Monthly Archives: January 2011

Innovative Followers

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I love watching people fuss over false dichotomies.  Liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, Sane/Congress … This week’s dubious duo are Innovators and Fast Followers. In all industries, but in exaggerated form for high tech, there is a need to innovate. Mankind was built through innovation that allegedly improved life (fire did improve living though Twitter remains debatable). Many companies thrive on innovating while other lay in wait for innovation to occur and then compete through plagiarism. It can (and should) be argued that Microsoft rarely innovated anything, but made a tidy living by hijacking innovations from CP/M, Lisa/Mac, WordPerfect, and other also rans. Microsoft was the fast follower model to follow. This is not to decry the innovators. Apple grows consistently and has high stock price multiples not by dominating every market (aside from MP3 players) but from perpetually rethinking products. Collective gasps were heard when they introduced the Lisa (the Mac’s antecedent) … Continue reading →

Bean Bits

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Looks like Leo is back from his coffee break. HP’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, was MIA for a while, allegedly escaping a court appearance at the hands of Oracle.  Now that the nastiness of litigation has lapsed, Leo has reappeared in rumor mills that speculate on how he might possibly change HP more so that Mark Hurd or Carly Fiorina (though the changes wrought by that pair have Bill and Dave spinning faster than disc drives in their respective graves).  A Wall Street Journal report says that Leo, the former head of software shop SAP, wants to make software HP’s new focus. To which one former HP tech guru said “Lord help us, more HP software! Arghhh.” HP is not a software company.  Aside from Openview, which appears to be reverse mistake, HP is not only known as a hardware company, but also as a source of software incompetency.  Even … Continue reading →

Innovation Insufficiency

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Is owning 95% of a market enough? Taking in a number of market share estimates, Apple iPads have about 5% of the potential U.S. market for pads/slates/tablets (or as the wags at The Register prefer to call them, Fondle Slabs).  This is based on current P.C. market penetrations (north of 76% of households) and the estimated U.S. deployment of iPads.  Thus, the green field of the slab market is currently wide open. Which explains why several million Android slabs were introduced at CES last week. Market mechanics are based on many things, with technical innovation being a misleading indicator.  Apple has always been an innovator, but innovation in and of itself is insufficient.  Apple invented the PDA market with the Newton, which sold four or five units.  Pure innovation, but not only was it ahead of the market, it was also poorly marketed.  Alternately the iPad was very innovative and … Continue reading →

Paranoia Pays

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Steve Jobs needs to call Andy Grove ASAP. Groves, one of Intel’s founders, was very clear on the concept of paranoia in the tech biz.  Perhaps being Hungarian and thus too well acquainted with Soviet oppression, Andy learned paranoia at a young age.  But he refined his paranoiac inclinations being in the technology business, a war zone where corporate death comes quickly and painfully.  Like a battlefield where every soldier is out for himself, nobody and no company are safe from competition. Not even Apple. Wildly popular and cult-like, the iPhone and iPad made indelible marks in the consumer electronics space.  Though pads and smartphones existed before Jobs took on the job, Apple refined the product category and advanced the expectations of the market.  Combined brilliance in product design and marketing led to worldwide buzz, techno lust and a stock price that makes members of the House of Saud blink … Continue reading →