Hugh MacLeod
Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
I’m Hugh MacLeod. I’m a cartoonist. Occasionally I write books. gapingvoid is interested in start-up culture, because changing business for the better is what we’re about; that’s what Social Object Factory is about. We live and breathe it; we help everyone from lone entrepreneurs, to mid-sizers, to Fortune 500’s do the same. Check out our work here.
We create art that helps companies kick ass, end of story.
We also have a daily cartoon newsletter that makes a lot of people happy.
If you just want to say ‘Hello’, feel free to email me, anytime.
If you want to talk business, then it’s probably best to please contact my business partner, gapingvoid CEO Jason Korman, here. We look forward to working with you. Thanks!
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September 30, 2007
[View from the taxi, about an hour ago.]
I’m in Paris, typing this from Hotel Le Meridien Etoile, where I’m staying.
I’m told lots of Microsoftees are staying here at the moment as well. Ping me if you fancy meeting for a drink down at the bar.
+44 770 309 9462 or email will do.
Rock on.
[Googlemaps view of the Eiffel Tower. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
I’m at Waterloo Station, about to get on a train to Paris. I’m there till Tuesday evening.
I’m attending this big Microsoft thingy.
If anyone fancies hooking up, I’m on my cell +44 770 309 9462.
J’adore Paris. Mais oui.
[Me and Microsoft’s Steve Clayton enjoying the first ever opened bottle of Stormhoek Blue Monster Reserve]
If anybody wants to get their hands on a bottle or two of Stormhoek Blue Monster Reserve, this is how the lay of the land is looking:
1. You have to be a member of the “Friends of Blue Monster” Facebook page.
2. You have to live in the UK and the E.U. [Europe]. America will take a wee bit longer while we sort out the importer. We’re hoping to have the first bottles ready to be shipped out by mid-October.
3. You have to be of legal drinking age, obviously.
4. They’ll be available only by the half-case [6 bottles], not individually.
5. Sadly, Stormhoek is just a small wine company, and we can’t afford to give them away. We will sell them at £45 per half-case [£7.50 a bottle]. Free shipping is included in the UK, but not Europe.
6. Though certain people inside Microsoft may like what we’re doing, this is not a Microsoft gig. This is a Stormhoek gig.
7. Yes, red wine will also be available eventually. Working on it.
8. If you fancy a half-case, please drop us a line at bluemonsterwine@gmail.com. Thanks.
9. And also, a big, huge, massive thanks you to all the groovy cats inside Microsoft who lent their support to making this happen. Rock on.
September 28, 2007
From Johnnie Moore [one of my favorite bloggers, by the way]:
And (doh) that’s what Hugh’s Blue Monster schtick is about, right? As I get it, the Blue Monster as represents all the energy that keeps people at Microsoft despite its frustrations — and the idea that it needs to be unleashed.
Yep. That pretty much sums it up. Thanks for that, Johnnie.
Taking a Blue Monster-type tack may be the wrong move, of course [I’m a cartoonist, not a soothsayer]. But besides rearguard actions defending their core cash cows, what other option do they have? What other option does any large company have, with a mature brand and a vast army of shareholders? Serious question.
September 27, 2007
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I wrote the preceding paragraph to illustrate the intellectual bankruptcy of what I call “Dinosaurspeak”. That rather sociopathic combination of being completely focused on customer benefit and yet completely selfish at the same time.
And yeah, if it doesn’t work on gapingvoid, it ain’t going to work on your product, either.
What is interesting to me is that this style of language was pretty universal only a few years ago. Sure, you had a few mavericks out there stirring things up, but most external business communication was pretty much stuck in firehose mode.
When markets become smarter and faster than the companies servicing said markets, language changes. Of course it does.
[Originally posted November 5th, 2004.]
Uber-Microsoft Watcher, Mary Jo Foley is writing a book about “Microsoft 2.0″:
In Microsoft 2.0, I plan to talk about Microsoft’s future, not its past — which is ground well covered by many other Microsoft authors before me. I’ll provide an overview of the Microsoft people, products and strategies who will matter during the next decade. I’ll do my best to distill all the tips; conversations with customers, partners and competitors; and insights I’ve gained while reporting and blogging about Microsoft over the past couple of decades into 300-plus pages.
Can’t wait to read it! Rock on.
[NB Mary Jo also belongs to the “Friends of Blue Monster” Facebook group.]
From my own, strictly non-techie perspective, I see Microsoft’s future less in terms of their two big cash cows [Windows and Office], and more in terms of their relationships with their 750,000 partners. These relationships are the Golden Goose, not the commercial bundles of ones & zeroes. The latter just enable the former etc.
