A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the increasingly self-reinforcing dominance of a group of very large companies in the tech industry. Those companies — Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. — have made it all but impossible for smaller companies to break into the industry, to grow and to build sustainable businesses without being either wiped out or acquired in the process by the industry’s giants.

However, though as a general rule all of that is true, there are some exceptions out there in the form of a handful of small but successful companies that have somehow managed to survive surrounded by much larger competitors. It’s worth looking at some of them and how they’ve achieved what they have, to see if there are lessons for others.

Anker: Compete where others don’t want to

Anker is the company that made me want to write this piece. It was in the news last week when it launched an Amazon Echo competitor based on Alexa, just the latest in a fascinating series of consumer electronics products that started with batteries and went on from there. The Verge did a great profile on the company and its history, which is well worth a read if you’re interested. The key to Anker’s success seems to have been a narrow focus on competing in areas where the big players really didn’t want to. That began with accessories like batteries — first, replacement batteries and then external batteries for smartphones — a place where the big companies either didn’t want to play at all or wanted to offer products at margins that provided a nice price umbrella under which companies like Anker could compete.

But the company has taken that starting point and grown from there, expanding into home automation devices and arguably taking the same quality-plus-affordability approach it took to accessories, with the Echo Dot competitor the latest example of that push. Because it undercuts others on price but has built a reputation for reliability, it occupies a somewhat unique niche between the low-cost no-name brands out of China and the more expensive stuff from the big established brands. There are a few lessons here for others: Compete where the big players don’t want to; build from an innocuous base to compete more directly with the larger companies; and, lastly, don’t forget that brands don’t all have to be built at the high end.

Roku: Be Switzerland in a world at war

Roku is another company that stands out as a rare exception — a smaller player that competes head-on with some of the biggest names in the business and has not only survived but thrived in terms of market share. Roku started out as an arm of Netflix, making hardware for its fledgling streaming service, but was soon spun out on its own, and has since made a business out of providing the neutral TV box in a world where essentially all the major competitors are owned by big ecosystems. Though Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Sony all have offerings in the space, Roku has the largest market share in the U.S., through a combination of a range of price points and a certain neutrality in the ecosystem wars.

Roku’s next big step was pivoting from its focus on first-party hardware to providing a platform for others under threat from the big ecosystems, offering its operating system as a way for other smaller players to break into the smart TV space and bring a compelling and rich set of apps to that market. Again, it offered neutrality where others offered only walled gardens and ecosystem favoritism, and it has now gained substantial market share in the smart TV operating system space, too. That pivot is still in its early stages, and Roku still likely makes a good majority of its revenue from hardware rather than licensing, but that balance will continue to shift as Roku prepares for an IPO. The key lesson here appears to be that there can be an opportunity in being the neutral player that offers an alternative to warring ecosystems, especially when none of those ecosystems has established a dominant position.

Airbnb: Create brand-new markets in the digital layer

Airbnb is another fascinating company that has come from nowhere over the last few years to build a large and seemingly profitable business in the midst of otherwise dominant ecosystems. And it has done it largely by creating a new market, rather than competing in an existing one. Airbnb exists in what I call the Digital Layer — a business model in which infrastructure-light companies leverage existing physical infrastructure and proprietary software to connect buyers and sellers in such a way that new markets or liquidity are created. Arguably, the biggest and most successful companies that have emerged over the last few years in the consumer tech industry all fall into this model — Uber and Lyft are the other big examples, but there’s a plethora of smaller ones, too.

The key here is recognizing that a consumer tech company doesn’t have to compete in the consumer tech market, and in fact the best opportunities exist outside the tech industry, in traditional markets like accommodation, transportation and retail. By digitizing those markets, these companies create new value that wasn’t there before, often enabled by ordinary people with no history in those markets who choose to supplement earnings or make their main income in this way.

Creating just the right user experience, removing barriers and simplifying transactions through smartphone apps and other digital tools then provides the differentiation needed against legacy business models. The big ecosystems so far haven’t participated in these markets at all, though ride-sharing seems to be the market segment they’re most likely to enter, with both Alphabet and Apple dabbling already. But the lesson here is competing outside the constraints of the traditional tech industry and creating an opportunity where others didn’t see one.

