Companies
Remembering Windows 95
It's a slow time in the technology industry. Breakthrough innovations are few and far between: the iPod is almost four years old, and it's hard to point to anything very interesting since then. Because revenue growth has slowed, mergers and acquisitions have become the main order of business at such companies as Oracle and, for a time, HP. Venture capital is increasingly migrating to biotech, physical security, and other sectors only tangentially related to computing. The industry could use an injection of energy, activity, and not least important, revenue.
Given this state of things, everyone is watching Microsoft, which is preparing to launch a new operating system next year. Last month, merely changing the name from code (Longhorn) to product (Vista) devoured a lot of attention, and more recently a stripped-down version of the product shipped to beta testers. The product has been a long time in coming, and the scope has been managed downward in several respects. Nevertheless, both Microsoft and the industry more generally see Vista as a potential jump-start very much in the same category as Windows 95 ten years ago. Because Vista represents the first opportunity in over ten years to begin with a "clean sheet of paper," unlike Windows 3.1, 98, ME, and 2000/XP, Bill Gates has repeatedly linked the two products in public.
Before looking at whether that association is warranted, it's worth remembering just what Windows 95 brought to market. In 1994, loading a browser onto Windows could be complicated by the operating system's lack of Internet Protocol support. DOS prompts were very much a day-to-day reality. File names were limited to eight letters, and CD-ROM support was spotty. E-mail was used only by fringe populations rather than being nearly universal. Adding hardware was more difficult than it needed to be, multitasking was nearly impossible for both processing and user interface reasons, and multimedia computing was, again, the province of only a small subset of users.
Windows 95 changed all of that. Even before Gates' famous "Pearl Harbor" speech helped turn Microsoft into an Internet-aware company, Windows 95 made Internet connection, through both browser and e-mail, a mass phenomenon. Multimedia, too, became an everyday event with better hardware support (including CD-ROM drivers). Overall usability, despite the initial confusion at using a "Start" button to shut down a machine, was enhanced by deeper camouflaging of the command-line layer, longer file names, and plug-and-play peripheral support. Finally, the operating system kept pace with Intel's chip performance and supported more realistic instances of multitasking.
The public responded. In the quarters immediately following the launch, retail sales of Windows 95 software soared, augmenting a strong increase in OEM sales of pre-loaded operating systems. Responding positively to improved networking support and promises of enhanced manageability, corporate IT organizations spent at record levels: Microsoft's operating systems revenues jumped from $1.5 billion in fiscal 1994 to $4.1 billion only two years later.
What might we deduce about the prospects for Vista based on the Windows 95 experience? First, it's hard to see a parallel burst of initial interest, with or without a Rolling Stones commercial. According to Microsoft, the benefits of Vista fall under five general headings:
-Reliability
-Security
-Deployment (for organizations managing large rollouts)
-Performance (including better power management and faster boot up)
-Management
These categories of improvements are clearly aimed at corporate buyers rather than individuals. Most of the things a consumer-grade user will see - including better desktop graphics, and RSS support within Internet Explorer - already come standard in Mac OS X. Backward compatibility will be substantial, to the point that many Vista improvements (including the IE browser) will be available as retrofits to Windows XP. These upgrades will also slow Vista adoption.
Here's another way of thinking about the comparison. In 1995, Microsoft turned the telephone network into an extension of the computer, or vice versa: between them AOL and Windows 95 made the Internet a household utility. In 2006, no parallel leap into an adjoining domain - think of home entertainment, specifically the television - will be supported. Bill Gates’ longstanding prediction about widespread adoption of a voice and speech interface to the PC will be addressed with Vista support, but even given a powerful standard processor configuration at its disposal, Vista still won't make masses of people retire their keyboards.
In short, Windows Vista looks like a solid product for corporate purchasers, but the lack of "gee-whiz" and "I've always wanted to be able to do that" desirability will prevent end-user excitement from reappearing the way it did ten years ago. An industry in search of the next big thing will have to keep looking.
--Dr. John Jordan
Founder, Still River Research
Posted by John Jordan at 12:53 PM | TrackBack
Backstage at DEMO
Backstage, DEMO's product demonstrators are a jumble of nerves. These companies are betting their product launch on the six minutes they have in front of the audience of 700 business development executives, investors, media, and other opinion makers. What's it like to launch a product at DEMO?
Forbes' Arik Hesseldahl has followed one of this year's companies, Jambo Networks, and chronicled its journey to DEMO in a multi-part series, Diary of a Demo.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The DEMO@15! Opening Remarks
Welcome to DEMO@15! Fifteen years! It’s almost hard to believe. . .
In that time, we’ve produced twenty DEMO and DEMOmobile Conferences. In fact, this is the21st DEMO event in 15 years. Over the years, nearly fifteen hundred products have been introduced on the DEMO Stage.
