Paul Wallbank is a speaker and writer charting how technology is changing society and business. Paul has four regular technology advice radio programs on ABC, a weekly column on the smartcompany.com.au website and has published seven books.
Apple’s mapping problem could indicate bigger problems at the company
As Apple fans howl about the about the new iOS6 Maps feature which replaces the old one driven by Google Maps, it’s useful to get a cartographer’s view of how Apple got things wrong.
Michael Dobson’s analyis deep dives into the complexities of mapping which can be summed up in one phrase; “their problem is that they thought they did not have a problem.”
Like many things in life, mapping is a lot more difficult than it looks and assuming that a drawing or an older map is correct or the features unchanged is risky.
This is not a job you just leave to machines sucking down data from various sources; details needs to be checked, validated and checked again before being added to a map.
What’s worrying about Apple’s map snafu is this probably wouldn’t have happened under Steve Jobs as he’d have used the app himself and yelled at people when it didn’t work.
Apple’s decision to run with a substandard service smells horribly of decision by committee and compromised products being release to suit managerial imperatives rather than delivering one perfectionist’s vision of what worked.
We may well be seeing the beginning of Apple’s evolution into an anonymous corporation.
One of the positives of that is we may also discover a less secretive or hubristic Apple.
How Apple fix their map application is going to be interesting, they certainly have the funds to hire the best brains in mapping along with the 7,000 other employees Google are estimated to have in their mapping division, the question is should they?
For Google, having a huge division building and improving their maps search as geolocation is a key part of their local services and search tools.
Apple on the other hand doesn’t need a stand alone mapping division and while they can afford one, it certainly isn’t an effective use of their capital or management time.
It may well be that Apple will have to swallow their pride and license the data feeds back from Google or even Nokia, or perhaps they could even put in a bid for Nokia just to mess with the minds of Microsoft’s management.
Regardless of which way Apple decide to go, they’ve got themselves in an expensive mess which is going to take some time or money to fix.
For now, I’m sticking with iOS5 on my phone as I like my mapping app too much, particularly the integrated public transit features. My guess is I’m not alone.
The Internet is not killing retail, it’s lousy service, poor pricing and 1980s management that digging the incumbents’ graves.
The collective gnashing of cavity filled teeth over the demise of the Darrell Lea confectionery chain has given rise to some interesting commentary. If some pundits are to be believed, the lolly maker’s financial woes were due to the evil interwebs allowing Australians to buy choccies from cheap overseas suppliers.
But if you were to cross the road from Darrell Lea’s flagship Sydney shop you’d be outside one of Apple’s iconic stores that are the most profitable retail outlets on the planet – US Apple stores are 17 times more profitable on a per square foot basis than the average American retailer.
So retail can be successful. It just depends upon how it’s done and the internet has little to do with many of the retail failures we’re seeing at the moment.
Darrell Lea being absorbed into the VIP Pet Foods empire has a lot of lessons about retail but they are more about service and the failure to move out of the Twentieth Century, particularly when new competitors like Haigh’s and multinationals like Lindt are entering the marketplace.
Service is an integral part of this story. While the service at Darrell Lea stores wasn’t terrible it also wasn’t particularly notable and neither was the value of many of the products, leaving the customer underwhelmed.
A similar story of poor service is behind the failure of the Allans Billy Hyde chains – the comments on the Smart Company story about the music stores’ collapse indicate how customers found service lacking while the prices and range were ordinary. There was no real reason to shop there.
The business models of Darrell Lea and Allans Billy Hyde are locked into a 1980s way of doing business where one or two chains dominate a segment and attempt to charge duopoly prices while exercising their market power to screw suppliers.
A duopoly model works for Woolworths and Coles simply because of their scale. If you’re a smaller chain selling non-essential, non-perishable goods then customers will either not buy them or find better deals and service offshore.
Staff, of course, are a nuisance – after all they only serve customers and customers don’t matter when you have the market locked up – so staff are treated as a cost to be ruthlessly minimised while being paid the minimum that the well-paid management can get away with.
That contempt for retail staff is exacerbated by management’s reluctance to train them, which locks the stores into a downward service spiral as knowledgeable and experienced shop assistants find a job where their skills are valued.
