How This Worked Di?

How This Worked Di?

Facebook and K o l a v e r i D i have one big thing in common — no one knows why they succeeded

So here is a little thought experiment. The year is 1999, and the world around you is going mad about this thing they call a ‘dotcom’. You have started emailing around a year ago, and love the experience. A friend of yours is sitting somewhere in Silicon Valley, and he suddenly realises that he has this brilliant idea to launch his own website. Before he approaches venture capitalists — who are ready to fund almost anything which sounds a little different — he thinks it's wise to run the idea by you. You have always given him good advice.
    "So I had this idea about a website," he tells you while chatting on Yahoo Messenger.
    "Oh yeah," you reply, suddenly feeling all important. "Tell me about it."
    "Basically I plan to launch a social networking website."
    "A social what?" you ask.
    "In real life you meet people and become friends, and then share things with them. Similarly, the website will allow you to make friends online, share your thoughts with them and even upload your photographs online."
    "Hmm. But I am already doing that in real life. Why would I want to make friends online?" you question.
    He doesn't have an answer to that. He agrees it's a dumb idea, and that's where the conversation ends.
    Now twelve years later, the kind of website your friend had in mind is making the world go round. It allows you to make friends online, put up status messages of your innermost thoughts and even lets people you hadn't invited for your wedding see your honeymoon pictures.
    It's called Facebook. And it now has 800 million users. The website was launched in 2004, and back then no one really knew it would be such a huge hit. As Duncan J Watt explains in Everything is Obvious - Once You Know the Answer, "If you'd asked...people who currently belong to Facebook back in 2004 whether or
not they wanted to post profiles of themselves online and share updates with hundreds of friends and acquaintances about their everyday goings-on, many of them would have likely said no, and they probably would have meant it. The world, in other words, wasn't sitting around waiting for someone to invent Facebook so that we could all join in."
    What this example tells us is that it is very difficult to know in advance what will work and why it will work. Also, Facebook worked, but some other websites with very similar concepts like Orkut, MySpace etc did not go anywhere. But once something succeeds, everybody and anybody will have an explanation for its success.
    Take the case of the mega hit Kolaveri Di from the Tamil movie '3', which even has my mother dancing to it, since she first saw it on Youtube. A rather nondescript video of the song was put up on Youtube
    and it was trending within days. On the last count, the song had had 30 million hits (which Aishwarya R Dhanush, director of the movie, has as her status message as I write this).
    So the question everyone is asking how did this Tamil-English number capture the imagination of all of India? The Indian Institute of Management at Ranchi has even organised a seminar on it. Articles appearing across a section of media have come up with their own reasons. One article has attributed the success to the KISS (Keep it simple, silly!) strategy. Another said it is an outcome of out of the box thinking. ‘Hummability’ counts, not meaning, pointed out another.
    All valid points. But points, which could be applied equally to a lot of other songs and
    music floating around on Youtube which no one has ever heard. The basic lesson from both these examples is that things like Facebook and Kolaveri Di just happen, you can't make them happen even though you might have an explanation for why they happened, once they have happened.
    In the cultural markets this has been proven time and again. As Watts writes "The history of cultural markets is crowded with examples of future blockbusters - Elvis, Star Wars, Seinfeld . Harry Potter, American Idol —that publishers and movie studios left for read while simultaneously betting big on total failures."
    Closer to home a brilliant example is that of the film Sholay. The film was massacred by critics when it released. As Anupama Chopra writes in Sholay: The Making of a Classic, "Taking off on the title of the film, K.L.Almadi writing in the India Today called it a 'dead ember'… Filmfare's Bikram Singh wrote: 'The major trouble with the film is the unsuccessful transplantation it attempts — grafting a western on the Indian milieu. "The film went onto become the biggest blockbuster in Hindi cinema. Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, the second biggest blockbuster of Hindi cinema (adjusted for inflation) was referred to as an extended wedding video by the film critics.
Joanne ‘Jo’ Rowling, better known as J K Rowling, finished the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1995. The publishers weren't interested. It got rejected twelve times before Bloomsbury, a London-based publishing house agreed to publish it. The initial print run was 1000 copies and the advance Rowling got for the book was£1500.
The book and its sequels were a smashing success and according to Forbes magazine, Rowling was the first person become to dollar billionaire by writing books.
What rings true about books and movies also rings true new businesses. The spectacular success of home-grown IT giant Infosys is a case in point. The initial public offering (IPO) of the company in 1993 was undersubscribed and the company was bailed out by the investment banker Morgan Stanley, which picked up 13% stake in the company.
When Bharti Televentures (now Bharti Airtel Ltd) went in for an IPO in January 2002, it set the floor price at Rs 45. Several analysts back then found this price to be expensive. The stock fell to a low of Rs 20.75 within a year of listing on January 10, 2003.
If people had seen the potential of the stock, when it listed on February 18, 2002, at a price of around Rs 45, they would have multiplied their money by 7.6 times (At the time of writing this, Bharti quotes at Rs 344) by now. And this after the stock price has taken a tremendous beating over the last couple of years.
The same stands true for Google, whose founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to sell the company for $1.6million in the late 1990s. Google currently has a market capitalisation of around $216.5billion.
The moral of the story is that it is next to impossible to predict what will work when it comes to complex systems like culture and business. Given these reasons the explanations people come up with to explain the success of these things is largely irrelevant. On most occasions we don't know. Watt puts it best when he says, "Ultimately, in fact, it may simply not be possible to say why...the Harry Potter books sold more than 350 million copies within 10 years, or why Facebook has attracted more than 500 million users. In the end, the only honest explanation may be the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold because lots of people bought it." Similarly Kolaveri Di succeeded because a lot of people heard it.
 

Source :ET