theSpiel on Business

I'm really slack, I know

2011-07-13T02:52:00.002Z

I've been a bit slack here with my posting but there's been a lot more activity on my other blogs... please check 'em out!

Addicted2wheels - bike racing for everyone
Offline - my take on the planet and its politics
Dopage - all the dope on the dopes who dope, allegedly
Secrets of a Sydney Past - personal photos and recollections of Sydney's history
Central Coast Imagery - my photography blog
Musical Must-knows - software and gadgets for the electronic audio artiste
My Alfa Blog - as in rust-free Italians
My PC Help Blog - as in fixing hardware and software

Will Holden survive?

2009-02-01T23:26:00.002Z

'Will Holden survive?'. That was a search string I just saw in my stats. Interesting.

First up, why does this interest anyone? (BTW, Holden is an Aussie automobile brand name, wholly-owned by GM.) If you were CEO of GM, or a shareholder, it would be of interest, and you would want it to be profitable. But you would also be keen on the overview - does Holden's survival depend on brand alone, or do we need to make 'Holdens' in Australia?

Judging upon the relatively slow sales of re-badged imports masquerading as 'Holdens' it looks fairly likely that local manufacture - or assembly - is indeed important to buyers. Or maybe they are just the wrong cars, poorly marketed. Then again the locally made big cars are declining too, so maybe 'locally-made' doesn't matter so much any more either. After all, most Aussies have bought into multiple foreign brand-names anyway, like Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Sony, Hyundai, Apple and so on without caring about 'where it was made'. So why should it matter with Holden's cars?

Well Holden's survival also matters to Holden employees. And many of them are involved in making the cars themselves. Many more are involved in sales, distribution, marketing and servicing, and to be honest they may say they care where the cars are made but at the end of the day they just want a job. So local manufacture is probably not that important, unless you actually work in the factory. In which case you would indeed be asking, 'will local manufacturing survive'? Well I looked at that some time ago in this post, where I looked at the energy consumed in car manufacture. In a nutshell I found that the Italians and the Koreans were far more efficient at making cars, to a staggering degree. The Holden Commodore was simply a glutton in energy terms and was probably sustained only by subsidies.

So I think that's the answer, really. If left alone with current levels of subsidy the local (Australian) manufacture of cars will continue to decline. Likely as not, if supported by increased subsidy it will stay at current levels. Which is a fairly expensive way to support a few manufacturing jobs; however prestige and politics go hand in hand with subsidies, and I suspect we'll continue to foot the bill. Don't forget that these subsidies are often hidden as 'incentives' and 'tax breaks' under umbrellas like 'innovation'. Thus we get Federal government support for local manufacture of old tech like hybrids inserted into declining car designs like Toyota Camrys, or 'new' small GM cars that are still using old petrol tech.

So will Holden survive? Yep, certainly as a brand, even if GM itself died. But it will only take one tough decision by a determined government to bring down the house of cards that is 'local manufacture'. And after that, who will care?

Network World article on free DNS services

2008-02-10T21:05:00.000Z

Good, readable and useful article on free recursive DNS services. Worth a read if you want to break free of your ISP's DNS service.

And another good read on DNS turning 25. Blame (or thank) Paul Mockapetris for your DNS woes I guess.

Teamplayers... what are they, really?

2008-01-30T21:21:00.000Z

We like to think we need 'teamplayers' in our business, and in our lives in general. They sound like assets, don't they? People who are cohesive, get along, absorb instructions and lead others in the designated direction. They follow the rules, don't make trouble and work as one with the group to generate the desired result. All goodness, surely?

Mind you, to most of us our vision of a team is based around sporting analogies, tinged with military terminology like tactics and strategy. So we tend to see our manager as a coach, our team leader as a captain and the team working in different positions on the field but playing to the same rules and game plan. Which is all sweet and lovely within a context of strictly enforced rules, clearly delineated roles and an end result (ie winning games, winning the season finale etc) that's a self-reinforcing common vision.

If we are to critique this just a little, what exactly do we have in common here with modern work practices? Perhaps it was a stronger analogy in the 20th Century's time-and-motion-manufacturing and typing-pool -style of regimented labor, but does it hold true in a world of increasing role diversity and the blurring of who-does-what-when. Do you see yourself in such a team? I don't. I work in a geographically dispersed, virtual team, do everything myself (from typing to reporting to creating graphics; scheduling my time, prioritising as I see fit) as and when needed. I set my own hours around a work and life balance and rarely find myself boxed into anything like regimentation. It's more fluid, organic and diverse, and very flexible.

Sure, I'm just me, just one example. But the shift in work practices - from full time to more part-time work; from office or factory to home-based work; from clearly delineated single-task-based work to multi-tasking, is as real as the shift to a service-based economy. Not everyone works likes this but a heck of a lot more do today than yesterday.

So what does this mean for teams? To some, nothing at all. They cling to old ideas with new labels. They divide people up by 'personality type' and advise that you need one of these and two of those and lots of these worker bees to make it hum. Which is great if you are a bee, and ant or maybe a wasp. But what do insects know about teamwork outside of their genetic endowment? What about insects, sorry people who need to generate new ideas to improve the business and match - or beat - the competition? We don't want to make the same stuff the same way over and over again, do we? Well not if we are making incandescent bulbs in a world that is switching to energy-saving LEDs and fluoros.

In this new 21st Century world we need flexible, adaptable people who think and act on the run. They are assets to the team as well, in fact they are the new team. And if they uncover problems and devise and implement solutions within the overall team context and direction then they are invaluable. So we don't want mere followers, we want action-thinkers who network with their peers. We don't want them to buck the system for no reason, and we need a way to accommodate valid dissent, too. We don't want managers to have to micro-manage, either. So it's not just the team player per se but the team organisation that needs to allow free thought, innovation and a way to generate and propagate new ideas, quickly. In fact in a lean organisation, and I mean Lean in a particularly business-oriented way, the team player will contribute incremental improvement to process, procedure and organisational design quite natuarally. So they are truly a thinking, doing, trying-out-new-ideas kind of beast. Sure, not all of the team members will shine to the same degree, or generate the same caliber or type of idea; but they will support each other and provide an environment of contribution by which the team overall prospers.

So it's a cohesive environment of contribution that is important, coupled with flexible, empowered individuals. Perhaps thinking about 'personality types' and trying to build teams around a shopping list of personalities is too blinkered in this new world. Maybe we need to expect everyone to do a bit of everything, but in their individual way.

Ford: Out of touch or what?

2008-01-08T00:52:00.000Z

Bleeding cash, selling off assets and now dressing up old ideas as their best new ones. All wrapped in a slick name. Help! Bail out of Ford now, before the rats jump! No, wait, it may just work. Let's announce a great "new" way to get more power out of a smaller engine and save gasoline to boot! And give it a catchy enviro-friendly name like "EcoBoost". From the Car Connection: With its EcoBoost technology, however, Ford engineers apparently are adopting new math. An array of new engines will not only boost power but increase mileage while also reducing harmful emissions. The technology will make its formal debut at this month's Detroit auto show. More significantly, the automaker plans to begin rolling EcoBoost out on a half-million Fords, Lincolns, and Mercurys annually over the next five years.

You'd imagine EcoBoost to be something unique and whizzbang, but it's a combo of direct injection and turbo charging. Not only is this old tech - like 1940s airplane technology - but it's not even newsworthy in the auto industry. Like direct injection is new? OK, for an automotive petrol engine it's maybe 10 years old. Turbocharging? Decades old. Low-boost for fuel efficiency to make a 6 feel like an 8? Ancient history - go check out SAABs in the 80s for starters. And so on.

What it does show is that Ford doesn't have the cash to come up with genuinely new ideas. The only saving grace is that it's logical - and timely, if a bit late to the party. So it may just work, if staving off the inevitable is the goal. Just how long do you reckon Ford can keep banking on its past without bankrolling the future?

Tom Yager gets excited

2007-11-28T21:53:00.001Z

InfoWorld blogger Tom Yager gets a bit excited about AMD's Spider chipset. Quad-core meets graphics management in one super-moddable yet lower-power chip. In a word, it's another Intel-beater. (That's if you allow 2 hyphenated words to count as one, as I clearly do.) It's a good read, especially if you too get excited about performance improvements and renewed competition in the CPU marketplace.

I say that because I remember all too well the 'good old days' of competing CPUs from the likes of Motorola and Zilog, as well as Intel. Let alone competing operating systems! Yes, yes, we have AMD and a few others out there now but largely (and for too long) it's been a landscape of endless Intel and Microsoft design and manufacture, hasn't it? Now we have more hope for competition than ever, with the likes of Linux et al, generic Web Services and of course the Open Source movement opening up the software side of the world; and AMD offering some very realistic options in the hardware marketplace.

You probably don't need to know this, but here it is...

2007-11-28T21:32:00.000Z

A general ramble about business stuff...