DEMO has tremendous reach, and tremendous staying power –through good economic times and terrible ones – because of the great community that has grown up around this event. DEMO really is about the people, and, of course, it is about the products -- products that become the lens through which we get a better glimpse into the trends and ideas that will shape the technology market in the coming months.
Long before these 73 companies came together in the DEMO Class of 2005, the DEMO marketing team was talking about “technology in Bloom.” That idea became the central theme of the marketing. And I have to confess that while I liked the artwork, the colors, and the design, I really didn’t pay close attention to the campaign. I was busy narrowing a field of some 450 companies to 160 finalist, and then down to the 73 that are at DEMO@15!
I’ve often said that in planning DEMO, I don’t begin with an concept of the market and find products to fit it. Rather, I find the best companies and suss out the market trends those products reveal and amplify.
So there is some serendipity in the fact that the 73 products and companies -- in the longer context of the past 15 years – speak to this idea of “technology in bloom.” You see, if there is a unifying idea among these extremely diverse products, it is that of fruition and growth. Whether in the consumer segment or the enterprise market, these products speak to fulfillment of long-held promises.
Think back to the very first DEMO in 1991. Howard Elias, one of our innovator award winners – introduced the very first integrated multimedia PC. Two vendors were showing the PC as a platform for television. These were the harbingers of the digital media revolution. Fifteen years later, a half-dozen companies are here demonstrating that digital media is a powerful, everyday reality.
DEMO 94 was host to a shootout between Novell and Lotus over the desktop application that was then called Groupware. Today, collaboration is simple and accessible, and a part of dozens of applications, from collaborative blogs and wikis to business instant messaging.
Throughout the mid 90s, DEMO attendees saw the first digital cameras and photo editing software. Among our most memorable onstage demos was Kai Kraus’s demo of the photo morphing software called Soap. Now, digital cameras are everywhere, including our mobile phones, and we have companies here who are continue to push the bounds of digital photography.
In 1996, DEMO showed early work in Voice over IP. At DEMO, you’ll see companies that have embraced VoIP. They have tackled the hard problems of messaging and are bringing new sanity to business and consumer telephony.
At DEMO 97, a little company called Hot Office introduced what was arguably the first ASP software. A few attendees that year thought accessing server based software through a browser was a ridiculous idea. A few years later, we struggled to define .NET and Web services and to show meaningful examples of these then-new ideas at work. This week, service-based software is almost a given and Web services are opening new opportunities for businesses of all sizes, but especially smaller enterprises. Delivering enterprise-class functionality at small business prices is leveling the playing field of business in a manner that could profoundly affect how work is organized in the years ahead.
At DEMOmobile 99, Atheros unveiled its WiFi chipset. Two companies at DEMO are advancing the state of the art in WiFi connectivity. As importantly, the ubiquity of WiFi is having a profound affect on the consumer technology experience. Supported by this wireless networking technology and others, long-envisioned ideas around the complex problem of home monitoring and control are a simple reality, ready to implement now.
These are just a few of many examples where the seeds of technologies, planted across the years, that are coming to fruition in the products and services being launched here this week.
But make no mistake: these are not merely iterative products built on old ideas. Certainly, they are evidence that the personal technology market has reached a level of maturity and stability. Yet each of these products is innovative in its own right: innovative in creation of new technology, in the combining of components, in their approach to problems, and in the business models that take them to customers. The 73 products at DEMO this week are here because they move the market forward.
In fact, growth is clearly a theme in these products: The growth and maturity of the consumer market; a return to growth in the business market. Now to be clear: I’m not talking about hot-house growth spurred by artificial light and potent fertilizer – the conditions that allows for a spurt of energy without deep roots.
We are moving into a period of sustained growth because the tough soil and harsh conditions of the past four years have made today’s technology companies stronger. It is interesting to note that nearly half of the companies at DEMO this year – 32 to be precise -- are self- or angel-funded. These are companies that have accomplished the hard task of bringing products to market on the grit, passion and determination that they can create real change.
But no matter the size or funding, all of these companies know the challenges of innovating in a tough market and each has pushed through, developing great ideas, fueling new concepts, and creating real and sustainable value for their customers and themselves. These companies and these products are well-rooted for future success.
And these companies will play a role in the market growth that cuts across technology sectors – business and consumer. You’ve heard me talk before about the blending of work and personal lives. That line continues to blur, at least when it comes to technology. Today, business and consumer technology markets are tightly integrated.
Thre are so many entry points in the market that lead to the purchase of even more productivity enhancing, life-style enhancing products. And you know how quickly one purchase can lead to another, how products justified as a work expense are used as well for your personal enjoyment.
There are, simply put, great things to buy and they are offered in programs and packages and at prices that make them attractive to business and individual consumers. And they are coming to market at a time when consumers and IT Buyers are coming back to the table.
Indeed, I have said about this particular demonstrating class that it may well be the most expensive DEMO I have produced – expensive because there are a lot of products in this class that I simply have to have.
I invite you to visit the DEMO@15! Web site to learn more about these products.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 09:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack