Did Flickr Really Miss the Instagram Opportunity?

In the evening on Christmas Day, Kellan Elliott-McCrea put together an interesting response to the question: "Why did Flickr miss out on the mobile opportunity Instagram is winning?" leveraging insights from Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. 

Kellan, who was a software architect at Flickr, begins to paint a picture using Clay's disruption framework that positions Yahoo! (owner of Flickr) as the incumbent in online photo sharing, and Instagram as the disruptive entrant to the market.



After reading his answer, here’s my take on the issue.

Did Flickr’s Management Team Miss Something?

How could it be so hard for a site like Flickr (a leader in the online photo sharing space) to break into mobile photo sharing? Is it simply a case of bad management or are there other dynamics in play?

Reading Kellan's brief account of the strategic meetings in which they "spent *years* debating whether or not to build iPhone apps/iPhone optimized sites or bet on a HTML5/multi-device strategy," makes me think that their strategy was configured in a way that would lead them to kill ideas related to the mobile photo sharing space, and here’s why.



Clay's past observations of the behavior of incumbents reveals that the executive leadership's decision making process was most likely focused on, "how will these new mobile platforms make Flickr even more attractive to our power users (help them upload more photos, create more 'Sets,' share more photos), or turn more visitors into power users (users who upload frequently or subscribe to a 'Pro Account')?" History and experience has proven that successful management teams have grown businesses by creating products and services that perform better than anything else in a consumer's consideration set. In short, Flickr's management team was doing what any good management team should be doing.

To gain a deeper understanding of what the management team at Flickr considers important to its users, we can look at the top three bullet points of Flickr's Pro offering:

• Unlimited uploads and storage.
• Unlimited sets and collections.
• Access to your original files.

To paraphrase what the management team would say to a user: “We know that you take a lot of photos on your camera and we don’t want to limit what you upload. We also know that organization is important so you can find the photos later. Lastly, we want to preserve quality; we won’t over-compress your photos and force you to store a second copy somewhere else.”

Flickr wants to be the online version of your old photo albums. Therefore, the more focused the management team is on enhancing the product so that it does this job well, the more successful it will be.

Now that we have a basis for understanding how Flickr arrived at this point, the question is “where do they go from here?”

To answer this, we will employ a framework called “jobs to be done,” which helps us explain how consumers pull products into their lives to do a “job” based on the situation that they’re in. A common strategic misstep is to assume that two products in the same category (e.g. online photo sharing) inherently compete for consumer attention. But when we start to understand how situational context drives consumption, we often begin to see that they don’t compete at all.

Understanding the Jobs of Photo Sharing

Let me archive and share my history.
A look back at the recent history of photo-taking behavior in aggregate gives us a feel for how Flickr came to be, and how our past behavior relates to the value that it provides.

The Film Era

• Fewer photos taken.
• 99% of photos viewed only once then stored away in a shoebox.
• A select few photos chosen to be added to a photo album.

The Digital Era

• Many more photos taken. If I took 24 photos in a session in the film era, I’m taking 240 in the digital era.
• Space is no longer a premium. Almost all photos can be added to a digital album without cost.
• This leads to more photos being viewed more than once.

Flickr’s model relates to the fact that people attribute value to the photographs that they take and the memories that they capture. The value is realized in the moment that the photo is viewed in the online album. “Help me save and catalog my memories, and let me look back and enjoy them in the future, and share my history with others.”

Let me share the moment I’m in.
Conversely, the value of Instagram is more about the present than it is the past. “Help me share the experience I’m having right now.” Or, “I wish you were here to experience this with me.” The value in this situation is realized at the moment that the person snaps a picture and adds it to the stream on Instagram, thus sharing their current experience.

If Flickr’s value is realized from the web to the person viewing the photo, Instagram’s value is realized from the mobile phone to the Instagram live sharing stream.

Flickr’s Next Move
Having a clear understanding of the consumer jobs of photo sharing will help guide Flickr as they decide how to address the growing mobile photo-sharing category.

Rolling out a stream-based service such as Instagram to complement Flickr's current album-based service would require the creation of a new value system for the service so that it could avoid the perils that their past skunk-works project experienced.

Does this also position Instagram as an attractive acquisition target for Flickr? Acquiring it and allowing the team to operate autonomously would enable it to continue its growth without subjecting the product to Flickr's existing product success criteria that has hindered mobile offerings in the past (such as Flickr's current mobile offering, and the skunk-works project that Kellan refers to).

