Archive for the 'Business' Category
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
McKinsey: “The next step in open innovation”
There’s a great article over at McKinsey Quarterly’s website on the next step in innovation. It offers a peak into where companies are headed now that they’ve (well some at least) established basic means for tapping into open innovation through communities. To access the full article you need a login.
For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls—from suppliers, independent inventors, and university labs.
Executives in a number of companies are now considering the next step in this trend toward more open innovation.1 For one thing, they are looking at ways to delegate more of the management of innovation to networks of suppliers and independent specialists that interact with each other to cocreate products and services. They also hope to get their customers into the act.
I was particularly interested in the hurdles to evolving towards a more participative value chain model. These are the four hurdles McKinsey identified:
- Attracting and motivating cocreators
- Structuring problems for participation
- Governance mechanisms to facilitate cocreation
- Maintaining quality
I would add a fifth challenge which is maintaining visionary leadership. The challenge is that when a company open up to such participation, it’s too easy to justify investment in innovation to solve what customers, suppliers, etc are asking for today. What’s difficult in an environment with tons of user input is to also step back and recognize where you *should be* beyond what’s being asked for today. Think of Apple. If Apple had asked and listened to its customers about what to do next with the iPod next, customers would have posted a million points about X, Y, … N feature enhancements they’d like to see. What Apple did instead is look beyond what was right in front of everyone and set a strategy to take over the mobile device people carry with them. Apple looked further ahead and built an SDK platform for enterprise applications. They set a brilliant strategy that has now resulted in the iPhone becoming the next generation of what was just a music playing device. How many people will carry and iPhone and an iPod? Now look at the boost to Mac sales and you can see Apple has executed this strategy very well.
This challenge is also present in open source communities. Often the community will set many resources to what gap is in front of someone willing to speak up and complain or advise. The challenge is for that community to look a step ahead and identify what are the needs your users will want 3 years from now, not today.
I’ve diverted from my starting post, but while I thought the article was great, I felt compelled to add my personal addendum. The bottom line is that I think companies need to build into their open innovation model a means to capture this longer term vision either from the community if possible (without community NDAs) or through internal means.
Monday, May 26th, 2008
A massive energy innovation bubble on the horizon?
I can sense it - energy innovation will be the biggest bubble for investment - and the greatest economic challenge over the next 5-10 yrs. We all know “things are happening” even today, but a couple datapoints this weekend confirmed for me this really is going to be huge. One thing I’ve noticed continually happens is that a major issue like energy will likely see over-investment which drives exuberated expectations and which will lead to the pendulum swinging too far with a market correction to follow. But the pendulum is swinging and that’s a good thing for the world economy. I only hope the changes are not too late.
If I get time this week, I’ll explain more, but I even just noticed James Governor is expanding the Greenmonk analyst team. Follow the money is always a good model for investing in growth :-)
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Open Source VC Funding Does a 180 Turnabout in 1Q08
http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/04/01/vc-funding-for-open-source-hits-an-all-time-high/
Very interesting twist in what I thought was a dying field… apparently “open source” funding in 1Q08 really took off after a dive in late 2007. Not only the highest quarter of funding, but also the most deals done. Thanks to Raven for sending the heads up.
Friday, March 28th, 2008
McKinsey’s 8 Business Technology Trends to Watch
Do any of these sound familiar?
Managing relationships
1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
Managing capital and assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
Leveraging information in new ways
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Motorola gives into Icahn; splits ala Palm
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9903426-7.html?tag=nl.e703
I’m sure Carl has something big in mind, but if you look at Palm or many others, these moves don’t seem to have great track records. Interesting move, but I’m not sure this was the best option for Motorola to turn things around…
The Mobile Devices business will handle the designs, manufacturing, and sales of mobile handsets and accessories, and will license a portfolio of intellectual property. The Broadband & Mobility Solutions business will handle voice and data communication solutions and wireless broadband networks for enterprises and governments. It will also handle IP video, cellular, and high-speed broadband network infrastructure, and cable set-top receivers.