Despite the scorn poured on Apple’s staff training policies, the core of their retail success is that you will get a passionate, knowledgeable person helping you at one of their stores while their competitors will leave you wandering the aisles unless they think there’s a fat commission to be had.
This contempt for suppliers, staff and customers is the real malaise for Australian retail and it’s an opportunity for smart new entrants into the marketplace.
While many of those new entrants might be online, the ecommerce side has little to do with the fundamental problems of lousy service and overpriced products.
Interestingly, while Darrell Lea had an online strategy, the new owner doesn’t. Any customer visiting the VIP Pet Foods site has no chance of finding where they can buy the products, let alone order them through the website.
While it would be nice to know where you can buy their products, the owners of VIP probably don’t care as their business model is based upon distributing their products to retailers and those stores can do their own advertising.
So retail still matters and the high hopes we had in the late 1990s that ecommerce would drive the middle man out of business was just as wrong-headed as the old-school managements of our dying retailers.
Virgin America shows how quickly legacy operations are falling behind their younger competitors
“The problem with legacy businesses is legacy people” said David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America at the Dreamforce conference.
For many organisations this is indeed the problem; that managements, workforces and shareholders are locked into a way of doing business that has worked for them in the past, so when change arrives they are ill-equipped to deal with it.
One of the key take aways from the Dreamforce conference is that the rate of business change is accelerating as technologies like cloud computing and the Internet mature.
For the legacy businesses locked into old ways this means they are going backwards faster than they could imagine.
A good example of this is when Virgin America showed their vision of how customer service works in a connected, social world.
The problem for companies like United and the other legacy carriers with their older aircraft and lumbering IT systems is they simply don’t have the infrastructure to provide these services if they wanted to.
One of the characteristics of 1980s management thinking is under-investing in equipment. ‘working your assets’ by flogging them way past their replacement dates is a handy way to increase profits and management bonuses, but it leaves a business exposed when newer technologies come along.
That’s the problem the legacy businesses, whether they are airlines, banks, telcos or in any other sector. Those who are nimble and those who have invested in new systems can take advantage of the change.
For some of these businesses even if they had the wits, and cash, to make those investments it’s dubious whether they could make the tools work properly.
‘Getting it’ is more than just understanding how to turn on an iPhone or send a tweet, it’s about how these tools can be used in a business.
If you don’t know how to use these tools, or understand the consequences of using them, then the investment is wasted.
For those organisations who are falling behind, they have to start moving quickly or their legacy is the only trace there will be of their existence.
Can Salesforce take a place alongside Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google?
“Did he just say we’re at the half-way mark?” Whispered the ashen faced journalist beside me as Mark Benioff’s Dreamforce keynote reached the 90 minute mark.
Benioff did and the presentation did indeed go three hours because Salesforce.com had a lot to announce with launches of new mobile apps, customer service programs and HR services.
At the press conference later in the day, Benioff said “we are interested in collaboration and the customer. the reason we’re in marketing is because our customers want us to be in marketing.”
An interesting part of this is the Facebook relationship, with the Buddy Media acquisition 10% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes through Salesforce. This in itself makes Salesforce a key Facebook partner.
Facebook’s relationship goes deeper with Salesforce, at the media conference Marc Benioff mentioned that the company’s purchase of Rypple came about because of urging from Tim Capos, Facebook’s CIO.
That deep relationship was on show in the opening keynote where Facebook were one of the strategic partners showcased by Benioff.
Of the products showcased, one of the important points that kept being raised was Salesforce’s role as the enterprise social media identity service.
A partnership between Salesforce and Facebook to provide online identity validation would effectively kill Eric Schmidt’s aim of Google being the Internet’s identity service although Benioff was at pains in the media conference to emphasise there was room for more than one player.
Google are also being challenged by Benioff’s announcement of Chatterbox, a secure online file storage and sharing service.
While the focus with the Chatterbox announcement was on the threat this presents to Dropbox and Box.net, the bigger targets are Google Drive, Apple iCloud and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
Salesforce’s move into the various fields of HR, marketing, file storage and collaboration are part of the company staking its own position among the various web empires.
With a strong enterprise position, it’s quite possible Salesforce could establish itself as the fifth of the Internet’s great empires.
Every empire needs an army and a particularly strong claim Salesforce would have are the ranks of developers and supporters gathering around the service’s open APIs.
