Staying relevant in the Radio cabs space - Is Meru holding up?

Nokia's CEO ended his speech while announcing their distress sale to Microsoft saying, “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” Immediately, he and the entire management team publicly wept.

All case studies on Nokia dissecting the reasons for failure point to one thing in common - "inadequate pace of innovation & the seeming reluctance to change even as their world was turning upside down". Interestingly, all market leaders across industries who have been swept away with fundamental changes in their respective industries have this in common - Polaroid, Yahoo or Sun Microsystems.

When I need to book a cab, I usually check the 3 apps on my phone - Uber, Ola and Meru. The occasion decides the app that gets picked. If its an early-morning drop to the airport, the choice invariably is Meru (having burnt hands on a couple of occasions while trying to switch to other operators). For every other case its either Uber (on those rare occasions where surge pricing is not on!) or Ola.

Having used Meru for over 8 years, I'm amazed at their consistency - both, in their 'uber' punctuality with guaranteed before-time arrival AND in they being wedded to technology that is atleast few years behind the industry. 

Their Android app has few frustrating touchpoints. For instance, a basic thing such as the 'favorites' feature doesn't really store your home/office location. Meru, surprisingly doesn't yet have a navigation map for its drivers. The GPS seems to be used only for cab booking. So, the driver doesn't have the advantage of routing technology, and the customer's bill summary doesn't provide a route map, unlike Ola/Uber, which offer this check on whether the driver took an optimal route. Without GPS mapping & proper address storage, you end up explaining your home address & landmark to the drivers, every single time. 

While these contribute to a poor UX overall, their significantly higher fares put off users. Today, a bulk of their daily trips seem to come from airport drops and pick-ups, which is one location where you can still find a very high number of their cabs. Considering that the rival cab aggregators do a pretty good job in the above areas along with providing a seamless app user experience, it remains to be seen when Meru would catch up. However, I've noticed in the past that they took an inordinate amount of time to start offering online payment and wallet facilities, years after their peers, so this may take a good amount of time, as well.

As a side note, strangely I've noticed several of their drivers, across trips handing over their business card containing personal contact details, with Meru branding, possibly encouraged by the company. This is puzzling to say the least on why a cab aggregator would encourage their drivers to push for direct bookings with customers.

Pic Source: Forbes article

Thus, directionally the story of Meru cabs doesn't appear to be too different from the fall of some of these biggest names, in the anecdote at the starting of this post. Meru had a stellar rise to the top in the organised cab players market and at a point had a near monopoly in a couple of major Indian cities. The arrival of cab aggregators marked the reinvention & rejuvenation of this industry - players like Uber, Ola & the erstwhile Taxi4sure had innovated the radio cabs space, unseated Meru cabs from its leadership position and gave it serious competition. 

Thankfully, the story is not yet over for Meru. It continues to try and reverse the downward trend, raise funds and even put in place an expansion plan to fight back. However, the initiatives don't seem to be paying off at the pace that the competition is grabbing business from them. Atleast from a consumer's perspective, things don't seem to look good. 

Gartner and the interesting space of Technology advisory

Couple of weeks back, I had attended Gartner's Business Intelligence & Analytics conference at Mumbai, their recurring annual event in India. Overall, it was a very well organized conference with good thought leadership being served across the sessions, by their analysts.

All these years of my work experience, I have been bumping into Gartner - their collaterals in the form of whitepapers/webinars and the occasional analyst discussions and conferences. Their business and engagement model continues to amaze me. Quite like some of the successful consulting and research-advisory organizations, they have a rather evolved model of existence. Here, I take a 50,000 feet and possibly simplistic view of my understanding of their business model.

