Day: May 4, 2005

Schwartz on India and China

The Register has a telling quote by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz:

“My view is that (India and China) don’t have to deal with all the legacy systems that Western Europe, the US and Japan do,” Schwartz said in an interview with The Register. “There are no mainframes. Microsoft Exchange doesn’t have the same presence in the IT landscape. Windows isn’t nearly no entrenched.”

Developed nations must spend an excessive amount of time focused on reworking old systems to work on modern computing tasks. In addition, customers are hampered by a lack of innovation – the result of bloated, lethargic companies that own huge markets such as the mainframe, desktop or browser, Schwartz said.

As a result, India and China could well dominate something Schwartz sees as the next-wave of computing, which is a scenario that takes millions of networked devices, high bandwidth and web services for granted. While the US is busy paying cheap coders to fix PeopleSoft applications, savvy folks in India could be plowing ahead on a fresh infrastructure.

“You can’t huddle in Mountain View and expect to be able to understand the market in China,” Schwartz said. “You have to be there.”

Paul Graham on PR

Slashdot points to Paul Graham’s essay:

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren’t about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

I know because I spent years hunting such “press hits.” Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.

ActiveGrid, LAMP and Java

News.com writes:

An open-source software company called ActiveGrid is challenging the established thinking among builders of large-scale business applications.

The premise of ActiveGrid, which released an early version of its server software and tools on Monday, is that application servers based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification are no longer required. Company Peter Yared was even handing out “No J2EE” pins at LinuxWorld earlier this year.

Instead, Yared proposes building applications with scripting languages, such as Python or PHP, which are easier to use than Java but typically not used for high-end applications. ActiveGrid’s solution for building out large-scale systems is to network several LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, plus PHP or Python or Perl) servers together in a grid.

In an essay, Yared argued that the day of powerful applications servers that centralize many functions, like database access and caching, are pass.

Instead, a distributed grid of back-end application servers will function more like a “text pump” moving text-based XML files around the network. And scripting languages, he says, are very good at handling text and easily building Web pages.

The Java versus scripting languages debate is a hot one in the world of software development. ActiveGrid is just one more company eager to push the scripting envelope.

Mobile and TV Advertising

The Feature has an article by Mike Masnick:

Just as advertisers are realizing that the dream of pushing real-time ads to mobile devices is dying, it appears that a few are recognizing the power of advertising that’s pulled by the user, rather than pushed by the advertiser. In fact, some say that user-requested mobile advertising is going to eventually take the place of television advertising.

Andrew Robertson, the recently appointed head of Omnicom’s well-known BBDO advertising firm, is talking about how people can now avoid any advertising they don’t like — meaning that any effective advertising has to be something that the user actually wants. “You have no way to interrupt because they can choose what they can do. The opportunity is if you can create some content that they want to engage with, they can do that all of the time from anywhere.”

In other words, the whole mindset behind the entire advertising industry needs to change from one that’s about getting as many eyeballs on the ad as possible to getting people to actually want to see the ad. It’s a huge shift in mentalities, and the mobile Internet is likely to lead the charge. Since mobile devices are something that people carry with them all the time, and are connected to the wider world around them, it’s the perfect delivery mechanism — so long as the ads are requested by the end user.

End of Desktop PC Era?

[via Sadagopan] Mark Cuban writes:

The desktop is boring.

All the fun is happening with portable devices. Phones, Ipods, gaming consoles, PDAs, digital cameras, even hard drives and flash drives. All the good stuff is coming in small packages.

Remember the frustration of shopping for a PC in the 90s. Every couple months the PC would have something new and cool in it, and the price would drop. It was tough to know what to buy and whether you should do it now or wait.

Thats exactly what is happening in the portable.mobile device market. My Ipod, My Sidekick, my hard drives,my PSP, my Xbox even my laptop all have overlapping features. Each is getting closer to each other in feature set every day.

Which means that the war for my pocket is on. Which is going to allow me to only fill one pocket rather than the 2, or 1 plus beltclip that Im filling now.

Its a fun time for portable.mobile devices. Its the 80s and 90s for desktops all over again. Every time I go into CompUSA or Best Buy to see what new stuff is on the shelves that I can play with, every phone has a new feature. Every hard drive is smaller, cheaper, faster. Every PDA has new features and software.

