Cutter Consortium was kind enough to publish an article of mine — “Disrupting the Disruptors” — in their IT Journal, a special issue on “Creative Destruction” in the IT industry.
Here’s a link to a complimentary copy of that issue of the magazine.
Cutter is a huge panel of IT experts who will give you disinterested advice on most IT questions.
My article was on how incumbents might be able to defend themselves against disruptive technology business threats. A quick read, IMHO…
A recurrent meme at the Hadoop World conference last week was the idea that part of “Big Data” or even “the heart” of Big Data is “bringing the computation to the data.”
At first I thought that the main impact of this — beyond the very real observation that “shared-as-little-as-possible” architectures are great for scaling data processing — was poetic: it was sort of a democratization of compute power, or liberating compute power from the dark satanic mills of Oracle or the like.
But there appear to be architectural implications as well. A stateless or practically stateless approach to data weakens any hope of transactional integrity, for example. If you coordinate enough to be certain that everything will be undo-able, you’ll never get anywhere on your data. You need probabalistic assurances, not logical ones.
Also, new approaches will be needed for security and storage in an architecture where a vast universe of data/computation nodes coordinate. Maybe there are startups looking at this today, but would love to hear of anything interesting going on in these areas.
Was in a discussion today about the “consumerization of IT”, by which people mean the trend to have consumer technology products and approaches become the leading edge for innovation in the enterprise.
The tenor of the conversation was that this was a historic shift, and that enterprise IT had formerly led innovation in consumer IT.
I found myself objecting. It’s not that consumer IT has never led; it just hasn’t led lately.
In the ’80’s, a new machine called the PC (and even Macs were called PCs then) invaded the enterprise. Its owners valued the pleasure of running software on a PC, the interactivity, the fun of using PC software.
Enterprise software, which was mostly time-sharing — so-called “green screen” apps — was ugly, cumbersome, and hard to learn how to use. There was nothing fun about it.
PC software — and it was the “consumer” software of its day — led enterprise IT, and enterprises were dragged kicking and screaming into supporting it.
Throughout what you might call the “LAN-based PC” era, consumer IT led. And then a different wind blew — mainly databases and database-based applications — and the client-server era began. What led then was the ability to run large datasets in something less than geologic time. Enterprise IT led, and led until… new clients came along that were a pleasure and fun to use, and users insisted that the enterprise support them.
Maybe it’s a cycle, and not a series of epochs.
Your thoughts?
If you push down on what people think is attractive about “connected TVs” (television sets with an Internet connection built in), the use cases seem to boil down to apter another kind of “convergence”: in this case, convergence between television programming and online programming.
Do you need a connected tv for that? No, but it should be a nifty medium in terms of screen real estate. Unfortunately not so nifty in terms of input device(s) unless you happen to enjoy spelling things out with a remote control or cuddling a qwerty keyboard on your lap. But maybe voice input will take care of that: the gadget-oisie is gushing about Siri, forgetting that Siri is witty but not that great at voice recognition (like a URL, say). Those of us who broke our hearts trying to do natural language stuff in the ’70s and ’80s appreciate the difference between wittiness and understanding.
In any case, I’m excited about the coupling of Internet interactivity and social connection with tv production values. Get ready for a great ride.
OK, if we’re going to have a significant increase in noSQL approaches to big data management, what will take the place of SQL?
This isn’t just a Zen koan. SQL, a language I never cared for, nevertheless has two signal virtues:
What will take the place of this border in the noSQL world? Today it’s anarchic: the query is a method in some languages, a specification in others, and (thanks to some bridging technologies), SQL itself.
Just as web applications took UI/UX back a decade, noSQL risks taking the data layer abstraction back a decade or two. Needs some work.
Anybody know good companies or approaches to this problem?
Ever since I made salt cod this past September I’ve been meaning to make something with it.
The problem has been that you have to soak the salt cod in fresh water for 24 hours (or even more!!) before using it, so you have to be together enough to plan 24+ hours in advance and then deliver on the other end.
This week the perfect storm. Debbie is out of town, so when I got home Thursday night from NYC I had no distractions and was able to see clearly forward to the Friday night as an oppty. I jumped on it.
Salt Cod Fish Cakes, from Gourmet, via Epicurious, are what you might call, if you were Jewish, latkes with scales and fins. Basically a potato pancake (with an inexplicable bit of parsnip thrown in) with salt cod as about half the throw weight.
Here’s the finished fish cakes. I thought they were great, but I love salt (I thought the unwashed bacalao was pretty tasty, before the 24 hours fresh water treatment).
Anyhow, as Marshall would say, good chomp.
We’re looking for investments in connected TV. Apple TV and others have thus far not ignited this market, but we believe something will.
Ideas?
We investors frequently fault entrepreneurs — especially tech entrepreneurs — for not understanding the difference between a great product and a great business.
A business is so much more than a product: it’s a value proposition; it’s communicating that value proposition to the customers; it’s bringing the product to the market, and to the customers; it’s establishing an advantage vis a vis competitors; it’s building an organization that can reproducibly do all of the above. It’s no wonder that many startup businesses don’t know whether or not they have a great business, even when they might have a great product.
