Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Risks in the disruption machine

Joining forces with the tech disrupters can be risky as governments doing deals with Uber over public transit are learning

At last year’s Dreamforce, Uber founder Travis Kalanick sat down with Marc Benioff to discuss the ride sharing service’s history and its aspirations to reinvent public transit.

Those aspirations are coming to fruition reports The Verge as local governments across the US sign agreements with Uber to supplement their public transport networks.

In entering those arrangements local officials are finding a number of problems, not least the service’s obsession with secrecy that falls foul of US public data practices and legislation.

That clash between the Silicon Valley obsession with hoarding intellectual property and US open government beliefs is one that will become more common as agencies attempt to ‘Uber-ize’ their services.

However the Uber model isn’t working well in some markets as the fate of Washio shows.

A month ago Mic Magazine wrote about how Washio was a symptom of the ‘disruption’ being wreaked on communities by the tech industry as high priced services displaced undercapitalised smaller business.

Washio’s success, like Uber and most of the tech startups following the Silicon Valley greater fool model, required capturing enough of the market to have a dominant position in the marketplace making it hard for new competitors to enter while driving out existing players who can’t afford to make losses indefinitely. This is path followed by Amazon, Microsoft and even IBM.

However this strategy is risky if there’s not enough capital, which Washio has now found with the service entering bankruptcy this week.

The sad thing is Washio’s unprofitable and unsustainable business model let them kill other companies whose owners, managers or investors were unable or unwilling to compete with a loss making enterprise.

For small businesses in particular the effects of a well funded megalith intent on driving them out of business is particularly cruel – as we saw with booksellers and Amazon.

Local governments need to be particularly aware of the risk of making Uber the only provider of neighbourhood public transport, leaving them the sole player that owns all their data could well prove particularly costly, one only wonders what could happen had a local hospital done a laundry deal with Washio.

Automating the back office

Walmart’s streamlining of back office processes is a warning to middle managers everywhere

US retail giant is to slash 7,000 back office jobs reports The Wall Street Journal as the company looks to focus on customer service. The process that’s seeing those jobs lost are part of a bigger shift in management.

The automation of office jobs isn’t new – functions like accounts payable have been steadily computerised since the early days of computers – but now we’re seeing an acceleration of white collar and middle management roles.

As increasingly sophisticated automation and artificial intelligence increasingly affects middle management roles, we can expect further changes to organisations’ management structures.

The opportunity to streamline and flatten management will be something company boards will have to focus on if they want to keep their enterprises competitive and responsive in rapidly changes markets.

For managers, there’s a lot more disruption to come for their roles. Those stuck in 1980s or 90s ways of doing things are very much at risk.

Huawei’s attempt to shape the cloud

For the last two days Chinese network equipment vendor Huawei has been holding its first Huawei connect conference in Shanghai.

There’s alway plenty to announce at these conferences and Huawei had consultancy partnerships with both Accenture and Infosys, their IoT strategy and their big push into cloud computing.

Ken Hu, the company’s current CEO, even had a new word – cloudification – to describe how business processes are going onto the cloud. Although during the segment on their relationship with SAP, the Huawei executives were at pains to emphasise that in their view most enterprises are a long way from going to a public cloud and will be hosting their own services for some time yet.

Despite the clumsy buzzwords, Huawei does have an interesting selling point in the market with its tie up with telcos giving it both a strong sales channel and a unique selling point. How well they execute with telecommunications companies that are notoriously poor at selling these services remains to be seen.

Huawei’s internet of things services are a similar proposition. Being close to the carriers means the company is well positioned to compete in the market, particularly in M2M applications, but again that closeness to telcos could be a hindrance.

The big message from Huawei Connect is that Chinese companies are genuine competitors to European and North American companies like Ericsson and Cisco, something illustrated on Tuesday when Tencent previewed their new head office in Shenzhen that will act as a live R&D lab for their IoT offerings.

Overall Huawei Connect was a good example of the Chinese government’s efforts to shift the nation’s economy up the value chain.

Digital businesses’ lost tribe of managers

Business leaders are struggling to understand their digital strategies, Forrester reports.