The move to establish an independent position on the web would also explain Benioff’s commitment to HTML5 as this avoids locking the company into an Apple, Google or Microsoft dominated app environment.
We’ll see over time how Salesforce establishes their position among the internet empires, right now though their range of services, customer base and partner ecosystem means they are well placed to compete with the big four currently dominating the web.
Paul travelled to the San Francisco Dreamforce conference courtesy of Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com announce a range of new products at Dreamforce 2012
Over the last two years Salesforce.com have been one of the more aggressive buyers of cloud computing and social media startups with acquistions of companies like Rypple, Desk.com, Buddy Media and Radian6.
Today, ahead of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com announced a revamped product range that brings together the social media and big data tools from these acquisitions along with some in house innovations.
Salesforce expect nearly a hundred million enterprise tablet computer users and smartphones by 2016, so like all web based services, they have to make their platform available as an app. Salesforce’s new Touch iOS App allows users to use Salesforce.com as an app on the iPhone.
Despite Mark Zuckerburg’s disavowal of HTML5 last week, Salesforce remains committed to the standard despite developing an app for the iPhone.
“Initially we’re rolling out Touch in a way we’ve made sure works the way people want it to work on an iPad,” Peter Coffee, Vice President of Platform Research at Salesforce.com, says.
“We are reiterating our commitment to HTML 5 as a device and platform neutral cluster of standards.
“As HTML5 begins to clearly coalesce we’re making a major commitment to that and we’re going to lead the way while the opposition is still trying to work on one browser.”
Salesforce continues their focus on social media with their Chatter service becoming a key part of their Force.com cloud applications platform. Chatter itself is being extended with a new feature to enable companies to create their own branded communities.
That social integration continues as the company rolls out Social Key, an application which, as Andy MacMillan, senior vice president and general manager of Data.com says “will empower companies to derive value from social data for the first time.”
If Social Key does achieve a real measure of value from retweets and Facebook posts it may well mean many social media experts will have to return to multi-level marketing or real estate sales. This in itself is not a bad thing.
The new Salescloud platform uses Chatter to build business intelligence on customers, bringing data across a business to help sales teams target their efforts more effectively.
While sales is by definition the focus of Salesforce they are also launching a similar Chatter service for support teams. This compliments the acquisition of Assist.ly at the beginning of the year.
Marketing too is being targeted by Salesforce with the launch of Marketing Cloud that combines the Buddy Media Facebook marketing service and the Radian6 social media monitoring platform.
While already the leader in business cloud applications, Salesforce are making a strong bid to dominate the sector in a way that Microsoft did in the desktop computer industry twenty years ago.
Browsing through the 400 partner stands at the Dreamforce Expo shows Cloudforce are building a deep ecosystem around their products that will make it hard for competitors to break into the space.
Whether Salesforce achieve this dominance remains to be seen, but they are certainly giving a new set of tools for businesses to understand their customers.
Pricing and Availability
Salesforce Touch is generally available today on iOS devices, and included in all Salesforce editions.
Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot in Fall 2012.
Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.
Data.com Social Key is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.
Pricing of Sales Cloud Partner Communities and Data.com Social Key will be announced at general availability.
Dreamforce showcases Salesforce.com’s vision of cloud computing, big data and social media’s future.
The history of Salesforce.com tracks the evolution of cloud computing. Founded by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris in a San Francisco apartment at the 1999 peak of the dot com boom, today the company has over 100,000 customers with a market capitalisation of 21 billion dollars.
While founded as a sales Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) service, Salesforce’s range of products has extended across a number of other business functions such as business intelligence and customer support.
Dreamforce is the company’s international major conference which in 2012 is expected to attract 90,000 attendees to hear what is planned for the platform as they expand into new fields.
Along with Salesforce are 350 partners exhibiting their services that plug into Salesforce’s system. As we saw at the Xero conference, the community of developers and support companies are as important to a software company’s success as its products.
One of the notable things about Salesforce is the company’s hunger for acquisitions having taken over twenty-four companies in the last few years. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce are integrating those startups.
Salesforce are probably the company at the forefront at adopting social media into their products as seen with the acquisitions of companies like Facebook advertising platform Buddy Media and the Rypple social performance review service.
The move to mobile is changing how businesses interacts with customers, this is one of the challenges for Salesforce.