Michael Gartenberg counters: “Mark Cuban goes on a rant about the death of the desktop PC and how mobile gadgets will replace it. I think mark’s a little off here. While he correctly notes the overlapping nature of his various devices, he ignores the secondary functions are often mediocre. My phone is a poor camera, my camera a poor mp3 player and my mp3 player a poor PIM. The key is context. When walking in SF on Tuesday and struck by a moment, I was able to snap a pic on my cameraphone but when I go on vacation you better believe my digital rebel will be along. Its not convergence, its context. Likewise, on the plane I needed to create a presentation, respond to a few hundred emails and write a several reports. In theory I could have used my Treo for that but it wouldn’t have been productive or pleasant…As for the desktop? death Well my “desktop” at home has half a terabyte of disk space, serves up content to three rooms in my home as well as my mobile devices. The pc isn’t gone… It just morphed into a new role and still handles the other stuff it did in the 80s and 90s better than any other device. My laptop has only a fraction of that capacity or horsepower.”

Sadagopan adds: “The PC is no doubt facing massive challenges – challenges in the form of raise of pervasive devices, advances in telecom bandwidth and consequently the advent of hosted solutions as a serious option( Gates has not touched upon this) and we are not seeing any fundamental changes in the PC operating systems and collaboration is taking new forms which Windows family is not able to catch up with. Most of the criticism about the PC comes from the operating system’s fundamental instability and poor reliability. I think that PC’s continued use depends to a large extent on the speed and featured in future windows rollout and to an extent the increased reach of the functionalities of the mobile and the PDA. Afterall the PC sale volume is very less compared to the mobiles which are selling several times over. The quick rate of change in these products and how they are sold, will completely alter both how the products are sold, and how we expect to buy them.The PC is not going to go away any time, it will continue to get faster, more powerful, and smaller, then eventually when we’re all on broadband, I think we will go back to the days of dumb PCs that run applications that are hosted online. Want to write a document, a “web browser” opens that enables you to do your word processing, and stores the document in your personal web space on some server farm in cyberspace. Enteprise applications are already going heavily towards web based, and more and more home applications will continue to as well. Desktop applications may be dying, but the role of desktops in accessing our applications would remain valid for some more time to come agreed handheld devices shall dominate moving forward.”

TECH TALK: Good Books: The Marketing Playbook (Part 2)

Here is an excerpt from The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula and Richard Tong:

It may seem hard to believe, but our experience with hundreds of businesses and their specific challenges has shown over and over that there is always one obvious basic strategy thats right for the situation. Once selected, your play becomes a starting point; its your path, your line of attack. From it, the rest of your in-market action plan comes to life.

Remember that there are only five plays to pick from. Here they are:

Drag Race: In some circumstances, your best bet calls for singling out one competitor and putting the pedal to the metal racing against them to win the category. This can be quite exciting, so its a really tempting choice. But you better have what it takes to beat them over the finish line.

Platform: Success can be hell. Once youve secured a lead in your category, you have to hold on to it and make the most of it. Standing on your platform at the top of the category, you need to be on the lookout. You must gather allies and defenses. Sounds kind of boring. But its essential. Success begets envy and you never know from where a new challenger is likely to emerge.

Stealth: Just because youre not strong enough yet to win the battle doesnt mean you cant win the war. In this play, you undermine the status quo in your market by whittling away at the incumbents weak points. And maybe even by making them look foolish. But remember, you still have to stay out of their way and survive. Big, dumb, slow competitors can still squish you.

Best-of-Both: Go ahead, have your cake and eat it, too. While in many cases the smart decision is to focus, requiring a trade-off at the high-end or low-end of the market, in the right circumstances you dont have to. With this play, instead you gain dominance over the whole of the category by collapsing these two ends. If you appeal to the most important needs of each part of the market, you can win them all.

High-Low: Compromise is for weaklings. With this play, you try to close out the competition by splitting the category and owning both halves. It takes a lot of finesse, but when you need to keep a competitor from establishing a Best-of-Both foothold, you need to appeal to the distinct prejudices of both the elites and the common folk, the high end and the cheap. This is the hardest play to manage, but if its done right, youll achieve high volumes and high margins at the same time.

In choosing the right play, there are some important questions you will need to ask yourself. Different plays are best suited to different conditions. Different plays require different strengths. Do you have the right ones to pull off your choice? Some plays are riskier than others. How tough are your nerves? Depending on the play, succeeding can take a long time. Do you have the time, patience, and resources? After all that, how big is the goal youre after? Is it achievable? Is it worth it?

John and Richard have written the book. It is for us to put it into action!

Tomorrow: Better Presentations

Continue reading TECH TALK: Good Books: The Marketing Playbook (Part 2)