No simple answers

For the purposes of this column, I’ve necessarily kept things pretty simple here, and have arguably somewhat oversimplified what has made these companies successful. In addition, these companies I’ve discussed are by no means the only successful small tech companies to have emerged over the last few years, and there are other strategies to achieve what they have. They do demonstrate that, however high the odds against success in a market dominated by giants, there are opportunities to be both found and created, and that it is still possible for the right combination of skill, timing and smarts to carve out a niche where the big players won’t squash you. At least not right away.

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

This week, I was driving in my neighborhood when I spotted that most American of sights — a bunch of kids running a lemonade stand, waving signs and trying to flag down passing cars. In some ways, it seemed like a great business opportunity — the temperatures where I live have rarely dipped below the high 90s lately. And yet I didn’t stop — not because I don’t like lemonade (or kids), but because I simply don’t carry cash anymore, and I’m fairly sure the neighbor children weren’t taking credit cards.

This got me thinking about all the people and sectors of our economy that are still dependent on cash, and how they might be affected by our increasingly cashless society.

Cash is in decline

Whether anecdotally or based on solid data, I think most of us have a sense that cash is in decline. One study from last year suggests that cash is the preferred payment method of just 11 percent of U.S. consumers, with 75 percent preferring cards. In other markets such as China, cash is dying out even more quickly, with mobile payments increasingly eating into both its share and that of cards. Though my local dry cleaner in New Jersey was a rare (and suspicious) exception, I very rarely come across businesses that don’t take cards, to the extent that it now really takes me aback when it happens. For many of us these days, credit and debit cards — and to a lesser extent, mobile payments — are making cash largely irrelevant. I still have a huge jar of loose change I accumulated over many years, and which now mostly gets used for the occasional school lunch or visits from the tooth fairy, but not much else.

But not for everyone

However, assuming that this pattern holds for everyone would be a mistake. There are still big sectors of the economy and large groups of people that remain heavy users of cash and are heavily dependent on it, and as others move away from it, that’s increasingly going to cause them problems. Sadly, this likely applies most to some of the more vulnerable and marginalized parts of our society, who will be least in a position to make the changes necessary to keep up as the rest of society moves on.

Just a few examples of people or businesses still dependent on cash:

• Homeless people and others who ask for money on the streets
• Charity workers soliciting cash donations in public areas
• Manual and casual laborers who get paid in cash, either for convenience or for tax reasons
• Cab drivers
• Those who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards, including many without regular incomes
• The elderly
• The very young, also unlikely to have bank accounts
• Anybody who works based on tips, from waiters and waitresses to maids and barhops in hotels to valet parkers
• Small local retailers and restaurants that can’t justify high credit card processing fees on mostly small purchases.

The list could go on much longer than that, but the point is that there are those who are in some cases heavily dependent on cash and are relatively powerless to make the changes necessary to keep up. These are often among the poorer and least educated people in our society, and therefore those with least access to technology, the traditional banking infrastructure or information about how to adapt.

Tech has offered partial solutions

The tech industry has offered partial solutions, but mostly in self-serving ways. Payment processing company Square has transformed many a small retailer or producer from a cash-only business to one that can take credit cards and even Apple Pay, and has created ways for those without traditional cards to carry balances and make payments with their phones. Amazon has introduced methods for those who deal mostly in cash to obtain one-off or refillable cards to be used to pay for things on its site. Venmo has turned erstwhile cash transfers into electronic payments. But these solutions mostly tear down limits to the addressable markets for their own products without necessarily expanding economic opportunity or promoting inclusion, while also often being based on internet and mobile technology not available to all.

But needs to do more

What we need are solutions for the rest of society, and especially for those without access to the internet and phones to be able to receive non-cash payments. What about an app that allows patrons or would-be donors to set up a transaction in an app, and allows the recipient to walk into a bank or store to pick it up in cash with a privately shared code? Or an app that allows users of basic smartphones to receive payments and carry a balance without creating an ongoing relationship with the payer? What about a service that would provide meals, access to beds and other facilities, or other needed items to the homeless based on donations from smartphone users?