September 26, 2007
In my recent “Thoughts on Microsoft” post, I wrote the following:
3. So what happens if the Simon Phipps’s of the world are right? So what happens if the future of software is indeed Open Source? How will Microsoft keep its shareholders happy? What if this recent article is right, and the unavoidable future is free software, and paid software is an equally unavoidable thing of the past? What then? Who has the answers? Do the answers actually exist yet?
[N.B. I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Simon Phipps this summer at a dinner party, and I found him delightful company. Though his job is working with Open Source at Sun Microsystems, he also had a lot of nice things to say about Microsoft. A true gentleman.]
I’m happy to report that Simon left the following comment on gapingvoid:
Thank-you for the kind words, Hugh. I’ve a long record of association, observation and then competition with Microsoft, and it’s my conviction that they need to rapidly transition to a position of peace with the concept and community of open source since it is reaching its “tipping point” because of the emerging dominance of the non-US market for them.
I’ve spent three years trying to make Sun behave in ways that make the community-of-communities trust Sun; it seems to me this has not yet become a priority for Microsoft.
Also, unlike Alec, I wouldn’t use the word “buddies” of Sun and Microsoft yet. I’d rather say they have moved to a position of communicating via market-standard co-opetition rather than via the courts.
[UPDATE:] My old high-school friend, SAP consultant Hamish Newlands leaves a thoughtful comment below:
Well, the real issue is exactly the one that the blue monster addresses. “Change the world or go home.“
Now, the two really big cash cows in MS are Windows and Office. The rest is big money, but not in this context, the margins and revenue mainly come from those two areas.
Only, problem is that Office has been feature complete from many people’s perspective since version 2000, and those who require the high end functions in later versions are really not that huge of a market. (Assertion, not fact, but it feels right to me, and I am SAP ERP consultant, so I think I have some feel for what corporations are doing in this area.) So, as software effectively does not wear out, you will keep using the old versions, certainly I do at home.
For Windows the situation is more complex, because the PC comes with the operating system installed, and you do not generally change it. But interesting enough, the latest version, Vista, has been a late, bloated and unpopular failure, to the extent that PC vendors are seeking to allow downgrades to XP, which is unprecedented. Add to that the recent monopoly judgements in Europe, and some of the suggested remedies, and you have some serious thinking to do about how to manage the breakdown of the network effect that keeps it all together.
Think of three things.
Open document formats are now being approved by ISO, allowing interoperability of document formats at last.
IBM is (re) entering the Office Suite market, with a version of Open Office. That says that they think it is a legitimate choice, and the suits will sit up and ask, “why am I paying hundreds of dollars if free is apparently good enough?“
Finally, if the EU continues on its way, MS will have God’s own job to extend the footprint to do more interesting things. Design meetings with an IP lawyer at the table, anyone?
But changing the world has already been done in these areas, arguably, what is happening now is just turd polishing. (Someone once said of six sigma and total quality, “I don’t care how lovingly you polish it, a turd is still a turd.)
Truly disruptive innovation does change the world, but I am not sure where MS is trying that these days. That’s not to say that the company is not clever, motivated, hard-working or whatever, but the goals have not changed significantly for some time.
[UPDATE:] Hamish had a few afterthoughts himself, and published them on his blog: “SAP has Decided to Stop Polishing the Turd”:
And that was the comment that got me thinking: I have been looking at Business byDesign in SAP, and have expressed some reservations about the fact that it is going to have to:* Requires a totally (or at least substantially) different sales model for the SME market
* Requires different implementation and support approaches
* Potentially cannabalises and changes the business model of SAP.At first I thought “neh, bad”. Then I read Hugh’s post, and thought, “Aha. Change the World or Go Home.” I grok the intent now, SAP is stable, big, and we could profitably polish the turd for ever. Or we could disrupt the whole market, change it, and win that game instead, even if it is different from the one we have now. Oracle has already stated it is not going to try it, effectively, so we have new things to do, and new horizons to conquer, even if we do have to learn new tricks.
Took me a while, but I am on board now. Business ByDesign. Let’s go.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s a few people inside Microsoft who can really relate to Hamish’s last point vis-a-vis their own stuff etc.
[UPDATE:] Software analayst, James Governor makes a good point in the comments, as well:
Never mind polishing a turd. Success comes when you allow your product babies to become children, and then young adults that eat their parents. R/3 ate R/2. SAP won. The rest is history.
Software companies are shackled by success.
[Cartoon inspired by Adriana, of course.]
September 23, 2007
[Neville has the backstory here. About 4 – 5 minutes long…]
“It’s not the object that’s important, it’s the conversations that go around it”.
“The future of marketing” indeed. It’s not what you (brand, ad) do to them that matters, it’s what they do to each other.