IBM lost server market-share but posted more revenue in Q3 2007. Now IBM won't be happy about losing share but they are clearly doing better at growing margins and selling into premium markets. So who should really worry about this - HP, Sun and Dell, or IBM? Hey, I work for IBM and this is my opinion only and not necessarily IBM's, but gee I'd rather be the guy making money than the guy discounting to the bone... if that's indeed what's happening.
Motorola slips to 3rd in mobile handset market. Now traditional MBA-style strategic analysis will tell you that 1st or 2nd are the places to be, and climbing looks better than dropping. So that's bad news for Motorola (13% share, down from 21%), good news for 2nd placed Samsung (now 15%) and 1st placed Nokia (a whopping 38%). Yes, I'd be looking to improve the product and sharpen the marketing if I were in charge at Motorola - or get out of the kitchen.
Sony win's Greenpeace's annual 'green-ness' award in electronics, replacing Nokia. Nintendo bottom of list. It's hard to know how this is measured fairly when unknowns abound. I suspect a lot of guesswork takes place, although policies are usually visible and practices can be tested, if Greenpeace actually go so far as to test them. Let's assume they do and give Sony a cheer, at least for now.

When your content is user-generated who has control?

2007-05-03T06:08:00.000Z

Within the Digg newsportal lies a fundamental driver of content - you. If you want to raise the profile of a story, you can. Collectively it can matter, as Digg discovered when it tried to ban what it believed was illegal content - access to a DRM decryption key - or at least content that could bring about a lawsuit. What happened was salutary - the management couldn't actually ban a story - the readers, together, simply kept it alive. Now this c be a fine display of democracy in action, or it could also be a fine display of poor judgement on a large scale; or perhaps mob rule. I can see some sense on both sides, and can see such 'user-controlled' sites experiencing ongoing legal problems until some degree of lawful control is either enforced on these sites - or user-ratings are declared simply to be free speech in action. Forbes story here.

What happens in a globally accessible world when you don't understand which option to choose?

2007-04-18T23:25:00.000Z

Well infoworld tells us here. It gets out. Not suprising, really. Wherever I have worked there have been people who didn't "get it" to greater or lesser degrees. Or who just didn't care enough to think it through. And a very, very small percentage who were bribable, malicious or just plain crazy. There's always a level of trust involved in any dealing we have with people but sometimes you need to build in some protection. At the most basic level, we set some rules so it's plain. And remind people about the rules regularly. At the top end, where the data really must be kept "inside", we default to the strongest level of protection. Like lock it up.

What infoworld is showing us in that article is that a search of Google's calendar feature is a rewarding pastime for some. They have highlighted taht some people share their calendar details without too much thought. Maybe it's inconsequential to them. Like who really cares if you are visiting the dentist today? And sometimes calendar entries are shared that by company policy shouldn't be... as in the McKinsey example quoted. Now I know how hard it is to control internal levels of document security - very hard - but we live in a world where increasingly useful Internet-based applications are being promoted to the masses. These same masses will become as familiar with the Google online application set as we may now be with Microsoft Office, and will bring that experience and expectation into the workplace. We can either leverage those skills for our internal corporate use - and save lots of time and money - or we can play it safe, ban the use of these thoroughly enticing tools "in house" and build the same functionality into our work based toolset. At great expense and possible frustration to our Google-savvy staff.

It's not a new problem, just a bigger one. Some big corporates will have no trouble funding an internal online workplace. But lots of smaller companies will cut those corners, use Google's or other online providers services and save a packet. They will pass these savings on with cheaper services to the client. And by doing so will eat into the big corporate's market shares. And simultaneously raise the risk profile for all of their clients. Unfortunately most of those clients won't see the risk they are taking until they Google up some confidential company material...

'Fattism' and hiring

2007-02-06T21:37:00.000Z

Thinking of the workplace and our hiring and promoting practices, can we, or perhaps should we, discriminate against the obese? Legally it's probably OK. Ethically it's at least questionable. Yes, the obese are human too.

Of course we discriminate all the time, based on how people answer our questions (and what we deem to be acceptable answers) and probably - if we are being honest - on how they look. We size people up. Are they clean? Do they clean their fingernails? Have they brushed their hair? Have they dressed appropriately for the interview? Even if we don't admit to preferring the good looking over the more ordinary we probably do it subconsciously anyway. We are even prone to picking people 'like us'. So it's probably true that unless you actively seek diversity you'll end up populating the office with 'people like us'. And the extremes are what will get left out - or discriminated against, if you like.

Of course it's absolutely reasonable to pick the best person for the job - ie the most qualified or experienced, or the one who has demonstrated by their answers the best grip on what you believe to be important for the role. And it's also reasonable to expect that they will fit into your existing team, although you could argue that adaptability and diversity are important, too, so getting hung up on 'psychological' stuff is at best another attempt at selecting 'people like us'.

So do we hire the obese? Well we could say that they potentially will have more health issues, and that they may require additional hardware (stronger, bigger chairs for example). Or that they may not be able to physically perform some tasks, or to even get out of the building if there was a fire. But you could say that of persons with a physical disability, too. Then again, you say, the obese have chosen to 'let themselves go', so it's their fault; and besides, if they care that little about themselves how can we expect them to do a good job? But of course they haven't chosen to be obese, rather they simply haven't chosen to exercise or to maintain a healthy diet; or they have a medical issue, known or not. So do we ignore them, or do we instead take advantage of their skills and for the moment at least ignore the weight issue?

After all, they need a job too. Workforce Management reports briefly here on this topic.

The car business...and product life cycles

2007-01-29T05:15:00.000Z

I may be too glib about it, but the car industry is being assaulted from all sides. Firstly, it burns resources, prodigiously, in manufacture, in using the product, in its distribution and in the infrastructure that supports it. It's not a happy product, but it has massive support from users.

The problem is that the industry is on the long tail of the product life cycle. Easy profit has largely gone and the way to make money is to sell more, more more; all the while hoping that the profit on service stays up as the core business margin dwindles. To fight this long term decline in profit companies have resorted to lean manufacturing and relentless quality improvement, both to squeeze out more margin and glue on some loyal buyers. It has worked for Toyota. They have reduced individual model cycles, and added value for younger buyers by offering a model for everyone and cutting out much of the aftermarket. Again, it has worked for Toyota. And they have moved upmarket to cream off a better margin. Again, it worked for Toyota.

But for how long? These are reproducible tactics. Korea's Hyundai is playing the same game. Soon China and India will join the fray. Ford is one major casualty right now, teetering on the brink. Expect big some changes in this market, very soon.

Social networking... again

2006-12-27T23:38:00.000Z

More from Wharton on Social Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Now they say a lot about these sites and others, and I think the bottom line is that no matter how successful they become they remain islands. One may dominate for a while but the barriers of entry are so small - and the friction of changing allegiance so low - that they will always be threatened by new entries. Not only that but there's no limit to how many you can join - join 'em all if want (I know I have). So 'loyalty' is an issue, or perhaps no longer an issue at all!

Possibly an aggregator will come along (if they haven't already - there have been weak attempts) that will allow these multiple channels to be hosted via one portal - a one stop social network site where you can see and interact with all of these competing sites. Now that'd be a significant step forward.

Recent Business Blogging...and more

2006-12-27T00:56:00.000Z

Grrrrrrr...Acronym abuse!!
Please folks, acronyms are a special type of abbreviation. They are pronounced as a word. They are not simply initials. IBM is an abbreviation; QANTAS is an ac..

The perfect car?
I think not. It seems odd that CNET even tries to review cars ... but they do. And they think the Lexus LS460L is one “L” of a car, apparently. Mos..

I've had some arguments - sorry - discussions…
Well I'm always ready to discuss global warming, and to change my stance. Indeed I’ve gone from 'yes, in theory that's true’ in t..

Core competence revisited... Amazon, Google, Yahoo
Pick your strategy. Leverage your core competence by diversifying into related fields, and risk straying from that core skill area, or stay strictly doing what..

Williamson on Aussie culture divide
Excellent essay by Australian playwright David Williamson really captures the essence of the cultural divide in this country. That ‘us vs them’ fee..

The cheap car muse
I love cheap cars, and I hate 'em. Transport is a great thing, personal transport even better. But it's a win-lose, isn't it? The cheaper they get the more they..

Online Web 2.0 Bullshit generator.. in beta
Not new but amusing enough . Follow the links at the bottom as well. At least it's Javascript.

Top OS upgrades of all time... hmmmm
Not the most exciting topic, but here it is . Personally I'd throw in MS-DOS 3.11 and CP/M86, but this is sooo PC-centric.

Intel vs AMD… the core battle
Tom Yager has an opinion or 2. How about this one: “Wait if you want to, but I’ll tell you this: If you take your first drive of 64-bit Vista on Qu..

Google and the ripoff merchants
Google tries hard - perhaps too hard - to use its "smarts" (the fancy, arcane and secret algorithms it's famous for) to outwit the shonky operators who lure lot..

The cheap car muse

2006-12-12T23:09:00.000Z

I love cheap cars, and I hate 'em. Transport is a great thing, personal transport even better. But it's a win-lose, isn't it? The cheaper they get the more they infest our lives. Not only do cars cost us resources when being built but they rob us of our land as well with infrastructure (especially roads) everywhere. Great for getting around, not so good for the environment or our peace of mind. Trouble is that the market is totally out of whack with true costs. The car makers get a free ride with infrastructure and then get subsidised power and resources to boot. Now this gives us employment and transport "freedom" but at the price of a distorted market. Such markets run wild and consume resources with little restraint because the price paid does not reflect real costs. Great for our personal freedom to consume and move, bad for everything else. Here's another cheap car entering the Aussie car market. Just what we need.

