Author Archives: admin

Perception Problems

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I hate religious squabbles, like one recent war of words.  I speak not of invectives thrown concerning the inappropriate placement of a proposed mosque in New York, but a string of nasty words cast upon a private discussion group debating if the iPad is a real computer. Zealots … they are never more fierce than in geekdom. The group in question is an invitation-only cluster of former gurus involved with a now obsolete mini-mainframe system.  Each member is brilliant yet more opinionated than a lame-duck congressman.  Aided in part by a member journalist who once covered that mini-computer beat, and who now chronicles everything Apple, the group exploded into strings of sneering over the viability of the iPad for people who want to do work as opposed to consume content. I think it started with a dig about USB ports.  Who knows.  The rhetorical blood flowed regardless of who fired … Continue reading →

Research Riddle

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Being 100% sure of anything is not only impossible, it is durn expensive. Market research is a common conundrum for every business.  In a perfect world where coffee is always fresh, all women are drop-dead gorgeous, and government obeys, a businesses would buy plenty of primary research to be completely certain about their marketing decisions.  Not only would such circumstances stuff obscene amounts of money into my own pocket, but the risk side of the businesses risk/reward equation would drop to zilch and assure huge rewards. Sadly, complete research would cost a fortune and never be complete.  Even Oracle has to guess once in a while, rolling multi-million dollar dice on limited research and a hunch. Former Joint Chief of Staff Colin Powell — who led the rescue of Kuwait — once said something like “I research until I have 60% of all critical information, then I go with my … Continue reading →

Breaking Barriers

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I opened a box of Cracker Jacks and the toy prize was a cell phone. Not a smart phone, but a commoditized flip phone that handled voice conversations, kept a contact list and something that resembles a calendar.  A cell phone so fancy that two decades ago we would have taken a human life to obtain one, but today is so feature free that we might give it to a child so some day he can tell his kids how hard he had it. Markets change constantly, but often products change faster than the markets that support them.  Take the cellular carrier market … please.  Given that the domestic customer base is saturated, carriers are in a constant struggle to keep customers locked into their networks and find new streams of revenue.  Yet they must also help finance your newer and more sophisticated cell phones in order to bring you … Continue reading →

Competitive Devaluation

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The phrase “It’s just money” makes less sense when you compare the U.S. dollar and the post-Greek Euro. PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) managed to devalue the Euro through some rather reckless mismanagement (a.k.a. government).   The value of the Euro compared to other paper dropped when people weighed the risk of owning one fiat currency as opposed to another.  We can hope that George Soros was holding a pocket full of Euros when the slide started. As the chart shows (and click on any of the graphics to see bigger, better instances) devaluation can happen instantly.  The same is sure in the technology business.  Aside from intellectual property (IP) protections via patents, there is no safety in innovation.  Creating something usable invites others to do the same.  Today’s glory product is tomorrow’s techno trifle. Are you listening Steve Jobs? With smart phones still a small part of the cell … Continue reading →

IBM Indirection

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You would think IBM might learn from their own experience. Organizational structure is strategic by nature.  How an organization is arranged influences other strategy, such as marketing and product development, and thus a whole host of daily activities and tactical initiatives.  Who your boss is and what her objectives are determine what you will do, such as replacing her coffee with decaf in order to encourage afternoon naps and thus allow you to get some real work done. IBM almost went bankrupt due to their organizational structure, as their former president and resident cookie monster Lou Gerstner confided in his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Given their early and dominant lead in mainframe computers, IBM developed an organization structure that made the mainframe the center of their universe.  Everything IBM did evolved to support sales of mainframes.  When the minicomputer revolution ignited and UNIX (the original computer virus) escaped … Continue reading →

Disreputable Tech

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Dilbert’s distrust of marketing exists for a reason. Back when I had a regular job — during the Taft administration — my co-workers loved to drop Dilbert cartoons on my desk whenever marketing was the strip’s topic.  In one installment a customer asked Dilbert if he was lying about a product, to which Dilbert replied “No, that’s marketing’s job.”  This naturally reinforces the very stereotype that Seth Godin outlined in his masterwork All Marketers Are Liars. The reputation of marketing people has been rightfully sullied because many marketing “professionals” destroy reputations — of their companies and themselves.  They fail to grasp both the mechanics of reputation as well as its essence.  Much has been written about the former since reputation in social media is a hot topic, yet the latter has been incompletely analyzed for high technology.  Reputation for a company and its technology products are intertwined, and failed market … Continue reading →

Android Drive

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I love it when people don’t get it — it means the market is ready to shift. This week the geeks at Google released a gizmo that lets average people create Android apps via a brain-dead-simple user interface.  The reaction from the technical community involved hysterical laughter, deriding the tool and the alleged limitation of the applications it could craft.  Uniformly they snickered noting that while Apple’s App Store is loaded with professionally honed software downloads, Google was encouraging point-and-meow apps.  They used the news to lambaste Google’s Nexus One handset, which had a short life before cellular carriers started selling their own Android handies. The technical community doesn’t get it, which means the market is about to shift. Nexus One and the Android App Inventor served similar purposes, namely market seeding.  Android was a relatively new entrant into the handset OS market, and going up against Apple, Microsoft, RIMM, … Continue reading →