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Patent Medicine: Google Keeps
Innovating to Keep on Maximizing Content Value |
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13 December 2004 |
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An ailing content industry is turning to technology
innovation more than ever to shake itself out of the
doldrums of declining revenues and wobbly business models.
But it's hard to keep up with the Googles of the world that
are out there patenting up a storm to lock in truly
innovative developments in content technologies aimed at
very human-scaled content value. Google's latest patent
filings hope to make it easier for paper content to find
value on the Web in highly innovative ways. Where were the
publishers and aggregators in this mix? Gnashing their
teeth while ignoring the need for fundamental innovations
that lead in forming content value. vContent is not always
an easy equation to balance, but without technology
innovation in the mix it doesn't add up to success. |
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Probably one
of the most interesting companies that I have worked for in my
career was Quotron Systems, Inc. Quotron was once to Wall
Street what Bloomberg is today, a brand name that became
synonymous with high-quality financial content delivery. To
keep up with the surging complexity of delivering realtime
financial market data and information Quotron did what a lot of
companies used to do to get a market advantage: they created
unique computer operating systems tailored specifically to this
task. It was funky stuff - a tape recorder loaded in new code
to the operating system and you could patch data or
instructions in a program without stopping the program or the
machine. In its time these leading-edge capabilities
commanded a premium price. But then came along client/server
computer technology, making it relatively easier and more
cost-effective to program mass-produced, general-purpose
computers to manage real-time financial content. Pretty soon
Quotron's proprietary systems no longer commanded premium
prices, and the company slid from preeminence to acquisition
and then to obscurity (check out the movie
Wall Street, that old fable of greed gone bad, for a few
glimpses of Quotron in action at traders' desks).
In today's content markets publishers
have ceded much of their old technology prowess to technology
suppliers. Instead many players in the publishing business have
slid to the opposite end of the spectrum, turning to a deep
understanding of the human end of the content business to prop
up the value of their content. Thus we see major aggregators
such as LexisNexis and Thomson investing heavily in
workflow-oriented applications, trying keep abreast of Web
portal and content management providers. In many instances
these investments are paying off handsomely and they can be
expected to do so for some time to come. But as detailed in our
paper on
The New Aggregation workflow-oriented software is also
subject to commoditization pressures. Innovation needs to press
on many fronts to find unique value, yet fundamental technology
improvements are well out of the picture for most content
companies.
Not so Google, which continues to develop
patented improvements in information processing to gain
advantages in the content marketplace. Its latest patent is
entitled "Method for searching media," a trite-sounding
development that actually turns out to be fairly profound.
According to Internetnews.com Google is planning via this
patent to enable search of printed material, offer pay-per-view
documents, scanned documents with clickable ads and even offer
the ability for print publishers to swap out ads in digital
copies of their printed pages. To some degree we all get tired
of listening to Google raining on the content industry's
parade, but hey, let's face it: they're the ones coming up with
many of today's fundamental innovations for delivering content
value. Trumped by Google's recent introduction of Google
Desktop, Yahoo! contents itself with acquiring the rights to
distribute its own version of the X1 desktop search tool, with
more intelligent features perhaps but with a significant lag in
performance - and several months of lag in time-to-market, time
in which Google can find the time to iron out technology and
marketing issues.
There's no magic bullet for approaching
technology in the content industry, but here are three key
thoughts to bear in mind when approaching fundamental
innovations:
- Marketing content without
technology leadership is selling out the future of a content
brand. Like American auto makers that disinvested in
technology leadership for decades in favor of marketing savvy
for technologically inferior products, most premium content
brands are setting the stage for their own undoing by shying
away from technology developments that upset well-established
business models and relying on safe adaptations of existing
client-preferred technologies to drive their markets. From
its inception generating value in the content industry has
centered around truly edge-leading technologies, a concept
that brands such as Google, Apple and, yet again, Sony seem
to have grasped firmly. Buying your way into an emerging
technology trend is an increasingly expensive way to approach
the development of high-margin content markets.
- Marketing technology leadership
without content marketing savvy can set the pace - for a
while. Google's continuing strength is its ability to
reach for content value propositions through technology
innovations first without being constrained by how business
models conceive of content value today. Money follows value,
not vice versa, so Google has been wise to demonstrate and
tune the value of its offerings via its lengthy Beta
processes that establish and understand the content value of
a product long before monetization models are developed. Not
many content companies can have the audience and brand value
to allow them to exploit this formula with such adept timing,
though, and in time increased competition in content
innovation may yet cramp this style. Keeping an open mind
about content marketing helps when developing leading content
technologies, but you have to be committed to making up your
mind before both the value and the technology equation slips
from your grip.
- Marketing content and technology
without a deep understanding of human values is a dead end.
As we demonstrate in our
vContent diagram,
it is a mixture of excellence in content development,
technology innovation and understanding human needs through
marketing and research that sets the pace in today's content
industry - none of these can be ignored to gain success in
today's content marketplace. Understanding the need for true
technology innovation from the perspective of true human
innovation is the first key to success for content
technologies. Web-born companies understand this pretty well,
but companies rooted in an earlier era still struggle with
the balance of content, technology and human factors.
Patenting ways of understanding how to deliver human-scaled
value in content has been one of Google's key levers in the
content marketplace - a value that its competitors are
oftentimes hard-pressed to replicate.
So it's hats off to Google for yet again
taking the initiative with ground-breaking content technology
developments to drive the industry forward - innovations that
embrace the full range of vContent on their way to what
promises to be highly successful monetization. No Quotron-like
scrap heap for them any time soon. As for the others...
-
John Blossom
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