Technology has such an enormous potential to reduce friction and make payments simpler, but what we need are innovations that do the same on the receiving end, including in ways that don’t themselves require technological solutions.

Calling on the tech industry to step up to big societal problems has been something of a theme lately in my columns, but I can’t help but think that this is yet another area where those already most on the fringes of society will just be left further marginalized by technology rather than brought into the fold by it. It doesn’t need to be that way: The bright minds that have created so many technologies that help us deal with our “first-world problems” can surely find ways to help those with more biting and pressing challenges as our society continues to evolve.

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

With reports this week that Samsung is readying a Bixby-powered voice speaker for the home, and an announcement from China’s Alibaba that its entry in the category will be launching next month, it feels as though we’re reaching a tipping point in the market pioneered by the Amazon Echo. Pretty soon, nearly every major platform and device vendor will have an entrant in the market, signaling a new phase in its development. But this market isn’t quite like other markets that have gone before.

A tipping point in smart speakers

Amazon, which arguably created the interactive speaker market with its Echo device in late 2014, had the market largely to itself for a good two years. Then Google entered the market with its Home device late last year, and this year saw a slew of announcements at CES, mostly of Amazon Alexa-powered speakers, with an announcement last month by Apple and this week by Alibaba, among others. Things certainly seem to be picking up steam, as the diagram below shows:

Apple’s HomePod should be with us later this year, while Tencent has said that it is working on something in this space; Lenovo’s Smart Assistant was announced at CES but hasn’t become available yet; multiple speakers from Microsoft partners, including HP and Harman Kardon, are on the way; and Samsung is reportedly working on a speaker powered by its Bixby voice interface. On top of all those, there are quite a few others from smaller companies.

A different kind of market

Most markets in consumer technology go through multiple phases, often pioneered by one or two companies who prove out the opportunity, followed by a rushing in of new players as the opportunity becomes obvious to others, and an eventual thinning and consolidation of the market as the winners begin to emerge. In the last few years, the rushing-in phase has been characterized by an influx of low-cost Chinese competitors in markets as diverse as smartwatches, drones, virtual reality headsets, fitness trackers and more.

That hasn’t really happened in quite the same way in the smart speaker market, for one obvious reason: This isn’t just another hardware category where free, off-the-shelf software gets you an instant global presence. Even though Amazon has opened up its Alexa platform for others, and we’ve seen a number of other devices launched that incorporate it, that platform is still fairly severely geographically limited. The Alexa Voice Service which device vendors can use is so far only available for the U.K., the U.S. and Germany. And, of course, Amazon as a brand may be present in many markets, but is only really popular in less than a dozen countries worldwide.

The Google Assistant only works in English so far, though support for other languages is coming shortly. But even once those roll out, much of the world will be left without a voice assistant platform that speaks its language. Apple’s Siri, at least on iOS, supports many more languages, but it’s not yet clear which HomePod will support, and of course Siri isn’t a licensable platform.

Localization beyond language

But language isn’t the only localization challenge with voice assistants. These assistants need to understand local accents and idioms, know the right conversions for locally used measurements, be familiar with television shows, movie stars, and sports figures in each country and so on. And they need to integrate with relevant local entertainment, information and other services. That makes expanding into other markets particularly challenging, and it’s yet another reason why most successful voice assistants will be part of broader ecosystems coming from big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

However, that means the broader opportunity for voice speakers is nothing like as large as for other recently hot consumer electronics categories, with the long tail of cheap Chinese vendors in particular likely to remain largely absent. It’s possible that, with the entry of players like Alibaba into voice speakers and Tencent and Baidu into voice assistants, we’ll eventually see some expansion into lower-cost tiers. But this is likely to remain a highly regionalized market, to a far greater extent than any other recent consumer electronics category.

