Ideas
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
Virtual Trust
Business notice: I have officially formed a company, Still River Research, to deliver consulting and analysis services. The website (www.stillriverresearch.com) is now out of beta after generous suggestions from several newsletter readers. I am now booking projects for the fall; please notify me if I can be of service.
Security stories currently dominate much of the news. Between London, the Patriot Act, data thefts and losses, and renewed efforts to mandate identity cards for immigrants, it's difficult to help but feel that the world is a scary, dangerous place. My focus here, however, is on a near neighbor to security: trust, and how it can be both reinforced and undermined in new ways via digital networks.
It doesn't take long to see how various online efforts attempt to prove their trustworthiness:
- eBay relies on collated word-of-mouth to label bad apples and reassure good citizens. The company's institutionalized reputational currency ("view my 100% positive feedback!") is not patentable yet constitutes an enormous barrier to competitive entry.
- Some social network and dating sites use acquaintances as proxies: "you don't know me, but you know Mike, and Mike knows me, so I'm probably OK." As the Spokes and Friendsters of the world have discovered, trying to scale friend-of-a-friend trust is neither obvious nor cheap. When was the last time you used one of these services and could honestly say it was overwhelmingly positive?
- Other dating sites rely on the objective authority of social science. At eHarmony, potential daters are greeted by "relationship expert" Dr. Neil Clark Warren, who has built a "detailed questionnaire measur[ing] the intricate facets of a person, including the 29 dimensions that are most important in relationship success." Not only that, an American Psychological Association conference included a paper that suggests that eHarmony marriages are happier than marriages built on other matchmaking techniques.
- Some entities have had a difficult time recreating the trust they built offline in new media. According to Lawrence Baxter, chief e-commerce officer at Wachovia quoted in the July 21 Boston Globe, the bank can no longer use e-mail to communicate with customers because phishing attacks so skillfully recreate the look and feel of official correspondence that customers routinely delete real messages. Cost structures used in the online bank's business case, meanwhile, almost certainly are rendered obsolete by the need to revert to physical mail.
- Amidst all of the 10-year celebrations of e-commerce sites eBay, Amazon, c|net), some longtime readers may recall our discussion of Encyclopedia Britannica, which was nearly wiped off the map after over 225 years of operation. The company still exists, still publishes multi-volume hard-copy products, and recently announced it had re-formed and upgraded its panel of experts. That body, once home primarily to white males, now includes four Nobel laureates, two Pulitzer Prize winners, and a much more representative cultural makeup. Significantly, the last meeting of the board was ten years ago.
Several conclusions emerge:
1) Trust pays: eHarmony says they get 10,000-15,000 new members a day, each of whom has spent between $50 and $250.
2) Trust is expensive to build. As I searched for a new cell phone, Staples referred me to an outside vendor, but the vendor's site retains a Staples logo at the top, with the reminder that Staples will stand behind any transactions. The vendor's own site, with no such guarantee, sells the exact same service plan and phone for $50 less. Given the failure rate and overall dissatisfaction with U.S. wireless carriers, that $50 insurance looks very appealing.
3) There's a fallacy that identification can routinize trust: TSA screenings assume that someone with a driver's license that matches her face won't try to do anything bad to the aircraft. Conversely, someone who doesn't provide ID is kept off the plane: former Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore is in federal court challenging the unwritten and/or secret law (nobody has yet produced it) that states that an "internal passport," as he calls it, is a condition for public transportation. (Here's the Gilmore site: http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/index.html)
4) The Britannica case, in its contrast with Wikipedia, highlights a particular dynamic on the Net, that of open vs. closed credibility, or trust if you will. Much as "many eyes make bugs shallow," as Eric Raymond argued in The Cathedral and the Bazaar in reference to open-source software, Wikipedia establishes trust in the volume of researcher-reader-editors who will spot and fix errors. Unlike the Staples model, money is less effective than reputational currency - the same stock of "funds" that makes eBay work.
Britannica, on the other hand, seeks the credibility of the few: the Encyclopedia's editor stated that, "At a time when vast quantities of questionable information are available on the Internet and elsewhere, rigorous and reliable reference works are more important than ever." They are, but Britannica has a lot to answer for: the BBC reported that a 12-year old boy in London found five errors in two entries. Add to the errors the cost to fix paper editions, and the lag between error detection and correction - how many readers will propagate errors in the interval?
