PE4_Dabbling with Dabbleboard

After many hours of thinking about how I could use a Web 2.0 tool as the basis of my Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario, I decided to go back to Dabbleboard and try to figure out how the students in my executive MBA class might use this tool to share their visual thinking skills. Over the next four weeks we will be reading and discussing Dan Roam's book called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.  For next week I have assigned Part I in the book, along with a Fortune article by Copeland and Weintraub (2010) entitled "Google: The Search Party is Over."  I asked my students to apply some of the visual thinking techniques outlined in Roam's book and draw at least one diagram that highlights some of the issues raised in the article about Google.

Screen shot of Dan Roam's book

Earlier today I emailed my students and asked them to use Dabbleboard to share their diagrams with me and the members of their study group.  During class on Friday, January 21st we will view each others' diagrams and discuss the various types of problems confronting Google as its search business slows down and the company needs additional sources of revenue.

Dan Roam argues that all problems can be classified into one of six categories -

• Who and what? - problems that deal with things, people and roles
• How much? - problems that require measuring and counting
• When? - problems associated with scheduling and timing
• Where? - problems regarding direction and how things fit together
• How? - problems about how things influence one another
• Why? - problems related to seeing the big picture

I decided to use Dabbleboard to create my own diagram that reflects a where problem that was mentioned in the article about Google.  Now that the growth of Google's core business in search has slowed down, Copeland and Weintraub (2010) suggest that Google must figure out from where its next big source of revenue will come.  I created this drawing in Dabbleboard to depict the possible paths that Google can follow, at least according to Copeland and Weintraub (2010).

Dabbleboard Diagram - Where problem at Google

The first path is the one that Google appears to be taking right now, as illustrated in its recent acquisitions of YouTube, Double Click and Ad Mob, for $1.6 billion, $3.1 billion and $750 million, respectively.  This path continues Google's reliance on selling advertising as its primary source of revenue and profitability.  According to Copeland and Weintraub (2010), in 2009, approximately 91% of Google's revenue and 99% of its profit came from selling display advertising on its various Internet properties.

More recently Google has entered the mobile Internet business with the release of the popular Android operating system for mobile phones.  Unfortunately, at least according to Copeland and Weintraub (2010), Google's decision to share the operating system at no cost to mobile operators (e.g. AT&T,  Verizon, US Cellular, Sprint and T-Mobile) means that the company will continue to rely on revenues generated through advertising, rather than licensing fees.  Ultimately, what this means is that Google has not been able to diversify its sources of revenue beyond the collection of fees from advertisers.  I agree with Copeland and Weintraub's (2010) conclusion that Google's stock will continue to decline in value and its growth will slow down even more if the company can not find new sources of revenue that are independent of advertisers.

In this class (ETC) we have explored using a few Google applications, such as iGoogle, Blogger, Google docs, and Google forms, etc., but most of us have not paid any licensing fees to use these applications.  Google does license a suite of productivity applications to companies in an effort to get them to switch from providers of other office applications, such as the Microsoft Office suite, but these licensing fees only provided approximately $350 million in revenue during 2010 (Copeland and Weintraub, 2010).  I doubt that Google will be able to gain much market share in the office applications market, no matter how low they set the price for licenses per employee.

I agree, to some extent with Copeland and Weintraub (2010), that Google needs to figure out how to tap into the popularity of social networking, which in many cases has eliminated a user's need to turn to Google to search for product recommendations or answers to questions that can be answered just as easily by posting a comment on Facebook or Twitter and getting immediate feedback from Friends.  I am not sure what the answer is for Google's where problem, but Dabbleboard helped me to diagram the different options and make the dilemma more visual.  It will be interesting to share my diagram with my students on Friday and see how their diagrams differ.  I guess you'll have to come back at the end of the week to see my video documenting what happens when Dabbleboard goes to the eMBA classroom at UW-Milwaukee.

References

Copeland, M. V., & Weintraub, S. (2010). Google: The search party is over. (cover story). Fortune, 162(3), 58-67.   

Roam, D. (2009). The back of the napkin: Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures. New York: Portfolio.