Electronic Arts: Social Technology But A Less Social Attitude

In case you missed it last month, The Consumerist, a consumer affairs blog, released their “Worst Company in America” poll. The same company won it last year as well. What was surprising was the company was not one of the usual suspects e.g. pharmaceutical, financial organisations or oil companies but a computer game company, specifically, Electronic Arts (EA).

The poll was online and, clearly, many of EA’s consumers occupy the same space so perhaps this explains why EA ranked so highly. However, EA recognised their online contingent a little over a year ago, when they became a ‘social enterprise’ with Salesforce (the Microsoft Xbox in the picture tickled me).

The merits of the poll and whether EA deserve this emotive accolade can be debated elsewhere, what struck me was Peter Moore’s response (the Chief Operating Officer) in the light of their social outlook. You can read it here.

Peter’s Thoughts

Peter’s response begins with the quote “The tallest trees catch the most wind.”, akin to the Australian idea of the “Tall Poppy syndrome”; those which are successful are the ones people seek to tear down. Peter explains they won the award last year for a dodgy ending to one of their games and for being misrepresented in their support of SOPA.

It seems the list of complaints has grown in twelve months because he also goes on to admit certain failings this year with the promise to do better. However, just as he trivialised the reasons for winning the award in the previous year, he vehemently denies and snipes back at other complaints. Here is his quote:

• “Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme.  It’s not.  People still want to argue about it.  We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.
• Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam.  45 million registered users are proving that wrong.
• Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming.  Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games.
• We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really…
• In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games.  This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.”

So Peter applies a few tools of argument here:

• Of those issues he cannot refute, he acknowledges them to take the sting out of the tail. Any time these issues are raised again, he can confirm he has already acknowledged them and move on. What was not provided is a plan outlining how they will be addressed.
• For SimCity, he simply denies the claim i.e. it is not DRM without explaining why the concerns are without foundation or the true motives for forcing solo players to be connected
• He appeals to numbers for Origin and micro-transactions
• He ends with a couple of trivial grievances so the reader is left with the thought that all of the issues are trivial

He ends off the post with some inspirational rhetoric being “committed to fixing our mistakes” and saying how they are constantly “listening to feedback from our players” (presumably with the tools put in place by Salesforce.) He ends by saying, in reference to his tree quote at the start “we remain proud and unbowed”, confusing, for me, whether things will be addressed or not.

The Problem

There are people that disagree with my position on this, such as Nic Healey of cnet. Nic is rightly impressed that Peter is responding at all and likes that he is committed to improving. I agree with this to an extent. However, the tone of Peter’s response strikes me as more Parent-Child than one of conversational equals. As a reader, the message I hear is “We have made some mistakes which we have given lip service to (and a free game) and, while you are telling us about other issues, we will ignore them because we do not consider them important or legitimate; we know best.” Arguments referencing the ‘silent majority’ do not confer respect and simply nullify the argument through fallacy. There is no way to know whether the silent majority are happy or not.

The problem is EA are hearing through their social tools but not listening. They are then telling their customers what is going to happen (and what is not going to happen) rather than conversing with them to find a solution.

Social Tools versus Social Philosophy

EA have social tools, thanks to Salesforce and Jeff Bradburn, EA’s Senior Director of Support Systems, says “The close relationships that we're building with customers (via these tools) are a real game changer.” However, winning The Consumerist poll two years in a row suggests, at least for some fraction of their customers, there is a problem. Buddy Media and Radian 6 are industry-proven tools so if the technology is not to blame, what is?

The problem lies in the culture exhibited by the COO and the associated social strategy. If you are going to reduce the barriers to communication you must be willing to engage respectfully with the people complaining. I have talked about the Cluetrain in the past and, again, we see the problems corporations face when they do not heed its warnings. My guess, given EA has won the award two years in a row, is that the COO is embodying an attitude evident in other areas of the business and it is this that is causing problems.