Monday, March 10th, 2008
A business school case study unfolding before our eyes
The new unlimited calling plan competition unfolding over the last week will be an interesting case study sometime in the future. Will this end with all market players racing to the bottom and losing profits to the benefit of consumers, or will Verizon’s first mover advantage give it a boost in competitive share gains - or will they all win with consumers paying for more than they consume? Only time will tell but it will be an interesting dance to watch and provide plenty of fodder for future corporate strategy textbooks …
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23564206/
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
Linux is an example of successful “mesh innovation”
Interesting conclusion by Steve Hamm:
There’s already a clear example of mesh innovation working. That’s open source software. Linux, Mozilla, and other incredibly successful software programs were created and are constantly improved by people scattered all over the world. So it’s a powerful model for innovation.
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Was the Terminator powered by Linux? The US military is gung-ho for Linux and “Future Combat Systems”.
This is a strong testmament for why I always tell people… it’s guaranteed that in the long run, Linux will win. The only OS out there that will remain competitive is Windows (IMO). And Windows will compete and be successful for the opposite reasons Linux will. That’s ok, if Linux dominated the market, it would be a monopoly - although a nicer one than we currently have :-)
Some analysts tout open source software as one of the next great technology waves, comparable in its disruptive effects to personal computing and the Internet. That future is already partly here for the U.S. military, with programs such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) and organizations such as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) using open technologies.
http://www.military-information-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=2326
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
When will the M&A market wake up?
I hate seeing business mistakes that happen over-and-over again and each time someone tries to make up a justification for the same trend. In the late 90’s it was Netscape and then AOL, AOL, AOL. Now those failed ridiculously - there’s always a hit platform of the day - something as fleeting as the popular bar of the week in a major city. Now it’s MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook, and this nonsense continues. To be worth extraordinarily high multiples, a company has to generate revenues - hear me? Revenues; yes, that means money.
Sorry, just a rant of the day, but think about how similar some of these “Web 2.0″ acquisitions and valuations can be compared to AOL. It’s a platform for social networking - and social networks change. Perhaps they’ll be popular in certain crowds for some time, but how will they generate revenue? (ads is the only obvious one… and those are predictable revenues). Beyond that, what justifies such a ginormous valuation? The user population may grow, but even at a peak estimate, what is the revenue stream? Does it match the valuation? Revenues are simple and any company has good average estimates to predict ad revenues. The formula is simple: $/click * average clicks …. not too difficult.
I get the scary feeling M&A activity in some IT circles has become too much of a billion dollar dartboard game. Bet on this new hit platform, that exploding platform, next year’s hottest platform… nonsense, bet on revenue streams that you can predict. If you have some other business model, so be it, but any decent analyst can predict the 3 yr future. If you’re using over 5 years to justify a high multiple valuation based on what should be a predictable revenue stream… come talk to me and I’ll help you spend it wisely on something else.
And with that backdrop, think about Yahoo! and Microsoft…
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
Microsoft puts the IP threats to UK company streaming Office
Microsoft has said that the Internet service provider Fasthosts, which has started offering a hosted version of Microsoft Office 2007, is infringing on the software giant’s license regulations.
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
Check out Dealipidea.com
This is a really cool site that I saw just started up covering business deals in a Wiki for a great historical buildout of information. Michael Robertson started it up and explains his rationale here.
You can find it all at Dealipedia.com
After continually getting frustrated that I couldn’t find historic data on business deals or easily keep track of new deals without reading a dozen different publications I decided to remedy the problem by launching Dealipedia - a business wiki for mergers, acquisitions, venture investments, IPO and other deals. We’re launching with nearly 20,000 deals, but also never before revealed info like how much Yahoo paid for Flickr, how much Google paid for Grandcentral and how much the founders of Myspace made in their sale to News Corp.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
Apple… the company just baffles me…
I really, really don’t get what Apple is trying to prove here… companies trying to build business apps onto the iPhone and getting slapped with the DMCA because the Apple browser lacks Java and Flash support (e.g. it sucks)? Seriously Apple?
