Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Exciting but vague

A blank page for everyone is how Tim Berners-Lee sees the World Wide Web, this opens opportunities for inventors from all walks of life.

On Tuesday Tim Berners-Lee rounded off his Australian speaking tour with a City Talks presentation before 2,000 people at a packed Sydney Town Hall.

After an interminable procession of sponsor speeches, Berners-Lee covered many of the same topics in his presentations at the Sydney CSIRO workshop the previous week and the Melbourne talk the night before.

These included a call for everyone to learn some computer coding skills – or at least get to know someone who has some, wider technology education opportunities, more women in computing fields and a warning about the perils of government over-surveillance.

On government monitoring Internet traffic, Berners-Lee has been strident at all his talks and correctly points out most of our web browsing histories allow any outrageous conclusion to be drawn, particularly by suspicious law enforcement agencies and the prurient tabloid media.

Who owns the ‘off switch’ is also a concern after the Mubarak regime cut Egypt off the Internet during the Arab Spring uprising. The willingness of governments to cut connectivity in times of crisis is something we need to be vigilant against.

The web’s effect on the media was discussed in depth as well with Sean Aylmer, editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, saying in his introduction that Berners-Lee’s invention had been the defining feature of Aylmer’s career.

While the web has been traumatic for a generation of newspapermen, Berners-Lee sees good news for journalists in the data explosion, “how do we separate the junk from the good stuff?” Asks Tim, “this is the role for journalists and editors”.

One person’s junk is another’s treasure though and the web presents one of the greatest opportunities for people to “write on their blank sheet of paper.”

When asked about what he regretted most about the web, Berners-Lee said “I’d drop the two slashes,” repeating the line from Melbourne the night before.

At each of his Australian speeches Berners-Lee has paid homage to his mentor at CERN, Mike Sendall. After Sendall passed away, his family found the original proposal for the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which formed the basis for the world wide web.

“Exciting but vague” was the note Sendall made in the margins of Berners-Lee’s proposal.

Vague and exciting experiments was what drove people like James Watt and Thomas Edison during earlier periods of the industrial revolution. Tomorrow’s industries are today’s vague and strange ideas.

Who will build the next Barnes and Noble?

The rise and fall of US bookseller Barnes & Noble shows describes the changes in our society and the urge to join online and real world communities.

As US bookseller Barnes and Noble shrinks its store network, Mark Athitakis has a tribute to the once ubiquitous chain in The New Republic.

Barnes and Noble was never popular among US independent booksellers because of the perception, probably true, that the chain drove locally owned stores out of business.

What it offered though was a safe, comfortable place for booklovers to gather in suburban shopping malls. As Mark points out, it created a community.

Its stores were designed to keep people parked for a while, for children’s story time, for coffee klatches, for sitting around and browsing. That was a business decision—more time spent in the store, more money spent when you left it—but it had a cultural effect. It brought literary culture to pockets of the country that lacked them.

In recent years that community moved to coffee shops, in the United States B&N’s role was taken by Starbucks, at the same time our reading habits changed and the business of selling books and magazines became tougher.

Now that community is changing again, as the online societies like blogs, Facebook and Twitter become important, the coffee shops have responded with free wi-fi which is a perfect example of how the online and offline world come together.

That need to create communities, either physically or online, is a driving human urge.

Online that role is being catered to with social media platforms and sites like food, mommy or tech blogs where like minded people can gather.

Down at the mall, Barnes and Noble catered for that need in the 1980s and Starbucks in the 1990s. What will follow them may be the next big success in the retail or hospitality industry.

Image courtesy of Brenda76 on SXC

In it to win it – does overcompetitiveness hurt entrepreneurs?

Does the winning at all costs mentality actually hurt entrepreneurs when business isn’t a zero sum game?

I’ve written before about entrepreneur and venture capital investor Mark Suster and his writings about business are always worth reading.

His recent post pulling together writings on the DNA of an entrepreneur is interesting reading however one point jars – competitiveness.