Gartner has a core team of expert analysts, some very good people with diverse & deep industry experience who do research and study trends. However, a bulk of their intelligence and industry reading comes through their consulting and advisory streams of business, wherein they engage IT sellers (technology vendors) and IT buyers (end clients of the vendors) to provide services on a variety of business accepts: 

• how should I position, package & sell technology products/services to my clients?
• how do I buy technology to solve my problems & how should I evaluate vendors?
• who are the top clients I should go after?
• who are the worthy vendors to evaluate?
• ..and so on

As you can see, they are at the centre, talking to both the sellers and buyers and that places them in a great vantage position - both for trend-prediction and match-making! With a market leadership, they are uniquely positioned to practically know whats brewing on the supply and the demand side - this completes their vision of what's happening in the industry. This gold-mine of information coupled with some smart analysts gives them the crystal-ball gazing abilities to call out evolving trends, atleast a couple of years in advance.

Now throw in a slew of products and solutions that are actually by-products of the above mentioned core engine - whitepapers, magic quadrants, hype cycles, analyst calls, webinars, global conferences, media products and what not. They brilliantly package and monetize this knowledge as suitably positioned information offerings, and have an army of people across rolls in their big org-structure who complete the picture (those that most industry watchers wouldn't even be aware of).

One might argue that there is a potential conflict of interest in this (seemingly self-feeding) cycle - IT sellers, in order to get positioned in the mainstream of the Gartner market picture would need to first get into this universe. This is invariably by signing up as a Gartner client, participating in their events and thereby gaining a mind-share with the all-important analysts. Though a successful emerging player could surely get noticed from the outside, there are doubts whether they can get featured in the mainstream collaterals (say, like the Magic Quadrant) if they choose to stay outside the ecosystem.

A potential counter-argument to the above could be the credibility and growing mind-share that Gartner enjoys in the Technology eocsystem, with IT buyers, sellers and all others on the sideline watching it. Perhaps, Gartner walks the fine line by balancing needs/commitments to their clients with an unbiased market picture portrayal to all others. Perhaps, they manage all this too well. 

Nevertheless they are in an interesting position and doing some exciting stuff in the technology industry. Definitely, a space to continue watching.

Do Business cards still make sense?

A business card from 1895. Surprisingly, they haven't evolved much

The past week I was in the Hyderabad Startup Saturday meetup, a monthly gathering organized by HeadStart. Bumping into some interesting folks, I was networking and exchanging business cards. But all through, I had this awkward feeling of practicing an anachronistic custom, not very different from dispatching a snail mail postcard in the internet age. That made we wonder whether business cards had outlived their once-useful lifespan?

Let's face it. We use cards to exchange contact details, and what do they generally contain? Name, role, phone, email, website and maybe a couple of social profile handles. But, when was the last time you wrote down a mobile number from a friend and keyed it into your phone manually? How much more awkward it can get to key in a twitter handle from the card?

Agreed, cards help register one's name and role, as a supplement to the spoken word. In some occasions, they can be useful icebreakers to strike up conversations. And, there is always the possibility to impress with an unconventional design. 

But these aren't reasons enough to keep business cards, which are actually vestiges of the erstwhile corporate era, on ventilator-support. Yes, there have been barcode incorporated cards and other digital embellishments on a physical card, but these solutions are akin to taping a brick-phone from the 90s with a GPS navigator device, on its rear.

Lets think up some alternate possibilities. What if we can enable digital-handshake by letting people wave off their mobile phones, to automatically exchange a profile brief and all their social handles (perhaps even contextually deciding whether to share Linkedin/Twitter handle with a professional contact or Facebook/Instagram profile with a friend). The person can then choose to glance at the profile brief on mobile and then with a single click add the shared contacts to all relevant platforms.

Atleast, this would help save the hassle of printing and maintaining currency of a physical business card. And it will definitely do away the awkwardness of reaching out into one's pocket to pull out a piece of paper for networking.

PS: At the time of posting, I did a quick check on prevalent apps that address this problem. There seem to be some action over the past few years, and a few of them seem to be catching up. But, the final word from several experts is that physical cards are giving a tough fight, and they just refuse to roll up and die!