Are senior executives lost when discussing their company’s digital strategy?

At the Huawei Connect conference this morning in Shanghai, Nigel Fenwick, a Vice President and principle analyst of Forrester Consulting, released his company’s study titled Business and Technology Leadership in a Post Digital Era.

Forrester surveyed 212 IT and business managers across selected markets in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific for the survey and found only four percent of business leaders were confident they understood their companies’ digital strategy.

Even more worryingly less than ten percent of business IT leaders claimed they understood their organisation’s digital strategies.

The reason for this, Fenwick believes, is the pace of change in the technology sector as managers struggle to put digital innovations into the context of the business.

Exacerbating this lack of understanding is how companies are ‘bolting on’ digital strategies to their existing business models rather than thinking about how their industries, products and markets are being transformed, Fenwick says.

There’s little new or surprising in Forrester’s report and the small and selective data set doesn’t inspire confidence in the survey’s results. It is however a good reminder of the challenges facing today’s boards and executives in understanding the consequences of a rapidly changing economy on their businesses.

Autodesk and the China manufacturing challenge

China’s focus on R&D is changing the country’s manufacturing outlook which has major consequences for the rest of the world.

At the recend Autodesk University event in Sydney I had the opportunity to talk with Pat Williams, the company’s senior vice president for Asia Pacific.

Williams’ beat covers all of Asia and he’s based out of Shanghai where he’s been based for the last eight years and prior to that he spent a decade in Japan.

Having spent so much time in North East Asia, and heading to the PRC the following week myself, it was interesting to hear Williams’ views on how industry is changing in China and ther country’s attitude to American software companies.

“There’s a lot of noise that gets made in China about their local IP and the local vendors and what I say is ‘the Chinese companies are competing in a global market and they are under the same competitive pressures as everybody else in the world so when they find a better tool they use it. Despite all the noise, business is quite good there.”

For the Chinese economy, the aging and increasingly expensive workforce presents a problem, something addressed by the China Manufacturing 2025 plan which sees the country increasingly competing in high tech sectors such as aerospace, telecommunications and biotech fields.

“China’s kind of an anomaly,” says Williams of the country’s immense growth rates. “From a government perspective there’s a lot of horsepower behind the things that they do – China 2025, their manufacturing initiative, you’ve got what they’ve been doing with Building Information Modelling (BIM) and our architectural tools.”

They’ve really kind of spearheaded what we’ve been talking about on things like 3D printing of houses. China on its own is just this mushroom that’s happening.”

While the industrial shift in China and the rest of Asia is promising opportunities to companies like Autodesk, that change is affecting their workforce as well with the company announcing plans to lay off ten percent of their workforce earlier this year.

Those cutbacks are part of the adjustment to a new market reality says Williams, “it was part of right sizing the business.” He observed “we realised our margins were going to be compressed as we move to a subscription model.”

Autodesk’s shifts illustrate how the opportunities in the new economy don’t come without costs even for the companies that seem to be winners in a shifting marketplace.

In China, American companies are finding they have to a unique proposition – companies like Apple and Autodesk are good examples – and as the country moves its economy further up the value chain all foreign businesses are going to have to show how they add value.

Succeeding in a changing economy isn’t without uncertainty. And it certainly isn’t without risks.

Australia’s NBN debacle

However when it comes to missed targets, broken promises and the sheer scale of money wasted, Australia’s National Broadband Network dwarfs all the world’s broadband roll outs.

One of the most stunning examples of Australia’s uncompetitive, post-mining boom economy is its National Broadband Network.

Announced in 2009 to provide high speed data access to the nation to address the effects of thirty years of poor decisions and poorly thought out policies by successive governments, the project was intended to upgrade the telecommunications network and break the near monopoly of the incumbent telco, Telstra.

Sadly the project quickly foundered as the managers of the company set up to build the network made a series of poor decisions that stemmed from their underestimating of the project’s scope and their arrogant hubris in rejecting the advice of those who did.

