Affichage des articles dont le libellé est technology. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est technology. Afficher tous les articles
vendredi 11 mai 2012
Why Microsoft Is Being Left in the Dust
There are now a number of companies — Apple, Google, Amazon, and others — that have Microsoft in their rear-view mirrors, disappearing quickly on the horizon in a cloud of dust.
That kick of dust in the company’s face is being emitted by Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, and Google’s search and cloud domination. Microsoft’s own wild lunges into various technology segments are also contributing considerably to it being left behind. Take the company’s recent partnership with Barnes & Noble, where it took 18% of the Nook e-reader for $605 million in cash and future guarantees. This was a move to compete with Amazon, but can it really compete?
If you want to know why Microsoft’s share price has been flat for 11 years while Apple, Amazon, and Google shares have soared, this is why. Microsoft is not innovating aggressively. It is not leading categories or blazing trails. No, it’s acquiring aggressively as a shortcut to innovation. That isn’t working. Its own history suggests as much.
Microsoft Has Not Capitalized on its Partnerships and Acquisitions
Last year, Microsoft announced a broad strategic partnership with Nokia, presumably to use Windows operating systems and software on Nokia’s smartphones. This was 15 months ago. But last week, a report found that Apple and Samsung generated 99 percent of the profits in the mobile phone category. Nokia, which once enjoyed more than half of all mobile phone profits, made zero.
In 2009, Microsoft acquired a 10-year license to use Yahoo’s core search technology, which later became the Bing search engine. Today, Google’s search market share is a dominant 66%, with Microsoft’s Bing a very distant second at 15%. After spending billions building and marketing Bing, Microsoft is barely visible in Google’s rear-view mirror.
Finally, what of Microsoft’s Skype acquisition a year ago? It’s too early to tell, but here’s a fact worth noting: The Wall Street Journal reports that 85% of Microsoft’s revenue comes from Windows and Office software. The rest of it? Barely a blip.
And so, Microsoft is proving, like many have before it, that acquiring companies outside your core competencies are recipes for failure. Remember when Cisco purchased the Flip video camera, at the time one of the most popular consumer electronics products on the planet? How did that work out? In 2010, HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion, but we haven’t seen any industry-altering smartphones from HP.
Conversely, consider Apple’s acquisition of Siri: a technology that immediately and profoundly complimented and enhanced its iPhone. It fit obviously and very successfully.
Microsoft Does Not Need to Compete with Amazon
Another major problem with Microsoft’s partnership involving the Nook is that there is simply no need for it to compete with Amazon. This is like Best Buy focusing all of its efforts on its ecommerce site while neglecting its one major competitive advantage: its brick-and-mortar stores. This is also like Research in Motion spending a year building its atrociously received tablet, the PlayBook, while neglecting its core competency of Blackberry smartphones.
Microsoft dominates the competition in computer operating systems and software. Computers are dying, right? And yet, in May 2012, there is no Microsoft Office for tablets and smartphones. Millions of iPads and Android tablets are being adopted in corporate environments, and most of those customers would be happy to spend $70 on Microsoft Office for each device. Except, it does not exist.
I can only guess why: because with its many categories, acquisitions and partnerships, Microsoft is physically incapable of putting its full focus behind converting its desktop products to mobile devices.
Microsoft is Going Wide, Not Deep
Which brings me to the third and final big problem with Microsoft’s Nook play. It is keeping with the strategy of going as wide as possible. Microsoft is not, and cannot be, all things to all people. In fact, no company can.
Here’s the truth: The wider you go, the more priorities you focus on, the less chance you have to be successful. But when you go deep, you can dominate. (See Apple, and Amazon.) When you go deep, you can continue perfecting. You become the world’s expert on a certain specialty. Apple is seen as the world’s expert on smartphones and tablets. Amazon is the accepted leader in online shopping and electronic reading. It’s because these two companies relentlessly focus on their strengths, saying no to nearly everything else. No. That’s a word Microsoft should consider trying out before it gets left in the dust permanently.
12:05 1
samedi 28 avril 2012
Yahoo Escalates Patent War With Facebook
The company also accused Facebook of not having a good-faith belief in the counterclaim it filed almost a month ago.
