Author Archives: admin

Exchange Equilibrium

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Market advantages are like puppy love.  They don’t last. Every product and service may have an advantage, and it is your competitors’ job to make that advantage disappear.  In early markets everyone tries to out-invent the other fellow, and they continue this until there are a handful of nearly identical offerings that end-up competing on price and +1 differentiators. This includes Bangalore. As much as techies will hate this, we have to admit that programmer time is nearly a commodity.  All other things being equal, a Java programmer in San Jose is no more or less valuable than one in Bangalore.  Yet San Jose is the 91st most expensive place to live and Bangalore is much further down the list at 165.  Thus, the commodity that is a Java programmer has price as a key differentiator, with the Indian working for less.  Cheap labor is why Silicon Valley companies have … Continue reading →

Social Smarts

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I love technology fads.  If I could just think of a way to profit from the inevitable failure of enterprises trying to implement them, I could retire … to my own private island. Social networking is more than a fad, though the surrounding hype makes it sound like one (with the possible exception of Twitter, a fad that I hope will fade fast).  Social networking serves a real purpose, namely uniting people who have common connections.  Facebook facilitates all types of unions from the common to the outrageous (if you can get jihadists to threaten you, then you know you have some power in the world).  The secret to social media systems is that they let people decide what common connections are important and that do not occur through nominal daily activities. Which is why most corporate social media experiments have been misguided wastes of your bonus check.  Corporate life … Continue reading →

Market Vision

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“There is no market there,” I said to the entrepreneur, who left in a huff. Sure, I might have been wrong, but that is unlikely.  The entrepreneur may be one of those storied Silicon Valley visionaries whose acute sense of the needs of certain buyers is so profound that he soon will buy a small third world country with his spare change, but that is just as unlikely. The first need every company has is a market.  The first question is always “does a market exist?”  After all, without willing buyers no amount of product design, cost reduction, hard work or plain dumb luck will make a company successful.  This then brings to the fore the nature of identifying viable markets, a task Silicon Strategies Marketing routinely performs for our clients though we have to deliver bad news more often than we like. There are two primordial paths to market … Continue reading →

Marketing Innovation

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I am overly fond of quoting Peter Drucker who said “Business has only two basic functions — marketing and innovation” and everything else is merely administrative labor.  But you have to give the man credit for stating a truth as succinctly as could possibly be done. The effect of marketing on innovation must be understood.  Unguided innovation has created many interesting, amusing and completly unprofitable technology products that caused tons of venture capital to evaporate (often through excessive and misguided marketing budgets).  Similarly, marketing occasionally identifies untapped markets, and is the seed for new and successful products (unless the market research was flawed, in which case see the preceding outcome).  Thus, marketing is both a creator and regulator of innovation. This subject is often not understood my entrepreneurs and even CEOs of major corporations.  Inbound marketing — the more interesting half of the profession — is all about understanding markets, … Continue reading →

Ballmer Bye-Bye?

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Is it time for Steve Ballmer to bail? I don’t pick on Steve for the fun of it — not entirely at least.  I bring up the dreaded discussion of putting a new captain at the helm because after a decade with Ballmer as skipper, the good ship Microsoft is foundering, leaking between nearly every plank.  In an era where everything changed, Microsoft did not change fast enough and has failed to catch the rising tides. Apple has not capitalized on everything and yet Apple now has a market cap larger than Microsoft (which we can take with a few drops of sea water since Apple’s forward P/E ratio is more than 50% higher than Microsoft’s, showing that navigators see better odds with Jobs on the investment horizon). Drucker wisely noted that “Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation.”  High tech is uniquely a product of both.  … Continue reading →

Portable Penguins

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“Linux, the original computer virus.” That line used to be said of UNIX, but no single flavor of UNIX ever spread across so many platforms and onto so many handsets.  Those handsets, the oft predicted unified communications solution, are the new OS battleground.  In a relatively short time we have seen: Google issue Android and, with partners Motorola and Verizon, shook Steve Jobs so bad he nearly busted a spleen (but I hear he can buy replacement parts easily enough) Flush from that success, Motorola decides that owning a Linux distro might be a good long-term option and buys Azingo Intel bought Wind River, the leader in embedded operating systems, and one who was grooming the embedded Linux market, including handsets, a chip target high on Intel’s priority list HP, unhappy that Apple iPads beat them to the Slate market, and seemingly unhappy with Microsoft’s offerings for slab devices, buys … Continue reading →

Networked News

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Newspapers.  Some say they are going, others think they are gone.  I think they are on the verge of a comeback. I have a cartoonist friend who is makes a good living drawing web cartoons.  He wishes a fast and speedy death to newspapers, believing that their business model is older and less lovable than Charles Foster Kane.  He sees no reason that any business built on the daily delivery of dead trees should continue. Some newspapermen reluctantly agree.  I spent part of Sunday afternoon with two reporters for a local newspaper group, which despite the efficiencies of consolidation admit that they live from fiscal quarter to quarter.  They have no idea how they are going to survive.  The cynical observation “Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion on a ukulele,” may be outdated.  We have to … Continue reading →