The Facebook Paradox (and why I am slightly behind our time)
I was a Panasonic employee in a past life. I spent a long time in Matsushita Electric Industrial/ Video Systems Division (MEI/VSD for short) in Osaka, Japan. I was there right about the time when the Japanese yen was rising fast against the dollar, exports were weak and Nihon Keisai Shimbun (WSJ of Japan) had editorials on the death of lifetime employment. Yahoo! and Netscape were new, SGI was the it company and Sysbase still competed with Oracle.In the mean time, Sony and especially Sharp were constantly kicking our behind in almost every consumer electronic category, coming up with one hit product after another. We on the other hand were going through one blunder after another while trying to imitate Sony (MCA/Universal or 3DO anyone?) - which eventually led to the ousting of the CEO.
Although it has since recovered, Panasonic / MEI - a shadow of its old self - is no longer the worlds largest consumer electronics company. It does not ambitiously compete in every possible category as it once did. Panasonic’s current tag line is “Panasonic - ideas for life”. While I was in Japan though, our tag line used to be “Panasonic - slightly ahead of our time”. That particular phrase used to bother me a lot, I used to joke that we were actually “slightly behind our time”. The conformist attitude so apparent in our slogan emanated from every part of the organization - too scared to take big bets, too scared to be different, too scared to stick out! We were so busy imitating, we forgot to listen to our customers.We forgot to innovate, we forgot to take risks.
A couple days ago over lunch at Torrafazione, I was complaining to Bijan how silly it was to get an e-mail from Facebook to go check my inbox at Facebook. An e-mail to check an e-mail, now that’s silly. I signed up to Facebook not too long ago to check out all the hoopla on Facebook apps. I have a whooping 28 friends and I go to the site at least once a day, I sign up to groups / apps, whatever - I should get it but I don’t!
Bijan, probably amused but in a straight face tells me, “Those kids live in Facebook, they don’t have e-mail. That’s their communication tool…” and I realize I am indeed slightly behind our time.