Wow horrible APP, who came up with this, tried to install and use it, wasted a whole day and it still didn't work I gave up.
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90% of Startups Fail. But at VZ, 90% of our stupid ideas get dragged on forever because we have the money to keep them going and promote all the idiots who ran it into the ground...
ha
WHY? Becasue nobody tells lowell what to do. That attitude has permeated these morons in VLSS. That and some undeserved god like aura they fell they have. Im a special VLSS boss. CRAZY!! Have a good idea here? Keep it to yourself and get back to work.
We are not too big to fail, it will just take a while. This company's failure will go down in the history books as EPIC.
was this some sort of VLSS project? sure smells like one - they tend to be tunnel visioned and driven by a few doo doo heads who ask questions but fail to hear the answers., And i would imagine they used typical VLSS monkey math to derive the expected benefits. It's terrific to drive new ideas and ingenuity - but many VLSS projects are forced toward a perceived solution that hasn't been vetted by anyone with practical business acumen.
...and why disregard use of successful business practices in place? Why not use some of the vast expertise in the company to enable your project? Or have the powers that be already RIFFed them?
Update 2.0 changes the name to BLOW90
I wondered the name go90, what is that. Being a Verizon employee you would think we should know, wrong. So I googled it, if you use your phone as a phone, you have to turn it 90° to watch a video. Another great idea.
Lowell should lay off all the go90 employees so he can turn their garage like office with rough unfinished floors into a museum. The public and generations to come deserve to see where the greatest millenial tool ever created came from. This type of greatness only comes once in a thousand years!
The most inspiring story I have ever read!
It was almost worth ripping off the public and the government, lying in the press and firing all those employees. All to make the awesome go90!
One day if the world still exists, the young kids will read about the great achievements of our age... Bill Gates out in his garage showing up IBM...
Lowell Mcadam and the 600 Verizon employees (and focus groups) in their garage, (with rough unfinished floors) making go90!
quote
- If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.*
Quote: * doing something is obviously better than doing nothing. *
did I mention that it was a lot like a "Silicon Valley Startup"? I did right?
Chapter 9 (Epilogue)
It is now January 2016 and go90 still sucks. However, Verizon has every reason to believe it will be huge in 2017.
and that OP is the story of go90
In chapter 7 things really get crazy...
"We were looking for a brand name that had an action orientation to it and that lended to the interplay between the positioning and promotion," Ambeault said. Both he and Colyer said there were a lot of names that were tossed by the wayside before the company settled on Go90 (they declined to say what those were)."
"Verizon also used focus groups in developing its content strategy. "We developed the content strategy and then from there … we put it in front of focus groups to get their reaction, and really to a person, they thought it was well received," Denson said. For example, designers initially used the word "tribes" to describe groups of people who followed particular entertainers, a word they derived from focus groups (however, that term was changed to "crews" in the current version of the app)."
(Probably a good idea)
As the summer wore on, Ambeault said there was simply "lots of caffeine in various forms for everybody." The enterprise grew to between 300 and 350 people out in San José and 500 to 600 people in total across Verizon working on Go90, Colyer said. A new business needed to be stood up, including technical operations, customer service and marketing operations. Those teams needed to be staffed and had to figure out how to run their operations, which "added to the frenzy," Ambeault said.
Workers in San José took turns to give their colleagues rest on a weekend or a night off, Ambeault added, "but most of the product and dev and UX resources were seven days a week from June all the way up to when we celebrated pressing the submit button to the app stores" in late September.
Colyer said that everyone had dinner at night at the facility in San José and gave up their vacations. "It was a mad dash," he said. "We went off the safe route and we went to a much more aggressive product route and had to build a lot more to make the new objectives."
How ripe did it get? "I don't remember anyone smelling," Colyer said. "It was getting quite frazzled. We were working people every weekend. We were working people long into every night. There were always cars at the building."
After testing Go90 with 5 million invited customers during September, Go90 officially launched to all wireless customers using iOS and Android on Oct. 1.
Some exciting parts from chapter 6;
At the Verizon facility on Trimble Road in San José, there are white boards everywhere. He might have been exaggerating a little, but Ambeault said you can write on almost every surface.
