Signal, MobileCoin and Marketing Myopia
The announced integration of MobileCoin (MOB), which provides extremely fast, privacy-ensuring payments between two parties, with Signal, one of the most popular messaging apps, has brought forth more vitriol upon Signal than the witches of Macbeth spewed upon Shakespeare’s eponymous protagonist.
But this vitriol is misplaced. Signal has made a brilliant decision.
To Understand Why, Let’s Start with the Critics.
- Security expert Bruce Schneier opined:
I think this is an incredibly bad idea. It’s not just the bloating of what was a clean secure communications app. It’s not just that blockchain is just plain stupid. [N.b. this is incorrect, as MOB isn’t blockchain based.] It’s not even that Signal is choosing to tie itself to a specific blockchain currency. It’s that adding a cryptocurrency to an end-to-end encrypted app muddies the morality of the product, and invites all sorts of government investigative and regulatory meddling: by the IRS, the SEC, FinCEN, and probably the FBI.
And I see no good reason to do this. Secure communications and secure transactions can be separate apps, even separate apps from the same organization. End-to-end encryption is already at risk. Signal is the best app we have out there. Combining it with a cryptocurrency means that the whole system dies if any part dies.
2. A representative anti-integration comment from reddit user caithsith01:
Whether or not this is shady, it is definitely completely unnecessary and destructive feature creep.
The beauty of Signal is that it does two things, and two things only: secure Signal to Signal communication, and a great SMS/MMS app. Even more importantly, it does both of those things at once, seamlessly switching between secure and insecure depending on context. That’s it. That’s what it does, that’s why it’s good.
This is absolutely unrelated. What the fuck does a payment system have to do with either of those functions? Nothing, that’s what. It feels borderline like they will be using their established userbase to deploy malware — or at least, software that no-one using Signal has asked for. It makes me concerned about what the app is going to be doing on my hardware and whether I can actually trust the ‘secure’ part above.
Signal has built up a great messaging platform. Lately I’ve noticed many, many people starting to use it from my contacts. They wil [sic] absolutely kill it the second that people start perceiving it to be untrustworthy. This move will achieve that almost instantly IMHO.
Marketing Myopia: The Critics’ Affliction
As Jim Gaffigan might say:
Marketing? But I thought this was about messaging and a privacy coin. What’s next, a discourse on the mating habits of Arctic seals?
No. For those not in the marketing field, “Marketing Myopia,” written in 1960 by Theodore Levitt and published in the Harvard Business Review, remains today one of the most influential and popular business articles ever written. Levitt summarizes and illustrates his thesis:
The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because the need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones), but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented [emphasis mine].
Hollywood barely escaped being totally ravished by television. Actually, all the established film companies went through drastic reorganizations. Some simply disappeared. All of them got into trouble not because of TV’s inroads but because of their own myopia. As with the railroads, Hollywood defined its business incorrectly. It thought it was in the movie business when it was actually in the entertainment business [emphasis mine]. “Movies” implied a specific, limited product. This produced a fatuous contentment, which from the beginning led producers to view TV as a threat. Hollywood scorned and rejected TV when it should have welcomed it as an opportunity-an opportunity to expand the entertainment business.
So…What Business Is Signal Really In?
The critics of the MOB/Signal integration are profoundly disturbed that Signal is apparently departing from its core business, i.e., messaging, and is now ready to sacrilegiously add a payment mechanism.
But is Signal’s business really messaging? Are kik, snapchat, Facebook Messenger and others really competitors? Let’s parse Signal’s mission statement: “to develop open source privacy technology that protects free expression and enables secure global communication.”
Yes, “global communication” is in there, but the focus is “privacy technology,” not “private messaging.” Messaging is one application or instantiation of privacy technology, not a tautological equivalent.
What does this mean in the marketing-myopia-aware language?
Signal Is Not in the Business of Messaging, but of Privacy!
Signal understands this, which is why MOB is exactly the right strategic fit, a repudiation of the marketing myopia integration critics have exhibited.
MobileCoin Founder & CEO Josh Goldbard stated: “MobileCoin builds privacy-protecting payment technology designed for messaging apps.”
There’s that word “privacy” again. But there’s more.
Isn’t a financial transaction between two parties a communication? Certainly, it’s an exchange of information requiring a messaging capability, but which further includes a payment rail.
That’s not enough, though. Is the payment rail privacy-enhanced and protecting or is it like Venmo, which by default broadcasts your transactions to the world?
MobileCoin and Signal are therefore two of a perfect pair, committed to the same mission of privacy in all messaging, whether involving payments or multimedia.
Everyone who cares about privacy in an era of ever-encroaching surveillance by corporations, nation-states and totalitarian regimes should be applauding this integration from the rafters.
