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ShareIt's currently fashionable to write on Slumdog Millionaire. Here are my two bits of wisdom as well: Slumdog Millionaire is ahuge hit and something positive that has come out in these depressing times. What nobody seems to be writing about is the fact that the movie almost did not see a theatrical release. And what a pity it would have been, if that had happened.
Just to recount a few facts. In August 2007, Warner Independent Pictures paid $5 million for theatrical distribution of the movie in the US. The studio shut down in May 2008 and was on the verge of releasing Slumdog Millionaire directly on DVD. In mid-August 2008, the studio entered into an agreement with Fox Searchlight, which bought a 50% stake in the movie.The movie was finally released in the US on November 12, 2008,in all of 10 theatres. It grossed around $350,000 by the end of its first week. Gradually, word of mouth picked up and as on February 3, 2009, the movie had grossed nearly $68.5 million, having played in over 1,400 theatres.
For a movie that took around $15 million to produce, that is not bad at all. And now, with 10 Oscar nominations coming in, it is expected to gross over a $100 million, which means profits of nearly six times the investment made in the movie.
The success of Slumdog Millionaire reminds me of a very interesting point that Seth Godin makes in his book Small is the New Big. "If your idea is great, people will find you," he writes. And nothing elucidates this better in the recent past than the huge success of Slumdog Millionaire.
The point that Godin makes is that in this day and age, if the idea behind a product is good, and to the condition that it is launched, chances are that it will find its takers. The reason behind this is the fact that word of mouth these days can spread exponentially through multiple channels.
If people like a particular product, they may choose to blog about it. They may SMS or email their friends or even use the mobile phone to pass on the message. The point I am trying to make is that word of mouth is not just word of mouth, anymore. If people like an idea, it spreads.
The chances of a strong "word of mouth" also ensure there is no need to go in for a big bang launch for a new product, as has been the case in the past. Slumdog had a very small launch, and as it gained popularity, it was released in more and more theatres.
So the next logical question to ask is, "How do we know that an idea is good?" Now that is a very difficult question to answer. "You just throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks," management guru Thomas Davenport told me in a recent interview.
Google is probably the best big company is the world at throwing small offerings onto the market. There are so many offerings like Gmail (email), Google Talk (instant messaging), Google Base (classified advertisements), Google Finance, Google Docs (productivity tools), knol (a Wikipedia-like offering), Google SketchUp (product design), Google Chrome (web browser) and on and on and on, that the company has rapidly brought out.
In fact, experts even say that Google may be flinging a product too many onto the market. This is a point that Bala Iyer and Thomas Davenport make in their article titled "Reverse engineering Google's innovation machine" in the Harvard Business Review. "One could argue that they have been throwing too many things at the wall because even the CEO wasn't sure how many products they had. It's hard for potential customers to even know, how many things there are out there," says Davenport.
Yes, Google may be overdoing the launching new product bit, but how does a company ever figure out whether a product is worth the trouble, unless it launches it in the market? If Slumdog had gone straight to the DVD market, would it have been such a huge hit? The trick, of course, is to make a very low-key launch and hope the word of mouth works.
One thing that allows Google to keep flinging newer products is the fact that its employees are allowed to spend one-fifth of their working time on projects which do notconstitute their main job. Thisis because Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, believes in the fact that innovation usually stems from small teams and not from big, fat organisations.
As companies grow big, they get stuck with their existing business and stop innovating. Take the case with Microsoft; it has gotten so huge that doing anything new is very difficult. As Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, an innovation consultancy, told me in an interview, "Microsoft has gotten so huge that moving the needle is incredibly difficult. And its current products have gotten so complicated that it makes it hard to move with any kind of nimbleness. It's ironic in a way, perhaps it would have helped Microsoft if the US government had in fact broken it up, leaving smaller, nimbler units in its wake."
My bet thus remains on Google, because it allows its employees to work in small teams and is not afraid of throwing new products onto the market.
The trick, as I said earlier, is not to bet the entire company on one big launch. Google understands that, Microsoft doesn't.