5) In the physical world, institutions can convey cues that reassure patrons of their solidity and presumably good intentions: marble pillars on a bank, brightly lit colorful plastic in a strip mall, even flight attendants' and pilots' uniforms. Online, Wells Fargo, Target, or Delta can't convey the same kind of authority in pixels, so the task becomes twofold: connecting to the existing credibility through branding, and capturing various kinds of word of mouth.
In the coming months, several trust stories will bear watching:
- Pharmaceutical companies, particularly in the COX-2 (Vioxx) neighborhood, have suffered major reputational damage, much of it related to online behavior, and the legal proceedings will be only one element of a fight to regain public trust.
- The 2008 presidential race will begin heating up, particularly the early-stage fundraising. Watch for the lessons various candidates learned from the Howard Dean experience.
- After the golden age of the CEO as hero, the past few years have reversed the public perception of business leaders. Huge severance packages following poor shareholder results, lawsuits, guilty verdicts, and general tarnish on the aura make for a tough time to be a leader. Will Mark Hurd fare better at HP than did Carly Fiorina? Can Ford and GM rise to the challenge of viability and profitability? Will Boeing build a lead on Airbus? In each case, much will hinge on how much trust the leader can generate in his or her own company, the market, and the financial community. So far, by the way, it appears that Hurd understands the power of e-mail better than Harry Stonecipher at Boeing, who apparently let it become his undoing.
--John Jordan
Founder, Still River Research
Posted by John Jordan at 07:24 AM | TrackBack
Let’s go orienteering!
Last week I spent three fascinating days in Zaragoza, Spain at Guidewire’s Innovate!Europe 2005, where I learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t for tech start-ups across the European markets. Mårten Mickos’ talk was a terrific distillation of the cultural drivers that help and hurt innovation in embryo. The event was a fiesta of opportunities to observe cultural drivers - a big part of orienteering.
To crib from thesaurus.com, to “orient” means to:
· Familiarize, adapt, locate
· Inform, advise, edify, enlighten, initiate, instruct, prepare
· Affect, apply, connect, refer, unite
· Or, if one is of a sinister mind: distort, angle, bias, influence, point, twist, warp
In my first Guidewire post I talked about how important it is for companies to understand their blogosphere (in my opinion everybody’s blogosphere is a bit different). While I was in Europe, I stopped by Burson’s offices in Paris and Madrid to share what I’ve distilled about corporations and blogging over the last year or so.
My standard advice these days is for companies to take the blogosphere in three steps – evaluate, participate, and create. Some companies should never do more than simply evaluate and monitor their blogosphere. Some may choose to participate via existing blogs, and still fewer may choose to create their own blogs. Many corporations have it backwards though - they want to jump in to creating first. This can backfire; some prominent companies have jumped into the deep end headfirst and suffered for it.
Evaluation – the essential step every corporation must take - is all about orienteering. Companies need to familiarize themselves with their blogosphere. They need to adapt themselves to using an RSS reader and checking it as often as they check their other news sources. They need to locate the key bloggers. They need to map their blogosphere or hire a company, like us or one of several others, to do it for them!
Once they establish the basic lay of the land, companies can be informed, edified, enlightened and instructed by what they find, and in turn they can instruct their peers inside the organization about what they find and where they find it. A great example of this is Andrew Carton, creator of treonauts.com, who I met at Innovate! last week. His site is an invaluable resource not just for Palm, but for anyone who makes or wants to make handhelds.
If the company is shrewd, they will then apply what they learn and see. What they learn from their blogosphere can affect every aspect of their interactions with the public – customer service, sales, public relations, etc. If they’re really shrewd, they’ll establish valuable connections with bloggers as well.
Corporations who have been foolish enough to try to bias, influence or twist have – at least so far - failed, thank heavens.