That’s important because there’s already a false narrative around a global market in voice speakers. Several of the news outlets that covered Alibaba’s announcement this week said it was a competitor to Google Home and Amazon Echo, but since those devices don’t work in China and Alibaba’s won’t work outside China, they’ll never actually go head to head.

Business models will vary, too

The other interesting thing about the voice speaker market is that, for at least some of the players, it will be a means to an end rather than a lucrative business in its own right. It’s already clear, for example, that Amazon sees the Echo family and the Alexa platform as an opportunity to sell more stuff on Amazon.com, while Google plans to use advertising to create additional revenue streams on the somewhat cheaper Home. Apple, meanwhile, will take its usual tack of monetizing the complete package of hardware and software, though it will likely see some uplift in services like Apple Music off the back of HomePod sales, as well.

In China, meanwhile, we’ll likely see these and other business models play out, with Alibaba’s device named after one of its popular online stores, and Baidu’s and probably Tencent’s efforts likely to be more ad-focused. All of this will lead to different pricing strategies for the hardware itself, with the early Chinese examples hitting price points roughly half those of the two early leaders in the U.S. market, and Apple in turn pricing its premium speaker at roughly double those devices.

This is going to continue to be a fascinating market to watch unfold, one that won’t necessarily follow any of the established patterns from other recent hot devices. It will be more regionalized — even balkanized — and more varied in the business models than other device categories. As a result, we’ll likely see several major players taking leading positions in different regions around the world, rather than global winners as in smartphones, tablets or PCs. Over time, we’ll certainly see the usual thinning and consolidation as some winners do emerge and smaller players fail to gain traction, but in the meantime, it feels like we’re going to see lots more new entrants and interesting devices and business models.

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the iPhone going on sale, so there’s lots of navel-gazing about the impact the iPhone has had on the industry — and pretty much everything. I’d like to think about which products in the market today might have a comparable impact to the iPhone over the next 10 years.

I put this question to my Twitter followers, and got a range of interesting results, including:

• Tesla (both cars and solar shingles)
• Oculus Rift
• Crispr
• and the Nvidia DGX-1 for AI and machine learning!

Those are all fascinating answers, including a couple I never would have included in my own analysis. But I have a different set of three possible products in mind, and I’ll talk about each of them below. As a reminder, what defined the impact of the iPhone was that it was a single product from a single company, and yet that product never achieved majority market share, but still managed to transform not just its own industry (smartphones) but both created and transformed others as well. So that’s the bar that any worthy successor has to clear.

Amazon Echo

To my mind, one of the products that has the best claims to this title over the next 10 years is the Amazon Echo. Like the iPhone, it has essentially created a new category that really didn’t exist in the same way previously, and has captured the public imagination in ways few would have predicted. It has done so with a new interface (much as the iPhone used its multi-touch interface as a key selling point) and has created value beyond Amazon’s own contributions through “Skills” or apps and integrations with other companies. In the process, it has created a market that now also includes Google and will shortly include Apple, and that also includes many smaller manufacturers and products.

Apple Watch and AirPods

Although it might seem funny to include another Apple product (or two) in this analysis, these two feel emblematic enough of two emerging wearables categories to include them here. The Apple Watch is by far the most successful smartwatch out there, while AirPods promise to create a new category around the ears some have called “hearables.” More broadly, though, they’re part of a trend we’ll see in the coming years in which the functions of the smartphone will be increasingly delegated to other peripheral devices, whether merely as input and output devices in the short term or as powerful processors in their own right. Over the next 10 years, these devices will increasingly take on tasks that smartphones have themselves taken over from other devices over the past 10 years.

Microsoft HoloLens

I hesitate to include this device on this list, mostly because it’s far from being a mainstream product today and therefore isn’t really in the same category as the iPhone. But it’s perhaps the most high-profile example we have today of an AR headset, and that category as a whole feels like it will be very important over the coming years in defining new interfaces, creating new markets and generating tons of new value.

More likely, though, it will be Magic Leap, Apple or some other company that eventually brings a mass-market AR headset to market and truly creates a new category. For now, as I’ve written previously, AR will be dominated by the smartphone, but much of the work that’s done on smartphone AR will eventually be applicable to headset AR, too. Much more than the Oculus Rift, which focuses on VR and therefore a smaller long-term addressable market, AR headsets feel like they’ll be a really important category 10 years hence, even if the HoloLens doesn’t yet capture what that market will look like.

