Google's forbidden fruit to Iranians

The photo that is used by the online petition inviting Google to provide its services to Iranians

By: Houman Kabiri Parvizi

Mobile Editor

Computer and Communications World Magazine
Persian version is available via this link


On Tuesday 28 FEB, 2012 and during the Q&A session after Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt,  key notes at the mobile world congress in Barcelona, an Iranian journalist, Hessam Armandehi, asked Schmidt: “Why Google has limited its services to Iranian users?” and whether it would lift blocks on the company’s services in Iran.
Schmidt who seemed was not aware of those limitations, consulted the company’s lawyer off-stage and answered: “limitations were part of the laws in the US, apologizing for Google’s inability to act differently.”

Is that true?

The act that Schmidt and Google’s lawyers are referring to is: “IRANIAN TRANSACTIONS REGULATIONS” (31 C.F.R. PART 560) which is stating that:

“Except as otherwise authorized pursuant to this part, [….] the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply, directly or indirectly, from the United States, or by a United States person, wherever located, of any goods, technology, or services to Iran or the Government of Iran is prohibited, including the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply of any goods, technology, or services to a person in a third country […] is prohibited.”

As it stated in this regulation there are some exceptions: “Except as otherwise authorized pursuant to this part”. Some authorizations have been made by the US government so far. For instance on 8th March 2010, The US Department of Treasury eased sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Sudan to allow exports by US companies of services related to Web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, chat, social networking and photo- and movie-sharing.

According to the amendment:

“The new general licenses authorize exports from the United States or by U.S. persons to persons in Iran and Sudan of services and software related to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, including web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, and chat; social networking; and photo and movie sharing. Today's amendments also provide that specific licenses may be issued on a case-by-case basis for the exportation of services and software used to share information over the Internet that not covered by the general licenses.”

However, the amendment limits this allowance to free software only:

“To qualify for these authorizations, such services and software must be publicly available at no cost to the user.”

Nearly one year after this amendment, on 19 January 2011, Google made three products available to Iranian users (Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome) and not surprisingly added Chrome extensions to the allowed list right after Schmidt’s speech at Barcelona on 28 Feb 2012.


Which Google’s products and services are not available to Iranians?
There are plenty of Google products and services which are not available in Iran including Android Market ( Now part of Google Play), Google Chrome (OS), Google Mobile and Google Lab as well as some of the advertising services such as Google Adwords and Google Adsense. Recently an online petition by Iranian users titled: “Don’t be Evil, let Iranians use your software!” invited Google to lift those limitations on Iranian users. The petition has been signed by more than 5000 people so far.

The focus of the petition is on Android market and Chrome extensions which the last one has been made available as of 28^th February 2012.

Why Google is not providing more products and services to Iranians?

Android is the most popular smartphone operating system in the world which is being developed and distributed by Google. Along with the Android, the supplementary service which is providing myriad applications to the users is running by Google as well: The Android Market. As of February 2012, Android Market has 450000 applications which nearly 70% of them are free to download. Also, Majority of applications in the Android Market are related to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, including web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, and chat; social networking; and photo and movie sharing which are allowed to be exported to Iran according to the latest amendment by the US Department of Treasury. In addition Google can provide even more services and products by seeking specific licenses according to the amendment.
Despite Schmidt’s argument pinpointing the US regulations as the cause for those limitations, those numbers and facts are leading to some obstacles that might be the reason for Google’s restricting strategy against Iranian users.
In order to provide access to those free applications from Android Market Google needs a department to review all of the applications and check the compatibility with the US department of treasury requirements mentioned in the amendment. On the other hand, Google cannot earn anything from Iran because it does not have any source of income in Iran. More than 96% of Google’s earnings come from advertising which is not allowed in Iran according to the US sanction regulations. So when there is not any incentive, why should the company spend lots of money for a department to review more than 300000 applications and monitor the new applications for those requirements?
So it seems the US regulation is just an excuse for not providing products and services to Iranians by Google. The reason behind this decision would be this fact that Google cannot earn anything, even 1$, in return. However, it is not really good answer in a press conference Q&A session! Is it?

Techno Yoda insight: The "Integrated User Experience” a tough but promising task for the new Sony CEO

Sony is practically starting to gather its online services under the Sony Entertainment Network, SEN,  umbrella. Effecting from 7th February 2012, Sony Playstation Network, PSN, IDs will be transformed to SEN IDs. In September Sony announced its new "Integrated User Experience” strategy by introducing the Sony Entertainment Network and revealed its plan for combining and re-branding  its two hacked services Qriocity and Playstation Network under one roof, SEN.
Now it seems the strategy is progressing to the practical phase and at this stage the company is unifying more than 77 million user IDs of the PSN users with the current SEN IDs. However, The PSP users are not included at this stage. This will allow users to have access to the other SEN services such as Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited channels of the SEN with their unified IDs. In other word, through this change SEN will gain more than 77 million new users instantly! This number of users is lagging far behind more than 200 million users of iTunes, but it can be a good start for SEN.