In Steve’s view competitiveness is about winning at all costs and crushing the opposition.

That’s fine when competing for a customer, fighting over market share or pitching to the same VC investor, but business usually isn’t a zero-sum “if I win, you lose” equation.

Sometimes its about complimentary strengths. In the early days of PC Rescue I tried to partner with an old colleague who had set up a competing business.

Mark was actually a better computer tech than I was, my strengths lay more in sales and administration, had we teamed up we’d have been a good combination.

Unfortunately Mark took Suster’s view of ‘winning at all costs’ and when I foolishly referred customers to him because I was either busy or thought he could do a better job, I found he was stealing those customers.

Eventually I had to cut ties with him, and it cost him money and the chance to be part of something bigger. Mark was greedy but I’m sure he thinks he ‘won’ against me when there really wasn’t a contest.

Geeks are particularly poor at admitting they have weaknesses, in fact their lack of self understanding could be their greatest weakness of all. So drumming a ‘win at all costs’ message into their heads is almost certainly counter productive.

It may well be that this win at all costs view is damaging the mental health of many entrepreneurs, by viewing what others are doing through a prism of “I have to win” almost guarantees depression as often the life of an entrepreneur is more steps backwards than forwards.

As most reporting of startup and entrepreneurs is distorted by survivor bias, we often gloss over this latter point – in reality starting your own business, particularly one that’s under-capitalised, is hard and tough work with a high chance of failure.

That chance of failure means a ‘win at all costs’ mentality could result in a generation of mentally damaged former entrepreneurs.

Mark Suster’s views are really good on what drives the Silicon Valley model of business. We need to take care though we don’t take the wrong lessons which end up hurting our businesses, families and our own mental well-being.

Jackpot image from Henriette via SXC.HU.

Do kids really need laptops in school?

Computers are seen as essential to education, but are we mistaking the tools for the methods.

Are laptop computers really essential to educating our kids? Fairfax media reports this weekend that the Australian Federal government’s laptops in education scheme is near collapse.

What stands out from the story are the quotes from educators;

Chatswood High School principal Sue Low said her school was providing laptops to students in year 9 but the uncertainty over future plans was unsettling.

“Laptops are now just as much of the culture of education as are pens and paper,” she said. “To not have certainty over how we will administer laptops to our students is very disruptive, and we need that certainty as soon as possible.”

Some schools have come up with their own solution to the problem. One NSW school has made arrangements with a private provider under which parents can buy a laptop for $1341 or rent-to-buy for $90 with monthly payments of about $50.

That computers are important is not a debate, but are we putting to much emphasis on the tools and not enough on what education is trying to achieve?

One educator said a decade ago that they could teach an 80 year old to use a computer in a few hours, but an illiterate 15 year old may be lost for life. This is truer today than it was then.

Computers are flooding our lives with information and the tools to gather that information are intuitive and don’t need 12 years of school to master.

What we are all need are the critical and mathematical skills to filter out the dross and misinformation that floods onto our screens.

Old and young have the belief that if something is on the web, then it must be true. The biggest challenge for parents and teachers with the web is convincing kids that cutting and pasting huge slabs of Wikipedia into an assignment isn’t research.

Not that this is just a problem in the classroom – plenty of politicians, business leaders and time poor journalists have been caught out plagiarising Wikipedia and other websites.

In recent times I’ve been to a lot of ‘future of media’ events where the importance of ‘data journalism’ has been raised. What really sticks out listening to these is how poorly equipped both young and old journalists are to evaluate the data they’ve gathered.

This isn’t just a problem in journalism – almost every occupation needs these skills. We could argue those skills are essential for citizens who want to participate in a modern democracy.

Computers, and coding skills, are important but we risk giving students the skills of today rather than giving them the foundations to adopt the skills of tomorrow.

We also risk making technological choices that risk education departments, schools and kids being locked into one vendor or system.

Giving every child a laptop is not a replacement for them having the critical, literacy and numeracy skills to participate in 21st Century society.

High cost politics – how the Australian election will fail business

The introduction of middle class welfare by the Howard government and Labor’s refusal to undo it is locking Australia into a high cost trap with little hope either party addressing the real issue.

“Running costs have gone crazy” complains Sydney restauranteur Jared Ingersoll at the same time the Australian events industry warns it’s being crushed by a higher dollar.

While the closure of an inner city cafe doesn’t mean that much, a bigger warning about Australian costs comes from Royal Dutch Shell who have put their gas investments on hold due to project blowouts.

Natural gas investments are the core of Australia’s economic policies with the country’s Asian Century report identifying energy exports as being the country’s main revenue earner over the next quarter century.

Costs of doing business in Australia have been steadily on the increase since the Howard government introduced the GST which triggered Australia’s transition to a high cost country.

It didn’t have to be that way but Howard’s addiction to middle class welfare meant what should have been a opportunity to reform the economy during the mid 2000s was squandered with gifts handed out by one of the highest spending governments in Australian history.

While Whitlam at least spent money on bringing sewers to the suburbs, Howard spent his on subsidies to rich schools and parking permits to self-funded retirees.

It would take a brave government to undo Howard’s work which isn’t something we can expect from the populist and cowardly Australian Labor Party that lacks any of the honesty or strength required to confront the whining middle classes about their unsustainable entitlements.

Which makes the election announced last week interesting. In her election announcement the Prime Minister made a mention of dealing with the high Australian dollar, which at least shows the Labor Party sees there’s a problem – although they certainly don’t have the stomach to make the tough decisions required.

On the other side of politics though it’s all unicorns and magic puddings. Tony Abbot and his friends are partying like it’s 1999.

The Liberal Party policy paper released last week is notable for not acknowledging the global financial crisis and maintaining that taxes can be cut while Howard’s middle class welfare state can be expanded.

The best example of the Liberal’s addiction to middle class welfare is their promise to introduce a parental leave scheme. As their Strong Australia policy document explains;

Paid parental leave ought to be paid at a person’s wage rate, like holiday pay and like sick pay, because it is a workplace entitlement, not a government benefit.

Not only does the Liberal Party believe that high paid workers should get subsidies for their nannies, but that employers should pick up the bill, just like holiday and sick pay.

Middle class welfare and a massive business cost increase to boot.

In a Smart Company poll last week, the small business readers overwhelming endorsed the Liberal Party.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For those worried about getting Australia’s high cost base down there are serious debates to be had about our tax and welfare systems along with tackling issues like high property prices, over-regulation, aging population and workforce skills.

Most importantly, we have to define what Australia wants to be in the 21st Century.

Little, if anything about these issues will be discussed before September and in the meantime the Dutch disease will slowly strangle Australian business. We need better.

Sharks patrol these waters

You can’t expect an anti-virus program to fully protect IT systems, the risks are far more pervasive.

The announcement that the New York Times was attacked by Chinese hackers after exposing the financial details of the nation’s Premier doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anybody following either China or computer security issues.

One of the realities of modern computing is that systems are constantly being compromised, the complexity of IT networks is so great that even the best security experts can be caught off guard.

Securing our networks

In such an environment the normal business and home computer user has little chance against sophisticated criminal or government sponsored attacks, by the Chinese or any other spy agency.

One example of how badly wrong things can go for an organisation is the hacking of security advisory firm Stratfor in 2011, this illustrated how small business practices of having relatively open networks and poor password security can have serious consequences.

The issue is not how we fortify our systems against intruders, but how we manage the risk. A useful analogy is how supermarkets deal with shoplifters – they can’t eliminate the problem, but they can manage it in ways that control losses.

Businesses, governments and home users have a range of things they can do to make it harder for hackers to get into a system and limit what they can access if determined one gets in.

The limits of anti-virus

Another aspect in the story that doesn’t surprise is the poor performance of the New York Times’ anti-virus software. According to Forbes, Symantec only caught one malware program out of the 45 installed by the hackers.

I have an entirely rational hatred of Symantec. While running an IT support business, their products were the bane of our lives and we encouraged users to choose alternative security software because of the unreliability of many of Symantec products, particularly the once proud Norton brand that was aimed at home and small business users.

At the time of the great malware epidemic in the early 2000s, Norton Anti-Virus had a huge market share and it proved to be worse than useless against the various forms of drive by downloads and infected sites that were exploiting weaknesses in Microsoft Windows 98 and XP systems.

Windows weaknesses

The common culprit was Windows ActiveX scripting language that Microsoft had introduced to standardise its web features. While a good idea, Microsoft made ActiveX a fundamental part of Windows and gave the features full access into the inner workings of the system.

Sadly Symantec made the decision to run all their security software on ActiveX as well.

As ActiveX was the main target for malware writers it meant that Norton AntiVirus or their Security suite would crash in a heap once a computer became infected and the Symantec software would actively interfere with attempts to cleanup a compromised system.

Making matters worse was Symantec’s subscription policies which cut customers off from vital updates and their bizarre policy of not including important upgrades in their automated updating function.

The failures of tech journalism

All of these factors made Symantec a loathed product in our office. It wasn’t helped by a generation of tech journalists who wrote gushing stories about Symantec, gave their products favourable reviews despite the company’s lousy reputation and consulted their employees for expert comment.

It wasn’t tech journalism’s finest hour. What really grates is the number of these folk still peddling nonsense about IT security and anti-virus software.

That distrust of Symantec continues to this day and those of us who struggled with their products a decade ago are not surprised at their poor performance on the New York Times’ network.

State sponsored risks

In defense of Symantec, the Chinese hackers are very good and its unlikely any security software would stand up to a sustained and determined attack from them or their counterparts in the US and Israeli governments.

We should also note that government agencies trying to get into systems is not just something done by the Chinese, US and Israelis; every government in the world is engaging in these activities against foreign businesses and their own citizens.

So we have to accept that these breaches and attacks are a real threat to any computer and any organisation. It may well be should build our security strategies around the assumption the bad guys are already in the system rather than believe we can build a giant electronic fort to keep the bad guys out.

One thing is for sure, you can’t rely solely on anti-virus software to secure your IT systems.

Building Africa’s multinationals

Ashish Thakkar is one of the new breed of African entrepreneurs who will shape 21st Century business.

African business site CP-Africa has a profile on the continent’s youngest billionaire, 31 year old Ashish Thakkar, based on a recent interview with the Wharton Business School.

Ashish’s story is fascinating one, his family have been refugees twice – once from Uganda when Idi Amin expelled the Indian population and later in Rwanda – and each time his father rebuilt the family’s fortunes from scratch.

In setting up his own business at 15 with a $6,000 loan, Ashish surprised Dubai authorities who thought his age was a misprint. 16 years later Mara Group operates in real estate, tourism, manufacturing and IT services across 24 countries, the bulk of them in Africa.

The interview is an insight into how African economies are evolving and how the continent is just as diverse as the others – it’s as foolish to lump all African nations together as it is to consider all Asian or European countries as being the same.

An important point that jumps out of Ashish’s interview are his thoughts on attracting foreign investment;

We have a huge issue in Africa with unemployment. Unfortunately, a lot of our governments think the answer is foreign direct investment. It’s not.

This is one of the mistakes governments around the world make – it’s understandable as those big foreign corporations are impressive and rich, there’s also the kudos a politician or public servant gets from being seen as a great statesman consorting with global captains of industry, this is one of the attractions in the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos.

As Ashish points out, attracting big corporations is not the answer to building a thriving, modern economy. It requires the locals to take action, not just in the business sector but right across the community.

Waiting for a big corporation to come along to kick start your business community is just a cargo-cult mentality which rarely works.

