Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Driving Windows 8

    Driving Windows 8

    Microsoft today released their preview edition of Office 2013, the product that underpins the company’s dominance of the business IT sector.

    Users sticking with an older version of Windows hurt Microsoft’s bottom line and one of the key parts of the company strategy with Office is to drive adoption of the latest operating systems which usually means buying new computers.

    The problem for Microsoft is that there has been no real compelling reason for users to upgrade for a decade since the release of Office 2003.

    Coupled with the failure of Microsoft Vista, this had damaged the PC industry’s model of users upgrading computers every three to five years.

    Microsoft would be hoping the cloud integration features, the same versions on desktops, tablets and smartphones coupled with keen prices will be enough to make contented XP users make the jump to Windows 8 and buy a new computer as well.

    Whether it does will depend on the market caring – if users simply don’t care about Office 2013, let alone Windows 8 on either desktops or smartphones, then Microsoft will struggle.

    Unfortunately for Microsoft, the era where they could dictate what people used on their computers is over and that could be their biggest management challenge of all.

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  • Digg and perserverence

    Digg and perserverence

    A couple of years ago news sharing site Digg was one of the hot properties of the Internet. On the weekend Digg’s remaining online assets were sold for $500,000. So what happened to a service that promised so much?

    The short answer is the business was overtaken by other services like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. Coupled with that, the founders moved onto other projects. Running a business is tough and it’s understandable that founders would move away from an enterprise that doesn’t seem to have an exit.

    In many ways this ties into the presentation by Ian Gardiner, Viocorp’s Co-founder and CEO, at Microsoft’s Bizspark APAC conference about perseverance. Where does a business owner draw a line with their startup baby? Should you pivot into another model or just move on from the idea altogether?

    None of this is straightforward and the decisions will be different in every business. A local computer guy is going to have different factors to consider to failing doughnut franchise. Equally a fading media company is going to be very different to those confronting a declining department store – despite what the MBAs and management gurus steeped in the 1980s view that “all business is like soap” ideology.

    For some like Ian, ‘pivoting’ to a new business model is the answer. At the Microsoft event last week, Sebastien Eskersley-Maslin of Blue Chilli described a participant of his  Club Kid Entrepreneur who decided to sell paper airplanes and was so successful they started running out of paper to make new ones.

    Faced with a shortage, the young entrepreneur decided to use the remaining planes as a target game – so rather than selling them, he charged a few cents to throw them at targets.

    That’s the classic pivot, which the founders of Digg couldn’t execute with their web service.

    All isn’t lost for Kevin Rose and the other founders of Digg though, while the headlines read about the $500,000 sale of the remaining assets they overlook that Digg’s other assets sold for sixteen million.

    Choosing to persevere with a struggling business is a matter of faith – faith in yourself, the vision and the product you’re selling. It can be tough to let go of something you have so much faith in.

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  • Avoiding business dependency issues

    Avoiding business dependency issues

    Fortune magazine this week describes how Facebook’s change to the Timeline layout has killed business pages and the billion dollar industry in maintaining those pages.

    According to Mashable, views of Facebook business pages have halved since the timeline feature was introduced which in turn has destroyed the markets of businesses like Buddy Media and Vitrue who were making a good living from setting up corporate Facebook pages.

    Once again this shows the danger of being locked into one service or platform to do business – you genuinely have all your eggs in one basket.

    Whether it’s relying on only one customer or one supplier, the business who is locked into a single channel risks ruin whenever the owners of that channel decide to change something.

    In Facebook’s case, it isn’t greed or simply bastardry that has killed these businesses, just an unintended consequence of an improvement to their service.

    For many businesses throwing all there resources onto social media platforms, they should remember that Facebooks – or Twitter, LinkedIn, Google’s or Pinterest’s – business objectives are not necessarily theirs and any business partnership is at best unequal.

    If you’re going to depend upon one customer or supplier, at least make sure you’re making a fat profit to cover the risk that losing them will kill your existing business.

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  • The Death of the IT Guy

    The Death of the IT Guy

    Until recently the cottage industry of computer repairers was thriving, having been born with the massive take up of computers by homes and businesses in the 1990s.