Virtual opportunities

2006-12-06T21:28:00.000Z

Go on, have a Second Life. I must admit I'm there, but only in the most modest way. I find the virtual world as scary as the real one, so my social and financial success is limited. Forbes has an article here about successful entrepreneurs in Second Life. Including one self-professed real-world millionaire who made her dosh virtually in real estate. It's still early days... and there are competitors, but Second Life seems to be gaining street cred real fast. I must conquer my fears and get out more, in a virtual sense.

RSS and business

2006-11-20T22:35:00.000Z

Do you use RSS feeds? I do, in various ways. They feed my content (such as this posting) to any web page of mine that I choose. They arrive in my reader (to be read or ignored, depending upon time). They also trigger emails to warn me of changes and some even pop up on my screen. One feed gets turned into voice and podcasted. But do you use RSS?

I must admit most people around me - socially - go blank. Even some people at work. And I work in IT. They may use it but the name escapes them. It's just how some things work. And you don't always take an interest in the how, just the what.

So it surprises me that InfoWorld can report that "In fact, a recent Pew Internet Foundation survey found nearly one in three individuals consumes RSS feeds. But for enterprises, the most telling response was that 63 percent of these RSS users subscribe to work-related feeds."

The claim of one in 3 "individuals" surprises me. Maybe these are unusually IT-aware individuals. I'd personally be surprised if 1 in 3 individuals in the street had even heard of RSS. Maybe 1 in 10 - and that's a big maybe. But once you do know what it is and what it does it's not a surprise that people find it useful. That 63% of actual feed users use RSS for work purposes is probably about right - but I'd love to see the data!

IBM TV - another way to get the SOA message across

2006-11-16T22:33:00.000Z

In the IT world SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is getting attention - along with frameworks like ITIL. SOA can be a bit hard to get to grips with, especially for the non-IT manager. You may find the new IBM TV service useful - it presents a rich multimedia approach to explaining concepts such as SOA. I'm biased, I work for IBM, but it's still a useful site. My opinion only, not necessarily that of my employer.

Dell dies a death in network gear

2006-11-10T02:53:00.000Z

If Dell is the great commoditizer, why hasn't Dell run amok in the networking business? Network World takes a look at the question and finds that maybe the range isn't broad enough, or that it's gear is neither cheap nor enterprise-grade. Others have found Dell's network gear to be robust, reliable hardware, so maybe the problem lies elsewhere. As in trying to be all things to all markets, or maybe just realising that the periphery isn't as profitable as the core business.

Netflix and its ilk - is there a future?

2006-11-07T02:48:00.000Z

In case you don't know, Netflix runs a web-based hard-copy DVD business. They are considering online downloads but they, and many commentators, don't think that the current business model will fall apart anytime soon.

Now how would you analyse that? You could do a SWOT. You could do an environmental assessment. You could consider core competence. Let's just do some of that now.

They are strong with online presence and do a great job at getting DVDs out to customers and back. So they could leverage that online presence to go for downloads, but the movie companies want to sell DVDs, not rent 'em., so that could be a problem. You need to have a usage limit or a time-lock of some sort if you do rent 'em out by download. Still, it's do-able.

What about threats? Bigger capacity DVDs may mean more business, or multiple movies per DVD - which is possibly less business or less revenue per disc anyway. Kiosks that burn single copies are a threat. Downloads are obviously a threat, but are restricted by download speed. Now if that speed limit is broken by Internet-over-powerline - or any other technology - then that could be serious. It would have to be super-fast, however, or super-easy. That's either a lot of bandwidth or some means to pre-load much of the content to customer's machines before they select it. That's do-able, too.

Environmental threats include the cost of fuel (affecting delivery cost) - which is sure to rise.

Now Netflix are thinking no real threat for 5 years and they expect to be doing good business in 15 years time. With what you know about the speed of change in IT, and the imminent arrival of WiMax and IP-over-powerline, what do you think?

Forbes has a nice overview of Netflix and the threats to its business plan here.

Aussie vs US CEOs - US study

2006-10-25T00:11:00.000Z

Interesting survey result - from Workforce Week: "Those Fun-Loving Aussies: Australia's "work to live" culture is borne out by results of a recent study. Australian CEOs tend to take more risks, while U.S. executives are more conservative in their business practices, according to a survey commissioned by the Executive Connection, an Australia-based organization for CEOs. Although both Australians and Americans are described as "hardworking, socially skilled and self-confident," Australia CEOs tend to be more flexible and willing to take risks than their U.S. counterparts, who are more likely to do things "by the book." The information was gathered through personality assessments administered to 55 Australian CEOs by Hogan Assessment Systems of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Their responses were compared with nearly 8,500 U.S. business leaders across a range of organizations and business sector."

I'm a little surprised that the US CEOs aren't more 'entrepreneurial' in that 'risk-taking' sense, but maybe we are talking about different things. As always the devil is in the details with any survey. In other words, please take with a grain of salt!

I've just run another strategy workshop

2006-10-18T14:01:00.000Z

I think the hardest part is the admin afterwards. All of the butcher's paper, all of the post-it notes and the PowerPoint presos to be collected, collated and saved somewhere accessible. I didn't do a SWOT this time... maybe I should've? It was what the client wanted, though. Participation, discussion and more discussion. Only a few heads nodded off towards the end and mostly we seemed to have good, practical things to say. Only at the very end did someone actually twig that strategy was different from tactics - it always seems a hard bit to grasp - and most were mired in a world of daily practice rather than lifting up their heads and looking around. It's always fun to expand an audience's horizon a little, so if one or 2 heads took a peak then it was worthwhile :)

Sony's battery blues

2006-09-29T03:34:00.000Z

Sony's woes continue with IBM and Lenovo battery issues. Sony is picking up the tab. In looking at the story over time, going back to the beginning as it were, it's interesting to see how the issue of exploding/overheating/short circuiting batteries has developed. I think Dell was first cab off the rank and it got a lot of attention on both old and new media. I think we all saw that Dell laptop catch fire, didn't we? I know that I thought dark thoughts at the time about Dell and their knife-edge margins (sorry, but I did) however the issue subsequently became one of 'pin the blame on the battery' as other laptop makers joined the fray as well. Eventually Sony admitted it had a problem and has made all the right moves to recall and replace. Perhaps Dell could have doused the flames earlier, but did it actually know what the issue was? I imagine that the manufacturers were 'waiting and seeing' who would get the bad publicity first, hoping it was someone else - but I could be wrong. They could all have moved first and got in there before the literal blaze of stories, if indeed they had detected an issue. I assume they had seen it smouldering in the repair stats for a while. Anyone know for sure?

IBM Cell on sale

2006-09-14T22:33:00.000Z

A gaming chip, or a supercomputer on a stick? IBM and its partners have beaten up its potential but done little so far to generate product. Well now IBM has launched the Cell with some demos of its abilities in medical imaging. It looks like a juicy niche rather than a wider market, but it could also be the start of something broader and deeper. It needs strong marketing and a commitment to port applications across to its unique architecture. There are some hurdles here to wide acceptance, but once the hard work is done the product appears strong. And yes I do have a day job with IBM, so my views are my own and not necessarily representative of the company's view.

Ding dong Dell

2006-09-07T01:37:00.000Z

My Strategic Management lecturer didn't agree with my 'Dell is doomed' analysis but I will stick with it for now. My thinking? Dell is great at supply chain efficiency and wringing the cost out of selling and building a known - well known - product. However that core competency dooms you to always arriving late to the party, playing catch-up to the innovators. Whilst you can derive a good business out of the top and tail of the life cycle, you must also continue to spread the net ever wider, until you have extended yourself too far. Meanwhile your core business has either declined or evolved, and you again have to chase. I'm not saying Dell can't survive at this game, just that it will reach limits. Has Dell reached its limit?

This Wharton interview with Michael Dell is interesting, if only for the insight into Dell's reliance on a future services business and relatively old hat ideas like Dell Connect. Can services save Dell? Hey I work for IBM, and my opinion is my own and not my employer's, but I still won't comment further!

Apple and iPod. How long would you wait?

2006-09-04T22:42:00.000Z

If you had 75% of the US MP3 player market and led the world overall in marketshare, how long would you wait before introducing a new player? Apple and its iPod are in exactly this position. Probably the slickest looking and easiest-loading player around, but increasingly facing slick new competition with more capacity. Do you wait until market share takes a tumble, or anticipate that fall before it happens? Ah, strategy, strategy.

If Apple is smart - and they are - they will have numerous ideas up their sleeves. Products ready to launch but kept in reserve for the right moment. They may have a digital radio player, which would be a differentiator - and would show leadership. They may have more capacity or a larger screen, which would be matching the competition, not leading it. They may have something completely unique. Or they may have botched it completely. Unlikely but possible.