Google is MIA

One thing that struck me here is that no Google device is on the list — both Google and Microsoft have recently pushed into hardware, and while Microsoft’s HoloLens made my list with the caveats above, nothing Google has made yet has been anything other than just another entrant in an existing category. On the other hand, cloud services and the AI and machine learning that power much of the next generation of those services will have a significant role over the next 10 years, though no single product or service will have a massive impact.

Two other answers

I think there are two other answers that are more compelling than any of the three I’ve just listed, and they are “the iPhone” and “none.” The reality is that the iPhone turned the smartphone into the biggest consumer electronics category the world has ever seen or is likely to see. The smartphone is going to become essentially ubiquitous around the world over the next few years, and no other product can hope to match that ubiquity, at least during the 10-year time horizon we’re talking about here.

Voice speakers are a fascinating new category, and will grow significantly, but they won’t be in a majority of homes for many years, and it’s smartphones that will continue to provide ubiquity for voice assistants. Accessories like smartwatches and Bluetooth earpieces are just that — accessories to smartphones — and though they will take over smartphone functions as I described above, they will continue to meet the needs of subsets of smartphone users and be heavily tied to smartphones for the foreseeable future. Lastly, AR will be big in time, but again, it’s through smartphones that the technology will have its broadest impact, while headsets serve a much smaller market even 10 years from now.

As such, the iPhone and the smartphone market it inaugurated will continue to be the most influential over the next 10 years, just as they were over the past 10. And no single new product in the market today will exert a comparable influence over the industry in the next decade, even though we’ll see some fascinating new user interfaces, product categories and changes in the way we all use technology and interact with each other and the world around us.

As I’ve long argued, though, just as Apple shouldn’t shy away from new product categories because they can’t match the iPhone’s scale, neither should any other player in the market be cowed by the impossibility of matching the smartphone’s impact on the world. There are plenty of worthy places in today’s technology landscape to put in effort and investment that will pay off handsomely in the coming years, and I’m looking forward to all the innovation that’s yet to come.

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Science-fiction author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Nowhere is that more true than in the tech world, where it’s easy to think that innovations, products and services available to us are ubiquitous, even when their distribution is, in fact, very limited.

Square and Google Home come to the U.K.

Both Square and Google announced on Tuesday that their products were coming to the U.K. In Square’s case, this is its first entry into that market, but its fourth international market outside the U.S., after Canada, Australia and Japan. In Google’s case, this is its international debut for the Google Home speaker and its Google Wi-Fi routers.

I have to confess that I was unaware that Square hadn’t launched in the U.K., and I was also unaware that Google hadn’t made its new hardware products available outside the U.S. until now. But I suspect that’s typical of those of us who follow the tech market in the U.S. — we’re so accustomed to being the first to see new technologies that we rarely spare a thought for those who don’t have access to them yet, even in a neighboring market like Canada (as with the Google Home and Echo).

Even within the U.S., though, there are often haves and have-nots when it comes to new technology, and Amazon’s footprint is a great example of this. Amazon just announced two new pickup grocery locations for its Amazon Fresh service, but they’re both in Seattle (and currently only open to employees). Its Amazon Go grocery store is also only in Seattle (and perhaps for a bit longer than planned, limited to employees). Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstores? All but one of the stores it has opened or announced are in or near big coastal cities, the latest in Chicago. Its Fresh delivery service is also limited to just a few markets, as are its same-day delivery services.

But this goes well beyond just Amazon. One of Lyft’s competitive disadvantages relative to Uber is the smaller number of cities (and countries) where it operates, even in the U.S., something the company is trying to rectify with a rapid expansion this year. I’m in New York City this week, and I’m finding there are a raft of options for ride-sharing services (for someone who feels increasingly uncomfortable with patronizing Uber), but that’s not the case everywhere in the U.S. Even something as seemingly ubiquitous as the Apple Store is still missing from several U.S. states.

