Category: Management

Michael Kanellos provides a perspective on what the US can do on the outsourcing phenomenon: “In a sense, the software industry is going through what the hardware manufacturing industry experienced 15 years ago when PC and chip manufacturing migrated to Taiwan. First, Taiwan specialized in manufacturing basic products like circuit boards. Now it makes around half the world’s notebooks and designs many of them as well. Classic tech employees aren’t the only ones affected: Some media companies now use cheaper copy editors in India to produce the news.”

His recommendations for the US:

Educational system needs to be strengthened so that more high-school graduates will eventually be directed toward the most challenging fields.

Politicians and high-tech companies should reinvigorate the concept of the melting pot: Rather than discourage foreign students or workers coming here, the United States should court them.

Third, the United States should take stock of its inherent skills. Although universities overseas have been catching up with the United States in terms of minting graduates, the United States still has an edge when it comes to project management and marketing.

The last word: “Smart people are going to be born overseas. The best thing the United States can do is woo them.”

Doc Searls has been reading one of my favourite books. He differentiates nicely between two technologies.

I’ve been re-reading The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen. It’s a popular bigco book, because it’s spot-on about the difference between sustaining and disruptive technologies, and how disruptive technologies threaten the sustaining ones that keep bigcos alive. (Witness what Linux is doing to Sun’s Solaris right now. And even to Windows in some cases.)

Sustaining technologies are what big companies sell. They innovate gradually and grow at the same pace. They don’t take many risks, especially when the returns aren’t compeltely apparent. They depend on customers and investors for money, and they obey those market forces. They avoid small markets that don’t solve their large-scale growth needs. They don’t believe in markets that don’t yet exist. Their marketing imperative is Necessity is the mother of invention.

Disruptive technologies are what small companies sell, or what companies of all sizes might give away in hope that they’ll achieve ubiquitous adoption at no cost and change the world for everybody. Disruptive technologies often start out in forms too simple, small and trivial for big companies to take seriously. They appear in markets that don’t exist, can’t be researched, and therefore don’t interest big companies. Their marketing imperative is Invention is the mother of necessity.

The 5KPC (that I’ve been writing about in the Tech Talks) is a disruptive technology.

Continue reading Disruputive Technologies

I have realised one thing in the past few months. To catch attention, one needs simple ideas and concepts (or analogies) to describe what one is doing.

For the few months, we talked of Emergic as a “thin client-thick server” computing solution, or “the alternative computing platform” or “computing for the next 90%”. Too difficult for people to understand. Now, I have simplified the message: its about the “5KPC” – the Rs 5,000 (USD 100) personal computer. The 5KPC concept immediately strikes home. Its something people can relate to.

And, then to bring out the notion that it needs to be networked, I give the analogy of the TV and Cellphone: both need a network to be useful. In the same way, the 5KPC needs a network connection to do its tricks. Put this way, people can understand and relate to what I am saying. The “thin client/thick server” phrases are too techno-rich, and have their own connotations.

I realised this when over the past month, I found people and companies calling us after a few people in the media wrote about the 5KPC – that was in fact just one of the comments I had made at a seminar two months ago. But I now realise that the simplicity of the concept and the fact that I put what seemed to be an unachievable price point has helped garner attention. Phrases like “Affordable Computing” just don’t have the same kind of impact.

We now need to be able to do this to other products and solutions we are working on. Like for BlogStreet, I said we need to be able to “search for experts” just like one searches Google for content. The simplicity of the concept can go a long way in being to both communicating it to others and making it a reality.

Bruce Mau has a nice collection of idead [via Shrikant Patil]. The 3 that I liked:

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

Stories about the media in the media always make interesting reading, especially if it happens to be about one of your favourite media sources. Ever since I started buying the New York Times regularly during my Columbia Days, I have enjoyed reading the paper. I also subscribed some time ago to the International Herald Tribune (now owned entirely by NYT). The website is a must-read daily. I read recently (I think it was the WSJ) about the NYT planning half-screen-sized ads on their website like what we are used to seeing in magazines.

