Investor’s Business Daily had an interesting report from ABI Research showing that now, and through 2014, iPhones and gPhones will dominate the smart phone application platform market. Combined they will own about 60% of the market in the out years, with all other competitors in the ‘other’ category. That includes Microsoft.
Continue reading →It has been a bad week for brands, and it is only Tuesday. Between Tiger Woods’ early morning mishap and certain global warming scientists being exposed as frauds, we have seen two well established brands bite bullets. Nobody believes that Tiger Woods was out for a 2AM joyride and happened to lose control of his car while leaving his driveway. His squeaky clean image is tarnished, and though not debilitating to his multi-million dollar income, his personal brand will not carry him as smoothly as before. Certain scientists lost much more when email and computer modeling code was hijacked and disclosed to the public. In less than three days the word “climategate” – which had not previously existed – has 13.4 million references in Google whereas “global climate change” and a mere 0.5 million. Those emails and comments in source code show that “scientific consensus” never existed, was straggled at … Continue reading →
There is hidden meaning to Silicon Strategies Marketing’s chess board metaphor. Sure, chess is a universal emblem for strategy, because you cannot win the game unless you think strategically – or unless you are IBM and build a computer that simply grinds through all possible moves in order to predict all possible outcomes of every game. The hidden aspect of chess is that it is played on a board divided into conquerable places, and the goal it to dominate space by taking it one piece at a time. In other words, segmentation. Market segmentation is like chess in that chasing the wrong segment with the wrong piece is a catastrophe in the making. Many chess strategies work like great market segmentation strategies, by taking the space/segment next to the one you already own and have well defended. Like SalesForce.com is doing. SalesForce started life with the right strategy, namely attack … Continue reading →
If you want to suffocate your competitors, wrap the market with a set of tentacles and squeeze. Like VMWare. With the introduction of vSphere, VMWare initiated a strategy for the next evolution of IT infrastructure management, namely the cloud. At product launch VMWare showed it already paid attention to a whole product strategy. By engineering APIs and other bolt-in points, partnering software vendors could complete the cloud whole product definition. For example, VMWare is not a security software vendor and never should be. But virus and intrusion protection are on ITs worry list. So VMWare had to facilitate cloud-ready options for security. They designed their product so other vendors could become part of VMWare’s whole product definition. Whole products are one aspect of dominating markets. The other essential elements to inviting FTC scrutiny include establishing partnerships with the top players in target segments and convincing the media that the race … Continue reading →
When IBM tosses down 100,000,000 R&D dollars, we had all better pay attention. IBM has discovered mobile, no doubt dumfounded by the runaway popularity of its media rival Apple. I am sure that Apple’s original 1984 poke at the then-failing IBM left a shoeprint on IBM’s corporate butt. With IT hardware commoditizing and the market for IT services being finite and more competative, it would be unsurprising if IBM was looking for where to grow next. They may be as enamored by iPhones and Apple’s app store as a crazed public. IBM has decided to invest $100M into mobile communications research over a five year period. Though Big Blue is focusing primarily on extending enterprise IT to handies, they are not imune to the notion of enabling B2C and C2C interaction as well. Apple has demonstrated that selling to the masses generates massive muhla. Being an organization driven by numbers … Continue reading →
No sooner did I speculate on who will make a run at providing p-cloud (private cloud) management tools than VMWare comes charging like malcontent bull in a Pamplona ally. Like Apple before it, VMWare is co-opting a single letter of the alphabet to brand a series of products. Apple owns ‘i’ and VMWare now owns ‘v’. I hereby establish my claim to ‘g’ for everything I create, such as g-confusion and g-discontent. One of VMWare’s initiatives is vCloud, which is one component of their broader Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) gestalt. VDC-OS – a clumsy acronym in an otherwise slick acronym flooded market – seeks to virtualize the data center in very broad terms. It already has select virtualization components for CPUs, storage and network and a 2009 roadmap for central management. What is interesting about their announcement this week is the addition of a security module. Though conceptually there … Continue reading →
One rule of marketing is to test your campaigns before launching them. This is so basic that those who fail to do so will fail in spectacular ways. Sounds like we are talking about Sun again. We are. This morning I received a quasi-spam from Sun promoting Glassfish, their Open Source web application platform. Since I have been delinquent on studying Glassfish and seeing where in the web app ecosystem it fits, I immediately jumped to the Sun Microsystems web site. Sure as sin Glassfish was not only prominently displayed in the left side menu of downloadable goodies, the home page banner was a big blue ocean with a glass fish swimming therein. I clicked into the download menu and as expected there was a “learn more” link. So far so good. The link points into the Java development web site … to a blank page. “Learn more by learning … Continue reading →