There is a wisdom regarding complaints that says that while your customers are complaining they still care and it is when they stop complaining that you are in trouble. Another wisdom suggests if you can turn around your harshest critics, they will become your strongest advocates. By ignoring the merits of the criticisms, EA is running the risk of disenfranchising those who use the services but are dissatisfied, sending them to competitors. Unless this attitude is addressed EA are, in my opinion, at risk of making the award three in a row.

The Similarities of Social and CRM

Just as CRM is both a technology and a philosophy, social networking is as well. It is very simple to access technology to open communication through online channels, what makes companies truly great is when they give great customer service through this and their traditional channels. Similarly, just as automating a bad process with CRM makes your company worse much quicker, using social channels to receive feedback and then dismiss it angers customers with much greater efficiency than possible without social channels.

Conclusions

I often come across prospective clients who have seen social tools built into CRM and are excited about the opportunities. It is true there is great potential in interacting with customers in near-real time through online channels. However, the question which I ask them and which always must be answered is “what is your social plan/strategy?” Without one you are doing the social equivalent of putting up a million web feedback forms and ignoring all of them. Social channels are a tool and, just like any tool, they can be used to delight customers or, as appears to the be the case with EA, they can be used to isolate customers.

Historical Operating Cashflow of Salesforce

Last month I looked at Salesforce’s end of year financials and talked about how their main source of revenue was staff handing over money for Salesforce shares. I wondered if this has always been the case and therefore thought it is worth looking at how the operating cashflow of Salesforce has changed over time.

Sources of Operating Income

The two sources I will focus on are the ‘Net income(loss)’ and the ‘Expenses related to stock-based awards’. The net income is the money made from selling services so it makes sense to look at this. The stock-based awards entry is worthwhile because it was the biggest contributor to operating income for the last financial year and for the last quarter of the last financial year. Another line item of reasonable size is the ‘Changes in assets and liabilities, net of business combinations’ but this has little consistency over the past four years and therefore tells us very little. The other significant line items refer to the loss of the value of intangible assets e.g. brand value referred to as ‘amortization’. These are not real cash transactions and, therefore, are also being left out.

Historical Trends

Here are the past four years of quarterly transactions for the two sources of operating cashflow.

The first thing that strikes me is the lack of seasonality in the quarterly figures; the trends are clear. While initially contributing roughly equally to operating cashflow, the two sources are heading on divergent paths. Income is heading south and seems to have been doing so since around 2011 Q1 (the start of 2010). Stock expenses are growing steadily and have been since net income turned into a loss, back at the start of 2011.

The Problem

Salesforce is bringing in money by telling a great story to its employees and they are literally buying it. However, sustainable companies do not consistently generate losses and borrow money from their employees to survive. Things must change. The question I have is if this is a story which has been going on for three years, what is management waiting for? Where is the evidence that they are doing anything to deliver on their promises of prosperity? Will Salesforce be the betamax of the CRM world? A product whose advocates cry was superior in every way if only it had not been outmanoeuvred by the ‘big boys’.

Given I am about to start working with a company who deals with both Dynamics CRM and Salesforce, I sincerely hope things do change. I want to work with great products and Forrester and Gartner both attest Salesforce is a great product but I am not so sure the company’s financials would make the grades in a magic quadrant comparison. As usual I will continue to monitor the financials of Saleforce in the hope things will change and, hopefully, not for the worse.

Three Limitations of Using Advanced Find

I got asked a couple of days ago if I knew of a blog which listed the limitations of using an Advanced Find query. I knew of a couple of the limitations off of the top of my head but could not find a blog summarising them. So here it is.

Outer Joins

In my opinion, other than being able to do aggregate calculations, this is the biggest limitation of Advanced Finds. So what is an ‘Outer Join’?

Let us say we have two tables in a database, the Account and Contact table. Advanced Find allows to ask questions like ‘Show me all Accounts which have a Contact whose first name is John’ or ‘Show me all Contacts where their Account is in the Mining industry’. In these cases a record exists in both tables e.g. an Account record linked to a Contact record whose name is John. This is called an ‘Inner Join query’.