September 21, 2007
[A view from the London Microsoft offices, taken earlier today. Westminster Cathedral in the background, McDonald’s in the foreground. N.B. I first ate at this McDonald’s when I was twelve years old, with my dad and my sister, the first time I ever visited London. We stayed in a hotel just up the street, so every time I’m in this neighborhood the memories come flooding back to me, for this is the first neighborhood in the city I became familiar with. Somehow visiting Microsoft today seemed to make everything come around full circle, from that Big Mac & Fries all those years ago.]
I was visiting some folk at Microsoft UK today, talking about all things to do with Blue Monsters and social objects. I even brought along a bottle of Blue Monster wine. Though I can’t talk about what the meeting was about, here are some general thoughts I came away with, in no particular order:
1. “Agents of Calcification”. This is a rather snarky term I recently coined to describe the folks in a big company– any big company, not necessarily Microsoft– whose role isn’t to invent, make, or sell stuff, but to maintain and enhance the apparatus of bureaucracy, even at the expense of the business itself. Though these agents can serve a legitimate organizational purpose, when any company has too many of these people, you sadly end up with this cartoon [i.e. a “Big Lump o’ Death”]. The bigger the company gets, the more energy anybody trying to get anything interesting done will have to spend, trying to navigate around these folk. These folk are why I never take on salaried positions at big companies– I’ve never been very good at handling them. Despite what Frederick Winslow Taylor may have said, people are not machines. Form NEVER follows function.
2. The Blue Monster came from a simple observation I made early on in my career as a Microsoft watcher: That most people I’ve met who work there could be making more money elsewhere, and taking a lot less grief from the general public and the media. So what motivates them? The answer to this, in spite of all the baggage that comes with it, is what makes the company so interesting for me.
3. So what happens if the Simon Phipps’s of the world are right? So what happens if the future of software is indeed Open Source? How will Microsoft keep its shareholders happy? What if this recent article is right, and the unavoidable future is free software, and paid software is an equally unavoidable thing of the past? What then? Who has the answers? Do the answers actually exist yet? [N.B. I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Simon Phipps this summer at a dinner party, and I found him delightful company. Though his job is working with Open Source at Sun Microsystems, he also had a lot of nice things to say about Microsoft. A true gentleman.]
4. Are people [both inside and outside the company] ready to start seeing Microsoft not primarily as a software company, but as a media company? And if Microsoft’s business model turns away from paid software, towards advertising and free software, who will be the winners? Who will be the losers?
5. Calling Microsoft “Evil” is too easy. An adjective used by the incurious and intellectually lazy.
6. I find it re-assuring that most Microsofties I meet don’t seem too phased by the fact that I use a MacBook, not a PC. As Bill Gates said recently, “We like Apple, they buy a lot of software from us.“
7. A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with somebody very high up the global Digital Advertising foodchain. He was telling me about how once he was pitching for a ten million dollar account with a large international client. The client basically said, “I love the idea. Let’s do it. But… can you scale it to a hundred million dollar spend?” My friend sadly had to confess that his idea did not scale that large. My takeaway: Advertising clients are lining up to give talented folk their money. The only problem is, this brave new world is still in its infancy, much the same way TV advertising was in its infancy fifty years ago. Unlike traditional advertising media, demand for services exceeds supply. There lies the opportunity, but even the smartest minds in the business are still having a hard time figuring it out.
8. Though Google may be a fierce competitor of my friends in Redmond, in many ways what they’re doing actually makes Microsoft’s job a whole lot easier. Google broke a lot of ice when it came to creating a viable mass market for advertisers [understatement]. Thanks to Google, people ARE willing to spend money on online advertising in a way they simply weren’t before AdSense came along. If Microsoft [or any other company] can add something to the party, with ever more increasingly sophisticated offerings, they stand to gain on a massive scale. The clients are there, ready and willing to spend the big money. But now the onus is on Microsoft et al to provide a good enough reason.
9. As wonderful and interesting as “Web 2.0″ has been to both me and a lot of my friends, the fact is, again, it’s still early days. Again, even the smartest people I know in this space have little idea about what’s going to happen next. Again, like TV advertising in the 1950s, we’re basically making it up as we go along. But that’s what makes it so exciting.
10. I still happily stand by what I said about Microsoft, late last year:
For too long, Microsoft has allowed other people– the media, the competition and their detractors, especially– to tell their story on their behalf, instead of doing a better job of it themselves.
We firmly believe that Microsoft must start articulating their story better– what they do, why they do it, and why it matters– if they’re to remain happy and prosperous long-term.
Let me put it another way: The future of Microsoft, and how Microsoft talks to people in the future, are one and the same. Yes, Virginia, the future of Microsoft is “Conversation.”
