customer focus Archives - Steve Sammartino

Falling in love with infrastructure

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a list of companies who should’ve done something, yet instead, let someone else do it for them. And in being asleep at the wheel, they will never be as powerful (read relevant) again.

Yellow Pages	should have become…	Google
Encyclopaedia Britannica	should have become…	Wikipedia
RCA / Sony / BMG / EMI / Warner	should have become…	iTunes
Newspaper classifieds	should have become…	Craigs List
Trading Post	should have become…	eBay
Barns & Noble	should have become…	Amazon
Industry X	could well become…	Your startup

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The key point is this. The future doesn’t care about your legacy, or how things were done in the past, it only cares about what people actually want. And people don’t care about your existing infrastructure, they only care about themselves.

There’s a million more of these examples out there, and many more to come. The question is which industry will you disrupt because they are too in love with their existing infrastructure?

The great media rumble

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Steve Sammartino

The internet has been a boon for entrepreneurs. The commerce said entrepreneurs have created has been one of connection, more than revenue with social media networks being the greatest love child of the internet age. The overwhelming majority of them are free to use, which has resulted in a dramatic power shift in the industrial media landscape. More succinctly social media is very quickly stealing eyeballs from traditional media.

While startups are busy creating the new forums which people connect and entertain themselves on, advertising and media agencies are scrambling to stake their claim on new media. It’s shaping up to be the demarcation dispute of the decade. Both parties believe that social media is rightfully theirs:

Media Agencies claim it is ‘Media’ and so their clients should engage them strategically.

Advertising Agencies claim it is ‘content driven’ and so their cleints should engage them straetgically.

What’s clear is that is isn’t about to go away and it will continue attract larger percentages of the marketing budget as time progresses. And just in case your wondering what I think about social media and who rightfully owns it, my viewpoint is very clear and is given below:

Just like any emerging technology or industry, no one rightfully owns it. It’s up for grabs. The companies (new or existing) who move into the space the quickest and add the most value will take home the trophy.

Revolutions and pleasure

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Steve Sammartino

In the October 1994 Issue of Wired, Gary Wolfe said in an article, article about Mosiac (the worlds first GUI web browser) and the coming internet revolution.

“When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing…

it is the only thing.”

Startup blog asks this:

What kind of pleasure is your startup bringing to its people?