However, if we ask ‘Show me all Account with no Contacts’ we cannot do it. In other words, if we ask questions where there is a record in one table and none in the other table we will find it impossible with Advanced Find. This is an ‘Outer Join query’. Other examples are reports showing neglected leads (leads with no activity for six months) which cannot be done with Advanced Find.

In the case of Accounts, Contacts and Leads, we can get around the problem using a Marketing List. In the above example, we can add all Accounts to the Marketing List and then remove those with a Contact, leaving behind the desired list. For other types of records, the only option is to have a flag field to help us. For example, we can have a ‘Contact Flag’ field on the Account which is populated when there is an active Contact associated to the Account. We can then use this flag to return ‘All Accounts with an unticked Contact Flag’, satisfying our Outer Join query.

Titles

Titles are NOT restricted to just the search entity. For example, if we are searching for all Contacts in a certain industry, we can bring in fields from the Account entity, by dropping down the entity selection when adding columns.

However, we can only go one level up. So, for example, if we want to ask ‘Show me all Appointments regarding Opportunities where the Account is in the mining industry’, we can display Appointment fields as columns and Opportunity fields as columns but we cannot browse up to the Opportunity’s associated Account and show their fields. In this case, the only workaround available is to replicate the key fields from the Account onto the Opportunity and then reference these copied-fields.

Grouping Conditions Across Entities

Let us say we want to know ‘All Accounts where the Account is in Sydney OR the Account has a Contact in Sydney’

We can write the above query but this asks for Accounts which are in Sydney AND has a Contact in Sydney. Normally we would use the ‘Group OR’ button at the top but this can only apply to conditions within the same entity and therefore we cannot group them. In this case the best we can do is run the query twice (once for the Account rule and once for the Contact rule), export to Excel and combine manually.

Conclusions

Advanced Find is one of the most powerful and accessible features of Dynamics CRM and any site not making full use of this function is missing out. Even those sites using it every day may not discover the limitations listed above. However, now you are aware of them, if you do find yourself coming up against one of them, you have some workarounds or the opportunity to rethink to see if you can gain insight through an alternative, supported, query.

Voting Has Started in the Top 100 Most Influential People in Dynamics!

It's that time of year again when I try to convince (mostly) complete strangers into voting for me in the Top 100 Most Influential People in Dynamics.

Today, you are that lucky (mostly) complete stranger. If you have felt swayed by my blog ramblings, feel free to vote by clicking the link.

http://www.dynamicsworld.co.uk/the-top-100-most-influential-people-in-microsoft-dynamics-list-for-2013-page-9/

Using Quick Campaigns for Managing Events

Here is a simple way to manage an event using Quick Campaigns in Dynamics CRM. I have implemented this, or similar, at a couple of clients where the process for the event was:

• Create an invitation list
• Call them up to see if they are coming
• Review for things like identification labels

Quick Campaigns

Probably not the most utilized feature of Dynamics CRM but a useful one none the less. Quick Campaigns allow you to take a list of Leads, Contacts or Accounts and assign an Activity to them, such as a Phone Call. We can also track the responses to these Phone Calls.

Create An Invitation List

Firstly, we need to create a list of people we are inviting to the event. We can use an Advanced Find query, pick them by hand from an existing view or use a Marketing List. In this case I will just hand-pick some Contacts. Once this is done I click the ‘Add’ tab and select Quick Campaign – For Selected Records (or For All Records On All Pages in the case of an Advanced Find). This is our invitation list and can be exported to Excel, if required.

We then set up a Phone Call for the Contacts, assigning them as we will.

Call Them Up

Going to the Marketing section and the Quick Campaigns in the navigation, we now see our event and click on the Phone Calls that have been created.

We open these up and make the calls. Once we do this, we unleash the secret potential of the Campaign Response. To be honest I never used to be a fan of Campaign Reponses; I did not find them very useful. Until I discovered this trick.

