Seat at the Table

Today’s Wall Street Journal, Scott McNealy penned a commentary explaining why consumers should want an industry standard for digital content they create as opposed to proprietary standards (I’m sure he’s thinking of Microsoft’s Word, Excel etc).   His piece was an almost perfect example of using consumer friendly messaging to drive a business issue.  However, there was one glaring mistake which I’ll address at the end of this post (hint: it is his opener).

The commentary argues that if a consumer uses a proprietary standard they don’t control their own data, but if they use an industry standard they have full control.  While the reality may be more nuanced (you can open Word documents in non-Microsoft applications – it just may be a bit messy – and thus you do control your Word based data), the consumer’s bottom line that Scott points out is true: consumers feel they want total control over their own content, and an industry standard can ensure that control.

The op-ed hit the strategic messaging target in a several ways:

• It frames the issue in terms that are not only relevant to consumers, but can drive consumers to action (to only look for applications that use the standard).
• It uses an element of suprise and teaches consumers something they thought was right, was wrong (Thought you controlled content you created on your computer? Your probably do not). 
• It bases the arguement on facts (almost – see the end of the post), not rhetoric.

Now, Scott’s message ignores the obvious business outcome that his and other companies will have an easier time introducing standards based applications that tryign to ween people off Microsoft Office.  That said, consumers won’t care if the business outcome is also a consumer friendly outcome.  As pointed out previously, a consumer message backed up by a truly consumer friendly business practice is the kind of public relations every company should have as an objective.

So what was the messaging mistake in the commentary piece?  The very first sentence has Scott saying the following: ”No one would argue that content you create belongs to anyone but you. But, in fact, it doesn’t.”  Actually, it does.  Consumer do own the content they creat, they just just don’t have total control if it’s a proprietary standard.  These are two different issues.  The rest of the piece does focus on control of content.  But by implying in the very first sentence that consumers don’t own their content, he opens the issue up for counterattack.

If I were the other side of the debate, I would simply point out that 1) this piece is factually incorrect as people have 100% legal ownership of all content they create on their computers; 2) even proprietary standard based content can be opened by third party software and done so legally.  And this latter point can be proven by simply showing how Scott’s own company, Sun Microsystems, has a word processor and spreadsheet program that can open Microsoft Word and Excel documents and the content, in Sun’s words, “will look better.”

And Scott’s piece was so close…