Day: May 12, 2005

Innovator’s Q&A

WSJ writes about questions that innovator’s must answer beofre proceeding with their idea:

The top 10 questions would-be entrepreneurs should ask themselves before pursuing an idea for a business:

1. What is new and different about your innovation?
2. What other things like this are out there? Why is yours better?
3. How big is the market? How many people have this problem?
4. How much would it cost to make this product? And what do you think the market will pay?
5. How defensible is the concept? Is there good intellectual property?
6. How is this innovation strategic to my business?
7. How easy is it to communicate the innovation?
8. How could the product evolve? Is there an opportunity to build it out into a product line? Can it be updated/augmented in future versions?
9. Where would someone expect to purchase this product?
10. What will be tricky or difficult in developing this product?

Big Media Meltdown

Jeff Jarvis points to some amazing facts and figures about what’s happening in the US. A quote from the Wilson Quarterly: “Collapse is not too strong a word to describe what has happened to America’s major news media. Stripped of their old economic and technological advantages, befuddled by the changing character of their audiences, and beset by new competitors, they are reeling from the blows recent scandals have dealt to their credibility and presige. Their old authority is one, and with it, perhaps their ability to define for Americans a shared realm of information, ideas and debate.”

When will it happen in India?

Yahoo’s FUSE

John Battelle writes about a discussion with Jeff Weiner, point man at Yahoo for all things search:

The vision statement for Yahoo Search is pretty damn good, if you’re into that kind of thing (I’ll admit, I am). Here it is, in its entirety:

To enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge.

Yahoo Search also has a mission:

To provide the world’s most valued and trusted search service.

When you think about Yahoo’s search mission as an organizing principle, a lot of what Yahoo is doing – 360, MyWeb, Y!Q, the purchase of Flickr – start to fall into place. Weiner calls his vision FUSE (for Find, Use, Share, and Expand) and it’s an apt metaphor – using search to fuse a myriad of services and applications, all of which center on knowledge and its application.

As Jeff pointed out to me, at the center of the idea of FUSE is what’s happening to media – how every single medium – music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web – is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0. It’s an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media – through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search. Hence, the FUSE vision holds water for me – search is not just about a web index. It’s about my interface to the world.

Relationships in Business

800-CEO-READ Blog has an excerpt from “The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership” by Steve Farber: “Relationships in the world of business…are won by paying nearly obsessive attention to the needs, desires, hopes, and aspirations of everyone who touches your business. By knowing not only when to stand firm–there is such this as tough love–but also when to sacrifice some of your own short-term needs in order for us all to be successful in the long run. And by proving through your own actions that you really love your business, your customers, your colleagues, and your employees.”

Guns, Games, and Style

Kevin Werbach writes: “Want a sneak peek of tomorrow’s technology? Look to generals, gamers, and fashionistas, where the real innovations will come from.”

In today’s technology industry, the three hidden factors shaping the innovation environment are guns, games, and style.

“Guns” means the military and the vast associated intelligence and homeland security apparatus. From battling distributed global terror networks to providing soldiers with real-time information on the battlefield, the military faces a plethora of challenges that call for cutting-edge technology. And with an annual budget in the hundreds of billions, it has the resources to pay for it.

Something similar is happening in the gaming world. Computer games are a big business, rivaling the movie industry in revenues. Moreover, they’re the most demanding application most users have for their PCs and other devices. A machine that can browse the Web in its sleep will still strain at the three-dimensional rendering demands of today’s games.

Style, the third element, may seem particularly incongruous in a technology discussion. Yet it’s an ever more significant driver of innovation. As the IT industry matures, raw technical specifications become less important. The baseline level of functionality is usually good enough. That puts a premium on aesthetics, buzz, usability, and other “soft” factors.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: What Went Wrong

An October 2002 article in Baseline summarised about what went wrong with the business model of Application Service Providers (ASPs):

The idea was that the customers, then primarily dot-coms, would be freed of purchasing and maintaining software and could use their dollars elsewhere, perhaps to bolster their marketing budgets and build their brands. And the rent would provide ASPs with a steady source of income.

But two things went wrong. First, there were few companies that thought renting was a good idea. Most wanted to own an asset as important as software, and they were not about to turn over anything that controls their critical business processes to an outsider. Second, the Internet stock-market crash wiped out most of the customers.

An earlier October 2001 article in Network World Fusion explored the issues in greater depth:

The ASP industry is experiencing growing pains common to any emerging technology as IT executives slowly warm to the idea of changing the way they do business. The difference is that instead of providing a tangible product, ASPs are delivering a service that is somewhat difficult to define. Add to that the inherent complexities of remotely delivering applications designed for a client-server environment, and the troubles quickly mount. Nevertheless, the notion of software as a service is here to stay. The question is which vendors will figure out the winning way to deliver that service.

In addition to some shaky business models, ASPs were facing difficult technical hurdles. “There were last-mile concerns, concerns about security over the Internet, transaction volumes over the Internet, things like middleware to write and maintain interfaces,” says Rob Unger, CEO of Agilera.

So while early ASPs targeted dot-coms and small businesses that required little integration and customization, and accessed their applications largely via the Internet, maturing vendors struggled with how to provide the same service to more demanding large corporations.

Corporations were worried about security, connectivity and integration, observers say.

What’s more, big companies didn’t want the “vanilla” applications ASPs were set to offer, preferring customized software that could be integrated with their internal systems.

Assembling the infrastructure necessary to deliver hosted applications isn’t inexpensive. Most ASPs have found it difficult to establish the customer base and recurring revenue they need to offset debt.

There is no question the ASP market will thrive, observers say. But you probably won’t know the players as ASPs. Software as a service, it seems, is what we’ll call the next big thing.

Tomorrow: Hagels Analysis