To compound the problem, the project was politicised by the intellectually lazy and opportunistic Liberal opposition who promised they could build it for less by utilising existing telephone and Pay-TV infrastructure. On becoming government, the then communications minister and now Prime Minister changed the scope to do that and promised a quicker and cheaper rollout.

Last Friday, the folly of the Liberal Party’s plans were shown when the National Broadband Network company, nbn™, issued their updated business plan that detailed a further retreat from both the original project scope and the government’s promises.

The Melbourne Age’s Lucy Battersby illustrated how completely Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party bungled their costings, showing just how mediocre and dishonest the government and Prime Minister have been in estimating the cost of the project.

However, NBN Co underestimated the cost of using existing hybrid-fibre coaxial [HFC] cables laid by Telstra and Optus in the 1990s. Last year it calculated an average cost of $1800 per house. But detailed field work discovered the cost was actually $2300.

…

In 2013 the Coalition estimated FTTN connections would cost about $900 per premise and this was raised to $1997 in a 2014 strategic review, and raised again in 2015 to about $2300.

In the real world, being out by nearly 300% would cost an estimator or executive their job and for a small business could well see them being put out of business, but in the carnival of mediocrity that marks modern Australian politics, those responsible for such mistakes only thrive, as do the managers of nbn™ who recently awarded themselves fat bonuses.

Adding insult to injury for the long suffering Australian taxpayers and broadband users is that the nbn™’s management have revised the scope again to overcome increased costs and now only 21% of consumers will get a fibre connection as opposed to the 40% claimed when the new government changed the scope.

Those scope changes beg the question why anyone bothered in the first place. Had the network been left with Telstra there’s a reasonable chance 20% of customers would have ended up on fibre by early next decade as the economics of maintaining and installing the technology overtook the older copper system.

Probably the biggest insult though to Australian customers though are the desperate attempts to make the new network profitable with plans to gouge the nation’s telco users as Fairfax’s Elizabeth Knight reported.

Data use per user is anticipated to grow at a compound rate of 30 per cent per cent to 2020.

At first blush these increases in usage might look exaggerated – but wait. Only last year NBN was working off the expectation that this year its existing customers would consume 90 gigabytes per month. But the current rate of consumption is actually 131 gigabytes per month – and rising.

Thus as the years progress towards 2020, NBN not only gets an increase in customers, it get an increase in revenue per customer .Monthly average revenue per user is forecast to increase from $43 this year to $52 in 2020..

So Australians will be expected pay more for their substandard connections to help an organisation that has consistently failed to meet its promises and targets. It should also be noted that rising Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is the opposite of what’s been happening in the real world over the last twenty years as revenues, and profits have fallen.

To be fair, it’s not just Australia that has struggled with rolling out fibre networks. In the US, Google Fiber is going through blood letting and scope changes as the company struggles to meet targets and keep costs under control. That same experience has been repeated around the world.

However when it comes to missed targets, broken promises and the sheer scale of money wasted, Australia’s National Broadband Network dwarfs them all.

Australian taxpayers, voters and telecommunications users should be asking hard questions of their political leaders

Cheap solar strands coal

As the price of solar power falls, coal mining and gas shipping assets increasingly look stranded

Last week Chilean power distributors signed a contract for solar generated power at the lowest rate ever, half the price of energy from coal powered generators.

As the cost of solar panels continues to fall, the need for coal and gas powered facilities continues to dwindle but given solar panels don’t need to be located in a central location, the nature of distribution networks is changing.

With power generation becoming more localised, communities don’t need expensive connections to power grids. In disadvantaged regions and developing nations, villages that would have to wait decades to be connected, if at all, now have a pathway to dramatically improving their standards of living.

Distribution companies that exploited their monopoly positions in providing power across wide networks are now having to reconsider the value of their expensive assets and lucrative business models.

Those countries and companies who thought high coal prices would bolster their standard of living, such as Australia, must be rueing their focus on fossil fuels. The massive investments made by mining companies and compliant governments are now increasingly looking like stranded assets.

Uber’s grand experiment

Uber’s losses raise questions of how far the loss making business model pioneered by Amazon can be pushed

Yesterday reports emerged that the icon of the disruptive economy, ride sharing service Uber, lost 1.2 billion dollars in first six months of this year.