The change is taking place ahead of the PS Vita launch and also the top management changes on April.
On Wednesday February 1, 2012, the Japanese giant, named Kazuo Hirai as its new president and CEO, succeeding Sir Howard Stringer, The Welsh-born American Citizen and the first foreign (Non-Japanese) CEO of its history.
Stringer’s right hand and one of the “Four Musketeers” who is promoted to lead the loss making giant has different and huge challenges ahead. Apart from the $2.9 bln loss and the ailing TV business, he should take care of the “Integrated User Experience” for network enabled devices including TVs, tablets, Walkman music players and specially smartphones to fight the rapidly growing iTunes, which has been one off the most important success factors of iPhone and iPad and can be a huge threat for the future of Sony. iTunes enables users to download music, apps, games, ebooks and more while SEN will provide music, video and game downloads and on demand services.
Apart from Sony customers, some of the multi-platforms supporting SEN services will be available to other manufacturers’ Android based devices as well. Consequently SEN is targeting wider range of audiences than iTunes which is dedicated to the Apple products users.
Although the new strategy for the SEN has covered three main pillars of the company’s entertainment services, it has not suggested any solution to provide ebooks and apps yet. Also, integrating other online services of the company under the SEN has not yet been announced. Apart from the current online services provided by SEN , Sony is providing several other online services such as:

•      Reader Store which provides ebooks download services for Sony eReaders and tablets.
•       Playnow by Sony Ericsson which covers downloading mobile contents for Sony Ericsson mobile phones such as applications, games, ringtones, music , videos and wallpapers.
• Myplay by Myplay.com which provides video, music, photo and mobile download related to the Sony Music’s artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Usher, Justin Timberlake, etc.
• Online services provided by Sony Pictures such as trailers and mobile games download.
• Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), which provides online games and entertainment.

These are just some examples and Sony has several other network based services for its regional websites as well.
Bringing all of these services under SEN roof is a challenging and difficult task but if Sony can make it, it can be a huge threat for Apple and its iTunes.

How developing a clear and distinct Brand Personality can help companies to overcome the challenge of differentiation in the Smartphone industry

Smart phone industry and the challenge of differentiation

Smart phone industry sub-sector is one of the most competitive markets and has one of the fastest growing rates in the global IT sector. Now a day, the market has shifted from devices and hardware towards ecosystems, a combination of hardware, software and also online services. The major ecosystems according to the latest research by Gartner are: Android, powered by Google with 52.5% market share, Symbian by Nokia (Transferred to Accenture from April 2011) with 16.9% market share, iOS by Apple with 15% market share and Windows Phone by Microsoft by 1.5% market share. As Nokia has stated that is phasing out Symbian and has chosen Windows phone as its main platform for its smart phones, the main rivalry is taking place between three main ecosystems in the smart phone industry, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Apart from iOs which has just one vendor, Apple, two other major ecosystems, Android and Windows phone have been used by several manufacturers across the world such as Nokia, Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and LG. The main challenge for these manufacturers is to convince consumers that their product is more sophisticated and can provide more benefits than others. However, many analysts believe that it is getting harder for consumers to distinguish a smart phone brand from another within a given ecosystem due to the similarity in the operating system, software, available applications and the relevant benefits. So finding another source of differentiation apart from hardware design and product outline or any other functional factors seems important and even vital within the smart phone industry. 

Brand Personality

The brand personality is a construct which is related to the emotional content of a brand and concentrates on what the brand says about the consumers and how they feel being associated with it. Through brand personality consumers will be able to recognise the value its stands for. It also acts as purchase motivator since consumers prefer brands whose values reflects those they respect. It can help provide needed differentiation by making the brand interesting and memorable, stimulating consideration of constructs such as energy and youthfulness, and enforcing brand-consumer relationship.

Dr Jennifer Aaker defined brand personality as: “the set of human characteristics associated with a brand”. 