While there aren’t well-defined maps that companies can easily pick up and apply to the blogosphere, the time and effort to truly orienteer within it is vital. Those who make the effort will find resources for their own businesses that will be truly enlightening.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dancing with Elephants: Steps in Big-/Small-Company Partnering
Last week, I joined a half-dozen executives and academics from around the world in a panel addressing the topic of constructive business collaborations. Never mind that First Tuesday hosted the panel on the Last Wednesday, the topic drew several hundred to the Ecole d’Ingénieurs et Architectes de Fribourg in Switzerland, where we debated the risks and advantages of collaboration.
Given a taste of my own medicine, I was allotted just eight minutes to share ideas on how small startup companies can effectively collaborate with large established companies. While not an exact transcript, what follows are some of the notes I used in the presentation.
There comes a point in almost every startup’s life when they realize that in order to get their technology to market, they are going to need to partner with a larger – often much larger – company. The mouse asks the elephant to dance.
Curiously enough, these large companies – the elephants -- have to dance. They are big animals, yet they must continue to grow. They have technology platforms and, based upon them, business franchises that they are trying to expand. But organic growth can be difficult for large organizations, and so they partner to extend their franchise, entrench their platforms, and drive new revenue into the business.
Elephants also have to innovate, another challenge for large companies that have as their priority serving current customers and keeping established products current and competitive. Small startups – the mice – can act as R&D agents for the elephants, filling gaps in the product portfolio and opening new product opportunities.
But dancing with elephants is tricky business, and it’s best to take a few lessons before sashaying onto the dance floor.
Lesson #1: Elephants don’t have to dance with you
Elephants aren’t in business to help you be in business. No matter how large or how rich, these large businesses are not benefactors for startups. They are in business to achieve their own market goals and they make decisions in their own self-interest. Elephants dance with startups not because they can but because they want to. It’s the job of the mouse to make certain the elephant chooses to dance with him.
So ask yourself:
– Does my business align with the elephant’s goals?
– Does my technology improve the elephant’s business?
– Does my technology fill a hole in the elephant’s product plan?
And then, approach the elephant with analytics to support your proposal. I recently met one smart startup, just three engineers, with some very impressive media technology. Independent of the elephant, this mouse ran real life trials to demonstrate that the elephant would see a statistically significant increase in average sales using the mouse’s technology. Needless to say, that got the elephant’s attention.
Lesson #2: Elephants are BIG
It may be evident, but it’s worth saying aloud: Elephants work on a completely different scale from startup ventures. To get the elephant to dance, you’re going to have to demonstrate that you can make a significant positive impact on the elephant’s business. That means big numbers, lots of zeros. Can dancing with you bring the elephant new customers or add significant new revenue?
If not financial returns, how will a dance with you enhance the elephant’s image, reach new markets, or otherwise advance a priority initiative? When Intel decided to get into the WiFi game, the company set aside millions of investment and marketing dollars to put into smaller companies that were moving innovative wireless applications into the market. Intel didn’t make this investment to help little companies, they did it to establish a market requirement and create demand for the chips they make for the then-nascent market.
Lesson #3: Dance a Familiar Dance
All of technology’s elephants have developer and business development programs specifically aimed at helping them find dance partners. These are well-established programs, usually with clear mandates and processes designed to scale across a range of potential partners. Elephants rarely create unique deals with small partners unless doing so will have a huge impact on the elephant’s business. It’s incumbent for the mouse to fit into the elephant’s program.
Lesson #4: Be Careful Where You – And They – Step
Even with no ill intensions, it is easy for a massive elephant to misstep. It’s important then to approach the elephant with caution. Large companies evaluate new products and markets with a build-or-buy analysis. If you approach an elephant with just an idea, you put your business at risk. The elephant, liking the idea but seeing nothing to buy, might just build it himself or find another partner whose idea has become real.
Some mice think they can solve this problem by asking the elephant to sign an NDA. You can ask, but you’re only demonstrating your naivete by doing so. Large companies don’t sign NDAs, and not because they are keen to steal good ideas. Rather, these companies are so large and host so many initiatives, that it would be impossible to know that projects similar to yours are not underway somewhere in the bowels of the organization.
If you are paranoid about losing your idea, protect it with execution (thereby making it easier for the Elephant to buy rather than build) and/or with patents.
