Business Tips Bob Young – people are more powerful than ever
Expert business advice from Bob Young, CEO and Founder of Lulu.com, as he talks about how the people are wielding that power and why you should take note:
“The fascinating thing about the internet is the concept that it connects each and every one of us to everyone else. We have never had that before. All our media through human history has been a one to many structure, whether it has been a verbal or in the old Greek days whether it was newspapers and the newspaper editor delivering the news to the masses or whether it was radio. It was always the producer who went and gathered all the facts and edited them down to a nice concise bundle of facts and delivered them to the user and the users heard all the same facts. Businessmen had the same problem.
If you were building a car you would design the car based on what you thought the market needed and you produced a car and a hundred thousand of them. But when you sold one to a customer you sold it from your factory to that one customer. Today the internet connects every single one of your customers, not just to you but to each other. So you produce a lemon of a car and you won’t know where to hide because your customers are going to tell each other about it and then the rest of the world about it.
So it is actually a fundamentally healthy thing form a consumer point of view. It is a of a burden form a businessmen’s point of view because it is no longer good enough to convince the world that you have a better product for them, you actually have to have a better product for them because if you don’t they are all going to find out about it soon enough because they are all going to tell each other. Conversely if you do have a better product suddenly you have these businesses that grow like top seed.
I can tell you the best single positive one that I know of and of course I lived was at Red Hat. At Red Hat this is in the very early days, when Mark Ewing and I were still operating out of our spare bedrooms and yet we won a major industry award for the best operating system, the best server operating system anywhere form this major technology publisher. All the other technology journalists stepped up and took notice of this and said hold on, we know that this Linux phenomenon is going well but Red hats a rinky-dink little outfit in the tobacco fields of North Carolina.
The competition for this was Microsoft, a multi billion dollar world’s most profitable corporation Microsoft. It’s son Microsystems who were doing ten million dollars a year ad IBM who were doing eighty billion a year, its Apple Computer, it’s Novel.
How do you pick little twenty five person you know few million dollars a year Red Hat as the best operating system? That has got to be a David versus Goliath story. It was actually the reverse.
Our engineering team was bigger than the biggest engineering team at the biggest technology company at the time. Because again we had harnessed all of the engineers across the world who needed a better operating system and by giving them away all of the code and giving them away their right to make modifications to the code, we had a bigger engineering team than even Microsoft and IBM could afford to assemble and yet there were only twenty five of us down in the tobacco fields in North Carolina at the time.
It was to me the winning of the award was kind of fun, it was when you had a beer after work when you start thinking about the ramifications of what this means that you really started to own in an very emotional way that the internet really does change everything.
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Duration : 0:4:21
The internet is …
The internet is taking for granted a lot.. it’s not until your internet goes down for maintenance even for an hour in your day – that you realise how dependent we actually are on it. I like Bobs style, seems very down to earth and he even wears a cap on interview ha!
I can’t even …
I can’t even remember what it was like to not have the internet! The internet is the best way of communicating for both business and socially, I don’t know where we would be without it!
Really like the way …
Really like the way that Bob Young makes his point – amazing to think just how powerful the internet is!
re selling – that …
re selling – that is a great point
Bob hit it on the …
Bob hit it on the nose…the internet is an amazing communication tool. Imagine how communication will change within the next ten years and how on to it businesses will need to be.
Yep, Bob is great. …
Yep, Bob is great. Great thoughts, great delivery. He’s someone worth keeping track of!
I agree – that …
I agree – that point was made by Shel Israel as well. In fact it may actually be an advantage to be smaller because the big guys move too slowly.
Bob has an engaging …
Bob has an engaging personality. The exciting point that he makes is that the internet empowers any business of any size to succeed and that marketing messages moving forward will need to reflect true value and attributes – or the product will fall over quickly.
I think the way bob …
I think the way bob explained how the internet had changed things for business was great i have never thought that way before.
I personally love linux based operating systems for servers and home systems.I never knew redhat had won an award over Microsoft that is so cool.
This is a really cool relaxed interview and i agree with jitty slitter that bob is my personal favorite
I thought Bob’s …
I thought Bob’s business experience was interesting. I enjoyed the first 2 minutes but then thought he did ramble on a little. He got the message through to me that internet is the way we need to sell our business in the future.
I think Bob’s …
I think Bob’s business experience is a great story in itself. I am hoping that the shift in power to the consumer will mean that we have more quality products to choose from in the future.
The internet really …
The internet really has changed everything, especially in business. Bob is such an enthusiastic person to listen to. Awesome
Thanks to the …
Thanks to the internet, consumers do have more power today.
Like Bob Young says:
“Its no longer good enough to convince the world that you have a better product for them – You actually have to have a better product for them” – What a perfect way to sum it up
I like what Bob has …
I like what Bob has to say. The grapevine is alive and well, but its gone from local to global. Great for the consumer
Bob Young is my …
Bob Young is my personal favourite yourBusinessChannel expert at the moment… Great that he is so into it!
This interview reminds me of an article I read recently about the record industry and downloads… it’s not just about one to one online conversation, its also distribution >> Many to Many distribution. HUGE!