By letting the opposition get ahead on memory size they have indeed risked looking like followers. But their loyal clientele are rusted on - at least a hefty proportion, anyway. So the risk is minimised - and in the meantime they can get the most value - and profit - possible out of the current design. Why change for change's sake when you are sitting on cash flow like this? (CNET article here, btw, that prompted this thinking.)

Google Trends - a useful service

2006-08-27T12:39:00.000Z

Don't forget to use Google's Trends service... or use it now if you've only just realised it's there! Trends allows search term comparisons, as in "alfa" vs "alfa romeo". It plots it graphically and by geography. If you need to know what search terms are hot and where, this is how you find out.

Oh yeah, it's also fun.

Generations - a real effect?

2006-08-22T06:03:00.000Z

So are generations, as in the labelled generations, a real effect? money.CNN.com thinks so, as do many, many others. The article on the end of that link tells us how to understand and work with the differences in attitudes between generations. It's easy to think along these lines - convenient even. But what's the evidence? Why indeed do we label ourselves Boomers or GenX or Y, or even Gen Next? Ostensibly because society evolved - changed - in more than subtle ways during the periods in question and we should recognise how the people born into these generations are indeed 'different' from each other. But are they?

My argument runs like this. Firstly, genetics is probably the most powerful influence shaping our lives. We act out our genome in the world, or our individual world, because where you are born matters a lot. In fact country, race, wealth, sex... you name it, these are all big players in our lives. Where you are born, the wealth and culture of your society and your individual family, and the education that you receive will act to shape your behaviours.

When you add all of that up it's hard to factor in "the Internet" as a big factor. Yet (to give but one example) the Gen Xers reputedly are more impatient than Boomers, having been brought up in an instant-on environment of which the Internet is a prime example. I would agree that a large proportion of the "1st World" born since 1967 have indeed grown up with PCs and maybe - just maybe - slow Internet; and that a large proportion of "1st World" Gen Yers will have the expectation of faster PCs, handy MP3 players and faster broadband Internet. But what proportion? And don't they still have parents telling them to wait in line? Don't they still have to wait in queues in the bricks and mortar world? Are they queue-jumpers as well as impatient?

Indeed, why do we say that they are impatient? Where's the evidence that frequent job-swapping is correlated with Internet use? Are we possibly putting the cart in front of the horse? Isn't it possible that the job-swapping comes about not because of an innate desire but because jobs now vanish, evolve and move in a way that didn't happen in the 1960s? Is it not true that female participation rates are now higher? Aren't many of us now better educated? Aren't our 1st-World economies now service-based rather than manufacturing based? Does none of this matter? Isn't it so much easier to just label the people?

When you total the World's population it's a small proportion that has been exposed to the nominated "generational" influencers, whereas everyone faces their genes, their need for food and shelter and company every day. And everyone - even the Boomers - live in today's world. Shouldn't today's "fast pace fo life" have rubbed off on them too, or are we saying that they really can't learn?

When you look at what the pre-Boomers went through - 2 successive World Wars - you can imagine the after effects. A shortage of males. A shortage of food, of shelter.... destruction in much of Europe and Japan, coupled with rebuilding would bring on huge changes in society. This is the argument for the post-War Boomers, that they grew up having 'known no war'. Yet we continue to have wars. Both before and since. And the effect varies with where you are standing. And humanity is a continuous, blended stream, not an on and off sausage machine churning out clones.

The Generations? It's just labelling. Treat people as people and don't get hung up on what you want to call 'em.

Business post wrap-up

2006-08-15T03:12:00.000Z

Free stuff from McKinsey's

Highly recommended for anyone in business or involved in business studies: the McKinsey Quarterly. Some content is free upon registration. If you are doing an MBA these reports are great reference material.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Apple's Leopard about to pounce

OS wars, again and again

Does it really matter what Apple does? They only have about 2% of the global PC market, if that. However they do possess greater 'mind share'. Far more than 2% of us know about Apple as a brand. We may like 'em or loathe 'em but they do come out with some funky stuff. Here's a positive (perhaps overly positive) report on Leopard from SmartHouse. With Windows Vista somewhere in the wings it's Apple's (and Linux's) time to make up some ground. With Macs now powered by Intel the obvious is happening - Apple can now confidently assert that all apps are available on the one platform - the Apple platform. Whilst that's reassuring for the Mac users - to have access to Windows apps on their otherwise more limited (if impressive) architecture - will it drive PC fans into the arms of Apple dealers?

I suspect it will grab a bigger bite, but it won't shake the earth.

posted by gtveloce at 2:52 AM

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Strategic purchase by AMD

The ATI purchase by AMD is interesting. It's not just a simple play to grow a company by absorbing a related but smaller company. Sure, AMD is a chip maker, but it makes the grandest chips of all - the CPUs - so buying up a graphics specialist is (a) chicken feed and (b) not going to shake the Earth. Or will it?

By buying up such a reputable graphics card maker they have guaranteed that at least some of AMD's product will now be getting inside some of those Intel boxes, not just their own. Intel may now have to consider putting pressure on its customers to drop ATI - but it surely risks anti-competitive action in so doing. And some graphics and games buffs love ATI, so there will be resistance. It's thus another ploy by AMD to get the brand into Intel territory and to drive a wedge into the box makers. Do they stick with ATI and thus side with AMD, risking Intel's wrath, or do they side with Intel and drop ATI, accepting any collateral damage that may bring?

It's a canny move by AMD in any case. Read Infoworld's take here.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Top ten proliferated new technologies by 2020

"In the year 2020 -- the death of locality and other predictions", from Infoworld with extras in bold by yours truly. Infoworld's writer had a talk with Hossein Eslambolchi, former president of AT&T Labs and CTO for the company. This is his/their top 10, except I have added my comment to Infoworld's.

Number 10 -- Next generation speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding [NLU] will redefine human machine interface. Comment: I hope it comes before then, I'm sick of typing. On the other hand I get a sore throat and what happens? Perhaps some more direct mind-machine interface would do the trick?

Number 9 -- Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business. By 2010 individual databases will store 5 terabytes to 10 terabytes of data. By 2020 Eslambolchi says a single database will contain 100 petabytes of data. Comment: can't argue against this one, it's happening as we speak (or write). Tell us something new!

Number 8 -- Open source components at network edge will dominate. Stuff that sits on the edge now, like security and XML messaging will be integrated into the heart of the network and new things will appear at the edge. Comment: hmmm, not very convincing. What's the new stuff? Should we be that concerned about where stuff "sits"? Will we even have an "edge" to consider by 2020?

Number 7 -- Broadband will be common -- death of locality. Comment: well, yeah. Once we cure famine and war we will have the death of locality. In lucky western countries we already have reasonable broadband and it doesn't matter much where you are. I am in Australia. Can you tell? But it matters in Lebanon right now, don't you think?

Number 6 -- e-collaboration and P2P will dominate the workplace. Infoworld says: Maybe. Comment: As we Kazaa and Skype our P2P way through our day now, this is a no brainer. Similarly with e-coolaboration. Like we do it now, so why should it not persist? It will proliferate. It will remain difficult to plough a field e-cooperatively but I'm sure tractors will be electronically, remotely controlled, guided by GPS and absolutely brilliant by 2020. We'll all want one.

Number 5 -- Sensor networks will proliferate. "Yes, if you sneeze into a tissue there will be a sensor on the tissue and you'll find an email in your inbox when you get home asking if you want to reorder". Comment: like we need to waste the world's resources on all those throw-away sensors. Better bet - the box counts the tissues and suggests a reorder, and the new tissues come sans-box.

Number 4 -- Wireless Internet Access will grow exponentially. Sounds obvious but Eslambolchi says gaps will be filled in over the next gen. Comment: still seems obvious. Barring a better way being developed, makes sense. Not earth-shaking. Burying/hanging copper made sense under the old water/power utility model. Thinking of which, what about data via the power lines? Talk about ubiquity...

Number 3 -- Networks will become personal. Wireless IP networks will create a new class of personal devices and services. A network dedicated to you. Infoworld supposes its 'like a personal portal on steroids'. Comment: I think we can all see this one happening. Loads of people have personal LANS, it's just an extension of the obvious.

Number 2 -- Security requirements will continue to increase. Comment: no way! Surely not? Are they wasting bandwidth writing this stuff? I'm beginning to think I am!

And Infoworld says that "the number 1 technology change we will see by the year 2020 is --
Emerging networks and the Internet will be ready for the "sextuple" play. Voice, video, data, wireless, gaming and sensory information". Comment: Go on, tell us more. Did someone have a slow news day? I'm sorry I just added to it! Anyone out there want to prognosticate with vision and insight, rather than stating the blindingly obvious??

Neverthess, as Infoworld says, "go forth and build a business around one of these. You can't lose". Indeed, it's a pretty safe bet you'll have a market. You may have to fight for your marketshare and the return on investment may be poor, but... hmmm. There's no free lunch here, folks. This is leveraging what's already well on its way with many players already claiming rights.Grab a niche or go for a big play, or perhaps build something compelling and new that leverages off these no brainers. Your choice.