Lesson #5: Know When To Stop Dancing
Elephants can dance on and on. They have deep pockets and market advantage. And elephants can be slow. Simply put: your urgency is rarely the elephant’s urgency. Many a startup has become exhausted and even failed waiting for a deal to move through an elephantine organization.
Before beginning the dance, know the signs and timelines that will guide your decision to get off the dance floor, preserving your time, capital, and energy for other more agile partners.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 03:11 PM | TrackBack
Who Are the Masses? What Do They Want To Hear?
Every day the impact of blogs on corporate communications and corporate reputation becomes clearer. Fortune’s cover in January and BusinessWeek’s cover this week aren’t about the fact that blogs exist; they’re about the impact of blogs on corporate reputation about a paradigm shift that we’re only beginning to understand.
Why are blogs so powerful? Because real people write them and real people read them. As BusinessWeek says in their tips, “PR Truly Means Public Relations.” It means talking to the public, not in a Norma Desmond, “I’m ready for my close up” way, to be sure, but in a way that each corporation must define.
Talking to regular people means saying things that regular people want to hear. This, unfortunately, is a challenge for those of us in the technology business. (If you disagree just think about leveraging paradigmatic shifts to achieve platform independence blah blah blah. . . )
“Disciplined” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about a politician, but people in this business know that, in order to succeed in communicating with voters, the message must be very simple, and must be said over and over and over again. This is pure torture for technologists. No matter how in love our CEO, CTO, product manager or even head of sales is with an idea, some other idea comes along and it’s “Hey look, there’s something shiny over there.” And the message is lost.
We have to learn how to tell a story that regular people will understand. And to tell it enough times that it makes sense. Why? Because everyone (consumers, voters, your parents) now knows who we are and where we live –we’re the ones who lost so much of their money back in 2001 and they use all of the stuff we make much more than they did ten years ago. So they’re watching us – and having feelings and opinions about what we do. And many of them are connecting to each other online and sharing those feelings and opinions. (See above.)
In the new world of true “public” relations, only the multilingual will survive. We have to talk to all of our audiences – business partners, regulators, shareholders, end users, CIOs, with the same message and the same story – but translated in a way that they’ll understand.
When I worked at Sun we were lucky enough to have a former USA Today reporter on our staff (here’s a shout out to Mary Smaragdis!). Mary edited every single press release about the Java technology according to USA Today’s rules. No acronyms, no industry buzz words, no technology described in a way that someone’s grandmother wouldn’t understand. This worked. The truth is, just because we understand our own messages doesn’t mean they’re good.
And while we’re at it, let’s cut out the inside baseball. Well, not all of it because it’s fun, but let’s change the ratio. I love a good architecture war as much as the next person, but let’s realize what the rhetoric is, understand its function in our business, and put it in its proper place.
Let’s not try our audiences’ patience so much anymore. If we don’t, we’ll pay for it eventually. Much of what we say and do is incomprehensible to our newly empowered constituents, and we often don’t pay attention to or understand how they perceive our way of doing business. It seems that most Valley leaders didn’t think for a moment that Enron’s egregious abuse of stock options would ever come home to roost here. That was an avoidable mess if there ever was one.
Finally, as I say to every person I media train, “Your audiences do not find you, your company, your products nearly as interesting as you find yourself, your company, your products.” If we can keep this essential truth in mind as we figure out how to describe what matters to us to the people who matter to us, we’ll make a lot of progress!
--Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Technology Practice
Burson-Marsteller San Francisco
Lisa Poulson is a member of the Guidewire Group Sounding Board.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at 10:40 AM | TrackBack
Catalyzing Europe's Technology Innovation Ecosystem
Over the past three weeks, I’ve been visiting with technology entrepreneurs in London, Paris, Madrid, and Geneva. These conversations have confirmed my belief that the technology development on the right side of the Atlantic is absolutely world class.
In fact, despite the constant refrain that Europe is “behind the U.S.,” I find that European-developed technology is quite contemporary with – and often exceeds – U.S. innovation. In certain markets – such as mobile content and services – the U.S. lags considerably behind much of the world.
Still, there is this perception among American investors and customers – and even among Europeans -- that Europe is lagging.