She proposed the Brand Personality Scale consisted of five dimensions and 42 items:

Sincerity (down to earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful)

•           Excitement (daring, spiritual, imaginative, and up to date)

•           Competence (reliable, intelligent, and successful)

•           Sophistication (upper class and charming)

•           Ruggedness (outdoorsy and though)

Although Aaker's brand personality scale has been used by many scholars and has been the most popular scale to measure brand personality so far, it failed to fulfil some of the most important applications. First and foremost, several cross-cultural researches, including two researches by Aaker herself, proved that some of the dimensions cannot by generalised in different cultures. Also as Azoulay and Kapferer (2003) argued,  Aaker’s brand personality scale may not measure really brand personality, but other unrelated concepts. They suggested that lack of strict definition of brand personality has caused confusion among researchers and proposed their own definition as “brand personality is the set of human personality traits that are both applicable to and relevant for brands”

Geuens, Weijters, and De Wulf (2009)  by considering critisims against Aaker’s brand personality scale developed a new scale with compatibility with the Big Five human personality dimensions. By focusing on the new definition of brand personality which was suggested by Azoulay and Kapferer (2003) they tried to exclude all none-personality items such as age and gender from the new dimensions and suggested new Brand Personality Scale consisted of five dimensions and 12 items:

• Responsibility (down-to-earth, stable, responsible)
• Activity (active, dynamic, innovative)
• Aggressiveness (aggressive, bold)
• Simplicity (ordinary, simple)
• Emotionality (romantic, sentimental)

They examined their new scale in the US and 10 European countries and argued that: “the scale can be used for studies on an aggregate level across multiple brands of different product categories, for studies across different competitors within a specific product category, for studies on an individual brand level, and for cross-cultural studies” 

However, this new brand personality scale has not been used that much so far.

How to develop brand personality?

Brand’s personality can be created and shaped by any direct and indirect brand contact that the consumer experiences with the brand. Both product-related factors such as product category, packaging, price, and the physical attributes and also other factors which are not related to the product such as consumer’s past experience, user imagery, symbols, marketing communication, word of mouth, CEO image, celebrity endorsers, and culture can form brand personality. This is in align with branding process in the relationship marketing concept which is highlighting the role of different relations on forming brand image on the mind of consumers including C2C relation such as word of mouth. Susan Fournier reframed brand personality in relationship terms. She views brand personality not as a set of interpersonal attributes but as the relationship role enacted by the brand in its partnership with the consumer. She emphasis if we assume a brand as a person so we can assume marketing mix as the person’s behaviour as a result she argued that every day execution of marketing mix decision constitute a set of behaviours enacted on the part of the brand. She suggested a typology of 15 relationship types characterising consumers’ engagement with brands.

 Although any aspect of marketing may affect brand personality, advertising may be especially influential because of the inferences consumers make about the underlying user or usage situation depicted. Advertisers may imbue a brand with personality traits through anthropomorphization and product animation techniques, personification through the use of brand characters, the creation of user imagery and so on. More generally advertising may affect brand personality by the manner in which it depicts the brand – for example the actors, the tone or style of the creative strategy and the emotions or feelings evoked. Once brand develop a personality it can be difficult for consumers to accept information that they see as inconsistent with that personality. Furthermore,  Although user imagery, especially in advertising, is a prime source of brand personality, user imagery and brand personality may not always be in agreement. In product categories were performance-related attributes are more central in consumer decisions, brand personality and user imagery maybe much less related . 

 New way of differentiation

Based on the above discussions,  it can be said that brand personality as an important emotional content of a brand can have an important role to create differentiation for smart phone manufacturers within a given ecosystem. So a research has been developed to provide empirical evidence regarding the extent to which smart phone brands have established clear and distinct brand personalities in the mind of consumers in United Kingdom, which is one of the most sophisticated smartphone markets in the world, and measure the brand personalities of the market leaders by using the new brand personality scale proposed by Geuens, Weijters, and De Wulf (2009). Findings of the research will be posted in this weblog.

Techno Yoda special review: Why Sony should acquire Sony Ericsson. (Part One)

Background

On 17 March 2000, a ten minutes fire in a fabrication line of the Royal Philips Electronics radio frequency chip manufacturing plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, caused supply chain disruption for many companies. Among them Nokia and Ericsson were two companies which faced severe component shortage. 40% of the capacity of the burnt factory was dedicated to Nokia and Ericsson.

Although Philips estimated that restoring the factory would take a week and assured top managers of both companies that their orders were in priority for Philips but they could not manage to start the normal operation in the facility months after that. Nokia found some alternative suppliers and could manage the crisis but the story of Ericsson was completely different.

Ericsson did not react immediately to the crisis. Top managers trusted Philips vows, neglected the situation and faced sever component shortage consequently. They could not develop new models or even produce their current models.