OS wars, again and again

2006-08-08T02:52:00.000Z

Why Fi? Connectivity as a utility

2006-07-06T22:40:00.000Z

Several cities in the US have committed to or are considering providing WiFi connectivity as a public utility. Just as we have public electricity, transport, sewerage and water supplies, so should we have Internet connectivity to our doorsteps. Now I couldn't agree more. However it has to be said that in so doing we potentially undermine established and future businesses. One emerging 'provider' of sorts is FON, a collective of WiFi users who intentionally open up their bandwidth (plenty of people do it unintentionally too). Now those people are buying bandwidth from an ISP, often using ADSL and copper wire. So a public WiFi network circumvents the need either for FON or for the underlying ADSL connection. Someone loses, somewhere. Now this is how it works anyway - you can't expect new players or technologies to back off and leave you alone just because - so I don't blame companies or organisations trying new models.

But we may have a problem when governments start to 'compete' as it were, or to in effect subsidise one delivery method over another. Local government infrastructure is great in providing cheaper connectivity to a broader range of the community - got to like that - but it does lock in an economic distortion. By subsidising WiFi you are advantaging WiFi over ADSL, WiMAX or any other delivery mechanism. What are the consequences in 5, 10 or 20 years time? Infoworld has a story on San Francisco's WiFi plans here.

Another market to explore - batteries

2006-07-04T04:40:00.000Z

Looking to investigate a market? As a marketing or strategy case study or report? How about batteries? Smarthouse has a nice wrap about it here.

It's not a bad market either. As our devices have become smaller (think cell phones or mp3 players) or our requirements for power and endurance greater (think laptops especially, now 50% of the PC market overall and growing) we have many issues to explore. The technology - how do you get more power for longer whilst making it smaller and cooler? The environment - what the heck do we do with discarded batteries? The future - alternative technologies and delivery strategies for increasingly pervasive computing-based devices.

It's worth some googling, surely?

Try these previous posts for MBA resources and discussions...

2006-06-29T07:27:00.000Z

Try these previous posts for MBA resources and discussions...

Price Wars

2006-06-29T04:27:00.000Z

Suppliers don't win price wars, so they avoid 'em. Really substantial profits lie in monopolies (set your own mark up) or where the competitors are small in number and preferably weak. It's allied in nature to the product life cycle, or at least similar in the way it progresses. Let's take a look.

You get a new idea and run fast. If you are successful you sell lots at great margin because there's no real competition. However that soon gets noticed and other people invest in similar designs and start to carve up the market. At first this is a good thing as it expands the overall size of the market, and profits remain high per unit sold whilst increasing volumes lower costs. However more competition comes into the market and there's a point where you can only maintain profit by lowering costs further or knocking off the competitors. So you use innovation, marketing and whatever comes to hand to beat off the little guys. You may make 'em offers they can't refuse or simply leverage your pricing to drive down the price so far that they (with smaller production runs) start to lose money. So the market tends to converge around a smaller number of winners. They get bigger, they keep their big production runs and lower costs per unit and the market settles into smaller price fluctuations that don't rock the boat.

At this point an uneasy truce may reign until someone will either decides they want more marketshare (perhaps they employed an MBA grad) and begin to innovate, or they pare back costs and start a price war. Innovation will keep the price up and refresh the cycle, like Gillette bringing out a new razor or Toyota marketing a hybrid petrol-electric car. However a price war will clearly drive prices down. If it's prolonged then you have a real problem. Once you have cut prices the market is less inclined to accept a higher price again (unless you have obvious supply problems across the board, like droughts affecting farm production) or demand is so great that it simply can't be met (like the world oil price as China ramps up demand).

Got the picture?

OK, so back to PCs. The microprocessor market was reasonably diverse in 1978 with chips from a range of companies (including Motorola and Zilog) that drove the earliest PCs. So prices were high but reasonable given the small production runs. As demand for PCs heated up the market saw some competition in the chip market with various players ramping up production and placing their bets on which designs would dominate. Prices came down. Then Intel, like Microsoft, lucked into a deal with IBM. When IBM stamped its name on a PC (and later on what it called the XT) it created a standard - a beige box with an Intel microprocessor, a monitor, a disk drive (later the hard drive) and an operating system - that is pretty much what we have now, give or take a mouse and a GUI.

What IBM did was expand the market. What happened next was that the market inflated quickly, new players came in and the race was on. IBM's sheer weight drove out the little guys - bar Apple - but gave the 'clones' like Compaq and later Dell a platform to work on. When the profit per unit fell too low IBM sold out. What we have left is a volume market where the only way to make money is to dominate and make lots. Which brings me to Intel. They cashed in on IBM's design and then went with the clones as well. Others tried to compete but Intel's was the standard endorsed by IBM, so they had to catch and then match Intel, who were romping away. In the long run we really only see AMD offering serious competition. At least until something left field - perhaps like IBM's Cell processor or another multi-use but single-die chip - comes along to disrupt things.

Now AMD have both innovated and offered a better price. They have been gaining ground, too. It's still a $US1.3billion minnow fighting against Intel's $US30billion whale, but Intel are hurting. So here comes the price war. Check out the Forbes article.

The telephony marketplace

2006-06-26T23:49:00.000Z

OK, here's another example of strategy playing out against the background of a product life cycle. You know the cycle - invent or buy into product or a marketplace, get it adopted, grow it, proliferate it, others copy it, they make it cheaper and better, you decide between volume or innovation or a balance of the two, you battle your competitors, make a good profit, find even more competitors sniffing out your profit, get bigger volumes, drive lower costs but profit stagnates and - bloody hell, is it worth it? Is this sustainable, or should we get out now and put our money elsewhere? Or do we innovate? Maybe diversify? Choose to lose the battle and shrink the company? Sell out to a winner (ie consolidate)? Become a niche player and nibble at the profitable edges? And so on until the product either becomes seemingly entrenched in a long-running war between a small number of big players (firstly think Coke vs Pepsi, and now think about how both Coca Cola and Pepsi have diversified their portfolios) or it dissolves into niches before disappearing.

The example? Telephony. Infoworld reports how Avaya is fighting back against VoIP in the smaller business arena by joining in with a solution that bridges the customer from small scale to larger PBX system. It's worth a look.

So, here's my brief analysis of the Telephony market. Firstly, pigeons. Then snail mail. Then telegraph. Lots of wires strung around the place. Then the telephone leverages the wires. It catches on, gets cheaper. It proliferates. Big players gobble up smaller ones. In some places it becomes a public utility monopoly, in others it's always commercial but is regulated to ensure some degree of competition. Better electronic switching technology drives down costs, allowing for less capital investment, more automation, fewer workers. The market saturates - everyone has a phone and most business a PBX of some sort. We see an innovation from within - mobile (cell) phones come along that use wireless transmission and the market accepts lower quality voice transmission for the convenience. All is under control of the big players until...

Along comes another technology, this time from left-field - data packets that leverage the wires. This technology proliferates and connects computers rather than telephones over the same wires and later wirelessly. The snail mail market is the first attacked - by email. Then email is attacked by instant messaging. All remains well in telephony - but uneasy - until this new player starts transmitting voice using these data packets. But the quality is awful when compared with dedicated analog voice circuits. But as the quality of VoIP improves it becomes clear that this will severely undermine every part of the telephony business. The new competition offers software based switching (effectively replacing PBXes), good voice quality and integration with instant messaging and low cost of entry. New players emerge from other industries taking bites out of the telephony market. Network world reports on one of these (Virgin Megastores) here. It's so easy to do that any retailer (for example) can buy into the VoIP market and take a share of the telephony market - right now.

Where do you think this will lead? The Telcos still provide most of the wires and wireless infrastructure but it is now being used by others to replicate telephony services on computers. And to integrate that with new services like video blogging and video chat. Some would say that Telcos are happy to be gate keepers and collect tolls on their systems. Some may say that the cheap internetworking of Wifi and WiMax services will undermine even that cash-producer. Will Telcos jump in (as some have already done) and embrace the digital convergence? Or will other players from the left side of the field now gobble them up?

Dissecting Dell

2006-06-26T22:51:00.000Z

MBA lecturers - and their students - love to pull big companies apart, especially so when there's joy to behold in someone's success - or failure. So we see classic case studies such as Kodak vs Polaroid or IBM vs Microsoft. Now I have to say it's fun to do this - it's like an archaeological dig where you stumble over some vital clue to why Carthage fell or Rome triumphed. But it's always post-hoc and it's almost never black and white. We think we learn something in these forensic examinations but how usefully can we employ what we supposedly learn?

If I'm ever in the instant photo business I'll make a point of reading up on the Kodak/Polaroid battle for example, but it's salient to remember that in the longer run another technology - the electronic optical sensor - developed alongside film and quietly got better, smaller, faster and cheaper until one day it overwhelmed the old film-based market and offered the sort of instant image capture we really wanted. A classic case of Porters' forces at work, where no-one was seriously looking sideways at threats from outside. As in outside the film and camera business. Hmm, maybe that's worth knowing.

Another threat comes from inside. As in inside the personal computer assembly business, for example. It's a classic product life cycle, isn't it? Early years lots of ideas, proliferation and innovation. Lots of home built stuff and tiny brands. Then 2 or 3 of those tiny companies shine and look to get an advantage (say Apple and Atari, but there were several more, including Visual) before a big player wakes up and claims turf using massive resources (say IBM). Suddenly the market is certified as real and the dominator creates a standard (which is later leveraged by Microsoft to great effect).