The perception is fueled in large measure by the lack of strong, recognizable global technology players to come out of Europe in the last 20 years. Today, when you list the great European technology brands, you can count them on the fingers of one hand: ARM from the UK. Business Objects and Gemplus in France. Nokia and Ericsson in Scandinavia. SAP in Germany. And this despite some €73 billion being spent on technology R&D throughout the European Union
So why -- with innovative engineering, significant public investment, world-class universities, a growing venture capital industry – has Europe not produce more great global companies?
The answers are not easy – and they do vary among Europe’s geographical and technical markets. But one thread is consistent: European countries, individually and collectively, do not have a cohesive ecosystem to support entrepreneurship and to move great, innovative ideas from conception to product reality. The parts are in place, but they are not working together effectively.
European entrepreneurs, for example, are a growing but still rare breed. Culturally, Europeans are risk adverse in their careers. Why take a chance on a startup venture when a public service job will pay you, if not exceptionally well, at least for the rest of your life? Besides, new ventures tend to spin out of large, established companies controlled by wealthy families or state interests. How can a small startup compete with that?
Contrast this cultural mindset with the United States, a country built on risk taking by the earliest settlers, explorers and prospectors. And whereas a failed venture in the U.S. is an opportunity to learn from mistakes, failure in a European venture is an indelible blemish on the record of the entrepreneur. So while hundreds of initiatives from the European Commission through local government outreach outline marked increases in technology growth, the initiatives themselves are thwarted by a cultural proclivity toward safer research positions inside large companies and public and private universities.
The entrepreneurial mindset is changing, albeit slowly, fueled in part by an emerging venture capital industry. Yet it is a mistake to closely associate European venture capital with U.S. venture capital. As an asset class, technology venture capital is some 10 to 20 years the junior to its counterpart in the United States. And because European venture investments have relatively fewer and smaller exit strategies to exercise, European venture is considerably more conservative and more selective than U.S. venture funds.
In the United States, early-stage companies are also supported by a network of service organizations. Lawyers, accountants, market strategists, communications specialists, strategic consultants, and a raft of others have deep experience in the specific needs of
early-stage companies. Many of these firms work with startups in exchange for ownership share, dealing in the one currency most startups have in abundance – equity. In Europe, these service businesses have neither the depth of experience nor the flexibility to work with startups on an equity basis.
The fourth leg of the ecosystem is the early adopters of technology itself. In Europe, large customers tend to be conservative in their adoption of technology. They are hesitant to do business with all but the most established of companies. As the CEO of a French software company told me last week, “My customers are more likely to examine my P&L before they will look at my technology solution.”
U.S. companies, on the other hand, have adopted the practice of embracing technology as a competitive lever. And while they can be cautious about working with young companies, they will weigh the competitive reward against the risk an early-stage company may pose.
Without a robust ecosystem to support technology innovation, European innovation is a lot of great ideas – but not a lot of great products or great companies. Worse, Europe risks becoming a second world technology market after North America and China, as early stage ventures pass over Europe to do business with the larger markets to the East and West.
The good news, however, is that things are changing in Europe, and changing quickly! Where just a few years ago, I was told that an event such as Innovate!Europe could not happen because the market is too fractured, today, I am told that it has to happen because the market is so fractured.
Indeed, that is Guidewire Group’s goal with Innovate!Europe – to bring together the pieces of the European technology innovation ecosystem and to act as a catalyst to encourage a unified and productive European marketplace. Innovate!Europe is a dialog among the actors who together can build a pan-European infrastructure to accelerate European innovation and product commercialization, and to build the next great European – even global – technology companies.
The ambitious goal of Innovate!Europe is – in a few years’ time – to require more than one hand to count Europe’s great global technology companies. In ten years or less, we ought to be able to name a dozen or more global technology brands grown from European soil.
This is not a simple task, and it cannot be achieved by simple conversations. Europe must address challenging questions and build an agenda to move forward together to create a great European Technology Innovation Ecosystem.
Posted by Guidewire Group at 11:08 PM | TrackBack
The State of the European Innovation Ecosystem
Conventional wisdom says that Europe’s technology markets are far too fractured to support a one-Europe competitive ecosystem of technology innovation and product development. Yet this is exactly the challenge that Europe’s technology investors, entrepreneurs, public sector officials, ITC executives, and early adopter customers must demand from one another.
