Lord of the Flies – The Company
The story is set in a company you’re all familiar with. There are no adults in control just big people that believe they are adults. It started well, a revolutionary product that changed how people went about their work. But not all that starts well ends well. Two dominant boy-men control the company. We’ll call [...]
Google Buzz Is New Black – Solving A Problem That Google Wave Could Not
Today Google announced Google Buzz. Watch the video: The chart below shows the spectacular adoption failure of Google Wave as a standalone product. This was predicted by a lot of people including myself. As Anil Dash puts it Google Wave does not help solve a “weekend-sized problem”. Besides the obvious complex technical challenges there are three distinct [...]
In Search of the Obvious – cutting through the marketing mess
When I first tweeted that Jack Trout‘s new book “In Search of the Obvious” had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it “The Obvious” because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, [...]
Does a picture paint a thousand words?
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about the basics of presentations combined with how you get the positioning and messaging for your product right. To help I’ve been reading Jack Trout‘s In Search of the Obvious, a marketing book which is all about making sure you focus your [...]
What Can Enterprise Software Learn From CES? – Embrace Ubiquitous Convergence
One of the biggest revelations to me from my trip to CES is that the ubiquitous computing, once an academic concept, has finally arrived. The data, voice, device, and display convergence is evident from the products that I saw. There has been wide coverage of CES by many bloggers who track consumer technology. However, as [...]
Will Zoho Conquer the SMB 2.0 Market?
(See the Editor’s note at the bottom)Online presentations, spreadsheets, word processing, CRM, project management, recruiting, invoicing, human resource tools — WOW! Zoho has it all. Naturally then I wanted to discuss the future of Zoho with Raju Vegesna (Chief Evangelist) as it relates to Enterprise 2.0. It turns out not much – but not for [...]
Watch the New Year Saboteurs
At the beginning of every new year, executives and managers are given new budgets to spend and initiatives to carry out. Getting your team to buy into the initiatives is challenging especially when they go against the corporate grain. I experienced this as a young executive at a manufacturing organization. Over the past decade, the [...]
What is Asana.com and Will it Change the Way We Work? Part I
Asana, is a workplace productivity startup co-founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook. After paying just $9000 for the Asana.com URL in June 2009, the company has raised $9m in venture funding to expand their business. The founders are predicting we’ll be working in a much more transparent and efficient way if they [...]
Enterprise 2.0 Strategy Matrix – A Guide for Internal Champions
Lost in a sea of cubes Imagine you’re in a cube farm, perhaps the 6×6’ grey type we’re all so familiar with. You’re at the center of the first floor of a multi-story commercial building. No windows, just a view of coworkers typing on their laptops and placing calls to check on the status of [...]
What is going on with LinkedIn?
Some co-workers and I were studying the Alexa and Compete scores of popular social networking sites yesterday and I was shocked to see LinkedIn traffic dwarfed by Facebook, Google and MySpace. I include Google, because according to Jeremiah Owyang (and I agree), Google is building a stealth social network by linking all of it’s web [...]
Build the Brand or the Business? – O2 and BT
When it comes to the real principles of marketing I’ve always been guided by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Their books like Positioning, Marketing Warfare, or The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing are essential reading. Even though some of the material is over 20 years old, it’s still perfectly valid in today’s market. Jump in [...]
Google Does Not Have Innovator's Dilemma
I asked a question to myself: “Why has Google been incredibly successful in defending and growing its core as well as introducing non-core disruptive innovations?”. To answer my own question I ran down Google’s innovation strategy through Clayton Christensen’s concepts and framework as described in his book “Seeing What’s Next“. Here is the analysis: Google’s [...]
The Google Enterprise Strategy Starts with Google Wave
Eric Schmidt – Google CEO Sources inside Google are telling me that 2010 is really the ‘Year of the Enterprise’. For a company better known for its’ consumer products, this is a major shift in strategy. They’ve been steadily laying the technology foundation for the enterprise blitzkrieg and expect to start profiting from it next [...]
Google Can’t Save Your Local Newspaper – But This Business Model Can
Newspapers are Dead. Ok, not quite dead but on life support. According to Silicon Alley Insider so far this year: 105 newspapers have been shuttered. 10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost. Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 ’09. 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20% Therefore when [...]
Rage Against the Machine
Disclaimer – The following post includes strong opinions and strong language, It’ll also annoy a small, but ultra-powerful group of individuals. What the hell….. Recently I had the privilege to have a first hand glimpse of the fundraising woes of an internet start-up. Without giving details, it’ll suffice it to say that I spent some [...]