Silicon Valley’s other diversity problem

Diversity is frequently in the news when it comes to the tech industry, and was again this week with the release of Uber’s diversity report. When we talk about diversity, it’s typically about underrepresented gender or racial groups, but there’s also another form of diversity the U.S. tech industry is missing out on — exposure to those parts of the U.S. and the world where many of the services that Bay Area residents take for granted are simply not available.

A tech worker living in San Jose can likely commute to work using Uber or Lyft or a number of other tech-based transportation services, order lunch through Postmates, and get groceries delivered at night from Instacart, Amazon Fresh or Google Express. But many of those services aren’t available (or in some cases relevant) in much of the rest of the country.

Living in such an environment and among other people who are benefiting from the rise of technology alternatives to traditional services, it must be tempting to think of these innovations as unmitigated boons to mankind. Of course, it’s often in the rest of the country where the negative impacts of these changes are felt, as jobs get sucked out of rural and suburban areas, either to disappear completely or to be replaced in high-tech zones. Engineers who only ever see the tech-infused version of the world they live in can have little conception of the impact it causes elsewhere, or the way the other half — or more accurately, the other 99 percent — lives.

Going global is tough but important

That’s why going global with a product or service is so important, though it may in some cases be tough. If innovations are beneficial, they should be as widely spread as possible, as quickly as possible.

It’s obviously much tougher where extensive physical infrastructure such as retail stores, warehouses, or even fleets of cars and drivers are needed, but we often see digital products and services like Amazon Echo and Google Home restricted to just a few markets, even ones that share a common language.

That’s why I was so impressed by Netflix’s global launch a little over a year ago, and continue to be impressed by major digital services from Apple like iTunes which span the globe, or even Siri, which supports many different languages in more countries than any of the other major virtual assistants.

Doing that work is hard — it requires local language support, cultural understanding, partnerships with local players and more — but it deserves doing, because the benefits of many of these technologies are worth spreading as far and wide as possible.

It’s also important for companies to put their people into more diverse places, because only then can those employees more accurately understand and represent the needs of those they’re trying to serve and create products and services designed to help a much broader swath of the population. I’ve also been impressed recently by Steve Case’s mission to grow tech hubs outside of the big existing ones as a way to bring renewal and growth to more places across the U.S.

More people in the tech industry should be thinking about how to distribute the future more evenly, both within the U.S. and across the world. That applies to their own businesses as much as to the products and services they sell.

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Facebook got some criticism from prominent users over the past week as it introduced a Stories-like feature called Messenger Day into its Messenger app. The blowback was somewhat surprising, because the equivalent feature in Instagram has been a huge hit over the last nine months or so, and has been blamed for Snapchat’s slowing user growth in the second half of last year. However, I would argue that the rollout of Messenger Day within Messenger is a symptom of a broader problem afflicting Facebook at the moment: It’s trying too hard, especially when it comes to new features.

Caution in 2012 over mobile ads

Back in 2012, as Facebook was readying for its IPO, some investors were worried that Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how to monetize its growing mobile audience. It had just begun to serve up ads in the News Feed on the desktop site, but hadn’t yet begun to do so on mobile. The reason appeared to be an abundance of caution over spoiling the mobile user experience. In March, Facebook did introduce mobile ads for the first time, but with both the News Feed ads overall and mobile ads in particular, Facebook remained very careful not to overload users with ads or overwhelm them with unexpected new experiences.

During this period, and for quite some time afterward, caution was the watchword. It served Facebook well, as mobile ad revenue went from zero in 2011 to 11 percent of ad revenue in 2012, and 84 percent of ad revenue in 2016. Though both the numbers of ads shown and the revenue they generated rose quickly, they did so in a way that didn’t break that fundamental rule of not ruining the user experience. Above all, Facebook seemed committed to prioritizing the user experience over all else, including its strategic objective to drive mobile advertising revenue.