Those losses show disruption doesn’t come cheap, although settling the damaging and costly battle with China’s Didi Chuxing will help the company’s cash burn.

Despite on track to lose at least two billion dollars this year, the company still has a substantial war chest having raised $8.7 billion dollars in debt and equity raisings over the last eighteen months.

While impressive, that war chest will only last four year at current rates and, given Uber’s already sky high 60 billion dollar valuation and the increasingly hostile Silicon Valley fund raising environment, it will be a relief to investors that the China battle appears settled.

There remains though an ongoing weakness in Uber’s business however with the company reportedly spending hundreds of millions a year in subsidies to drivers in key markets. How sustainable their business is remains to be seen.

In many respects Uber is following the Amazon example of beating down competitors by selling products at deep losses thanks to its access to capital and investors’ tolerance for building marketshare.

As we’ve seen with Amazon, that tactic has been wonderfully effective both in retail and in providing cloud services. For customers and the economy though, the reduced choices in the marketplace may end up not being in their interests.

Uber is an interesting experiment in how far the Amazon model can be pushed, for cities and states dealing with a deeply disrupted taxi and city transport network the results of that experiment may be telling.

Establishing a online small business presence

Australia’s National Australia Bank and Telstra launch a service for small businesses wanting to go online

How does a small business get online quickly and cheaply? This was a topic I explored in my last book, the e-Business guide, so it was good to revisit the topic after being invited to contribute a post to the new Proquo small business exchange website.

Proquo, a joint venture between NAB and Telstra, was launched earlier this month and offers more than two million Australian small businesses an online platform to network, trade or swap services with each other.

The service’s name is a take on the phrase ‘quid pro quo’ – meaning ‘this for that’ – and it offers users the opportunity to swap or exchange their skills or services in addition to traditional monetary payments.

Developed by NAB’s innovation hub, NAB Labs and Telstra’s Gurrowa Innovation Lab, the joint venture operates independently of its parents although the service will tap into both companies’ huge small business customer base and complement their existing service offerings.

For the blog post, I give a quick overview of the basics a small business proprietor needs to keep in mind when setting up an online presence, something every organisation should have. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to expand upon this important business topic.

This is a paid post on behalf of Nuffnang

Ditching the old tech – Lessons for the iPhone from the Apple iMac

Apple’s rumoured changes to the iPhone 7 are causing disquiet among customers, but they could mean opportunity.

“I’ve been betrayed, I’ll never buy another Apple product again!” was the cry in 1998 when the company announced their new range of iMacs and portables wouldn’t support the long standing Apple Development Bus (ADB) system and floppy disks.

At the time Apple had been in decline, only the year before Microsoft had bailed the company out with a few conditions that had deeply irritated the company’s loyal customer base.

Many of those customers – mainly in education and graphic design – had invested deeply in ADB compatible equipment and their irritation at abandoning that investment for USB based kit was understandable.

Today we’re seeing similar protests about the rumoured dropping headphone jacks from the upcoming Apple 7 device, customers aren’t happy about the possibility being forced from a well established standard to a less reliable and likely more expensive system.

Unlike the computer world of 1998 today’s marketplace is very different, Apple is no longer a quirky and niche product but the most profitable of the tech industry’s giants – as Microsoft was back when Steve Jobs swallowed his pride and accepted Bill Gates’ bailout.

However most of Apple’s profits come from one product line, the iPhone. While the iPhone is probably the only truly consistently profitable smartphone, it competes in a fiercely fought for consumer market.

Already in China, one of the company’s most profitable markets, the iPhone’s market share is falling in the face of good quality but slightly cheaper Chinese and Korean devices.

Should Apple push those consumers too far by shifting the iPhone to a more expensive or proprietary system then the competing Android devices may well pick up market share and dent Apple’s fat profits.

However history shows that these hardware shifts do happen and older technologies are supplanted by more expensive, but better, inventions regardless of how much users have spent on the status quo. A century ago the automobile started replacing a millenia of investment in horse drawn technologies.

