Sincerest Form of Flattery
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 168 comments
Let's face it - fast follower is a proven go-to-market strategy that companies in virtually every industry have used since the origin of the market economy. But some companies are more forthcoming than others about the inspiration for their product plans. In the case of Nokia, I wouldn't call them 'fast' by any means, but they seem fairly unfazed by the 'follower' label, as we see in this quote from the company's Nokia Music Store announcement: "I don’t know what is copying and what is original but if there is something good in the world, we copy it with pride,” said Anssi Vanjoki, head of the...
More ROI
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 176 comments
Another great day for headlines - this one is about the great enterprise quasi-embrace of Web 2.0, and the seemingly futile exercise of applying some ROI to it. As if IT doesn't have enough work to do already. Anyway, the top line pretty much says it all... "IT Execs Seek New Ways to Justify Web 2.0" Usual ROI metrics won't work with new tools, users say See here . If usual ROI metrics won't work, let's come up with some unusual ones that let us just sort of stumble into the answer we all want. As the saying goes, if you torture the numbers, they'll eventually confess. The best part of all this...
Headline of the Day
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 227 comments
" OASIS forms six committees to simplify SOA" See here . A bit of a departure from what I usually blog about, but this one was too good to resist. While SOA advocates continue to take the defensive on the difficulties of actually implementing one, the complexity has officially infected the standards process with this silly announcement. IBM will, of course, be at the table here - I wonder if those hours are billable......
Color of Money
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 168 comments
The NYT ran an interesting piece last Sunday (in the Style section, no less) about ‘green’ consumer products, and the profitable business of pandering to this latest fixation among American consumers. If consumerism has indeed gone green, then meeting the needs of your customer means helping them go green by supplying them with organic foods, hybrid cars, hemp clothes, and a number of other consumer products for which people will happily pay a premium. No need to dwell on the fact that consumerism created this mess in the first place – let’s all consume more stuff, as long as it’s ‘green.’ T here...
Have we met?
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 169 comments
I despise Plaxo. No, I really do. I’m annoyed at the ease by which people I have never met can not only get my contact info from people I actually have met, but also make it part of their spam delivery network in the never-ending quest to get more ‘contacts’ or (as is the case with networks like FaceBook and MySpace) ‘friends.’ Um…I’m sorry, have we met? I understand the value of social networks, and the explicit value of casting a wide net when looking for a job, building a client base, etc., but it seems that social networks have an underlying premise around making connections: they presume the...
Rude Awakening
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments
There’s been a slew of random articles lately about Gen Y Millenials entering the workforce (see here , and here ) and how this new generation of worker is going to shake up corporate America, and how they’re impatient, and they’re demanding, and they need to be entertained, and blah, blah, blah. There are some very basic forces of labor economics here that will provide a rude awakening for our eager-beaver band of up & comers. Let’s start with the labor supply, which models how our Gen Y’ers will decide between work and leisure activities. It’s been said that Gen Y’ers question everything...
5,000 Ads
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments
A recent NYT article cited a research finding that the average city-dweller sees 5,000 ads per day. If you looked at 5,000 advertisements in a single day, how many of them would you remember? If it’s the subconscious “ad impression” that matters, do you really need to remember? As the migration of offline ad spending moves online, it still isn’t a zero-sum game: the ad spending pie just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the old saying about how ‘I know 50% of my marketing budget is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%...’ takes on a whole new meaning. I continue to be impressed by advertiser...
Diary or Résumé?
Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments
When I was first enlightened about blogs, my reaction was similar to that of most people I know – an online journal? I had thought those were about innermost hopes and fears, and the notion of publishing them for all the world to see was a fairly big leap. That was years ago, and I’ve since realized my obvious misconception, as blogs today range from the infamous “hey, here’s what I had for lunch today” to full-on disclosure of some pretty deep, dark (former) secrets. This blog is about neither. What it is about is my penchant for dissecting big tech industry themes, and a good starting point is...