Live video: The first sign of trouble

I would argue the first signs of trouble over this apparent rule at Facebook came with its rollout of live video. That feature itself wasn’t overly intrusive at first but, over time, Facebook appeared very keen to get users to engage with the feature more, whether posting their own videos or viewing live videos created by others. That meant increasingly obvious and arguably more intrusive indicators of live videos in users’ feeds, in picture-in-picture videos that popped up in the corner of the app and eventually in the dedicated video tab. That last was particularly egregious in its use of notification-like red numbers which indicated there were new videos available to watch even though users hadn’t turned notifications on, and there was, in fact, no way to turn this feature off.

This was the first time Facebook appeared to sacrifice the user experience to a strategic objective, contrary to how it had handled the early rollout of News Feed and mobile ads four years earlier and, to some extent, it broke an unspoken commitment it had made to users. In this case, of course, there wasn’t even a direct financial incentive for Facebook to do so (unlike with its rollout of ads in 2012), and this was really just a case of Facebook saying the user behavior it wanted to see was more important than what users were actually doing in the app.

Messenger Day follows the same pattern

With the launch of Messenger Day, Facebook is arguably repeating this same pattern, sacrificing the user experience for a strategic objective. That’s particularly sad because the Instagram Stories rollout was so successful. One of the best features of Instagram Stories is how unobtrusively the new feature was added, with tiny circles that appeared at the top of the screen when you first open the app and then disappear as you scroll down. When there are new Stories, and even when Instagram itself chooses to use the format to notify users about new features in the app, the notifications are subtle and not distracting.

The rollout of Messenger Day, by contrast, is massively distracting and obtrusive. First of all, Facebook took over the camera button with a sun icon in the first day or two, messing with a core feature of the app. Secondly, the Messenger Day stories from friends are far larger and less in keeping with the overall design of the app than their Instagram counterparts. There’s also a prominent invitation to post to your day right in the middle of the app screen at launch.

Unnecessary annoyances

The stupid thing here is Facebook didn’t have to do any of this. Instagram Stories was so well received precisely because it added useful functionality in a way that didn’t detract in any significant way from the existing experience of the app. You could use the app entirely as you always had without having to scroll past distracting new content or user interface elements. You weren’t accosted with invitations to share your own Stories, and yet, if you chose to view Stories shared by others or to post your own, the experience was great. That, in turn, drove significant usage by the base and made the feature a hit.

Extending the feature to Messenger is absolutely logical. It worked in Instagram, and Messenger feels like another natural home, given Stories inventor Snapchat’s focus on messaging. But, of course, the Snapchat experience is divided into multiple screens, with the messaging interface separate from the content interface (which is where Stories show up, alongside Discover content). Swipe right from the camera to reach Chat, swipe left to find Stories. The Messenger app, by contrast, is entirely dedicated to messaging — all the content is in the core Facebook app, now an entirely separate experience. So, if anything, Facebook needed to make the Messenger Day feature even less intrusive, rather than more so, in Messenger.

A breakable pattern

This pattern isn’t set at this point — though we’ve now seen two examples of Facebook breaking the user experience to promote a feature it cares about more than its users, it hasn’t gone too far to turn back. It can still revert to its previous strategy of treating the core user experience as sacrosanct and only adding features in ways that preserve the experience while subtly introducing new features or functionality. It needs to get back to the ethos that guided its careful introduction of advertising back in 2012, and dial back the hard push for adoption of new features.

Facebook is simply trying too hard to drive user change that will come naturally if the features are compelling enough and presented unobtrusively enough to feel compelling rather than obnoxious.

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Over the past couple of weeks, the culture of one particular company has been almost permanently in the tech news. Uber has hit the headlines again and again since one of its former employees shared, in a blog post, her experience with harassment and discrimination as a female engineer. These stories highlight just how powerful company culture can be, for better or worse, and the extent to which the tone and culture of a company is set by a CEO, whether actively or passively.

Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick is in large measure responsible for the company culture at Uber, and he has set the tone for it from the beginning. As a single man, he’s boasted in the past about sexual conquests enabled by his role, and has a reputation for being combative, aggressive and impatient — qualities that have arguably served Uber well in its rapid growth and competition with players like Lyft. But those same qualities have also created some of the toxic culture that now exists at Uber, and his personal combativeness got him in trouble this week when a video of him arguing with an Uber driver was released.