That cargo cult mentality is alive and well in western nations, a good recent example was the campaign to get Twitter to open an Australian office in Melbourne.

Like Facebook, Twitter’s representation down under would be a government liaison staffer who would be best located in Canberra.

Campaigning for this only made Melbourne look like a bunch of provincial hicks, the city and state is capable of much better.

The sad thing is all our governments do this when squandering money subsidising multinationals to set up offices that were going to be set up anyway. Business books are full of betrayed cities like New London, Connecticut who gave away tens of millions only to see their great corporate saviour walk away a few years later.

It’s far better for government to spend those millions reforming business regulations and taxes to make it easy for local businesses to compete with multinationals and become the global leaders of tomorrow.

As one of the few parts of the world that isn’t facing the challenges of an aging population, Africa economies are in a good position to spawn a whole generation of entrepreneurs and corporations. It will be interesting to see if Ashish Thakkar is leading that generation.

Necessity, innovation and the birth of the web

The world wide web was born out of necessity. It’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, says the innovation has barely begun.

The man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee spoke at the launch of the CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship in Sydney yesterday.

In telling about how the idea the idea of web, or Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), came about Berners-Lee touched on some fundamental truths about innovation in big organisations.

In the 1990s the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva had thousands of researchers bringing their own computers, it was an early version of what we now call the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.

“When they used their computers, they used their favourite computer running their favourite operating system. If they didn’t like what was available they wrote the software themselves,” said Tim. “Of course, none of these talked to each other.”

As a result sharing data was a nightmare as each scientist created documents using their own programs which often didn’t work on their colleagues’ computers.

Tim had the idea of standard language that would allow researchers to share information easily, although getting projects like this running in large bureaucratic organisations like CERN isn’t easy.

For getting HTML and the web running in CERN Tim gives credit to his boss, Mike Sendall, who supported him and his idea.

“If you’re wondering why innovation happens, one of the things is great bosses who let you do things on the side, Mike found an excuse to get a NeXT computer,” remembers Tim. “‘Why don’t you test it with your hypertext program?’ Mike said with a wink.”

There’s much talk about innovation in organisations, but without management support those ideas go nowhere, the story of the web is possibly the best example of what can happen when executives don’t just expect their workers to clock in, shut up and watch the clock.

One key point Tim made in his presentation was that it was twenty years after the Internet was invented before the web came along and another five years until the online world really took off.

We’re at that stage of development with the web now and with the development of the new HTML5 standard we’re going to see far more communication between machines.

Berners-Lee says “instead of having 10¹¹ web pages communicating, we start to have 10¹¹ computers talking to each other.”

These connections mean online innovation is only just beginning, we haven’t seen anything yet.

If you want your staff to stay quiet and watch the clock, that’s fine. But your clock might be figuring out how to do your job better than you can.

Tim Berners-Lee image courtesy of Tanaka on Flickr

Explaining the NBN on 702 Sydney ABC Radio

The myths and challenges for the NBN in 2013 as the project to roll out fibre optics to most Australians begins to struggle

I’ve covered what the NBN is previously on the ABC for Tony Delroy’s Nightlife and on Technology Spectator last year looked at the challenges ahead for the project in 2013.

The National Broadband Network was always going to be one of the key issues in the 2013 Federal election, The Liberal Party’s policy launch on Sunday and Malcolm Turnbull’s comments on ABC Radio station 702 Sydney on Friday illustrated how critical it will be.

His assertion that wireless should be affordable is laudable, but the indications are that it is increasingly going to become less affordable.

It also puts the coalition in a bad position, losing the three to four billion dollars expected from the spectrum auction wouldn’t help their budget position.

One comment from Malcolm that particularly sticks out is on subsidies;

If I could just make one other point Linda, possibly the most important. The government as we know is spending a stupendous amount of money on building a national fibre to the premises broadband network. And the subsidies there run into the tens of billions of dollars –

The member for Wentworth is facturally wrong; there are no subsidies for the NBN, the government is providing the capital for the project which they hope will be paid back by 2018.

the value of the network once completed will be a fraction of what the government is spending on it.