Maybe in the near future we'll all have a "My Life in Pictures" album in our Flickr account, which will contain a stream of all of the photos we've taken from our mobile phones using Instagram.

-- Written in conjunction with Bob Moesta & Brian Tolle of the Re-Wired Group.

The Anti-Creativity Checklist

Here’s a question for you: If you had to come up with an “anti-creativity checklist” for your organization... a checklist guaranteed to stifle imagination, innovation, and out-of-box thinking... a checklist designed specifically for people who want nothing to do with disruptive change... what would your checklist look like?

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

Crystallizing a Future U.S. Auto Market: Brave New World

A guest-post by Brian Tolle.

May 2017

Well, I finally did it. I bought a new car. Not that I needed one – my old 2007 Chrysler 300 was holding up fine (it helps that it only has 80,000 miles on it after 10 years) but the new model at Target looked so great with great gas mileage and the usual reliability, that I couldn’t pass it up. Of course I’m keeping my Chrysler since it is a collector’s item but now I’ve got an updated car that’s fun to drive and didn’t cost a fortune to buy.

I know I could have gone to Wal-Mart and gotten the same car for less. Even Nordstrom’s sells cars now but they have the Cadillacs from the old GM operations. Not quite sure about the quality. Compare that to the Target and Wal-Mart models. Magna of Canada makes both cars. Three years after the collapse of GM and Chrysler, they came out with a private label business model for cars. So I knew from my research that 80% of the Target and Wal-Mart cars are exactly identical – but it was that 20% that made all the difference to me. The Target car is fun to look at and drive (and it was 20% cheaper than the price I paid for my Chrysler ten years ago – with much better quality). Compare that to the Wal-Mart version, the Wally, and I was more than happy to pay more to get the same car, theoretically, but a completely different car in my eyes. There’s something about the look of the Target car – classic but not stuffy, serious but with a certain irreverence – just like me. And I think it’s great that Target didn’t brand the car – no nameplate. There was an article in Wired magazine where the Target marketing guy said,

From the very beginning, we felt the design of the car should “say” Target but the buyer’s reaction should be “that’s me.”

Of course the way Target displays its cars is fun. Their in-store display with their station wagon model and all the stuff for a picnic out in the country really stood out…almost like you could step right into that life and all of it could be yours. Those Target merchandising folks know what they’re doing. And just the other day I saw in my local Meijer their car version. And wouldn’t you know, these cars scream Midwest.

It couldn’t have been easier to actually buy the car. About two years ago I saw that Target was offering a premium Target charge card for a higher interest rate but the deal was that up to 1/3 of the price of a Target car could be financed through shopper rewards points. Since I always pay my monthly bill in full, it was a no-brainer. It took me two years to save up enough points for the sedan model I had been eyeing. The rest of the cost of the car I paid out of savings that I had put aside through the ING Direct promotion with Target. So I had my “financing” ready to go even before I showed up at the store.

Checking on the Target website, I knew which models were in the store and I could put a 24 hour hold on any model. I chose the blue metallic sedan that morning online and showed up ready to pick it up. I also set up the car insurance online through one of Target’s insurance partners so that when I arrived at the store and swiped my Target charge card, the insurance coverage was instantly activated. The only thing that slowed me down was talking with the Target employee. They hire local community college students who are in the auto mechanics program so they clearly love cars and talking about them to the customers. Otherwise, all I needed to do at the store was sign a few documents and drive away.

What’s also very cool is the plug-in diagnostics feature of the car. Part of the package I bought with this car was unlimited diagnostics. So I can pull up to any Target store, plug in the online diagnostics to the outside port on my car and it will give me a reading of what needs work and how serious the issue is. It also gives me the option of scheduling a service appointment with one of their partners (I think it’s Jiffy Lube) for an exact day and time. A friend of mine did this and noticed Jiffy Lube has an optical scanner when you pull into the lot that tells the mechanics who you are and what you need. In and out fast -- sweet.

And just think…I used to dread going to buy a car.

What would you add to this picture of a future U.S. auto market to make it even more real?


About Brian Tolle
Brian Tolle is President of The Tolle Group and also authors Corporate X-Ray, a blog that looks at the impact of corporate culture in the business world. He has a Masters of Science degree in Organization Development from Loyola University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from The Catholic University of America.

