Monthly Archives: July 2010

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 →

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 →