Just as Salesforce has tracked the rise of cloud computing, the company is now tracking the evolution of Big Data and social media.
The Dreamforce 2012 conference should give some insight into how the company, and other industries, are adapting to the challenges presented by the mobile web, big data and the social workplace.
Paul travelled to the Dreamforce conference courtesy of Cloudforce.
Are Windows tablet manufacturers repeating last decade’s mistakes?
We often forget that tablet computers weren’t invented by Steve Jobs. For a decade before Microsoft and their partners like Toshiba or Dell had been selling ‘slate-like’ devices.
The market wanted tablet computers, particularly business users in sectors like logistics and health care, but the Windows products on offer were heavy, clunky and expensive.
It took the iPad to deliver what the market wanted — a lightweight, easy to use and reasonably priced tablet computer. This was the reason Apple were so successful.
The fundamental thing that will kill Windows tablets is cost and these tablets are too expensive compared to the Apple and Android competitors.
While having Windows compatibility and the opportunity to save to USB drives or corporate networks is handy in a tablet, there seems to be little reason for customers not to buy a mid-priced laptop.
It appears though these price points are part of Microsoft’s strategy. Steve Ballmer hinted at this in his Seattle Times interview last weekend.
Q: The iPad has the largest share of the tablet market, but its soft spot, it seems to me, is the price.With the Surface, are you planning to compete with the iPad on price or on features?
A: We haven’t announced pricing. I think we have a very competitive product from the features perspective. …
I think most people would tell you that the iPad is not a superexpensive device. … (When) people offer cheaper, they do less. They look less good, they’re chintzier, they’re cheaper.
If you say to somebody, would you use one of the 7-inch tablets, would somebody ever use a Kindle (Kindle Fire, $199) to do their homework? The answer is no; you never would. It’s just not a good enough product. It doesn’t mean you might not read a book on it….
If you look at the bulk of the PC market, it would run between, say, probably $300 to about $700 or $800. That’s the sweet spot.
The problem is the tablet computer market isn’t the PC market and those price points have changed.
What’s more, the features that attract users to tablet devices or smartphones are different to that of PCs.
Basically PCs, tablets and smartphones are different products.
Applying PC pricing structures, or marketing models, to the tablet market is a risky strategy.
Steve Jobs didn’t do this and Apple succeeded with the iPhone and iPad without damaging their Mac sales, whether Microsoft can pull of a similar achievement with the opposite strategy remains to be seen.
Travel review — United Airlines Sydney to San Francisco economy class
When the CEO of an airline states his product is unacceptable, your expectations of a trip won’t be high. So it was with trepidation I boarded United Airlines’ Flight UA870 from Sydney to San Francisco for an overnight economy class flight.
The 13 hour overnight flight from Sydney to San Francisco is a jet lag nightmare with a 3pm departure and arrival in SFO at 11am the same morning. So getting some sleep on the flight is essential regardless of how cramped the seating is.
Check-in
United’s online check-in is clunky but works and I was lucky to grab a windows seat that’s essential to getting any sort of sleep on an economy flight. The online check in refused to print a boarding pass so it was necessary to check in at the airport.
At the airport check in is efficient but you’ll have to enter most of the information about your accommodation in the US again. Keep these details handy as you’ll be using it for the US immigration form and may be asked about it on arrival.
Don’t expect clean tables at Sydney international airport
One aspect about waiting in Sydney’s international terminal is just how dirty it is. It’s depressing that the Sydney Airport Corporation is too busy clipping the ticket of unfortunate travellers with excessive parking fees and service charges that it can’t be bothered employing cleaners.
The Seats
Tuck in your legs, there’s not a lot of space to go around
When Jeff Simsek says his Airline’s economy class product is unacceptable he’s not joking. The old seats are less comfortable or roomy that those on Australian Jetstar domestic flights.
Leg room is about what’s expected on an oceanic economy flight but when the seat in front of you is reclined it’s difficult to read a magazine or use a laptop.
As far as power for your laptop or iPhone are concerned — forget about it, those things weren’t invented in the 1980s.
The broken headphone socket
The age of the seats shows in the lack of any seat based entertainment system and the socket for the headphones was broken making it necessary to rip off some of the inflight magazine’s back cover to get it working.