In the case of Apple abandoning the ADB back in 1998, it was the spur to adopt the USB standard which up until then had been buggy and unwanted as Bill Gates himself had found.

As history shows, Apple thrived after ditching the old technology despite the complaints at the time and if the company resists the temptation to lock users into a proprietary system there is no reason to think the same can’t happen again.

Apple mouse (with ADB connector) courtesy of Wikipedia

Spreading the tech industry’s footprint

The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

Just how broad is the US tech industry? It’s tempting to think that most of the American tech sector is concentrated in San Francisco Bay Area with some offshoots in Seattle and on the East Coast but as this New York Times piece describes, the country has a range of high-tech industry clusters.

Like Silicon Valley itself many of those clusters exist because of other industries, research facilities or companies – Seattle being home to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon being an example.

Another example of how other industries have influenced the development of industry clusters is shown in the example of Philadelphia.

I hadn’t thought have Philadelphia as having a tech sector until I spoke with Australian tech company Nuix about one of their key North American offices being in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken.

When I observed that Philadelphia wasn’t the obvious place to set up, Nuix’s managers pointed out how the city’s pharmaceutical, medical technology and telecommunications provide a deep talent pool for tech companies along with the city’s location between New York and Washington DC being an advantage as well.

Philadelphia’s civic leaders have contributed to it with their Startup Philly program that offers services and incentives ranging from networking events through to a seed investment program.

VeryApt CEO Ashrit Kamireddi, one of the recipients of a Startup PHL angel round, describes the pros and cons of the city investment program and points out it was the factor in setting up their business there.

Prior to raising a $270,000 angel round led by StartUp PHL, my two cofounders and I had just graduated from our respective grad programs and had placed 3rd in Wharton’s Business Plan Competition. We could have settled our company anywhere, with New York and San Francisco being the obvious choices. For a startup, the initial round of funding is where geography is most critical. Most angels don’t want to invest outside of their backyard, which explains the natural tendency for startups to relocate where there is the most capital.

Kamireddi’s point about capital is critical, for tech startups finding funding is probably the most important factor in where the company is based.

Funding though isn’t the only aspect and for established companies, particularly those in the Bay Area struggling with high costs which is what the New York Times article focuses on in its example of Phoenix, Arizona.

The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

Startups become a Sydney mayoral issue

Encouraging tech startups becomes an issue in the Sydney mayoral election

There’s a mayoral election pending in Sydney and the talk of the city becoming a startup hub is becoming one of the issues.

Over the next few days I’m hoping to interview each of the four major candidates on their policies regarding how they see Sydney competing against the likes of Singapore and Shanghai, let alone San Francisco or London.

In 2009, I was working with the New South Wales state government on their Digital Sydney project which looked at how the state capital could become a global centre, one of the things we found was that the city had many of the attributes successful creative centres had – diversity, tolerance and access to talent.

That project died in the face of bureaucratic ineptitude but the idea still kicks around with last week’s launch of the NSW Government’s Jobs For The Future report which, despite its opening thirty pages of buzzwords and waffle, contains some serious analysis of the state’s reliance on inward facing service industry jobs.

Refreshingly, the NSW Government strategy looks beyond the current mania around tech startups based on the Silicon Valley venture capital model – something the Federal government’s Innovation Statement failed to do – and discusses how to encourage growth and investment in other emergent sectors both inside and outside the inner city startup communities.

While Sydney can be an attractive place to live for the digital elite, it falls down in a number of areas with property being among the most expensive in the world, telecommunications being costly and unreliable coupled with a complacent corporate sector and a stingy investment community.

Making the city more attractive is going to take a number of initiatives that including easing the cost of doing business, improving links between academia and industry along with tapping into Sydney’s diverse immigrant populations.

Some of these factors are within the City of Sydney’s purview but most of them are state or Federal matters. By definition this limits what local politicians can do.

Which doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to do them and it’s good to see these topics have become issues in the local elections. For Sydney though, one suspects it’s going to business as usual until The Lucky Country’s luck runs out.