We then see profits made and competitors start up to leverage IBM's design (read Compaq and its ilk). Of course technology improves, production techniques improve and the PC assemblers keep leveraging lower and lower component prices so that the only ways to make money are volume (read Dell and similar) or niche (read Apple and the specialist gaming guys). So the big guy leaves the room (IBM) as it is writ large in MBA strategy courses - if you can't be 1 or 2 in the market or if you aren't growing you should get out.

So (in this highly simplified analysis) you end up mid-cycle with a myriad of niche players and the ever-collapsing and consolidating volume guys (Compaq gobbles Digital, HP eats them both). And what happens when the highly touted cost-reduced assembler stops growing? They look to diversify. So is that a good idea, to leverage your core competency (in Dell's case efficient assembly and distribution) across other products? Could be. But what if your competitors nibble at the sides of your core business as you look sideways? What if you lose focus? What if the big guy actually has new technology up their sleeves and is planning to come back and eat your market in a new way (for example IBM with pervasive, self-healing, autonomic grid computing)?

This could go is so many different directions. For example the Gillette scenario - keep reinventing your product so you extend the product life. The horse-drawn carriage maker scenario - your product becomes nearly extinct, replaced by a similar but better product. The super-customised-niche-in-volume scenario (which is where Toyota sees the car industry going).

So where next for Dell? Read this networkworld report on how Dell diversified into a related field, got the product and the pricing right but still floundered - the suggestion being that the product was great but it wasn't the solution the market wanted. Ah, the total package - product and solution. So how does a single-play volume guy survive the solution war? Is this another lesson for all of us?

Outsourced complexity

2006-06-23T01:05:00.000Z

Outsourcing deals may involve taking over a company’s assets, such as buildings and computer hardware, and may include the workforce as well. The impact on the employees is an obvious one, however it will vary in detail across industries, and is dependent upon circumstances such as the company culture and nature of the work. There is often a hidden agenda to deal with as well. Follow the link on this page to read more.

How Ducati killed its marketing department

2006-06-22T00:26:00.000Z

Is this a sign of the new way to partner with all stakeholders - including your customers? BNET provides the access to this Forrester report. Register at BNET (I have no interest in BNET BTW, just my own interest in knowing what's happening in the world) and either search or go straight here to read it.

In a nutshell, famous moto manufacturer Ducati has leveraged their heritage and loyal customers to "kill" - or possibly just rename and de-emphasise - their marketing department. And it seems to have worked.

Now I would have thought that Ducati was a no-brainer in terms of marketing. The bikes are highly differentiated and their fan base is loyal because of that and the company's pedigree. It's also Italian, which to me adds a certain degree of style and passion just by association. These fans are going to develop an unofficial online marketing engine anyway, so why not partner with that effort? Many other famous brands could do the same I'm sure (whether they subsequently decouple their marketing departments or not). I'm thinking top-end racing (push)bike brands like Colnago and cars like Alfa Romeo for starters.

The problems that may arise are manifold, however, so diligent planning and execution are vital. You need to be open yet ready to combat bad vibes from disgruntled rather than loyal clientele for starters. And will this community-feel work for equally well known but less passionate brands like IBM or General Electric?

More business resources to check out

2006-06-22T00:20:00.000Z

If you are studying or just want to keep abreast of new research and opinion, BNET, MBA Depot and teachmefinance.com are cool repositories of business knowledge. Read more here (with links).

Freebies from Harvard

2006-06-19T23:12:00.000Z

Some essential business reading from Harvard, including especially good stuff on Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard. Freebies but rego required. By the way, beware the implementation of a balanced scorecard. Some companies implement the name more than the concept. Is your balanced scrorecard truly balanced? Does it align? Or is it just another tick in the box effort? Read more.

Resources at theSpiel

2006-06-10T06:00:00.000Z

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Car company's credit crunch

2006-06-09T05:22:00.000Z

From The Daily Edition: Jun. 9, 2006 - The CarConnection.com - "Fitch Drops Ford Two Notches. Credit rating service Fitch Ratings took Ford’s standing down two more notches on Thursday, just a day after Moody’s warned that it might do the same to the third-largest automaker’s rating. Fitch now ranks Ford’s debt at B-plus, down from BB, with a negative outlook. The move is based on expected drops in revenue at the company through the rest of 2006, the ratings agency said in a release. Standard & Poor's has also said it might lower Ford’s ratings based on the continuing problems in the company’s North American operations. Rising fuel prices are cited too, as is the concurrent slump in Ford’s SUV sales."

Maybe the cars they sell are (a) too big and (b) not marketed well enough? Perhaps the company is not nimble, like Toyota? Perhaps it's waited too long to revamp its lineup in favour of niche markets, smaller engines, hybrid powerplants.. maybe all of the above? GM's not that much better and both companies have been divesting assets in the last few years.

Apple and innovation

2006-06-07T23:47:00.000Z

Ok, I don't rate Apple as much of an innovator, especially recently. The early Apples were based on ideas and kits that were available if you knew where to look. I looked. Many people knew where to look. Lots of us read stuff in the early 70s, even without the Internet ;-)

Credit where it's due, though. That the Steves were able to visualise a popular form of the microcomputer was cool and notable, and that they delivered on it was about it for innovation. They took past product ideas (from other areas, not just computing) and modeled a novel, workable PC out of it. But they weren't alone. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I know, and yes it did look great at the time... but at the time also we saw plenty of alternatives and different boxes with different operating systems. Certainly more so than now. The whole micro area was a hot bed of innovation of which Apple represent just one of the longer-term winners from that era. We tend to forget all the other players who have faded from the market.

So what about the Mac? Again Apple had the foresight to take other people's ideas and make it work as a whole. That's innovation;, taking ideas and bringing them to life. They were right about GUI and the mouse, but it still wasn't earth shattering to DOS and CP/M users. But the Apple II and the Mac were far more left-field than the iPod. What exactly is it? A portable music player? Didn't we have that already? So again they simply took an existing idea and in this case layed on a new twist. They have sold a lot of 'em because they were pretty close to first to market and won the marketing battle. They certainly thought it all through as a package, right down to the Internet integration. Apple - perhaps Jobs? - was more comprehensive in approaching the market than any competitor. To me that was the key innovation, linking the iPod with music delivery via the Internet.

At which point I'll stop my rave and point you here, to a Forbes article on Apple's perceived failure to grow the PC market via the iPod "glow".

Peer to Peer everything?

2006-06-06T23:40:00.000Z

Let's start at the beginning and connect the dots from there. Since 1969 or so the Internet has been slowly, inexorably connecting machines together via various forms of wire. At some point around 1993 it reached a kind of critical mass. It became known outside of itself and entered popular culture to a greater degree. It then went exponential because that's what happens when a good, usuable thing becomes known generally. It has subsequently allowed people with the tiniest, strangest, even weirdest of interests to come together into a much larger global group and share stuff. Mostly for legal purposes but sometimes not. It has for instance allowed Al Qaeda to connect and manage disparate resources in a way never before possible - judge that group as you will, it is certainly a model of leadership and management worth studying. It has also allowed porn to prosper, broaden and deepen to a degree unimaginable in a print-only world. And it has enabled Skype and eBay to get up and running. It also lets me work from home more easily, saving me some dosh and reducing my carbon footprint a bit.

So what's next? Well convergence and change is obvious enough. The Post Office has lost some of its business to email and Web-based 'brochure' distribution and has to diversify. The Telcos are losing their traditional revenue streams as VoiP encroaches. The media are finding more people attracted away from regular television and print, many traditional clubs and societies are finding membership dwindling as alternative loosely bound groups grow quickly and cheaply around a website forum. There are adjustments being made everywhere.

I'd look to Skype, the original Napster, Amazon, eBay, Google and PayPal as examples of what can be done and then think laterally. Adapt one online concept into another space and see what happens. You could fairly easily open up to global online competition all sorts of trading exchanges and financial institutions. You'd want to see checks and balances, some way to provide a degree of surety, but all sorts of investments and insurances could be made peer to peer or in a new marketplace outside of the old bricks and mortar establishments. Check out 'Peer-to-peer money' by CNET's Rafe Needleman for a few examples of what I mean. Any big corporates doing their futures analysis had better be factoring this in as a threat. When you are doing your Michael Porter-style strategy analysis and discussing barriers to entry, don't lock yourself into last century thinking. Your barriers may be lower than you think.

Google spreadsheets?

2006-06-06T22:47:00.000Z

CNET has reported today on Google Spreadsheets, a collaborative tool that apparently has gone into beta. Like collaborative word processing, an online spreadsheet is markedly less featured but has a key ingredient - the ability for multiple people to work on or simply view the same spreadsheet at one time, irrespective of location. Sure you can email an Excel file around, but with this idea we have real time collaboration. Not a new idea but with Google's weight behind it it could start something happening in the online application space.

Good news for the online application servers - it build market awareness. Good for Google, it broadens their range. Bad for Microsoft. However I smell a niche only at this stage.