Once working, the ‘entertainment’ was restricted to about ten channels, all of them offering some music and it’s suprising there is no news, business or comedy channel.
The 80s channel was eclectic mix including Madness and Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax — maybe it was lucky we didn’t have video screens.
If one area illustrates just how 1980s the interior of United’s cabin is, it’s the centrally mounted video screens. These just don’t cut it and are an embarrassment on a modern aircraft.
Food and beverages
Two meals were served inflight with beverages. Alcoholic drinks were included and the red wine was a perfectly fine Fox Grove Cabernet Sauvignon.
Lunch two hours after departing Sydney and was braised chicken with overcooked vegetables accompanied by a lettuce salad and a very dry chocolate cake.
Choose the fruit
Breakfast two hours before arrival was eggs, baked beans and chicken sausage cooked within an inch of their lives. It was edible but I’d suggest the fruit next time.
One thing to note about the United economy class tables is they are incredibly uncomfortable to rest your arms upon. On more modern airlines these tables fold into two.
Cabin Crew
Overall the cabin crew were efficient and courteous although not really friendly.
A bizarre aspect about the flight were the in-air announcements which were quickly mumbled declarations that were difficult to follow. The sound levels were low and the announcements were crackly, it must have been that 1980s equipment.
Arrival
One of the benefits of the United flight between Sydney and San Francisco is the sensible mid-morning arrival time so the airport and roads aren’t crowded. Getting away from the airport was easy.
1980s zombies
In many ways United Airlines are a vision of the future — zombie businesses staggering on without the money to invest in modern technology.
The US airline industry has ruthlessly used Chapter 11 to keep afloat over the last thirty years and now we have governments doing everything they can to prop up ‘too big to fail’ businesses we’ll see a lot more companies looking like United.
Qantas’ move off the San Francisco route also illustrates the drooling, anti-customer incompetence of Alan Joyce and the rest of his management team. The United flight was packed and they can continue to run aging rust buckets on the route as there’s no competition.
Given there’s no competition on the Sydney-San Francisco route, United is what you’re stuck with. If you have to fly economy on this route get a window seat, bring a bottle of water and take some sleeping pills.
If you were around in the 1980s, then enjoy the experience of what it was like when United’s 747s were new and the pride of the sky.
Paul travelled courtesy of Salesforce on the way to the Dreamforce 2012 conference in San Francisco
How the software giant wants to lock corporate customers into their products.
Microsoft’s annual Australian TechEd conference on the Gold Coast this week comes at an important time for the software giant as the company launches a range of products to meet the major threats to its tech industry dominance.
With the move away from desktop and laptop computers to smartphones, tablets and cloud computing services Microsoft’s profitable server and office franchises have become less relevant in a rapidly evolving market place.
To counter this move Microsoft are refreshing most of their key product lines this year including launches of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and the high stakes Windows Phone 8.
Underlying these releases is Microsoft’s “one consistent platform” offering a seamless experience between traditional in-house servers, the company’s Azure cloud product along with the services of partners, integrators and resellers.
Core to Microsoft’s enterprise strategy is their Hyper-V virtualisation product that allows businesses to reduce costs and business complexity by easily replicating systems onto different servers or networks. At present Microsoft claims 25% of the Australian virtualisation market compared to VMWare’s 50%.
At the home and small business ends of the market Microsoft also have a “one consistent platform” strategy with services like Office365 offering the same look and feel regardless of whether they are using a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer.
Microsoft hopes to replicate the success they had in the 1990s by locking customers into their integrated cloud and server environment. This is consistent with the “own the customer” strategies of other major players like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
The flaw in trying to own the customer across all devices is the difference in technologies – what works on a desktop computer with a mouse, keyboard and large screen doesn’t necessarily succeed on a smartphone or tablet computer using a smaller touch screen.
Windows 8’s development has illustrated how Microsoft are struggling with their aim delivering a consistent look across all platforms as early users struggle with the now renamed “Metro” touch screen interface and demand they get their start buttons back.
The inconsistency between platforms also appears with the cloud based Office365 productivity suite which lacks many of the advanced features of the desktop Microsoft Office packages that dominate the PC market.
Office’s advanced functions are one of the areas where Microsoft has successfully held off competitors like Google Apps as office workers – and writers – find the richer features in the desktop application actually matter when using word processors or spreadsheets.
