I’ve ranted before about the romantic views corporate executives have about the lives of startup founders.
“News Corp today has the energy and sensibility of a start-up,” Lachlan is quoted in the company’s media announcement.
Let’s see how that goes.
After several years of stalling, MS Office makes it onto the iPad with an announcement this morning by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella.
The idea of tying the product into the company’s Office 365 and Microsoft’s cloud services make sense although it might be a matter of too little, too late.
Perversely, if Office for the iPad is successful, it could remove one of the last barriers for business and power home users moving off PCs.
Microsoft’s move also shows cloud services are now the main focus of the company; Satya and his team have given up any attempt to shore up the traditional – and immensely profitable – box software business.
That is going to mean Microsoft’s financial statements are going to look very different in the near future.
Regardless of the success of Office for the iPad, what were Microsoft’s core businesses are deeply affected as the company evolves to the post-PC computer marketplace. The challenge is for Satya and his management team to manage that change.
The purchase of virtual reality headset designer Oculus by Facebook has raised some interesting questions about crowdfunding sites.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, many of those who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that Oculus ran now feel betrayed by the company selling out to the social media giant.
Founder Palmer Luckey explained the companies sale to the WSJ as a quest for more funds; “a lot of people don’t understand how much money it takes to build things — especially to build hardware.”
That ties into what founders have told Decoding the New Economy about crowdfunding startups; it’s tough and it easy to underestimate the capital required to launch a project.
Ninja Blocks’ Daniel Friedman told Decoding the New Economy last February that the main thing the company had learned from its successful Kickstarter campaign is that crowdfunding is a good way to raise funds for specific projects but a lousy way to fund a business.
Moore’s Cloud wasn’t as successful as Ninja Blocks and in his Decoding the New Economy interview, founder Mark Pesce described how he’d “rather eat bullets” than crowdfund a hardware startup again.
Startups are always hard, but it’s difficult not see how the high moral purpose often citing from Kickstarter project founders clashes with the ruthless moneymaking of Silicon Valley.
The criticism of Oculus also illustrates how crowdfunding lies between traditional investment and sales; those contributing to crowdfunding projects are true believers, not just customers and certainly not investors in a legal sense.
In recent times Kickstarter has been discouraging hardware startups from using their service; mainly because of the high risk of failure and disaffected contributors. The unhappiness with Oculus vindicates that move.
Oculus’ sale to Facebook may make many Kickstarter contributors doubly wary of Silicon Valley style startups trying to raise funds through crowdsourcing campaigns.
Looking at Oculus’ move, it’s hard not to conclude we’re seeing another cynical version of the Lords of the Digital Manor business model where enthusiasts are exploited by entrepreneurs looking for the big Silicon Valley pay off.
For Kickstarter and the other crowdfunding platforms, this is a problem as cynicism about the motives of those posting projects is probably a greater risk than the fear of being ripped off.
It may well be that Oculus marks a big change in the types of projects that get successfully funded, certainly the next hot hardware startup that tries crowdfunding is going to find things much harder.
On Networked Globe I have an interview with Sense-T’s director, Ros Harvey.
Sense-T is a project to connect the entire state to the internet of things using a sensor network monitoring soil, water and other environmental conditions to help the state’s agriculture and business communities.
Harvey’s ambitions for the project are high where she sees Sense-T even having the potential of rekindling the interest of the state’s students in science and technology courses.
It’s a brave project that means a lot to a state that’s doing it tough.
The last two weeks have been pretty hectic with Cisco, Salesforce and Microsoft events in Melbourne, as a result there’s a huge backlog of posts to put up.
One of the interviews that has worked out is with Cisco’s Vice President for Globalisation, Wim Elfrink, which is up on the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.
In it Wim covers how the next wave of upcoming nations, the TIPSS – Turkey, Indonesia, Poland, Saudi Arabia and South Africa – threaten to leapfrog the developed world and the opportunities for businesses in a world where everything is connected.