"Best Business Model in the World"
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 1:55AM
"It's a new service called Prezi. And it's insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software" In the last few weeks we had many positive references on international news sites blogs and other media, but Umair Haque's post on Harvard Business Publishing blog is one of the best reviews we ever had.
Umair - the director of Havas Media Lab and founder of Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique for blue chip companies and media industries believes that the new and most effective business model is simply to create "insanely great" stuff. Everybody's searching desperately for business model innovation - he adds, but "the 90s and 00s have been full of companies churning out the same old lame, toxic junk and trying to sell it in new ways — instead of detoxifying it."
He believes "stuff that's insanely great does what Prezi does — amazes, enriches, and inspires. That kind of stuff doesn't need a hard sell, a new market, or a convoluted product range. It just needs to be."
Check out Umair's presentation on Vimeo!
Umair Haque at BRITE '09 conference from BRITE Conference on Vimeo.
We are very proud of this review and hope that we can continue developing such a product.
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Reader Comments (4)
i fully agree with this review and subscribing for software online is something i rarely do but i have been tremendously disappointed with the delivery / downloads.
the product is great but simple things like getting reliable servers, getting Desktop to work and downloading the software seems to be really impossible!
what a shame....
Totally agree. look at what I did in three days! If you have a minute. And still using free.
I'm reading the Prezi blog archive in chronological order - difficult to do, but a lot of fun.
“It’s a new service called Prezi. And it’s insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software.” I can echo this story exactly. But Mr. Umair is not strictly correct in his analysis.
For example (watching the video) "people don't want ads"? Totally incorrect. And Prezi is exactly positioned to assist people with a very pressing concern, which is that they really, really want ads. Don't believe me? That's because you don't understand thick value.
Thin value is "create[ing] 'insanely great' stuff". Thin values are core values. Prezi is a core value, implemented. But core values - cores - are thin. A core is an axis. It is two dimensional.
What makes a value thick is layering.
A core value is a tool for doing a particular thing. Many cores are assembled into a cord. Thick value is the evolutionary vector of a cord. According to my analysis, that vector, of which your product is a core, is creating AN insanely great THING: i.e., the internet.
Cores become cords by interacting with each other. Your product implements a core value: zoom. I would suggest, as a planning exercise, taking a rather urgent look at as many other core values on the internet, and in the world, as you can think of, and discussing how Prezis can interact with them.
Tom, thanks for this great thinking.