This WSJ story has more:

For years, the Times was one of the most staid companies in a staid industry. But since Mr. Sulzberger took over in 1997, the Times has learned to throw its weight around. To push its brand overseas, it leaned on an unwilling Washington Post Co. to part with its stake in the International Herald Tribune, a Paris-based paper they had published jointly for more than 30 years. The Times took a tough line with book publisher Random House Inc. and online news service TheStreet.com Inc. to extricate itself from unfavorable relationships. And the Times has thrown sharp elbows in promoting its paper at colleges, irking rival Gannett Co.

Rather than following the traditional newspaper-industry route of protecting its flagship paper from economic swings by acquiring other businesses, Mr. Sulzberger is deploying his company’s brand name more than ever before by means of cable television, book publishing, national newspapering — and now international print journalism. Times executives say they’re trying to make their once-neglected business side the equal of the company’s respected newsroom.

AOL needs a new vision, and there have been plenty of suggestions. Business Week suggested selling AOL to Microsoft (and integration with its MSN service). Dave Winer and Doc Searls too have made their own thoughts. New York Times too has its ideas.

I think the easy way out is to contemplate selling AOL. That would be the wrong thing to do. I think what they should do is get Steve Case back and let him run it. There are few who understand AOL and its strengths better than him. As Dave Winer says, just as it is hard to imagine Apple without Jobs, it is tough to imagine AOL without Case. Throw Case a challenge. Give him 2 years.

In the current environment, my guess is that AOLTW will do is clean up AOL enough to line it up for a sale or spinoff in a year.

Continue reading AOL’s Future

From Fast Company. This is what Jeff Taylor, founder and chairman, Monster.com says:

We all need to go into the corn-storage business. By that, I mean developing “silo expertise” in emerging business areas — such as health care, government, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals — that haven’t gotten much attention in the past five years. Those are the places where money is still being spent.

We’re using that approach at Monster. For example, 71% of federal-government workers will be eligible to retire over the next eight years. My conclusion: I have to figure out how to do business with the U.S. government. So I put employees in a number of different departments who wear a government-solutions name badge. They represent a silo of expertise that’s going to help me win that business.

Call them “silos” or “niches,” “business units,” “communities,” or “channels.” I like “silo” because it represents a harvest. The market-place in 2003 is more specialized, competitive, and focused. If you want to harvest revenue, then you’ll have to get into the silo business. You’ll have to build 20 of them, each with a different expertise. Then, depending on the size of your business, you could make $5 million or $300 million in one of those silos and substantially increase your revenue productivity.

What does this mean for each of us? We can’t be generalists anymore. If you want to have a chance, you need to be a specialist. Be bold about your industry or niche expertise. If you’ve been in pharmaceutical sales, trumpet your expertise in the industry, not just your sales skills. You need to become a silo yourself.

Joel Spolsky discusses about the differing strategies Apple and Microsoft have to product promotion, and asks: “Should you talk endlessly about your products under development, in hopes of building buzz, or should you hold off until you’ve got something ready to go?”

I have a policy lifted from Marlon Brando, playing a mob boss in The Freshman: “Every word I say, by definition, is a promise.” The best way to avoid breaking promises is not to make any, and that’s as good a reason as I need not to talk about future versions of our products. There are four other reasons for this in software development – Competition, Underpromise and Overdeliver, Flexibility and Simplicity.

I hope we can follow these ideas for Emergic. We didnt talk much about what we did publicly (other than the blog) till we were ready. That has helped generate some buzz in the past few weeks. But, we still have a long way to go.

Writes Lee Gomes (WSJ):

Apple these days is in the unique and enviable position of appealing simultaneously to computer users at both ends of the usage spectrum. The first is the home user, someone who just wants to surf the Net and read e-mail. Not long ago, home users would have been crazy for considering a Macintosh. Now, they are crazy if they don’t.

The second is the technically minded user, who likes the new Mac because it’s based on software called FreeBSD, a kissing cousin to Linux. Apple says the Linux-on-the-desktop movement is stalling, which would once again make the Apple ecosystem the gathering place for people disinclined to like Mr. Gates.

Apple’s products have a buzz about them. I too am thinking of getting a Powerbook, to try out some of the new software.

Continue reading Apple is Back?

Business Week has a story on the challenges that face Google: “Competition is building at both the high and low ends of the market. Worse, some clients think the search giant is encroaching on their turf.”

Of course, who wouldn’t want to be in Google’s shoes, even though as the article says, “it may be facing one of the oldest maxims in business: Once you make it to the top, it can be mighty hard to stay there.”