Six months after that the struggling mobile phone division caused $167 million loss for the whole company.  In July 2000 Ericsson started negotiation with Sony to merge their mobile phone business. The estimation was that Sony which was one of the leading companies in the consumer electronics sector can provide the joint venture’s components demand and also its innovation and experience in consumer electronics market can improve the position of both brands in the mobile phone market.   At the same time Ericsson started to downsize the mobile phone business and sold its several factories in Brazil, Malaysia, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S to Flextronics. Finally Ericsson and Sony signed the memorandum of understanding in April 2001 and Sony Ericsson Company a 50-50 joint venture between Sony and Ericsson started in October 2001.

 A decade with Sony Ericsson, Collaborations and Rivalries between parents

Sony Ericsson demonstrated mixed performance during near a decade. The company did not achieve any profit for nearly three years from start and the parents invested another $500 million to the company during the period. However, the profitability was continued until the fifth birthday of the company when Miles Flint, Sony Ericsson former president, who was successful to convince Sony to allow using of two popular brands, Walkman and Cybershot, on Sony Ericsson mobile phones, announced their goal to become the third largest mobile phone maker in the world within five years, the position that Ericsson had before the joint venture. The company gained the third position on the third quarter of 2008 but failed to achieve profit.

Although there is not any public information regarding the financial transactions and/or terms and conditions of the agreement between two parent companies regarding using Sony Brands on Sony Ericsson products, since the W800i, the first Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, introduced in February 2005 at 3GSM congress in Cannes, it seems the allowance of using Walkman brand on Sony Ericsson phones granted by Sony before beginning of 2005, couple of months before appointment of the new CEO at Sony.

In June 2005 Sir Howard Stringer appointed as the first foreign CEO in the Sony’s history. His attitude towards the company’s joint ventures especially Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Sony NEC Optiarc in 2008 which ended up to acquisition of both companies by Sony, raised some rumours about the same action against lose making Sony Ericsson especially after Stringer’s interview with Die Welt in August 2008 which He mentioned that: “Buying out the a partner is never an easy thing.”  That showed his intention or maybe failed attempts to acquire the whole company.

About one month after this interview Sony Ericsson introduced its first digital photo frame, IDP-100, as rival to Sony’s range of digital photo frames. At the same time several photos from Sony Ericsson “PSP phone” published in the internet.

During the first years of his management, some symptoms of conflicts between two parents appeared. Although, Sony granted using Cybershot brand on Sony Ericsson phones on February 2006, couple of months after Stringer appointment, which can be considered as previous agreed plan between former CEO of Sony and Sony Ericsson, but until 2011 Sony did not allowed Sony Ericsson to use any other Sony brand. 

The weak performance of Hideki Komiyama, the first Sony Ericsson president which was appointed by Stringer to lead Sony Ericsson in September 2007 and was one of his closest co-workers of Stringer in  Sony USA, ended up to an exceptional swap in managerial roles between Sony and Ericsson in October 2009. Before formation of Sony Ericsson, both parents agreed that the president of the company would be appointed by Sony while chairman of the board came from Ericsson. This agreement remained unchanged until October 2009 when Sony Ericsson introduced the first CEO and not president from Ericsson, Bert Nordberg, and the First chairman from Sony, Sir Howard Stringer. That could be perceived as distrust of Ericsson to execution management of managers which was appointed by Sony, especially Komiyama. The company adopted Sony new revealed brand message “Make.Believe” instead and vowed the aligned collaboration with Sony.

 Android Focus

Sony Ericsson has focused on producing Android based smartphones, according to Bert Nordberg, The CEO and president of Sony Ericsson. But it seems Sony has big plans for Android as well. Sony has invested on Android based devices heavily. The company was the first TV maker which introduced Google TV equipped televisions based on the Google Android on May 2010. Also, Sony and not Sony Ericsson introduced two tablets based on Android which will be available from fall 2011. The company has developed an application for its e-book store for Android devices and more than that it is working on its dedicated platform named PlayStation Suite, to bring PlayStation games on PlayStation certified Android devices, which has three known members until now: Sony Ericsson XPERIA PLAY and two recently introduced Sony Tablets, Code names: S1 and S2. The recent update of Sony internet TVs allows users to control their TV via their Android base devices.  All of those actions clearly show Sony’s intentions to use Google Android as the main platform of its consumer electronics and entertainment products. In some cases Sony officials see Sony Ericsson as a rival. For example last year on December 2010, Sony’s head of TV division, Hiroshi Yoshioka, in an interview with New York Times, described the collaboration between Sony and Google on TVs “More” than “Sony Ericsson and Google on smartphones”.  So it seems Sony is really serious about Android.

Sony gets ready to acquire Sony Ericsson.

On 10 May 2010 Sony announced restructuring its business under two main cores: Professional devices and solution group and consumer product and service group. They also introduced the new division names VAIO & Mobile business group. The first products of the new group which can be considered as mobile devices were S1 and S2 Android based tablets.