From the Phone Call, we click on ‘Promote to Response’ to create a Campaign Response.

We now have a Campaign Response record which links the Contact, the Phone Call and the Event.

Review the Responses

From the Quick Campaign we can review all responses and, again, export to Excel if required.

Conclusions

Quick Campaigns and Campaign Responses are not a widely used feature of Dynamics CRM but work nicely for simple event management. If a more complex event is being managed and pre-event tasks need to be monitored, there is the Campaign entity, which also works with Campaign Responses. If we are not planning to make Phone Calls, we can use another activity instead and, finally, for really complex processes we can apply workflows and dialogs. Enjoy.

Silverlight to be Rewritten into HTML5

I did not get to go to Convergence this year but it is possible to access the excellent presentations if you registered. As it happens I did not register but an MVP friend of mine slipped me a login and password so I thought I would browse the content. There are some great talks on Orion which I highly recommend.

The Interesting Video

However, being the cheeky browser that I am I thought I would sneak behind the scenes a bit. All the videos were assigned a number in the URL i.e. http://msconvergence.com/videos/12345 so it was not hard to increment the number to see what else was around. One that I came across was http://msconvergence.com/videos/20125 which did not appear to be a polished presentation but a three-way conversation between, what I assume were Microsoft executives. This being said, the gentleman in the middle appeared to have a Finnish accent so perhaps he is from Nokia. Another curiosity is the logo in the top left suggests they are using a Google Hangout, rather than, say, Lync. Therefore, I assume, this is not an official presentation.

Once I started listening to the recording and realised it was significant, I took the screenshot with a hope of identifying the characters later. Unfortunately the presentation now appears to have been taken down and I did not grab a recording.

Anyhow, I am not sure if the recording was supposed to be on the Convergence site but the recording was of them discussing the future of Silverlight. As you may know there is hot debate regarding the relevance of technologies such as Flash and Silverlight in the light of the rise of html5, the new web standard. Consensus on the web seems to be that, while html5 is powerful, it does not have a fully fleshed-out development platform like Silverlight, is not a final standard and is supported by internet browsers to about the same extent as Silverlight is. In short, technologies like Silverlight are not going anywhere any time soon.

Microsoft’s Strategy

On the video, the gents talked about Microsoft’s role in the World Wide Web Consortium, some of the initiatives of the Windows Blue project and the plans for a SVG compatible Silverlight plugin to be the part of all browsers. To be more accurate, for a browser to be considered html5 compatible, it will need to support Silverlight. As the html5 standard is not final yet it seems the plan is to incorporate the Silverlight elements of .Net into the html5 standard if not for 5.0, then for 5.1 in 2016.

I can see the sense in this. For smaller animations and applications, developers can use html5. For larger, more enterprise endeavours where security is a concern and deeper client access is required, developers can use Silverlight and the .Net framework confident it will work in all contemporary browsers. Silverlight will move from being a Microsoft standard to becoming the standard for enterprise web-app development much as it is today for Windows Phones.

In the same way Microsoft and Novell worked on Moonlight for the Linux platform, it seems Microsoft plans to work with the other members of the Consortium to provide Silverlight compatibility in all popular browsers. Given Microsoft has already worked with Apple on bringing Silverlight to the iPhone, it will be hard for the other members to argue with these juggernauts of the client-server and digital worlds. Based on the rhetoric in the discussion it will be a case of getting on board or not getting endorsed as supporting the html5 standard.

It was also briefly mentioned that a project similar to Moonlight, called ‘Silverlite’ would also be hosted on codeplex for browsers not being directly assisted.

Conclusions

If Microsoft can insert Silverlight as a standard component of all web browsers this will probably be the end of Flash but will still complement html5, which can be used for smaller, lightweight projects. Thank you to Chris Cognetta, Jukka Niiranen and Jason Gumpert for their assistance with the article and for more information on the Silverlite codeplex project and Microsoft’s html5/Silverlight strategy, click here.

