2.0 in the organizations she interacts with and her line of business. Her response was on the lines of:

‘Very less.. it’s too early… actually people don’t want social networking the way it is on Flickr, YouTube.. In my view, LinkedIn is the ideal social networking platform… it is text based and doesn’t have too many images etc.. I can quickly check it out and come back… Why would I want to see my friends pictures on the net…. It’s a waste of time… how will it benefit the organization..’

Her responses made me wonder:

• Do our business leaders really understand, or have attempted to understand what Web2.0 is all about?
• Why do our business leaders equate Web2,0 to Social networking?

I my opinion:

• The generation gap between the GenNet and Baby Boomer generation has HUGE implications on how web2.0 is viewed within the organizations and how it can be out to productive use.

• In most organizations the leaders belong to the Baby Boomer generation and their interactions, in the course of business, would be with other baby boomers in their counterpart organization. This scenario lends nicely to a classic status quo model(unintentionally, without even the leaders realizing it) and a huge opportunity is being squandered – both in business, competitive advantage context.

Organizations that recognize the existence of generation gap within it’s workforce, the relevance of Web2.0 to todays genNet generation are in a great position to leverage the advantages of web2.0 within an enterprise to become more responsive, agile & competitive.

It’s an opportunity that an organization can either say ‘Pass’ or grab with both hands and run.

Is it a coincidence that the adoption and popularity of barcamps, unconferences has coincided with the emergence of Web 2.0? Are there any parallels and similarities between the underlying principles of Web2.0 & barcamps, unconferences? After all both web2.0 & unconferences are about user generated content, architecture of participation etc.. etc..

I have tried to map the web 2.0 principles from the seminal article on Web 2.0; Oreilly: The Web 2.0 Design Patterns and tried to map them to the underlying principles of unconferences — and I see a striking similarity between both.

So; are unconeferences as the Web 2.0 equivalent of conferences? I bet they are..