A lot of this is in some ways stating the obvious but I am writing this down to flesh out my own thoughts on product integration
Once (When I was little high on a certain fermented beverage in a certain geographical region where I should not have had access to it) I wrote down “Brands need to be like water.” The next day I had no recollection about why the hell I would write something like that. After all, brands are supposed to be in-your-face, supported by money-wasting crappy ads that hog to be top-of-mind of the customer (Kindly let me know any jargon I may have missed out on). Water seldom is that. Somewhere between that day and today, I managed to figure out what I meant and wrote a post on How brands should be like water . However, given the kind of integration that is being witnessed across the web-business landscape, I’m beginning to believe that products should be like water too ! What do I mean? Simple. That brands need to be malleable, flexible, at times colorless and odorless, seeping through every opportunity gap that presents itself, at times invisible to the user but more importantly, but at the same time being indispensable and omnipresent.
That was the Google strategy. It wasn’t just about the relevance of the results but its omnipresence and its invisibility. Whether it was in terms of its toolbar integration with Firefox, its allowing web content developers to embed the Google search bar on their site to peruse site-relevant content or its Google Desktop Search. The beauty is that whether you get on to a website, or on Firefox or your desktop, the Google logo is not flashed in your face, distracting you. But the moment you decide you need to search or locate any content, the first thing you see is the Google search bar.
That is its brilliance and its simplicity. The product takes on the form of toolbar, a webpage or an application depending on how the user uses it. The core function is not compromised in any way. And you never really realize your Googling something (as against searching for the content; Googling – searching using Google; searching- well, just searching) until you get the results page. This obviously first started with Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer so beautifully that it triggered its anti-competitive suits. Google has learnt the real lesson behind the anti-competitive suits and has integrated its products into other non-competing company’s products as well. It’s all about morphing the physical or the interface aspects of your products so that users do not have to differentiate between two products during the handoff from one to another. That drives adoptibility. And products that do morphing from being a stand-alone product to a feature (in its GUI implementation) in another product/ platform will win !
That’s why Facebook’s launch of Social Graph API created such a threat for Google. It had taken a leaf out of Google’ page and implemented it brilliantly. Stay out of the user’s face until they wanted to share the article/ info and then accentuate the page’s sharing abilities by allowing Facebook users to “like” the article and hence share it with all their Facebook friends. While that implementation resulted in more discoverable kind of information (as against Google’s search that allowed user to locate information they were already interested in as against discovering new information), it was a setback for Google.
Similarly, I kept reading about this tie-up between Facebook and Skype but just couldn’t put my finger on what exactly what was blowing my mind about it. I knew it was there but I just couldn’t place it. However, I was just re-reading my post on Mobile Money (the part about how mobile money could replace online transactions) when it hit me: Integrating one application as a feature into another product may incredibly be the fastest mode for adoption. For example, in this case, Skype would just be one more way of reaching out to your friends (some kind of click to phone a friend) along with the public “Write on Wall” or the more private “Send Message” options. Increase your adoption by being partly invisible as an add-on feature. Especially since, Skype makes its money on the volume flow rather than the number of installations, it makes perfect sense.
I think that’s the path for mobile money and adoption of similar technologies as well, especially in developing countries. Money transfers in Africa piggy-backed upon the existing businesses of transferring airtime between phones. Mobile money payments through M-Pesa work on existing USSD implementation (The technology implementation is different but the user interface is the same). Any new mobile products launched will have to have atleast one similar adoption strategy. Tie-up with an existing product/ service to enhance it. For example, in cases of Paymate, one of India’s mobile payment companies, it has tied up with Big Bazaar wherein along with payment options such as MasterCard, Visa, etc., you also have the option of using PayMate to make the payment. However, we don’t see the same thing happening on m-commerce platforms which are not Mobile Web based (i.e. service delivery through the mobile infrastructure and platform instead of using the mobile version of a website ). Mobile money is an obvious example but this concept is and will continue to increase in criticality with respect to all aspects of the mobile platform.And this is not relegated to such making your site or your product more “social” with Facebook and Twitter buttons for better “spread through word-of-mouth” but also directly enhancing the interaction of the user with the host site.