And, by the way, this is an April Fools Post ;)

Salesforce End of Year Financial Results and Subscription Numbers Versus Dynamics CRM

 

With the recent release of the Salesforce end of year financials and the release of Dynamics CRM subscription numbers at Convergence, we can kill two birds with one stone and see how Salesforce is going.

Unless stated otherwise, all numbers presented are taken from the Salesforce detailed financials (from their web site) and from the announcements made by Microsoft at Convergence. For what it is worth I would love to put the Microsoft financials up against the Salesforce ones but I am yet to see the financials for Dynamics CRM (statistics by region would also be delicious). To this end I can only highlight my delights and concerns in the Salesforce financials, use them to extrapolate subscription numbers and compare these to the ones Microsoft puts out each year (Salesforce has not put out any subscription numbers for over two years).

Earnings Call Buzzword Bingo

A regular spot in the Salesforce announcements, let us see what Marc and his CFO were thinking about as the end of the year approached.

Key phrases of two words or more were:

• deferred revenue (14 times) (that is revenue they do not have yet)
• our customers (13 times) (nice to see a focus on customers)
• non gaap (12 times) (as usual, in more recent times, Salesforce focuses on the numbers they have manipulated, rather than the ones they report to the government)
• cash flow (10 times) (I will do a section on this as cash is king and understanding the sources of cash helps us understand the health of the business)

Key words were:

This Quarter’s Keywords (total words: 3800)	Last Quarter’s Keywords (total words: 3000)	Last Year’s Keywords (total words: 3400)
revenue (45 times)	revenue (38 times)	revenue (37 times)
customers (23 times)	cloud (20 times)	cash (24 times)
cloud (22 times)	growth (17 times)	cloud (22 times)
customer (17 times)	customers (13 times)	social (19 times)
growth (17 times)	social (13 times)	growth (17 times)
service (16 times)	marketing (10 times)	enterprise (14 times)
enterprise (15 times)	service (9 times)	customers (11 times)
cash (13 times)	cash (9 times)	sales (10 times)
marketing (9 times)	sales (9 times)	service (8 times)
social (9 times)	customer (8 times)	heroku (5 times)
sales (8 times)	enterprise (7 times)	chatter (5 times)
margins (7 times)	mobile (7 times)	customer (5 times)

My takeaways:

• It is all about the revenue, customers and the cloud
• It is not about social as much as it used to be
• We do not want to look at cash any more (which is why I am going to)
• Service is becoming big
• Heroku who?
• Chatter who?

Cash is King

A common wisdom is that while the revenues can be manipulated (*cough* Non-GAAP *cough*), it is much harder to mess with the cash flows. So let us see where Salesforce is getting its cash from. Firstly, in a cashflow statement, cash comes from three places:

• Operating activities (generally the selling of stuff)
• Investing activities (investing back into the business, capital expenditure)
• Financing activities (external investment)

These definitions are pretty loose, so for a more formal breakdown, go here.

Generally speaking, a business should be making its money from operating activities and not so much from selling assets (investing activities) or from taking out loans (financing activities).

In Salesforce’s case we have:

• Operating cashflow: $282 million for the quarter and $737 million for the year
• Investing cashflow: –$178 million for the quarter and –$939 million for the year
• Financing cashflow: $124 million for the quarter and $335 million for the year

So, on the surface, all looks good; most of the cash is coming from operating activity, we are investing back in the business and the shortfall is being made up by the odd bit of borrowing, with a little surplus coming into the business (to the tune of 140 million for the year). If we listen to Marc, this is as far as we would go. Let us go one level down and see what some of the largest components of cash coming in or out of the business are for each type of activity over the year.

• Operating cashflow
  • Net income: –$270 million
  • Stock-based awards: $379 million
• Investing cashflow
  • Business combinations: –$580 million
• Financing cashflow
  • Proceeds from equity plans: $351 million

So, in terms of net income, we lost a little over a quarter of a billion dollars for the year. Now, a large part of this is the $150 million tax credit write-off I explained previously. However, even if we do not consider $150 million of this to be real, we are still left with a hole of $120 million in income.