And it’s not just Web 2.0 start-ups making the noise. SAP, the world’s largest supplier of business applications, has pitched in, saying Apple gave the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as the reason it can’t install its software on the iPhone.
SAP had hacked its code onto an iPhone as a proof of concept, which is now on hold.
Monday, February 4th, 2008
IBM’s Bob Sutor responds to Microsoft’s… nonsense and whining
Saw this article over at Ars today:
We spoke to Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source for IBM, who responded to Microsoft’s recent claims regarding IBM’s involvement in the OOXML dispute. “IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,” Sutor told Ars. “If ‘business as usual’ means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we’re proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.
Monday, February 4th, 2008
A processor market “I told you so”
It’s always interesting to see predictions like this one on processor innovations, volumes and success/failures actually coming true.
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
McKinsey Quarterly Interviews Mitchell Baker from Mozilla
I was stunned to see McKinsey Quarterly interviewed Mitchell Baker. I was even more stunned to find it was a very insightful article despite everything I’ve already read on Mitchell. Unfortunately I think you need a subscription to see the full article, but if you have one…
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_abstract.aspx?ar=2098&l2=21&l3=35&srid=17
Friday, February 1st, 2008
Microsoft! Really! Wants! Yahoo!
Wow, you know a company is desparate to acquire into a space when they’re paying 60% plus premiums… there goes a MySQL and Linux user…
Microsoft said Friday it has offered to acquire Yahoo in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.
Microsoft said it had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, which it said represented a 62 percent premium above the company’s closing stock price on Nasdaq on Thursday.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Automattic nets nearly $30M in financing
Wow! This is great news for Matt and the team behind WordPress. It’s always nice when one of your customers loves your product so much they invest in you! Matt Mullenwig covers his own news here.
Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
And the best Sun/MySQL Acquisition Analysis Award goes to…
drumroll please…
Jeff Gould. [applause]
Jeff’s analysis is dead on in my opinion and I found his application of business forces and behavior offers an analytical lens focusing on the real impact with great clarity. I’ve yet to see anyone prove MySQL can provide investors return on $1B using any conventional financial decision model. I’d like to also congratulate Oracle on a great move … (via Sun). Sometimes the smart thing to do is have one of these shirts on when you visit Redwood City (notice the arrow points in the right direction).
Anyway, you can read Jeff’s take here:
http://www.interopnews.com/news/can-sun-make-mysql-pay.html
BTW, if you’re curious, Mr. “My Sox stole your Tribe’s training program” O’Grady forced a very close, ballot-chad recount, second place finish with a very complete analysis over a Redmonk.com.
Update: It does appear Mr. O’Grady may contest the recount and this may drag on a while longer.
Friday, January 4th, 2008
AP Interview with Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst
I like Jim already after reading this interview.
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
Friday, December 21st, 2007
Daryl Stokes from IBM on open source virtualization
This looks like a great webinar (just landed in my inbox so I haven’t looked at it yet). I work with Daryl on a regular basis and am always impressed. Daryl also brought in Tony Iams from Ideas International who has a good knack for delving into the OS and platform details in a meaningful way. Hopefully my schedule will open up this afternoon to give me time to check it out before I head out on vacation!
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The benefits of virtualization in the datacenter are becoming well-known: Server consolidation, capabilities to deploy more applications and virtual machines on a single server, cost savings, power savings. Do these benefits encompass open source virtualization as well? Are there additional benefits of open source virtualization that would justify a serious evaluation against current solutions on the market today? Join Ziff Davis Enterprises for this panel on pairing server virtualization and open source technologies to learn more about how datacenter IT managers can achieve lower TCO, gain flexibility in a mixed-source environment, and increase data center efficiencies. The panel includes an analyst’s overview on open source alternatives for virtualization, a case study by an integrator on implementation, and explores:
Featured Speakers: |
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