On what basis? Certainly fibre has a 25 to 40 year expected life cycle, but that’s true of a roadway or an office building; does Malcolm suggest we don’t spend on that as well.

you could make a very powerful argument that the form, the channel of broadband communication which adds the most to productivity is in fact wireless broadband.

Possibly, but let’s see that argument. Currently data downloads to fixed lines still dwarfs mobile, both are growing exponentially.

Malcolm actually touches on the problem we’re facing with wireless — the shortage of bandwidth.

The government has been very slow at getting it out. As of the last report there was only about eight and a half thousand premises connected to the fibre optic network that they’re building throughout all of Australia

This is true, the rollout so far of the NBN has been disappointing. This is what observers are watching closely on this.

The Fibre to the Node setup also creates another problem – that of ownership. If Telstra retain ownership of the copper cable from the node to the premises, it means providers have to deal with two wholesalers one of whom is their competitor.

In fact it creates a whole rabbit’s nest of problems for retailers and could very quickly find us in a situation where telco access requires dealing with two monopolies — Telstra and NBNCo.

One the disappointing things about the National Broadband Network has been the poor debate around the topic, indeed the whole debate at times has been wrong headed. Any hope it’s going to improve during the election campaign isn’t likely

Managing unemployment perceptions

Why did we accept one in twenty workers being unemployed as a good thing?

Stephen Koukoulas has a look at the changing composition of the Australian economy in Business Spectator today where he looks at how things have evolved over the last 50 years.

One of the notable things is unemployment and how our perception of what an acceptable level is;

Australia’s unemployment rate is 5.4 per cent at present, it was 0.9 per cent in August 1970 while in August 1951 it was a staggering 0.3 per cent.

In the 1961 Federal election the Menzies government hung on by one seat, having been punished for allowing the unemployment rate to reach the dizzying heights of 3.5 per cent.

Through the Twentieth Century, Australia’s unemployment rate averaged around 5% as shown in this Treasury graph.

What’s notable in that graph is how high unemployment became the norm in the last quarter of the century. When it became obvious politicians and economists couldn’t move the needle below 5%, the process of convincing us that five percent was ‘good’ began.

One wonders what the acceptable level of unemployment will be for the next generation. Will they consider us the failures that our grandparents would?

Image of unemployed carpenters in 1935 courtesy of the NSW State Library via Flickr

Throwing your problems over the fence

Outsourcing, subcontracting and securitisation often shift costs and risk from those responsible. Usually the bill ends up with the taxpayer or shareholder.

I first heard the term “throwing the problem over the fence” from a telco project manager a few years ago, it describes how modern organisations shift risk to others.

Throwing the problem over the fence usually involves contracting out a task, the philosophy is once the contract is signed delivery is no longer management’s problem, it’s now the responsibility of the contractor. Once the job is over the fence it’s out of sight and out of mind.

Governments, financial institutions and most corporations have become very good at throwing their problems over the fence.

Contracting away your worries

A core tenet of 1980s management thinking is contracting out; freeing executives from the tedious task of actually doing their jobs lets them focus on the important things in life, like securing performance bonuses.

Of course you can’t contract out risk – risk is like toothpaste, squeeze it in one place and it oozes out somewhere else.

Unlike toothpaste, risks have a habit of growing if they are ignored. Which becomes a problem for whoever is unwittingly on the other side of the fence.

Railways and risk

In “The Crash That Stopped Britain” author Ian Jack looked at the causes of the October 2000 Hatfield train accident which threw the nation’s railway network into chaos.

Jack correctly predicted that no-one would be found responsible as the tangle of rail operators, maintenance companies, financiers, labour hire firms and regulators made it almost impossible to determine exactly where responsibility for a fatal failure lay.

Diffusing responsibility is partly by design although originally the idea was to save costs, the theory being that tendering work previously done in house to the lowest cost provider would save money.