"As I walked around there and collaborated with a variety of different folks, I always had two white board markers in my back pocket," he said. "And just in case somebody had stolen the eraser or it was a surface that was a white board but had no eraser, a rag in my back pocket as well."
Man, a rag in his back pocket! Now that is hardcore! Can you picture this? Who will play Ambeault in the film?
But don't worry those go90 dudes worked hard but they played hard too! Things even got a little crazy one day....
As the team worked like a Silicon Valley startup, things got a little rambunctious. Colyer described a room at the San José facility that is set up like a living room with a large flat-screen TV and couches. Large white boards were brought into the room to help the designers brainstorm ideas. "We spent, between the teams, a few days just making sure we were honing down what we thought the product had to be, getting totally aligned, getting as much great ideas as we could out of everybody on the team," Colyer said, describing the process as "very collaborative."
At one of these meetings, in early March 2015, he said, "we were sitting one time in the room, and apparently we were being loud."
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam had decided to pay a visit to the building to check in on the progress that was being made. According to Colyer, in the middle of the loud brainstorming session, McAdam walked into the room and said, "This is how I want this company to work."
Picture that scene in the movie!
well at least they sealed the floors even if they didn't finish them.
"The garage has rough concrete floors, and the carrier, which had moved a team into the facility in December 2014, had sealed the floors but hadn't finished them because it wanted the space to look rough. "
so cool!
so.... cyberpunk!
I think you have to be a millenial to make it work...
just in case anyone wants to read the rest of the exciting story it can be found here.
http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/inside-creation-verizons-go90
There are eight chapters. I shit you not.
pretty exciting right?
They are gonna make a movie of this starring Viggo Mortenson as Lowell McAdam telecom maverick.
who came up with this?
glad you asked..
Wallace Colyer was standing in a garage.
It was a day in early February 2015 and Colyer was at Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) development center in San José, Calif. He was addressing more than 250 employees at an all-hands townhall meeting, and the crowd was gathered in a large, open area, bordered by windows that looked out onto the back lot of the carrier's facility.
The garage has rough concrete floors, and the carrier, which had moved a team into the facility in December 2014, had sealed the floors but hadn't finished them because it wanted the space to look rough. It was a Silicon Valley touch that signaled Verizon's desire to develop a little startup flair. The garage has six sets of doors that can be pulled down to divide the space up, but on this day they all were open. Colyer, Verizon's vice president of engineering for its Go90 over-the-top mobile video product, had an important message to deliver.
There was a large group of engineers, developers, user experience designers and product managers assembled in the garage of the facility, which is near Mineta San José International Airport and only five miles from downtown. Many of them had come over to Verizon in early 2014 as part of Verizon's acquisition of Intel's OnCue platform. Many of those at the meeting had been working on IPTV and FiOS TV products, and were not focused on mobile.
Everything was going to change. Colyer told them that they would start working on a mobile-first product. "Burn your old bridges," he told them, and stop thinking of set-top boxes and consumer electronics devices as the way consumers would access video content. And crucially, he said, the new product would be aimed primarily at millennials, Americans born between 1982 and 2000, a group who now number more than 83 million.
Verizon had been edging toward this moment for several months, with a so-called "skunkworks" team developing the foundations of what would become Go90.
"But that was sort of the turning point where we said, this is what we're doing, we're focusing on it, we're going to make a big bet in these areas and we're going to put a significant amount of resources and infrastructure into it," Colyer told FierceWireless.
This is the story of the creation of Go90, Verizon's attempt to create a new service that appeals to a demographic it views as significantly important to its future, as told by some of the key executives involved in its development. It's a story of how Verizon wanted to create a product that would appeal to millennials, driven by a desire to create a large audience the carrier could deliver to marketers for targeted advertising (advertisers have largely been flummoxed by millennials' aversion to traditional pay-TV products).
And more broadly, it's the story of how a multibillion-dollar telecommunications company known for its staid leadership and methodically consistent financial results incubated a startup -- and a startup mentality -- inside itself.