Some of my regular readers may have noticed that the site has been changing over the last month or so. This really started with the merging of the Digital Imperative blog and my music/design site. I wanted to bring my career workinline with my creative and artistic work here at mattborghi .com. Since then I’ve been reading some of your comments, emails and past posts (of which this is post #90) and thinking about the editorial direction and content overall of The Digital Imperative. This week it became clear to me that while I might talk about Google, Twitter or Yahoo, or Web and Digital Strategy or communications, as well as posting videos or Mp3s of recent work at the core of my message is that of entrepreneurship. Whether you’re a corporate entrepreneur working inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company, the small business owner who’s reach is much more local than global or a Do-It-Yourself artist trying to gain a broader audience for your work — Entrepreneurship is an attitude.

It took me talking to a trusted colleague this week for that to become clear to me. We spent a good amount of time talking about what it means to be a small business and a small business owner. Entrepreneurship encompasses a series of soft skills, including ambition, persistence, organization, attitude and most importantly a belief in one’s self, but there are many other words that describe what an entrepreneur or entrepreneurship is.

I plan to spend more time talking about entrepreneurship and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Keeping in mind that my definition of an entrepreneur is looser than most. I define an entrepreneur as someone who works to put something together and is willing to take the risk for it.  This goes together with the newly-crafted editorial statement that I crafted for this site: The best investment you can make is in yourself.

So that’s the plan, and the direction I plan on taking with things. I’ll still be talking about social media, Web strategy, communications and the like because of course it’s absolutely the entrepreneurial spirit that drives one to undertake these things, especially as best practices are being written as we go. As always, I welcome your feedback, and look forward to the continued conversation.

For many years, I’ve been inspired by the Taoist concept called Wei Wu Wei, doing by not doing. This philosophy can be applied in many ways, but since the focus of this site is digital strategy, let’s focus on that: When you’re doing digital strategy the greatest success is found when you’re working with the Tao, or loosely translated, the unseen current of the universe. If you’re working against the Tao, then somehow, you just won’t succeed, or succeed for very long. Why? Because you can force anything, but forcing, by its very nature infers opposition, or opposing something… many dollars and much energy can be spent to force things, but eventually dollars and energy run out and whatever was being opposed prevails. If you’re working with the Tao, then there’s no need for force, because there’s no opposition.

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…

With all of the hype that’s going around right now about Bing potentially knocking Google of the search mountain, I felt that this article was very timely; and yet another story that talks about open and transparent is better than closed and opaque. This is the story of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The article, by Michael Calore taken from the This Day in Tech pages at Wired.com: June 5, 2002: Browser, Philosophy Born of Turmoil, Defeat.

There’s an interesting post here, called The Web Will Be the Death of Google. This is a good article that ties into all the press that Bing and it’s attempt at knocking Google off the top of the search mountain is getting. The thing that’s easy to forget is Google did next to no marketing for their search (interesting Salon article from 1999 that touches on this a bit, as well as a 1998 Cnet article here). I know for me, back in 1999 or 2000, numerous people recommended that I use Google, as I had been a big user of Yahoo! for everything. Eventually, Google became the search tool of choice, not just for me, but for a lot of folks. Was it because it worked well? Was it because it was lean and uncluttered? Was it because it was quick? Honestly, it’s probably some combination, but I know that value that Google offered came to me through word-of-mouth, and when I tried the tool, it delivered as promised. It was no frills, just a simple tool that worked well.

Again, Google did very little marketing; they put something out there that worked, and people came to it. Clearly, they knew what people wanted, and how to add value. This is a piece that Microsoft has never figured out. I’m not sure if it’s just been a case of willful ignorance, or just customer indifference because their OS monopoly made them a required player. However, either way I would say to serve is a privilege, and if your tool is chosen, then it’s bonus and bonus! Create the tool of choice, and cherish the privilege of service.

So as many folks sound the Google death knell, I say Google will die only once they’ve decided that they don’t want to serve the customer with imaginative and innovative ideas. Anyone, who saw the preview of Google Wave, last week, knows that they’re clearly not there yet. Yahoo! might be there, MySpace might be there, and there are others, but then there are folks like Twitter, and Facebook who keep trying to develop innovative tools to serve the customer.

The fact is any company that stops thinking about, or doesn’t consider their, customer is going to go out of business; whether they’re selling Web services or hot dogs… I only have to look at my home of Detroit to know this is true.

I hate to pile on Microsoft, who seems to be struggling with finding their place on the Web; but one would think that Microsoft, who’s been at technology marketing longer than most, would get how to do a product launch. I’m talking about the launch of their new Bing search service.

For starters their home page, the one linked above, is a cobbled together DNS forward: http://www.bing.com/ComingSoon that points at http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html, however, when you get to that page there’s nothing but a perpetually loading video (that never quite loads on both Firefox and IE7 with the most recent Flash plugin), and while trying to keep this Web 2.0 is a noble effort with the video piece, the “Find us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter” and “Share this Page” links seem to be a superficial allusion to being Web 2.0-minded, which is what Microsoft folks purport to being at this page here: http://www.decisionengine.com/Letter.html (note that they’re again using the decisionengine.com domain, rather than bing.com, so much for branding the URL and product name)…

From a Web launch point-of-view there are quite a few things that Microsoft should have done differently. Perhaps there was a rush to get to market, but with a cumulative total of six pages, max, I’m not sure why they couldn’t have done a better job than they did. The URL as product branding is huge, how could this have been overlooked?

Unfortunately, the shoddy approach that was taken to launching this new product taints my expectations of it. If the rush to get these pages up and posted was so great that they overlooked significant details like consolidating the URL used, as well as getting the homepage video to work on their own browser, then what else wasn’t worthy of taking the time to do it right with regard to the product? If it’s great, I’ll eat my words, but based on this launch I’m not holding my breath.

On the flipside I can’t help but think that with all of the expertise and R&D, to say nothing of money, with which they could just buy good ideas rather than try to create (or replicate) them, Microsoft has tried to create their own flavor of Google. It’s sad, really, because think of what Microsoft could do if they weren’t playing catch up.

For me the lesson taken away from this and the lesson I would share is:

If rushing sacrifices the integrity of your strategy, don’t do it.