Fortunately, another line item in the operating cashflow comes to the rescue; the stock-based awards. This is the cash generated by staff exercising stock options (as I explained in the second quarter analysis). Let us say Salesforce offer a discount scheme for their shares such that, each quarter, an employee can buy Salesforce shares with no brokerage and at a discount to the market price. Many would take up the offer and likely forego salary and bonuses in exchange for such a scheme.

Everybody wins. The member of staff recoups their lower wage by getting an asset at a bargain price and Salesforce get to reduce salary expenses and gain some money when the staff exercise their options. So where is the catch? The catch is in where the share came from because, essentially, Salesforce created it from thin air. The gap in the equation is with all these additional shares being created, each individual share is worth a little less and the asset was bought at a fair price, not a cheap price. Fortunately for Salesforce, the market has not caught on to this and the stock price remains high (despite there being 4% more shares in the pool than last year). In an ideal world, the value of the share being printed would be considered an expense, but it is not (because it is assumed the market value of the share will adjust to compensate). To this end, Salesforce get to print money and put it in the operating cashflow to an amount which accounts for over half of our operating cashflow. As long as the share price remains high, everything is fine.

Remember how I said “a business should be making its money from operating activities”? This assumes the main source of operating income is from sales, not the printing of shares. In my head I envision Salesforce’s operating income as a game of Jenga. We remove the value of the company from underneath and pile hollow bricks of cash on top. Eventually the market will wake up and the tower will fall down.

Investing income is, as I understand it, money spent on acquisitions and mergers.

The financing income is a curious one. The best I can make out this the cash from people paying into their pension scheme (which will eventually have to come out).

Therefore, overall we have a picture of a company printing shares to generate money to buy other companies and cover the costs of selling at a loss. If this the case, would it not make more sense to invest in the companies being bought, rather than in the company buying them?

Revenue and Costs

Revenues (red) grew at around 30% year on year, following the trend of slow deceleration we have been seeing for the past year or so. Unfortunately the cost growth for the same period was 34%. Meaning costs are still running away from revenue and, while this is the case, we cannot expect there to be a profit.

As we can see income is no longer dropping off the cliff, but it is still in the negatives.

In terms of margin, the frightening 9% loss, has now been brought back to around a 3% loss. We are only selling our $10 notes for $9.70 now.

Insider Sales

Using Yahoo’s insider transaction report for Salesforce we see that insiders (officers and directors) sold off a total of 8% of the shares they own over the past six months. For a company which is described as being such a success, it surprises me that the people who know the story from the inside continue to offload their ownership of the company.

Staff Numbers

In the third quarter results, I noticed staff growth was tailing off. This deceleration has continued as well. Salesforce is growing its staff, year on year, by about 26%. we have not seen staff growth this slow since 2010.

Subscription Numbers

I recently tweeted an infographic suggesting Salesforce had less users than Dynamics CRM. After digging into the statement, it seems Capterra’s source of numbers was this. At best, this is true only of the Sales Cloud subscriptions. Historically, I have compared subscriptions of the entire Salesforce stack to Dynamics CRM so I will continue with my tradition. While Salesforce do not release subscription numbers, we can guess at the numbers from the revenue being generated. Using the same methods of estimating as previously adopted, I predict Salesforce has around 5.8 million users and 165,000 customers. Assuming this is correct, the two are maintaining a subscriber ratio of just under 2:1 to each other.

Conclusions

For Salesforce, it is still mainly about revenue, customers and the cloud. The cashflow into the business appears to be driven from the purchasing of shares through options, rather than through sales. Profits are still elusive. My hope is the cost growth can be managed so that the business can be brought slowly back to profitability. Finally, in terms of how the two products fare, Salesforce has a user base approximately double that of Dynamics CRM, although Dynamics CRM has larger customers. This seems to be an on-going trend with the two products.