Is Microsoft bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone?
The News On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the intention to acquire Activision Blizzard with the vision of bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone, for $95 per share, which equals a transaction value of $68.7 bn. This is a bit more than eight times of the revenue that Activision Blizzards expect to have in the fiscal year 2022. With this acquisition, Microsoft can add 400 million monthly active users to the already existing 25 million Game Pass holders. Until the acquisition closes, the companies will run independently. After completion of the transaction, Activision Blizzard wil report to Phil Spencer, the newly appointed CEO of Microsoft Gaming. This acquisition makes Microsoft the third largest gaming company by revenue, after Tencent and Sony. The stock markets reacted with a sharp increase of Activision Blizzard shares to about $87, while Microsoft stock largely followed its pre-existing slight downward trajectory. Here my analysis in a brief video. The bigger Picture We have currently around 3 billion people and growing, who are actively gaming. Millennials and younger do not even know a world without social media and smart phones. They often play using mobile devices. Microsoft, on the other hand, is available on basically every device and offers quite some hardware, too, either directly or via partners. Additionally, Microsoft already before was a known entity in the gaming market, e.g. owning gaming platforms like Minecraft and Doom. Still, according to Shacknews, Microsoft seems to have missed the own growth targets, even though an increase of Game Pass holders from 18 million to 25 million in the year 2021 is quite significant. Apart from the...
CRMKonvos – The all time hot 5 including some surprises
The new year just started, so it is the perfect time to look at some data. To keep you curious: There are some interesting data points. I looked at and reviewed the success of our CRMKonvos. We are streaming live on various channels, including my LinkedIn profile, several Facebook channels including mine, the one of Ralf Korb, Korb & Kollegen as well as Tante Emma 4.0 and occasionally Kompetenztraining Ralf Korb. Of course, we are on Twitter using @twieberneit and @loneRangerCRM. Last, but not least we stream to our YouTube channel CRMKonvos. We are live every Tuesday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CET. Why do I say that? Because we are serving an international audience and timing matters for live shows. On all of these channels the videos remain available for viewers who could not make it to the live episodes. Shameless plug: Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel! Streaming to Twitch doesn’t seem to be that successful for us. I think, this is due to being live once a week is not often enough to build an audience. And then Twitch is full of gamers, who might be less interested in the latest and greatest of CRM and CX, delivered via good discussions with our expert guests. A hard part is that we haven’t found a solution that gives us detailed statistics, like views over time, duration of the view, engagement, etc. across platforms. Means, getting this data it is all manual work. If there is anyone who has a solution for this: I am all game, let me know via the comments or ping me via my LinkedIn or Twitter profiles. So, I did the data collection and am now able to tell you the 5...
How to walk a Fresh way towards CX and EX
The News On November 11, 2021 Freshworks held its annual Freshworks Refresh event. This year, the event had a hybrid format with around 250 customers, partners and analysts participating on site while around 17k people have registered for online participation. There was a social pre-event and an after-event for entertainment and networking purposes. The event itself was themed around “delight made easy”. Naturally, it had different agendas for customers and partners on one side and analysts on the other side. The morning was dedicated to a 4-hour sequence of keynote sessions for everyone. The event was kicked off with a keynote by Neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author David Eagleman, who spoke about the “Science of Delight”. The closing keynote was delivered by Amy Purdy, who shared her inspiring story of how she used creativity, a positive outlook and a never-give-up attitude to turn her life from nearly dying, finding herself with a double lower leg amputation and failing organs into becoming a 3 times Paralympic medalist. Between these two speakers, who set the scene, Freshworks offered product and customer information. Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham gave a product update that linked into Eagleman’s message and a distributed customer panel spoke about their experiences with Freshworks, how they implemented Freshworks solutions and how these help the respective businesses. Rounding this off, Freshworks awarded several prizes to customers who offer exceptional EX or CX and showcased the winners of an internal hackathon. The latter is relevant because these winning solutions made it into or will make it into Freshworks products. The afternoon was filled with customer related information in the customer and partner track and product and strategy sessions for the analysts. The...
Nimble Workflows for added value
The News I haven’t written about Nimble in a while. Probably a mistake, because there is always something interesting going on in the Nimble world. Already on October 19 2021, Nimble announced the availability of a workflow functionality that is targeted at enabling teams to replace spreadsheets with a when following through processes. Nimble workflows support Relating workflows to contact records with the objective of getting a complete overview of the relationship, including interaction history, attachments and custom fieldsManaging business workflows across departments to support more than sales and marketing needsPre-built workflow templates that are delivered by Nimble to already support a variety of common workflows for short time-to-valueCreating own workflows by modifying the delivered templates or creating new ones from scratchVisualization in a Kanban- or spreadsheet style with inline editing for making quick changesOffering the ability to add contacts to workflows from emails, websites, web forms, social media, business apps or via Zapier/Integromat and Nimble’s API In the words of Jon Ferrara, Nimble founder and CEO: “Repeatable processes are key to scaling a business, but managing external contact-related workflows across an entire company has historically been very difficult. Most CRM’s are built for salespeople while non-sales teams end up using spreadsheets to manage people processes. Since Nimble is in the business of relationship-building, we realize the importance of effective collaboration. With [Nimble] Workflows, every department in your organization can now manage all people-related processes within your CRM!” As part of the announcement, Nimble emphasizes on its enhanced positioning as being built for the whole company and “not just sales and marketing teams.” The bigger picture Workflows are something...