Carrot Beats Stick
WooHoo: You’ve just unlocked the URL of Blogville Badge! With Hostess becoming as bankrupt as the nutritional information in a Ding Dong and Kodak redefining the Kodak moment of another kind of bankruptcy, I immediately thought of my childhood. Thankfully those cheerful marketing images that blanketed the store shelves were replaced by a different set [...]
If Your Company is Still Blocking the Move to Social, Then Join Electronic Arts in Battle
The world’s largest gaming company is going through a remarkable transformation into a Social Business. Electronic Arts understands that today’s technologies, unlike those of the past decade, are no longer limited to the individual. They impact everyone. Impact that’s revolutionizing … Continue reading →
What Startups Can Learn From Tim Tebow
The Tim Tebow phenomenon has become the biggest story in the NFL, exceeding the routinely remarkable perfection of the Green Bay Packers and the quietly dumbfounding turnaround of the 49ers under Jim Harbaugh.For those who aren’t sports fans, Tim Tebow…
Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw what could be a pushed for it. Everybody else; Microsoft, Xerox, Canon, and practically every single other company was missing it. Xerox Parc had it right in front of them, the GUI, Mouse, Object Oriented Language, and about every single thing we assume for computer use and development today but wasn’t doing anything with it. They were all missing it, except Jobs. The eccentric, crazed, reality distortion field generating Jobs pushed forward and found those that agreed, this was absolutely the future. Today’s computers owe so much to Jobs efforts to pull these people together, to what he saw as the future, and our modern computing world will forever be indebted to Steve Jobs.
Howard Hues had done this 50 years earlier. He simply stated, “nobody wants to fly on a plane at 10k feet and get shaken to pieces, planes need to fly at 30,000 feet or more were the air is smooth!” He then went about working to get a plane built that could do this! The Government was in his way, the industry was fighting him, everybody said this wasn’t the way to go. Nobody could build a plane that would do that right now! It’s absurd. He did it, and bought every single one of them he could putting the airline (TWA) in hock at the same time! But it paid off, and his airline had the nicest planes, best flight in the world, easily. Today’s airlines are all modeled after this ideal, our modern travel owes a huge debt to what Howard Hughes pushed forward.
The competition, the fighting pushed the envelope, but in both cases a visionary could see the future. To them it was plain as an image on a clear sunny day. To them, the future didn’t need to be tomorrow, it was ready right now. The future just needed dragged kicking and screaming directly into today! They did this, they pulled people together who could make these changes, and they with their teams yanked the future right into humanity’s grasp.
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IBM Announces FISMA Compliant Social Cloud – Will It Make Govt. Efficient?
After a soft release in early October, IBM has announced that they are releasing a social cloud targeting the US government agencies. This is a set of social and collaboration tools IBM is building on top of Federal Community Cloud they announced last year. Federal community cloud are secure, private cloud environments, part of IBM’s established [...]
Understanding How Dilution Affects You at a Startup
Dilution. Or as industry insiders call it, “taking a haircut.” Everybody knows that when you raise money at a startup your ownership percentage of the company goes down. The goal is to have the value of the startup go up by enough that you own a smaller percentage of a much larger business and therefore [...]
Twitter’s Walled Garden Strategy
Twitter today announced that they will be wrapping all the links posted on tweets using their t.co short URL. They are doing this with claims about better security but I feel that it is bad from the ecosystem perspective and user perspective. To be specific, it is both anti-competitive and anti-user. Tens of millions of [...]
Disrupt Yourself Before Others Disrupt You: DVD To Streaming Transition Is Same As On-Premise To Cloud
Recently, Netflix separated their streaming and DVD subscription plans. As per Netflix’s forecast, they will lose about 1 million subscribers by the end of this quarter. The customers did not like what Netflix did. A few days back, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, wrote a blog post explaining why Netflix separated their plans. He also announced [...]
Good for HP (with a but!)
Last week the IT industry had a major bombshell. HP announced it’s intention to get out of the PC business, drop it’s WebOS smartphone and TouchPad products and buy enterprise software company Autonomy. If you don’t recognize Autonomy they are a major success story born out of research at Cambridge University. Founded in 1996 they [...]
Teachable Moments in PR & Crisis Management
I was recently approached by Fast Company to comment on “crisis management” at startups in the wake of the Airbnb “ranksackgate” story. I agreed to do the interview because the story was about what other companies can learn rather than about airbnb in particular. What are the teachable moments? The short article in Fast Company [...]
Skype: Interop is a Waste of Time
Ecomm is a fantastic conference (for telecom propeller heads). This year I was only able to do a fly-by. However, the organizers are starting to post videos. Jonathan Christensen of Skype discusses the latest release of SkypeKit, an SDK for real time communications. SkypeKit is primarily targeted at consumer electronics manufacturers to embed Skype into a [...]
Dial M for Skype
The more I think about Microsoft acquiring Skype, the more I think it was a pretty smart move. The initial reports were all about synergies with various MS and Skype technologies, upon further reflection, I think the endgame will be carrier disruption….
Customer Focus: the Constellation Supernova Awards
Constellation Research, founded by fellow Enterprise Irregular and star analyst Ray Wang has just announced the ambitious Supernova Awards program, focusing on – what a twist! – customer champions of innovation, rather than vendors. Krish and I both feel honored to have been invited as Judges for the Cloud Computing category. Below is the official [...]
The Hollywood Culture
Debates are fun, especially when you are jousting with such fantastic and respected cloud dignitaries as Chris Hoff, Adrian Cockcroft and Simon Wardley. Come on, I mean who wouldn’t enjoy a good natured, well intended, yet fierce back and forth about the various clouds and their various philosophies ? Well, March 12 was a day [...]
Cloud Channel Challenges – SaaS Channel Compensation
The SaaS subscription model shifts risk from the customer to the vendor. Shifting risk back onto SaaS channel partners can put them between a rock and hard place.