Another of the advantages Microsoft has over Google and other cloud based competitors is their army of software partners, integrators and resellers supporting their products.
One of the pillars of the “One Consistent Platform” strategy are the service providers who have built their businesses on supporting Microsoft’s products. With the move to the cloud many of these integrators and resellers have been threatened by the reduced margins offered by online services.
The stakes are high for Microsoft and their partners as the computer industry moves away from the model which has worked well for them over the last twenty years.
Whether customers will stay with the revamped Microsoft services and products is going to depend on how well the “One Consistent Platform” is executed. As Apple, Facebook and Google have shown, customers will stick with one service if their needs are being met.
Giving the new version of Office a run on a Windows tablet
One of the key planks of Microsoft meeting the challenge presented by online services like Google Docs is their cloud based Office365.
The success of Office365 is important as Microsoft Office makes up a large chunk of the 24 billion dollars in sales, and $15 billion dollar profit, the company books from its Business Division.
As part of the Australian TechEd 2012 Conference, Microsoft gave a hands on preview of the Office 365 running on a Windows 8 tablet which was a good opportunity to see how both software packages worked.
Office 365
Office365 is very similar in layout and function to Office 2010 – if you’re using earlier versions of Office, particularly Office 2003, then you may find the ribbon bar and changed menus hard to navigate at first.
Integration with Microsoft’s Skydrive is good and seamless. A nice feature in this is how a user can setup multiple Skydrive accounts as separate drives. How well this works while on the road will have to be tested away from a controlled environment like the one at the TechEd meeting rooms.
The touch screen functions are fairly hard to get used to and they don’t work particularly well with fat fingers which Microsoft attempts to overcome with providing a stylus.
Another complexity is that the menus and touch screen functions aren’t consistent across applications. The handy ‘pinch’ gesture to zoom on Windows 8 doesn’t work on the Office applications on the tablet which is a shame and is also a bit irritating for power users.
Office365 adds a range of other features like web publishing, video editing and IT management tools but the hands on demo didn’t give enough time to properly evaluate these aspects.
Window 8
The first thing that jumps out with Windows 8 is the basic interface isn’t intuitive. The tile based system is difficult to use if you’re used to a keyboard and mouse or mobile systems like Apple iOS and Android.
Another worry is the Windows 8 interface – or “Metro” as it was known – uses different applications to the desktop version. The problem with this was illustrated when trying to run a video on the device as the Internet Explorer in the Windows 8 interface was a different version to that on the desktop so videos would run in one mode, but not on the other.
This confusion between software versions is a recipe for user confusion, lost data and possibly even a security weakness. It’s surprising that having effectively two operating systems running on the device was considered to be a good idea.
Looking under the hood at the Control Panel, the Windows NT heritage of Window 8 becomes apparent. Anybody used to tinkering with the settings on Windows XP, Vista or 7 systems will have no trouble finding their way around the new version.
Overall the performance of Windows 8 was impressive. It’s quite fast and responsive and this is something that Microsoft’s demonstrators are proud of.
Tablet blues
The surprising thing was the Windows 8 system was running on a Samsung tablet with still no ship date for the Windows hardware.
With Christmas approaching, Microsoft are running out of time to compete in the tablet market and it seriously raises questions on whether the Surface tablets were prematurely announced.
The experience with Office365 on the Windows Tablet was satisfactory although the demonstration showed there’s some barriers to adopting tablets as the main work computers.
Office 365 shows the strengths Microsoft have in the market, if Microsoft can get their tablet strategy right then they have a good product to compete with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
Time will tell if they or their hardware partners can get products that customers want onto the market.
Paul travelled to TechEd and stayed at the Gold Coast as a guest of Microsoft Australia.
It’s nice not to have doubts, but from outside the comfortable corporate headquarters Microsoft looks like they are struggling in this space.
Steve Ballmer might be more credible if he did admit to doubts and at least hint there is a plan B in their smartphone strategy.
Companies need leaders with doubts – doubts about their strategy, about their managers, about the economy and – most importantly – about their own infallibility.
One of the worst aspects of 1980s management ideology was the myth of the CEO superstar. Too many good businesses have been destroyed, and too much damage done to the global economy, by senior executives who have believed in their own infallibility.
Some doubts might help a business, particularly when that company is struggling with some serious threats.