Kalanick has set the expectation that growth and ultimately “winning” is the single overriding goal at Uber. Everything else is secondary or even irrelevant. As such, even without ever explicitly stating women shouldn’t be treated with respect, that sexual harassment or discrimination reports should be ignored, or that Uber shouldn’t hire more women, he has set expectations that have prioritized performance over employee welfare. He may never have even considered the impact that his obsession with winning has had on these other aspects of Uber’s business, but that’s precisely why such a CEO can be so dangerous for company culture. A good CEO needs to be aware of all facets of the business, and should surround him or herself with other executives who will represent the interests of the various stakeholders in the company.

Even when not creating cultures toxic to women or other groups, CEOs have enormously powerful impacts on the companies they lead and the cultures they foster. That influence can be positive or negative (and sometimes both — Steve Jobs was legendary for his exacting standards for products, but the way he communicated his dissatisfaction was often abrasive and upsetting to colleagues whose work was deemed inferior). Jeff Bezos at Amazon is arguably a strategic genius, but both white- and blue-collar employees at his company have complained about unreasonable working conditions.

Culture can also be a tough thing to change — I would argue that Kalanick’s biggest challenge, once the semi-independent investigation concludes, is going to be making meaningful change to the corporate culture. That won’t work if he doesn’t begin modeling better behavior himself. All the official policies in the world don’t make a lick of difference if the people at the top don’t demonstrate, by their behavior, that they will abide by them and expect others to do the same. It remains to be seen whether Kalanick is capable of the kind of personal change that he seems to finally accept he needs to make following this week’s events.

However, it is possible to change company culture. I’ve already mentioned Steve Jobs, and it’s worth looking at the subtle ways in which Apple’s company culture has changed. There are certainly far fewer stories about employees being berated or belittled, while the company has made a far greater commitment to being a force for good in the world beyond the role its products alone play. Tim Cook has weighed in on social issues, used Apple’s money to advocate for causes, massively increased the company’s environmental efforts, and more. But yes, there are occasional rumblings the company doesn’t innovate or has lost its focus somewhat over the last five years too.

Another example of perhaps more dramatic corporate cultural change is Microsoft, where Satya Nadella appears to have presided over a significant transformation in the last couple of years. Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft was legendarily a fairly cutthroat sort of place, with stack ranking an important part of employee evaluations, lots of empire building and working in silos, and little collaboration between major units. Under Nadella, a more collaborative culture has emerged, and that new culture has already begun to bear fruit in the form of new products and services and something of a return to growth. Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft is now being perceived externally as a company once again capable of innovation and creating great products.

I’m conscious that all the CEOs I’ve mentioned are men, and all but one are white men. The lack of diversity in Silicon Valley becomes more acute the further up the corporate echelons you go, and at the top of the largest consumer tech companies, there are very few women. Marissa Mayer is a rare exception, but her tenure at Yahoo is coming to an end and Yahoo has certainly had its own cultural challenges under her leadership. But, at many of these companies, there are at least some female leaders in the upper ranks, from Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook to Amy Hood and Peggy Johnson at Microsoft, and Lisa Jackson and Angela Ahrendts at Apple. It’s probably no coincidence that some of the company cultures most hostile to women are those with the fewest women in senior roles.

Cultural change is possible, but the CEO has to be part of the change rather than part of the resistance, and can’t merely pay lip service to that change, either. If employees, contractors and partners are to be treated well, that has to start at the top, and the message has to be that each of these stakeholders is important in their own right and not merely as a means to an end or pawns to be sacrificed in the pursuit of some other objective. It is absolutely possible to build companies that put up huge numbers, especially in the short term, in spite of, rather than because of, how they treat their employees. But it’s rare to see a company that wins the ongoing support of both employees and investors with a lousy set of corporate values.

(You might also want to listen to this week’s podcast, where Ben Bajarin and I discussed some of these same issues.)

Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him @jandawson.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.