Indeed, while the conventionally wise may have held firm to this belief in the past, the wisdom is in dire need of rethinking if European technology innovators are to compete on a global stage and European businesses are to remain competitive in global markets.
I tested this theory as I met with investors, startups, service providers, and journalists around Paris and London last week. No one doubted the premise.
“There is no point in one market, if it isn’t really one market,” said Fiona Vickers, an executive recruiter for Highland Partners and a founder of the exclusive business networking organization “The Chemistry” in London. “If Europe is going to be any kind of power [in the global technology market], we must come together. And if we do, Europe has the opportunity to be the leading power.”
Certainly, there are business barriers to creating a unified European technology ecosystem. Yet it seems that nations that have come together under a common currency should be able to find their way to mutually beneficial laws, regulation, and business practices to create an environment in which innovation flourishes.
The challenges could be overcome easily if they were “simply” business issues. Instead, centuries of history, culture and custom divide European countries as much as the Euro and the European Commission attempt to unite it. Europeans -- who travel along routes established by the Romans and live among medieval castles and cathedrals -- have very long memories, indeed. They are rightfully proud and fiercely protective of their heritages, their cultures, and their languages.
And those cultural differences set up very high barriers to business. Take, for example, the conversation I had with a French entrepreneur who has been building his startup entirely in the U.S. He told me, when I asked why he didn’t build the company in his homeland, that “it is too hard to sell in Europe.” Then he told me about a German customer who insisted that native-German speakers be assigned to provide customer services – and that customer service representatives be physically located near the customer’s site. “To roll out in Europe, we would have to place people in every country where we want to do business. That is too expensive. In the U.S., I have an office in Silicon Valley and another in Boston, maybe also in Chicago, and I am covered. It is much more efficient.”
And pity that poor German customer. By placing demand for local, native-German speaking sales and customer support, the customer effectively limits its technology choices only to those companies who are willing to comply with that demand. Surely some startups will do so, but many of the most innovative companies will not. They will seek out larger markets that can be effectively targeted with a few well-placed resources – markets such as the U.S. and China. And the German customer? He’s left without a technology lever to use for business advantage.
That said, after some eight years of Europe watching, it is clear to me that Europeans are eager to see things change. To a person, the people I talk to agree that the time is now to bring together a dialog that promotes a cross-border technology ecosystem in Europe.
In fact, in the most shocking admission, one French venture capitalist acknowledged that English would be the language of business in Europe. Coming from a Frenchman, that is some sign of change, indeed!
Posted by Guidewire Group at 06:03 PM | TrackBack
Finding Media in the Mirror
Trailing only slightly the efficacy of the Bush Presidency, the future of journalism is among the most hotly debated issues in the digital media world. Traditional newspapers are taking a pummeling from blogs. Virtually every news source in existence is under scrutiny. Does traditional news still matter? Have career journalists grown lazy? What has happened to objectivity? Since my childhood listening to the god-like voice of Walter Cronkite to today’s 40-point-font hysteria of Matt Drudge, the transfiguration of the news industry is staggering.
Amid so much change, where does one go for reliable, objective news?
Essentially, nowhere . . . and everywhere.
If it’s a reliable, objective single source you seek, I wish you the best of luck and hope that your journey to madness is short and relatively painless. Reliability depends on whom you’re talking to – or reading. Some swear by Jon Stewart; others take Rush Limbaugh as gospel. And objectivity? Hunter S. Thompson once said that the only true objective journalism is sports scores and stock market quotes, calling the phrase, “a pompous contradiction in terms.”
Modern journalism is fractured, confusing, blatantly biased and begging to be defined. So where does that leave us, the readers? It leaves us to our own devices and that may not be so dire after all.
