McAfee’s Own 9x Problem
As I sat this week at the Gartner conference, I had the opportunity to hear Andrew McAfee speak about Enterprise 2.0. One of the things I enjoyed hearing live was the 9x problem. He has written about it before, but the phenomenon is that we tend to overestimate the value of current solutions by 3x and underestimate proposed replacements by 3x. His great example was Tivo not being used by everyone in the world even though it clearly rocks. Thus validating the anecdotal presumption in the consumer space that new products must be 10x the old in value to be adopted.
I used to work with the CEO of Mindscape and he would often quote the ephemeral 10x rule when I would bring up crazy ideas. The problem today is that I have no idea how to measure this axiom. If I sit down with my team and we design a blog feature for our social network, is that 10x better than someone sending an email, or a newsletter? I doubt asking users (before they are users) will yield any reliable data. I am at a loss for how to measure this value before actually deploying a solution. Ideas welcome.
As I watched Dr. McAfee speak it also became apparent that he has his own 9x problem. His slides all look like they came from the standard power point template (not that there is anything wrong with that). To his credit, he added his name in the footer of each slide, but no other substantive changes. I assume he sat down one day and said, “I can spend a bunch of time on a new template, but the message is the same, so why bother”. Thus another “good enough” solution of today lives on in the face of prettier, if not better, solutions.
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September 20th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
in the loss of productivity. Also, allowing clients to see personal profiles of our employees may allow them to read details which may dissuade them from choosing us as their firm of choice. Security of data is another possible drawback of Web 2.0. (http://oracleappslab.com/2007/09/19/mcafees-own-9x-problem/) In sum, while the new dynamic tools of the internet can be a great addition to our firm, some thought and planning should go into their adoption in order to avoid the threats they may pose. Other sources of knowledge and inspiration:
September 20th, 2007 at 7:25 am
I assume he sat down one day and said, “I can spend a bunch of time on a new template, but the message is the same, so why bother”. Thus another “good enough” solution of today lives on in the face of prettier, if not better, solutions.Share This[IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG]
September 20th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Paul, The existence of the 10x rule aside, I’m going to disagree with Dr. McAfee. (Is his 9x PPT online?) Rather than explaining the 9x difference as a function of user estimation error, I’m inclined to chalk it up to hidden costs and barriers. Re-framed as such, this is a perfect candidate for Porter’s Five Forces. Just do the analysis as if the user is deciding whether to enter the market. Doing the analysis for Tivo and tell me if you still think it is a good fit for Early Adopters, let alone the rest.
September 23rd, 2007 at 5:33 pm
[...] capital or attract more clients, as with everything, there are some drawbacks to it use. The addition of new blogs may encourage employees to share their weekend experiences as opposed to w… No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI [...]
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