Author Archives: admin

Consolidation Crazed

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I love watching markets, because they are at times very predictable (which doesn’t explain why I lost my shirt investing in alpaca futures back in the 1990’s). Presently we witness market consolidation in various technology sectors. IBM, Oracle and SAP are pillaging every available Business Intelligence (BI) vendor who survived the initial market shake-out. And Mark Hurd, HP’s chief, is predicting an ongoing slew of mergers and acquisitions as part of a broader technology market consolidation. Even my broker thinks the technology market is ripe for thinning the flock (let’s hope his predictions about tech are better than those llama fleece demand). At the risk of repeating myself yet again, all markets consolidate over time. When first invented there were dozen of telephone companies, and eventually there were but a few. When cellular phones were whelped, there were a dozen domestic carriers, and they have merged and purged down to … Continue reading →

G-overnment

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Google’s announcement of their mobile platform sucked all the wind out of both the mobile and open source markets this week … and it is only Tuesday! I won’t argue the good news. The mobile operating system market is so disjointed that it makes Pakistan politics look well ordered by comparison. The dysfunction is due to the primary proprietary plays (Windows and Symbian) not opening the stacks enough to allow significant innovation on the application front. Google’s choice of Linux will drive not only adoption of G-phones, but of all Linux-based handsets, and thus a thriving ecosystem. This is a cascade event. Obscured this week was a little discussed news report on the antithesis of unrestrained capitalism, namely government. In particular, a report showing that the U.S. Federal government is adopting Open Source almost as fast as it is gobbling my tax dollars. I sure hope their IT savings from … Continue reading →

Matching Expectations

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I want to brag about one of our clients and use their main product as a micro case study in product identification and whole product definition. Mobile Complete provides a unique service called DeviceAnywhere (which I don’t think is a great name for the service, but Silicon Strategies Marketing was not engaged with Mobile Complete during their initial branding efforts). What DeviceAnywhere does is allow you to remotely use real, live mobile handsets for testing mobile applications. They give you access to hundreds of popular devices, in regions all around the world, and the ability to test every aspect of the device and your application. Before DeviceAnywhere, the market had two options: use emulators for testing or buy one of each phone, for each carrier, in every country and carry monthly service charges for all of them. The later is an extremely expensive option, and even wealthy companies like Google … Continue reading →

G-Phone = G-Force

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There must be a new virus in Silicon Valley because whenever Google sneezes, a lot of people fall ill. The latest wildly spreading contagion is the under-disclosed and over-hyped G-Phone (or GPhone depending on which news writer is sober enough to meet his deadline). Google has let slip it is doing something in the mobile space, and the few clues have led many to believe they will introduce yet another mobile operating system, butting heads with Windows, Symbian, and a hoard of completely unaligned Linux mutant variants. There is good reason for Google, or anyone else to want a piece of this action. It is a huge industry and one that is growing at previously unimagined speeds. This rate of growth shouldn’t be surprising because the industry gives people cheap, portable personal computers with built-in telephony and music capabilities. Cell phones are the unified communication hubs that never materialized in … Continue reading →

Grow Rich Slowly

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In a presentation I’m giving at Software Business 2007 on the topic of “How the Software Business is getting Crazier”, I talk about why growing your business from top-down, as is the tradition in the software world, may not be the best approach. In the good old days (which were about a decade ago) most B2B firms started vending their technology to enterprises. This made a great deal of sense given that: Technology was expensive to develop, and thus expensive to buy Fast payback on development from early-adopters was essential to maintain fiscal life-support Only enterprises were sophisticated enough to implement most technology Marketing and distribution costs were significant But a lot has changed in a mere decade. Software is cheaper to build due to more developers, better tools, Open Source models, etc. Software design has been simplified to the point that nontechnical people can implement many/most products The Internet … Continue reading →

Enterprising SaaS

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The good folks at Gartner shocked me recently when they reported that SaaS was eating a larger hole in enterprise budgets, now accounting for about $4.2B in spending, and …

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