Selling Walkmans in an iPod World

Selling Walkmans in an iPod World

Posted by Bob Moesta @ The ReWired Group

John Jantsch | April 16th, 2009 - 07:07 AM

You want to sell what you’ve got to sell, but what if that’s no longer what the market wants to buy. The Sony Walkman (for those of you under 30) was once the thing. Rich kids and cool kids had them and then everyone had them. But, that was yesterday, now it’s an iPod world.

So, the question is, are you still trying to peddle you industry’s version of the Walkman or are you willing to take a look at every aspect of your business, your products, your services, and your processes in an effort to give the market what it demands.

When times are good, people will spend their money on things they don’t really need, but right now, consumers are businesses are pretty darn focused on getting the most bang for every penny spent. Now is the time to make sure that your products align with that kind of thinking.

Let me give you an example of Walkman vs. iPod business models.

Traditional medical practice

Walkman - you make an appointment through your insurance company, mountain of paperwork, doctor makes you wait 30 minutes past appointment time, doctor pretends to listen, discounts treatment options you’ve found on Internet as a hoax, prescribes several medications to treat symptoms without any discussion about prevention diet or exercise.

Neighborhood clinic

iPod - same day appointment, paperwork online, massage therapy and green tea while you wait, appointment on time, discussion about overall health, encouraged to explore combination of traditional medicine and alternative therapies.

So, you’re not in the medical business - whatever industry you are in, I assure you there are standard practices that no longer mirror what the ideal customer is looking for - find out what they tolerate and blow it up.

No matter what you make, fix, ship or sell in this day and age, what you really have to offer to differentiate is the customer experience. You are in the customer exciting business and that comes about only when you can put away everything that you assume about your business and products and focus 100% of your strategic attention on understanding just exactly what the market wants today.

Diagnosing Non-Consumption

A post by guest-blogger Brian Tolle.

Bob Moesta and I took some time recently to digest an article (Recent Shifts in Place of Service for Noninvasive Diagnostic Imaging: Have Hospitals Missed an Opportunity?) which appeared in the Journal of the American College of Radiology this past month.

The article talks about how from 1996 to 2006, private physician offices saw a 63% jump in Medicare noninvasive diagnostic imaging (NDI), emergency departments a 77% increase, while hospital inpatient facilities saw only a 15% increase and outpatient facilities a 25% increase. As the title implies, the authors took the approach that hospitals dropped the ball in keeping this market share and now need to scramble to regain some of it.

The more Bob and I analyzed this, the more we suspected this may not be a story of market share being stolen away but the market expanding by tapping into the non-consumption demographic – those folks who don’t follow up with prescribed diagnostic imagings because it’s inconvenient to get to the hospital after the appointment with their doctor. We suspect that the convenience of getting the procedure done right then and there in the physician’s office is driving a good percentage of the increase in the physician office.

If this is the case, should hospitals spend limited resources on playing this game with little or no chance of winning? Do they “jump in” to the outpatient NDI market or “jump out” by partnering with physician practices?

Tell us what you think…where we may be off base or on target.

About Brian Tolle
Brian Tolle is President of The Tolle Group and also authors Corporate X-Ray, a blog that looks at the impact of corporate culture in the business world. He has a Masters of Science degree in Organization Development from Loyola University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from The Catholic University of America.

Treehouse Video: An Intro to Jobs-To-Be-Done

Jobs-To-Be-Done | An Introduction on Vimeo.

This video will give you a brief introduction to the marketing and innovation framework called Jobs-To-Be-Done.

It provides some insight about how situational context will lead a person to add certain products or services to a consideration set based on the Technical Job Requirements. We also explore how anxiety plays a roll in how a decision to consume is made. We wrap up by talking about how to gather the data that is needed to evaluate the Job that a product does.

Let us know what you think! If you have questions or ideas about how people are hiring your product, we'd love to hear them!.

Clay Christensen on Bank Innovation

In this video on BigThink.com, Clay Christensen discusses how looking to emerging markets could help the banks' current situation.

He points out how credit scoring has had an impact on the banking situation and how larger banks were disrupted with the widespread use of automated credit scoring by non-bank companies.

He concludes by exploring an interesting and unique solution to the banks' problem.