    Over the years, things got better for the local IT guy as businesses and then homes became networked. Some of the smarter technicians started selling and supporting servers and things got better.

    The arrival of the Internet, the approach of Y2K bug and, in Australia, the introduction of the GST made even more business for the local computer tech and the Windows virus epidemic of the early 2000s guaranteed plenty of work for anybody who knew how to wield a screw driver and a boot disk.

    As the industry matured, maintaining office servers and looking after the regular glitches in desktop computers was a steady, reliable source of income for most support companies.

    Every few years businesses or homes would upgrade their computers and that would trigger a cascade of costs as data was migrated and older peripherals like printers, serial mice and ADB accessories had to be replaced.

    Then all came to a stop with the arrival of cloud computing services where many of older computers could access online applications just as well as newer computers.

    For IT organisations with a business plan based up customers upgrading systems every three to five years this was a disaster.

    These businesses were already feeling the pinch with the late arrival and market rejection of Microsoft Vista and now their customers could sit on older XP machines and happily use the latest online applications.

    Sensible IT folk have understood the change and the good support companies now have an armoury of cloud based services for their customers. These businesses know the IT hardware and support spend of most businesses is shrinking and taking the market with it.

    Unfortunately there are a few holdouts trying to keep the old business model alive who have a hundred reasons why cloud services are no good for their customers.

    To be far to those fixed on the old IT model, this attitude is probably even more prevalent in corporate IT departments and among CIOs with cloud services seen – probably rightly – as a threat to their power and income.

    One of the biggest risks to those support folk who aren’t at least evaluating cloud services for their clients is that shrinking IT spend and eventually there won’t be much money, or customers, left for the old model.

    A similar thing is happening to bookkeepers and accountants as newer businesses and those with younger owners or managers are moving to cloud based software while the older ones are wedded to their legacy systems.

    The older accountants who won’t move to the newer systems are finding their businesses growth stagnant while their younger colleagues are picking up the work from new businesses.

    Computer support was always a business based upon the transition to a digital workplaces, similar to the men employed to walk in front of early motor cars with red flags.

    Now workplace technology has matured, there’s less work for the IT guy. Hopefully most of them will make the change and not get run over like the guys clutching red flags.

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  • On being a Luddite

    On being a Luddite

    “I’m a Luddite”, magazine editor James Tuckerman proclaimed as Master of Ceremonies for Microsoft’s Asia Pacific Bizspark Summit this week.

    James was referring to an article in Australian Anthill in the 1990s where he predicted businesses would never use the Internet for research.

    Being a Luddite isn’t a bad thing, James contends. In his view being skeptical about technology enables business owners to better evaluate technology as Luddites “think like a layman, don’t know the limits and think commercially”.

    None of this is true though – being a skeptic is not the same as being a Luddite.

    The original Luddites in the English Midlands weren’t anti-technology, they were opposed to the technology that would put them out of work.

    At the beginning of the 19th Century, mill workers were a highly skilled and extremely well paid trade but the new automated loom technology meant those skills were no longer needed.

    To protect their livelihoods, the loom workers started smashing the new machines and burning down factories. Eventually they were viciously suppressed by the British government with some being executed while others were transported to Australia.

    What drove the Luddites was the loss of their income and who is to say we would have behaved any differently if we were faced with being unemployed and destitute in the harsh conditions of 19th Century England.

    However we shouldn’t equate being skeptical about technology with being protecting one’s turf.

    Today’s Luddites are those businesses who don’t want to move with the times – those who have grown fat on easy credit or lazily clipping the tickets on state sanctioned monopolies.

    Some of those Luddites are going broke as consumers stop buying electrical goods or cars, while others lobby their friends in government to protect their privileged and profitable positions.

    In the early 1800s the Luddites eventually lost, we can only hope that when history repeats itself two hundred years later today’s Luddites haven’t damaged the economy too much.

    James Tuckerman isn’t a Luddite and that’s why he’s part of the future. I just wish he wouldn’t call himself one.

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