VoIP, convergence and everything

2006-06-06T07:14:00.000Z

I don't know about you but my mail box is filled with articles like this one in NetworkWorld, spruiking the latest VoIP and Power over Ethernet gear. So what, who cares? Well I guess I'm not in the market myself but the company I work for sure is... and probably yours as well. And your home? Well I certainly use Skype, even if it's only to call my kids to dinner via their PC. The point is - wow. Look where we are.

I saw - or recognised, I should say - my first modem in 1977. It was bolted to a wall in a bank. As a bank teller I used it to magically update bank balances at phenomenal speeds. 19kbps comes to mind, but I could be exaggerating by about 10 or so kbps. In another job in 1978, I was writing client info on cards and putting them in rotating open files. Work orders were copied off using smelly volatile fluids and despatched by hand to the guys - yes guys - who did the work. And that was a Telco, may I add! A year or 2 later I saw my first fax machine. Ten years later I worked with a guy who could afford a mobile - with a battery as big as a house brick and sold my first CD-ROM drives. I saw the Internet for the first time at a university in 1989. Yes, of course it was used to look at drawings of the Starship Enterprise from some geek from afar. By 1994 I had a home page and was dialling up via modem at astonishing speeds... it was so slow it was astonishing, anyway! Everything was text.

The talk was convergence, of a single global digital highway for all communication. The naysayers, mostly pundits or corporate CEOs with vested media interests said it'll take 50 years to change the world, or 20 at best - so let's ignore it or despise it. Then the tech world exploded, money was made and lost and we all thought the digital nirvana had slipped below the horizon... it looked like the doomsaying pundits were a bit closer to reality than we had hoped.

Yet here it is, 2006, and we have quietly linked the world with wires, opened the pipes and are cheerily globalising and digitising every damned thing we can find. Even the Telcos and media moguls can't hide from the revolution that is washing over us. And the naysayers from 2000? They have quietly joined in and will happily use VoIP just like the rest of us to save bucks off their telco bills. And big corporate media has bought up big in cyberspace whilst it's still cheap - the writing's on the wall. Or more to the point, on the screen.

Not as silly as it sounds

2006-06-06T03:24:00.000Z

One thing that you can achieve out of an MBA - apart from the sense of personal achievement, a new network of newbie managers, lots of articles on strategic anything and a nice piece of paper, is an understanding of the Lingo of Obfuscation, those weasel words we know and love. Seriously (and actually I was serious before, too) we do need to use language that makes sense, is understandable and is decriptive of what we want to achieve. We can't always dumb it down as much as some may want, going forward. Business is no different from neuroscience in that respect, is it?

Anyway, a reasonable read on recent business argot here, in the WSJ.

Hydrogen and realism

2006-05-30T13:23:00.000Z

The carconnection.com has run an interesting and balanced article on hydrogen-power in Iceland. In part it says, "The Shell station uses a process known as electrolysis to produce its fuel, electric current splitting water into its basic components: two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, the latter vented into the atmosphere."

Interesting indeed that they are producing the hydrogen onsite. Better, cheaper and safer than trying to transport it. The hydrogen is for a small H-dedicated bus fleet, by the way. The article admits "Electrolysis is an energy-intensive process, in itself, and if you were to follow the wires leading out from the back of the station, they'd connect to the big towers snaking east, nearly 30 kilometers into the country's rugged interior...As they approach the source, one can spot steam pluming into the sky. Some are natural vents, hinting at the violence roiling deep beneath the rocky soil." It's geo-thermal, folks.

So hydrogen is do-able, despite lower energy density and higher volatility. Especially so if you have locally renewable energy such as hydro or geothermal sources to tap into. In most countries you just don't have that sort of energy locally available, of course. So we resort to oil or coal. Which defeats the benefits of using H in the first place. Of course there is also Nuclear power but again the production of the right blend of uranium isotopes is energy intensive. So you end up spending energy to make energy. Are we ever to get out of this cycle of fossil-fuel dependence? What will it take?

Microsoft misses out - again

2006-05-26T06:15:00.000Z

Late to the Internet party in the first place, Microsoft seemingly can't take a trick. It lets the browser get away from it and have to spend like crazy to beat back Netscape, only to rest on its laurels and see Mozilla gain ground. Now it's missed the chance to tie in with ebay and or Yahoo... read the Forbes story...

Cars, malls and psychology

2006-05-26T04:19:00.000Z

An excellent article entitled 'More mall pall than Pall Mall' By Elizabeth Farrelly (May 24, 2006, Sydney Morning Herald). It begins, "Fantasise this: for some reason - dollars a barrel, airborne particulates or, conceivably, government backbone - petrol is all but prohibited. Car use, while not banned, has shrunk to maybe one-20th of present levels. Sydneysiders drive only as absolutely necessary. For the rest, we walk, cycle or take trams. What would change?".

Indeed, lots would change - for the better, as Elizabeth goes on to say. There have been reports in Sydney that the rising cost of petrol is driving people out of their cars and back onto public transport. Whilst we are a long way from returning to villages and corner shops, it's a start. I think also that the hypermarket malls will fight back, possibly by investing more heavily in public transport that feeds directly to their shopping plazas. We shall see.

More from Elizabeth here.

A summary of my recent posts

2006-05-25T01:50:00.000Z

Hotcakes and hydrogen

By Robert Russell in http://thespiel.com 1 day ago

cost via the small ongoing fuel saving, depending upon how much driving you do. They are also a 'safe' buy in that they still use the fuel you buy at gas stations (as against some alternative home brew, cold fusion or risky hydrogen). Read more...
http://thespiel.com

By Robert Russell in http://thespiel.com 1 day ago

Rob's Guide, part 2 Track race tips Sydney's Velodromes What do those lines mean? Automobile links Mustknow links Philosophy links Music Links Images of the Russell, Matthews, O'Brien and Brown families in Australia Rob's Amateur Art Gallery
addicted2wheels

By Robert Russell in addicted2wheels 2 days ago

Rob's Guide, part 2 Track race tips Sydney's Velodromes What do those lines mean? Automobile links Mustknow links Philosophy links Music Links Images of the Russell, Matthews, O'Brien and Brown families in Australia Rob's Amateur Art Gallery
the gtveloce.com-munity of interests

By Robert Russell in the gtveloce.com-munity of int... 2 days ago

Links GTVeloce.com ...cars, bikes and com-munities The bike racing forum ...for racers only The general purpose gtveloce forums ...for everyone MBA related resources ...with an HR spin The KlausenRussell Com-munity ...please visit! OODB ...out out damned Blog GTVeloce.com blog
Velodrome 101

By Robert Russell in addicted2wheels 2 days ago

too so keep away - it can get a bit hairy if you get stuck in that transition zone, especially if you are on the duckboard at speed and try to get onto the banking before a turn. It's a good way to fall and bring down the pack. Read more...
Image gallery

In Image gallery 8 days ago

Rob's Guide, part 2 Track race tips Sydney's Velodromes What do those lines mean? Automobile links Mustknow links Philosophy links Music Links Images of the Russell, Matthews, O'Brien and Brown families in Australia Rob's Amateur Art Gallery
Aviation images

In Aviation images 8 days ago

Links GTVeloce.com ...cars, bikes and com-munities The bike racing forum ...for racers only The general purpose gtveloce forums ...for everyone MBA related resources ...with an HR spin The KlausenRussell Com-munity ...please visit! OODB ...out out damned Blog GTVeloce.com blog
Airliner art

In Aviation images 8 days ago

[IMG ]
Airliners, automobiles and art

In Image gallery 8 days ago

[IMG ]
Welcome to the image resources at GTVeloce.com

In Image gallery 8 days ago

Folks Copyright is reserved, but feel free to browse. Reuse is often possible by arrangement and some images may be purchased. The content starts here . Image gallery
Welcome to Aviation images and postcards @...

In Aviation images 8 days ago

Folks Copyright is reserved on all images, be it my own or other attributed work - please ask before using. Otherwise feel free to browse the content here . Aviation images
OffLine

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Links TheSpiel.com TheSpiel's Business Blog OODB GTVeloce.com OffLine Addicted2wheels Site Feed

Can't resist this one from Wharton - on Microsoft

2006-05-18T03:26:00.000Z

Entitled 'Microsoft's Multiple Challenges' the argument goes like this:

(1) Microsoft's size can be a handicap. Updates take ages, new products even longer. Google is nimbler, for example
(2) there's "brain drain" and Microsoft's ability to develop a new generation of leaders is questionable, especially when it's harder to offer the 'ground floor' opportunities of the past.

It makes me wonder if Wharton isn't thinking of IBM rather than Microsoft, but there you go. However they also don't count Microsoft out - yet. Size may overwhelm nimbleness if the right moves are made. Whilst the sharemarket may temporarily punish the MS stockprice for it's supposed 'fearing what the competition could do', in the longer run MS's vast bank balance will fund many skirmishes against the likes of Google and Sony.