“Today Yahoo! filed additional claims against Facebook in U.S. District Court related to two additional patents on which Facebook infringes,” Yahoo said in an emailed statement.
“As we have stated previously, Yahoo!’s technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. We intend to vigorously protect these technologies for our customers and shareholders.”
In the face of the new claims, Facebook was more succinct: “We remain perplexed by Yahoo’s erratic actions,” a Facebook spokesperson said, also in an emailed statement. “We disagree with these latest claims and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.”
With the “erratic” dig, Facebook seems to be depicting Yahoo as the tech-company equivalent of a crotchety old man. Considering Yahoo specifically calls out Facebook for using recently acquired patents as the basis of its lawsuit — even though some of the patents in Yahoo’s claim were acquired as well — the image may well stick.
A quick recap: Shortly after appointing former PayPal executive Scott Thompson as CEO, Yahoo warned Facebook that the social network was infringing on its intellectual property — specifically, 10 patents that relate to Internet technologies.
It then went ahead and sued Facebook a few weeks later, becoming something of a tech-industry pariah in the process.
Facebook, rather than try to end the suit with a quick settlement, set out to arm itself for a retaliatory strike. The social network quickly acquired many patents from both IBM and Microsoft. Facebook also countersued Yahoo — saying that it, too, was guilty of patent infringement.
The whole affair would be funny if it wasn’t a symptom of a wider, all-out patent war. In the last year we’ve seen Apple, Google, Microsoft and a host of others sue the pants of each other, and a company that barely does anything can claim to hold a patent on the web itself.
So this latest salvo in the Facebook-Yahoo patent war likely won’t be the last. What’s your take on the ongoing dispute? Sound off in the comments.
10:32 2
jeudi 8 mars 2012
This Article Generating Thousands Of Dollars In Ad Revenue Simply By Mentioning New iPad
12:57 0
samedi 3 mars 2012
Non-Scientists Use Business Savvy to Launch Med-Tech Product
In 2005, the two Dallas friends were chatting about a friend who was pregnant. She had two girls already and really wanted a boy. An expectant mom can find out the gender of the fetus with the first sonogram, usually at about 18 weeks. But there's a curiosity gap between the first home pregnancy test and that sonogram.
"We said, 'Gosh, you would think there would be a way to tell by the urine whether it's a girl or a boy,'" Griffin says. "How cool would that be?"
Some Internet research turned up an interesting bit of folklore. In the 17th century, women had a fairly reliable test involving grains of wheat and barley. It piqued their interest enough to look for a lab that would work with them.
They were not scientists, but they did know business. Griffin was a partner in a commercial real estate firm. Garland was a business-development consultant for PwC. They called on friends and contacts for referrals.
The search took them to San Francisco, where they found a company known for its quality skin products. It had the expertise and the vision to help them.
"We were on a fast track to get a product developed," Griffin says. "We felt like speed to market was important. We couldn't believe no one had done this before."
In addition to developing a reliable test, the lab had to figure out which week of pregnancy would produce accurate results. It had to keep track of each sample and match it to the sonogram and the gender of the resulting baby.
The lab went down many dead ends, but the biggest challenge was getting enough of "solution," or the urine of pregnant women. It developed a special cup for the solution samples, plus all the packaging and directions.
The two women tried doctors' offices and approached women in malls and offered them $20 to pee in a cup. Finally, they spread the word through churches and schools. Many women began dropping off samples in the mailbox.
"We did a lot of brainstorming and whiteboarding," Garland says. "How do you find the right jar [for the kit]? How do you design your box? Do we need instructions? A syringe? It gets complicated."
Ironically, it took about nine months to create the IntelliGender test. Independent testing facilities have rated it 85 percent accurate.
Both women were still working full-time, investing their own money in the company when the product launched with Internet sales in 2006.
As the orders for the kit increased, with CVS and Walgreens carrying it, Garland and her husband went to work at IntelliGender in 2009 to manage the volume. Griffin kept her job but participated as a full partner in the LLC. The company expanded to Australia and then to 23 other countries.
The kit now retails for $35. The most expensive part of the kit is the syringe for dropping a sample onto the tester—it was the only imported item. To date, the company has sold more than 500,000 kits worldwide.