To be fair, however, many VCs and angels don’t get the difference between a great product and a great business either. We convince ourselves that just because we understand how a product works that we understand the business that could successfully sell that product. Or we think that because we can understand a product in a marketplace that we undertand all the “gotchas” of running a business in that marketplace.
It’s not just entrepreneurs who need to be honest with themselves about the distinction.
Made two dishes last night: "New Coq au Vin" and "Crispy Cauliflower with Olives, Capers, and Parsley". One hit, one miss.
The hit was the cauliflower. The long cooking with oil in the pot – maybe you’d call it “non-stir-frying” or “pas de saute”-ing – made the cauliflower tender and crispy. And the dressing was peppy enough to please Debbie and me. Doesn’t look fantastic in this picture, but it was pleasant enough to the eye and tasty.
The dud was the chicken. I don’t know – I’ve got a thing about braised chicken, and I had an unstoppable yen to do some kind of chicken braised in wine.
The recipe looked bland, but I kept hoping that the infallible Epicurious would prove itself again. Guess what, it didn’t. Maybe I’m getting better at translating in my mind from the (web) page to the table. In any case, it was not obviously flawed in any way, but didn’t taste very… pronounced.
tecosystemsbecause technology is just another ecosystem
You Are Who You Build For
Every successful technology vendor knows who their customer is. For Apple, the end user is prioritized at the expense of every other consideration, save possibly form. IBM, on the hand, has traditionally designed and built software for businesses; users are a secondary concern.
The distinction is relevant because the requirements of users and businesses are frequently at cross-purposes; what’s good for users may not be good for employers, and vice versa. And while it’s possible to develop products for individuals within a business context – Microsoft Office is but one example of this – it remains a practice distinct from building products for the average consumer. As Windows Mobile’s history demonstrates.
Product development is inevitably a reflection of its target; the institution is a reflection of all of the above.
While this focus acts to constrain an organization’s addressable market – Apple is famously indifferent to selling to enterprises and IBM divested itself of its only consumer brands in 2005, attempts to service non-core audiences have historically been problematic.
HP, for example, seems to have belatedly come to the same conclusions that IBM did, as it publicly contemplates the separation of its PC business. And Palm’s webOS – a consumer oriented mobile operating system business that HP paid $1.2B to acquire, was orphaned in the same timeframe as HP’s now ex-CEO Leo Apotheker ended the firm’s dalliance with consumer relevance to focus on the business he knew best: business technology.
HP was, in that respect, merely following in Cisco’s footsteps, as the enterprise datacenter and networking supplier spent $590M to acquire Flip – a consumer oriented hardware business – that it retired two years later, having concluded that it lacked the ability to run consumer and enterprise businesses side by side.
Sun, likewise, was an enterprise technology company that sought to realize the perceived synergies between consumer and enterprise businesses; billions of Java handsets will sell tens of thousands of Sun servers, as the theory went. And while its technologies live on as core pieces of today’s mobile consumer experience, with a cleanroom reimplementation of the Java runtime at the heart of Android’s success, the firm itself was acquired at a steep discount by Oracle, having never realized its grand consumer-side ambitions. Because it fundamentally lacked the ability to develop and grow a non-enterprise business.
RIM may be the latest to learn this lesson. As consumer oriented operating systems – Android and iOS – absorb its marketshare, the one time mobile business standard has attempted to become more consumer friendly. While that by itself is challenging, the collateral damage – its core customers – is the real problem.
The practical lesson to be learned here is that it is crucial that vendors understand who their target market is generally, and who they’re targeting within that market specifically. Acquisition or development strategies that target non-adjacent, distinct markets may appear attractive, even accretive to the core business, but the execution is challenging enough that such efforts are rarely successful. Which is why there are no vendors with an equal ability to service consumer and enterprise markets.
While both enterprise and consumer focused businesses have historically produced revenue generating businesses, with capital markets traditionally favoring the outsized revenues that business software and hardware generate, the ongoing consumerization of IT represents something of a wild card.
When enterprises were able to impose their will upon their employees, enterprise vendors enjoyed barriers to entry sufficient to shield them from the likes of Apple. Businesses only bought the products that they wanted, which in turn were the products enterprise vendors built for them. But with “Bring Your Own Device” in full swing and accelerating adoption of consumer products like the iPad in Fortune 500 organizations, it seems clear that the barriers to entry that once protected enterprise oriented vendors are breaking down. The inmates are, more and more often, running the asylum.
Which doesn’t mean enterprise vendors should try – like RIM – to become consumer companies. History tells us that is precisely the wrong lesson to learn.
It does mean, however, that as enterprise vendors compete with their consumer counterparts, they will be at a disadvantage relative to their design, and must make adjustments to philosophies accordingly. Life was easy when you were selling to a business; now you have to sell to each and every one of their employees.
The lesson that statecraft has learned – “in the old world you’d negotiate with governments, in the new one you negotiate with populations” – is one that will become more and more familiar to those who would sell user facing business technology.
Disclosure: HP, IBM and Microsoft are RedMonk customers; Apple and RIM are not.
–>
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Categories: Consumerization.
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Steven O’Grady gets it right in his post about “You Are Who You Build For”, but the point extends to individuals as well. We are endowed — if you will — with a bent toward individuals and solving individual problems (B2C) or organizations and solving organizational problems. (B2B). No shame in either; the shame lies in trying to be something you’re not.