Instead its caused an escalation in costs as contracting out meant an increase in middlemen as financiers, lawyers, project managers, contract administrators – of which I was once one – and many others are drafted in to manage the outsourced contracts.

Throughout the Anglosphere – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the results of embracing this mentality has meant skyrocketing costs and delays in public work projects, a good example being the Southern Sydney Freight Line which was three years late and 250% over budget.

Naturally no-one is held responsible for the delays, cost over-runs or lousy initial planning and estimating on that project, which is a happy result for everyone except the taxpayer who foots the bill.

The Global Financial Crisis

While the cost of building railways, schools and motorways is a chronic problem, a far more bigger issue is the role of “throwing problems over the fence” in the financial industry.

Securitisation was seen as a magic bullet for the banking industry in the 1990s, the Basel Accords allowed banks to bundle up their entire home loan portfolios and throw them over the fence to fund managers and their unwitting investors.

When the inevitable happened with the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, it was difficult to attribute exactly who held the mortgages, let alone who was responsible for the losses among the mass of brokers, ratings agencies, fund managers and bankers who’d profited so well from the boom.

The only thing we could be sure of was that it was the taxpayer – you, your children and grand-children – who ended up holding the problem when the GFC’s bills were hurled over the last fence.

On the other side of the fence

Risk isn’t something that can be thrown over a fence, eventually it comes back in a bigger and nastier way. The question is who ends up dealing with it.

The genius of political and business leaders in the last 30 years has been in how they’ve thrown their responsibilities over the fence while retaining the perks and privilege of holding responsible positions.

Generally it’s taxpayers and shareholders sitting on the other side of the fence who have to deal with the costs and they aren’t getting cheaper.

Can Yahoo! disrupt the disruptors?

Business partnerships require bringing something of value to the relationship, Yahoo first has to define its strengths before searching for partners.

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer packed out the room for her interview at the World Economic Forum this week where she spoke about some of the challenges her and the company face.

One of the areas she sees for Yahoo! is in collaborating with other tech industry giants.

Mayer also is making a point of collaborating with companies such as Apple Inc., Google and Facebook, instead of competing.

“It ultimately means there’s really an opportunity for strong partnerships,” she said.

The problem for Yahoo! is that it doesn’t have a lot to offer companies like Apple, Google or Facebook – they are steaming along on their own and have moved ahead of the areas which Yahoo! dominated a decade ago.

Generally in the tech industry partnerships are more the result of the sector’s also-ran coming together in the hope that their combined might will overcome the leader’s advantages.

It’s the same philosophy that thinks tying the third and fourth placed runners legs together will make them faster than the winner.

A good example of this is Microsoft’s tie up with Nokia over the Windows Phone. If anything, the net effect has put Windows Phone and Nokia even further behind Apple and Google in the handset market.

Even when two tech companies have united to exploit their individual strengths, the results usually end in tears. Probably the best example of this was the IBM and Microsoft joint venture to develop the OS/2 operating system which eventually sank under IBM’s bureaucrat incompetence and Microsoft’s disingenuous management.

Those two examples show how partnerships only work when each party has something valuable to contribute and all sides are committed to the venture.

Marissa Mayer’s task is to find Yahoo!’s strengths and build on them, then she’ll be in a position to enter partnerships on an equal basis.

Whether its worth entering into partnerships with the big players though is another question. It may well be that Yahoo! has more to offer smaller businesses and disruptive startups.

Entering into a desperate alliance with Apple or Facebook could possibly be the worst thing Yahoo! could do, the company is no longer a leader and now needs to be a challenger or a disruptor.

Facebook’s locking competitors out of data feeds is an example of how complacent the big four internet giants are becoming, Yahoo! are in the position to upset that comfortable club.

The value of partnerships is that we all have weaknesses and strengths, a properly thought out venture builds on the various parties’ strengths and covers their weak spots. Right now Yahoo! has more weaknesses than strengths.