IntelliGender also sells IntelliCeuticals, natural remedies to support the health of pregnant women and babies. The company aims to bring more complementary products to market.
Looking back, Garland thinks that the partners' business expertise more than made up for their lack of scientific training.
"We both had marketing [experience]. Rebecca had contract negotiations and I had finance and consulting. My husband was IT, manufacturing and logistics," she says. "A lot of inventors have the opposite scenario.
"But if you spend your whole time in the lab, you have no exposure to business. I think that was key to our success. We had the background of how to make it happen."
Griffin agrees. "You can outsource anything you need," she says. "In fact, it's highly unusual that anyone would have all the skill sets you need to develop a product. Tenacity and ambition are the mothers of invention."
Photo credit: Courtesy subject
12:40 0
samedi 25 février 2012
Print is Dead! Long Live Print?
It’s been said before, but it needs saying again (and again and again): PRINT IS DEAD. Across the publishing industry, year-over-year declines in revenue, subscriptions and circulation, are well documented. Yes, there have been a few quarters of blood-stanching flatness (yay!), but – you heard it here first (or few weeks ago from The Annenberg School, or over the summer from Clay Shirky) – print periodicals are going to go away – forced out of this world by the march of technology and changing tastes, and replaced by new powerhouse brands – TMZ, Buzzfeed and HuffPo to name a few — which are poised to own the future, because they know how to adapt to (and even anticipate!) evolving user behavior. As John Paton, CEO of one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., put it recently “‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone’ is not much of a business model.”
Just this week, Gannett gave us a stunning reminder of just how little it understands the world it lives (and dies) in, and how myopically it views its business when it announced its $100M bet on establishing paywalls in all 80 of its local newspaper markets. A gambit predicated on “the public’s strong desire for local news and in readers’ longtime trust in Gannett’s papers,” according to Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore. Oh my. The paywall, whether for Gannett or other publishers, is a finger in the dyke, a cover-up for tectonic shifts in their businesses. For Gannett, local paper audiences are old (that’s what “longtime trust” means), and may well age out of relevance before Gannett’s gosh-darned paywall gets erected. And where’s the proof that the public wants local news? Readership is declining, local news website traffic is infinitesimal, and even pure digital plays like Patch can’t seem to find readers or revenue. The fact is, the thirst for local news can be sated by a single hometown blog, run pretty much by a single entrepreneurial blogger (granted they’d be very busy – and underpaid).
What can Old Print do to survive?
To use a trite metaphor (or two) – stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, grow a pair, and change your businesses. Pivot out of the corner and reclaim your heavyweight title. RUMBLE, Old Man, RUMBLE:
1. Face reality:
- The audiences of traditional print brands on paper and pixel are aging.
- Digital upstarts are capturing the new audiences, and stealing your least loyal current readers.
- The cost structures of Old Print companies are out of whack with the times.
- New technology is further commoditizing content, and fragmenting audience.
- In-house digital innovation at Old Print companies is largely non-existent, stymied by outmoded, editorial-first ego at the top, and fearful protectionism of current revenue sources: print subscriptions, ad pages and banner impressions.
2. Start thinking like startups.
Actually, start thinking like well-capitalized start-ups – pirates with a war chest. Lose the fear and deploy some of your profits to incubate new ideas (like The Washington Post) and go after whitespaces. Consider pure-play digital products and platforms you have the brand permission to create, and that leverage your current audiences to build new ones. Be aggressive; invest in your own technology and talent – and buy what you can’t cultivate.
3. Gut and retool your staff and cost structure.
Take a disciplined approach to justifying every position and business expense in your organization. Eradicate all unnecessary fluff, and all employees with meta jobs and not enough to do. Everyone in your organization should be a doer, contributing 100% of her/his work hours to either making things (content, technology, digital and physical products and services) or selling things (to consumers and advertisers). Keep your good editors. They are some of the sharpest, most creative people on the planet. They’ve simply been given a flat and narrow palette to work from. Put their imaginations to work. And bring in new, energetic digitally literate talent around them. While you are at it, delete your entire company’s Outlook calendar database. Start everyone off fresh without meetings. The people who are doers will automatically fill their time with more doing, and the people who suddenly have nothing to do are the ones you can cut. Act like a P.E. firm that’s just bought your company, before they show up at your doorstep.