I tend to agree. MS is fighting on several fronts but are so far hardly bleeding. They have even moved more quickly than Sony in the game console market and taken the upper hand for now. Sure, Google is a threat in many ways but whilst Google innovates tremendously (and threatens to do so widely, as in WiFi, geographic info systems and AdWords) it does not have the breadth - yet - to meet MS head on in most markets. As a search engine with AdWords revenue stream, sure, Google wins. But that's just one key play. MS's real threat may lie with the Open Document format rather than with just web search. Whilst Google chews at the edges, OpenDoc threatens to erode the value of the proprietary formats that tie us so neatly to MS's revenue stream.

Forbes on Google

2006-05-18T00:36:00.000Z

Let's face it, Google has entrenched itself. Why is that? When it first came to my notice - I guess around 1999? - they were just a cute name with a reputation for good search results. That reputation was a cult, underground groundswell much like that which had driven Altavista to be the previous search tool of choice - or arguably Yahoo!? Google entered the fray with a new idea - results based on the popularity of links to each site. That seemed to work, and they grew. They also innovated with AdWords and derived income from searches in a new way. The rest is history. Yahoo! also has a cute name, revenue and massive success - but Google, despite arriving later, has innovated in a way that has kept it ahead.

Forbes now asks,'Can anybody overtake Google?'. Well of course anything can happen.

Forbes suggests that both Microsoft and Yahoo! plan to claw back more ground by improving the ad-selling platform that surrounds their search engine. The idea: Offer advertisers a better way to target their ad campaigns. They also suggest that improved search results will back that up. It seems possible. Comparable or better search results plus a revenue stream drawn to a 'better' ad-selling platform may crack the nut that is Google. But is it enough to just match Google?

Unless it can be made more compelling for the searcher, by introducing an entirely new paradigm, by staggeringly improving the result relevance or by introducing some side benefit that draws repeated traffic - why change habits? In fact the web is full of examples of 'fads' but Google has transcended a fad. It may be different. However if it's not so different after all then it could simply tire and we'll all move on. It's a website and the web is pretty frictionless, even with all the toolbars hooking in....

I know I'd change pretty quickly and easily but doubt I'd go to either MS or Yahoo! I'd look for the cool tool from somewhere new and obscure ;-)

Corporate culture change analysis

2006-05-17T06:01:00.000Z

The purpose of this report is to identify, assess and plan for the primary Human Resource management issues pertaining to the employees of Spiel Corporation in Antarctica. The assessed issues are to be prioritised and the most salient selected for deeper investigation. To that end a wide-ranging environmental scan has been conducted, the content of which includes trend and incremental data over the previous 5 years, plus relevant projected trends and scenarios covering a further 5 years. Cogent issues have been considered in light of such identified trends and futures scenarios. Whilst many issues were revealed, one in particular has been selected out. The issue of Corporate Culture “drift” has been chosen for more detailed analysis, as much for its particular nature and scope as well as its potential to distract and disrupt the organisation in question. Read more....

My opinions only

2006-05-04T03:32:00.000Z

As always, my timely reminder that these posts represent my opinions only. If I quote someone else I attribute. If I recommend a web site it's because I use it myself. If an advert appears it's because I affiliate with Google and others similar in nature and usually means nothing more than that... the Internet is a wild and untamed place folks, so please tread warily. My opinions are just that and do not constitute advice or legal opinion of any sort.

All original material is copyright 2006 by myself, too. Other than that, please take advantage of the site, just remember to ask first or attribute fragments in the normal, polite way.

Wharton on oil prices

2006-05-04T03:14:00.000Z

The good, the bad and the ugly on world oil prices. A detailed piece by Wharton. They touch upon market forces affecting the move to alternative fuels far more than any concern over the environment. I guess we need loads more extinctions, cyclones and droughts before the use of carbon-based fuel is as powerfully moderated by logic and reason as by the almighty dollar.

Forbes slant on why hybrids are not selling like hotcakes

2006-05-04T00:31:00.000Z

Well they aren't hotcakes, for starters!

In short, hybrids make sense in many ways but their ROI is weak. It takes around 3-4 years to recover the higher cost via the small ongoing fuel saving, depending upon how much driving you do. They are also a 'safe' buy in that they still use the fuel you buy at gas stations (as against some alternative home brew, cold fusion or risky hydrogen). They aren't such a leap of faith for consumers. They are also 'feel-good' purchases, which is great. On the other hand car makers are at a loss to know how to market 'em because they are premium products offering savings at the low-end. This is an inversion of the case for most cars. Usually good fuel economy is aligned with the 'cheap' end of the market. Premium cars are at the high end of fuel economy - in the 'who cares about the petrol' category. The result? All up, sales are growing but from a very low base.

My take? They offer little advantage at the low end. I'd take a smaller car with the same or even better fuel economy anytime. Why would I want a Prius when I can have a Getz? I guess if I thought I needed something exactly that size maybe I'd consider it, but it's a market segment that's price driven, so you have to really want a car that size and really believe you are making a difference on climate change. Which of course is a delusion.

I've said it before, but here goes. You buy a car and it's already consumed somewhere between 40 and 60% of it's 'carbon quota'. The numbers vary with size and complexity, number of miles driven, total life-span of the car but the point is that fuel use is only one factor. Unless your new car's steel and aluminium was smelted with hydro or nuclear power it's likely as not come out of a coal-fired oven. Then there's all the petro-chemical plastics that go into a car...plus the shipping of parts and the finished good to you by ship and truck. The math is not as simple as 'oh, hybrids are better because they save fuel relative to a petrol car the same size'.

Anyway, read the Forbes article here.

Drucker - Mintzberg - Younameit

2006-05-04T00:10:00.000Z

Whilst I'm in the mood to share links, how about:
1. Leader to Leader - the Drucker foundation - a bit heavy at times but really good for research. Perhaps not essential for a daily read but a good site to check from time to time
2. BNET's Leadership and Strategy newsletter is an excellent source, with many other business related newsletters (including HR and Marketing) available from the main BNET site. The HR newsletter is also good. Subscribing is a good, and free, option
3. Forbes is a good read at times but the countless animated adverts drive me mad!

Happy reading and researching!

Another recommendation: MBA Depot

2006-05-03T23:52:00.000Z

Another useful site for those researching for their MBA or other business degrees: MBA Depot. Take a look. It's worth subscribing to the newsletter.

Interesting reading from McKinsey's

2006-05-03T23:17:00.000Z

The McKinsey group publish both free and 'premium' material - very useful source reports for MBA assignments and interesting reading in any case, it's worth subscribing to the Quarterly.

There's value in HR

2006-05-03T04:34:00.000Z

We suspect it's true and we want it to be true. But sometimes it's not obvious exactly what the return is from best of breed HRM. We may as well go back to Personnel departments if it's not true! Here's a study that quantifies the stock market value of HRM. Study by Watson Wyatt and the Human Resource Planning Society, reported via Workforce.com.

TheSpiel

2006-05-03T03:34:00.000Z

TheSpiel is about passing on what I know about business, especially focused on what I learned in achieving my MBA. It's also about sustainability. Too often we work in isolation and focus only on what's in front of us... climate change is but one example. If we as a group of individuals don't look after the the consequences of our actions - do a bit of prediction and then modify our behaviour - then we will have learned nothing from teh past and will pass on a tragic mess to our children. Do it once, do it right; and if you get it wrong, clean it up.

theSpiel on Business

I'm really slack, I know

Will Holden survive?

Network World article on free DNS services

Teamplayers... what are they, really?

Ford: Out of touch or what?

Tom Yager gets excited

You probably don't need to know this, but here it is...

When your content is user-generated who has control?

What happens in a globally accessible world when you don't understand which option to choose?

'Fattism' and hiring

The car business...and product life cycles

Social networking... again

Recent Business Blogging...and more

The cheap car muse

Virtual opportunities

RSS and business

IBM TV - another way to get the SOA message across

Dell dies a death in network gear

Netflix and its ilk - is there a future?

Aussie vs US CEOs - US study

I've just run another strategy workshop

Sony's battery blues

IBM Cell on sale

Ding dong Dell

Apple and iPod. How long would you wait?

Google Trends - a useful service

Generations - a real effect?

Business post wrap-up

Free stuff from McKinsey's

Monday, August 07, 2006

Apple's Leopard about to pounce

OS wars, again and again

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Strategic purchase by AMD

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Top ten proliferated new technologies by 2020

OS wars, again and again

Why Fi? Connectivity as a utility

Another market to explore - batteries

Try these previous posts for MBA resources and discussions...

Price Wars

The telephony marketplace

Dissecting Dell

Outsourced complexity

How Ducati killed its marketing department

More business resources to check out

Freebies from Harvard

Resources at theSpiel

Choose an option...

Car company's credit crunch

Apple and innovation

Peer to Peer everything?

Google spreadsheets?

VoIP, convergence and everything

Not as silly as it sounds

Hydrogen and realism

Recent posts from GTVeloce

Microsoft misses out - again

Cars, malls and psychology

A summary of my recent posts

Can't resist this one from Wharton - on Microsoft

Forbes on Google

Corporate culture change analysis

My opinions only

Wharton on oil prices

Forbes slant on why hybrids are not selling like hotcakes

Drucker - Mintzberg - Younameit

Another recommendation: MBA Depot

Interesting reading from McKinsey's

There's value in HR

TheSpiel