As a self-professed media junkie, my habits may be more egregious than others. Until CNN turned into non-stop talking heads (and when exactly did that occur?), I kept the all-news station on throughout the day. I watch local news nearly nightly, read the daily newspaper over breakfast and still turn to the “big guys” when disaster strikes. I subscribe to multiple magazines, from Vanity Fair to National Geographic. And I spend an obscene amount of my day checking my Bloglines feeds at an embarrassing rate, lest I miss the latest Linux rant on Slashdot. In short, I have become my own news network. Driven away from traditional media by bias, ineptitude, and unoriginal thought, I invent my own solution. I read the latest Iraq updates on Al Jazeera, bounce to the nightly news for their take, check in on Drudge for a giggle, then visit a favorite blog or two for any conspiracy theories I might have missed.
By the end of the day, I’m exhausted, wanting to return to the time when these events were spoon-fed to me. Walter, where are you when I need you most?
But should we hearken back to the day when Mr. Cronkite pulled off his glasses, choking back tears to inform us that our president had died? No pundits brayed beside him, no ticker ran below to relay how the stock market was reacting. Then again, no one told us how incomplete the Warren Commission report was or provided a platform for all the witnesses who swore something else was afoot. We had to wait 20 years to hear dissenting voices. Sure, some of us think those voices are all loony. But some of us don’t.
And that’s where we find ourselves in the 21st century – with the luxury of one thousand different voices from which to choose. Rather than demand that the old guard change or the new kids be more responsible, let’s see if we can shift to make room for all of us.
Perhaps the new face of media has turned out to be… our own.
--Carla Thompson, Editor, Guidewire Group Editorial
Posted by Carla Thompson at 08:08 AM | TrackBack
Interview: Chris on DEMO@15!, Great Products, and PR
Jeremy Pepper of POP! Public Relations posted an in-depth interview with Chris on his blog recently. It covers many of the terrific products that debuted at the recent DEMO@15, and touches on many of the emerging trends that Chris has noticed recently.
Posted by Guidewire Group at 01:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Where is Europe's Garage?
On a quiet tree-lined street in Palo Alto, California, you can stroll by the modest address where William Hewlett and David Packard worked together to start the company that is now known worldwide as HP. Indeed, the tiny garage at 367 Addison Avenue, designated by an historical marker as the ''birthplace of Silicon Valley,” is for many the symbol of innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship in the United States.
While Hewlett and Packard were not the first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, they are no doubt the best known, in the U.S. and around the world. They have been followed by Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, and countless other, lesser-known entrepreneurs. Today, it is not uncommon to refer to the early days of any technology company as “just two guys in a garage.”
As much as the garage on Addison Avenue represents entrepreneurship, however, it also represents an ecosystem that came alive to help these two men and those that followed build world-class companies. Along with Hewlett and Packard, names like Kleiner, Perkins, Wilson, Sonsini, Silicon Valley Bank, Regis McKenna, and hundreds of other investors, bankers, lawyers, and professionals that work with struggling startups to accelerate their march to success. This “Innovation Ecosystem” works together in the world’s richest IT marketplace to build the products and companies that drive the U.S. and, increasingly, the global economy forward.
This ecosystem is vital to any technology market, and as we look to Europe, we must ask: “Where is the garage?” “Where is the ecosystem?” Indeed, Europe’s research parks, universities, and institutions are ripe with innovation. Yet the ecosystem which surrounds the development, launch and commercialization of innovative technology products is highly fragmented across Europe.
This is the innovation challenge for Europe in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and why Guidewire Group is hosting Innovate!Europe. Innovate!Europe is the first executive-level conference focused exclusively on highlighting, supporting, and celebrating European-originated technology innovation, and uniting an ecosystem to transform technology innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe. We invite you to join us in Zaragoza, Spain, June 13 – 15, 2005 to take your place in this ecosystem of innovation. To learn more, visit http://www.innovate-events.com.
While many suggest that a pan-European technology market cannot be created from the fractured collection of country markets, we believe that a pan-European tech market must be created in order to build a strong innovation center -- in distinct European countries and across European country borders. Failure to bridge markets into a European technology powerhouse will stifle European economies in an increasingly global technology market. Without a large, attractive market base in Europe, technology companies in North American and Asia will bypass European sectors and look to one another as global technology trade partners, focusing on the large, and by comparison homogeneous, markets that each region offers the other.
Posted by Guidewire Group at 01:19 PM | 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