4. Stop thinking that technology serves content.
The anachronistic mentality that technology is just a means to an end for getting content in front of readers is going to kill you. Technology and content need to be seen as one and the same, each working with the other to delight and engage your users. To that end…
5. Update your web platforms.
To a publication, the flagship websites of print publishers are too unaware of the web-at-large. They put content and page views first, and appear to consumers as static, opaque and uninviting. There are a host of technology and design tactics that can be deployed to improve and open up your sites, making them more enjoyable to use, and enabling deeper connections with your audience. Watch what Lewis D’Vorkin is doing over at Forbes, and read everything he writes. (Disclosure: I worked with Lewis at AOL). Or, look at what Marcus Brauchli of The Washington Post is doing with that product suite. Remember, when it comes to digital, you’re creating a living, breathing application, not just republishing (or even “repackaging”) a magazine or a newspaper.
6. Use data to inform your editorial and product decisions.
Search and social chatter are the paths to finding audience. Install listening stations on editor’s desktops. Require real-time and forensic reviews of content and headline performance to teach your editors social and search engine biorhythms – so they can learn what their audience wants, and what content connects with them. Deploy machine learning and data analysis technologies on your publishing platforms to dynamically adjust metadata and tagging to improve SEO and content discovery.
7. Add great digital product people to the executive suite.
Your future is digital, and digital thinking needs to start at the very top. Digital product people are not your classic CTOs or CIOs; they’re people who think creatively about how to use technology to create digital experiences, and marry editorial with functionality. Put a priority on hiring the best talent to take you forward, and to work with your star editors to re-imagine your businesses. Together they can set a course for the future. Look for people from outside who are uninhibited by print tradition, can spot trends and have an innate ability to create and execute in the digital sphere. Just as importantly, empower them to hire and inspire great, nimble and creative tech teams, and teach technology – how the web works – to employees at all levels of your organization.
8. Break down the wall between editors, writers and readers.
If you do one thing, make your editors and contributors work like bloggers. Espouse transparency and accessibility. This is what builds trust and connection with your audience. Nudge writers off the cliff into the cacophony of social media, and redefine enterprise journalism to encompass not only reportage, but also building an audience of followers, and responsibility for driving traffic to their own work product.
9. Consider your most cherished asset – content – as currency, not the end-all, be-all, but a means to an end.
It’s the way to get your audience in the door and engaged on a larger scale. Ask: If content is your conduit, what can your audience do, and what will give them more value once they have engaged with your product? And I don’t mean: read another article, search our newly digitized library of old content, or print this page. We’re talking about what service or product experience, what self-sustaining platform, what new thing can you get your audience to try, share and love.
[image via flickr/NS Newsflash]
14:28 0
samedi 4 février 2012
Top 10 Free Google Chrome Plugins for Small Businesses, to Increase Productivity
extensions have sprung up to speed up to simplify the messy
world of Internet browsing. If you're a member of the club that
spends more time looking at screens than people, some simple
browser add-ons can streamline many of your daily processes
on the job.
We brought you a list of great Google Chrome apps for small businesses shortly after the store's opening. Here are 10 new
ones that are sure to increase your web productivity while at work.
1. StayFocusd
We understand it's a bit much to ask you to go completely cold turkey from Angry Birds. Fortunately for the Internet-browsing addicts out there, StayFocusd puts a cap on a list of sites you choose to limit. Whether you're wasting time on social networks, blogs, shopping or gaming, you can customize your list of restricted sites. Then, set your limit to the amount of time you will allow yourself to waste.
2. Large Document
Say goodbye to e-mail bounce-back notifications for documents over 10 megabytes. The Large Document app lets you transfer what e-mail won't, and it's simpler than an external sharing site like YouSendIt or Dropbox. The Chrome extension converts your file into a URL you can share. An added bonus? No log-in information is required.
3. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer
4. Yast
5. TabCloud
6. Screen Capture
Fun fact: This is the very app that took the photos for this gallery!
7. Popchrom
8. HootSuite
9. Read Later Fast
10. Google Calendar Checker
Let us know in the comments if you are using any of these apps. Which work for you? What did we miss?
11:42 2
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)
