Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: apple

  • A question of incentives at Microsoft and Apple

    A question of incentives at Microsoft and Apple

    Ben Thompson on his Stratechery blog speculates what Apple would be like were Steve Ballmer running the company.

    Thompson makes an excellent point – that Ballmer has been very good in building a company driven by incentives like salaries, bonuses and titles. It describes Microsoft very well and highlights the companies strengths and weaknesses.

    Were Ballmer to run Apple, Thompson concludes, it would be a far more profitable company than it is today but it would be fading into irrelevance just as Microsoft is.

    That makes sense as Microsoft under Ballmer has been able to profit from the dominant market position it built up in the late 1990s, but the company has struggled against innovative competitors or the big market shifts following the arrival of smartphones and tablet computers.

    Where Thompson is on more shaky territory is citing Amazon as another example of where profit is less important than innovation;

    Amazon famously makes minimal profits; Microsoft made more money last year than Amazon has made ever, yet Amazon too is far more relevant in the consumer market today than is Microsoft.

    Amazon may well be more relevant to the consumer market today than Microsoft, but that’s largely on the back of a business model built on shareholders subsiding customers – something that Apple has never done.

    It may well be that when investors get sick of propping Amazon up, the company’s business model will have to change. Should Amazon have a Microsoft like dominance of the online retail or cloud computing markets then customers might be in for a nasty dose of sticker shock as profits are maximised.

    Ultimately incentives are what shapes a company’s culture – whether the incentives are built around stack ranking, commissions or currying favour with the founder, they will determine how the business behaves.

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  • Could advertising have saved Blackberry?

    Could advertising have saved Blackberry?

    Could advertising have saved Blackberry wonders Joyce Yip on the Marketing Interactive site.

    Yip cites Samsung’s blanket advertising as one of the reason’s for the Korean brand’s success while Blackberry could only afford a token presence for the new Z10 phone.

    While there’s no doubt Samsung and Apple’s marketing muscle has helped them dominate the smartphone market, advertising alone doesn’t explain the dominant brands’ success.

    Blackberry was doomed from the moment a business friendly smartphone was released, no-one expected it at the time but it turned out to be the iPhone.

    Compared to the iPhone, the Blackberry was woefully underfeatured and once corporate users discovered email wasn’t the only use for a smartphone, the Canadian company’s fate was sealed.

    While the Z10 and Q10 phones were well featured devices, they are way too late for a market where Apple and Samsung have most of the sales and take all the profit.

    It’s tempting to think advertising and marketing may have saved Blackberry, but the company was overtaken by a fundamental market change which left it stranded.

    For a while in the late 2000s Blackberry looked untouchable in the corporate market and no-one would have expected Samsung and Apple to disrupt their position. That’s the real lesson Blackberry teaches us.

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  • Cranking up the phone wars

    Cranking up the phone wars

    According to All Things D, Apple will be announcing their next iPhone on September 10.

    With Samsung and Android phones steadily chipping away at Apple’s market share, it’s an opportunity for the company to recapture some of the brand’s allure after the passing of Steve Jobs.

    The market will be expecting a stunning announcement. Should the company disappoint, the pundits will be calling the end of Apple’s dominance and we can expect the firm’s share price can also expect to get further punished with it already down 35% from the $700 peak of a year ago.

    What Apple’s announcement will do is trigger another round of the phone wars as we approach the Christmas buying season. It might be a good time to buy a phone.

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  • Five years of the app store

    Five years of the app store

    It’s been five years that the Apple App Store has been open for business. in that time they’ve revolutionised the smartphone industry, reinvented the tablet computer and had fifty billion downloads.

    While the App Store wasn’t an original idea, plenty of telcos and handset manufacturers, had them, Apple were the first to get the formula right for the iPhone.

    Their success in changing the smartphone industry lead to their dominance of the tablet industry, another sector which had settled incumbents who were disrupted by Apple’s entry into the market.

    It’s notable how in both the smartphone and tablet markets, the established incumbents were struggling with the same business model that Apple got right. This is something other industries should pay attention to.

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  • Little shots at the moon

    Little shots at the moon

    Today I wrote a story for Business Spectator on the Google Loon project, a pilot program to see if high altitude balloons can provide affordable internet access for the developing world.

    What really fascinates me about Loon and the projects in the Google X program is the concept of the ‘moonshot’. Google explain it on their solve for [x] website.

    Moonshots live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; instead of mere 10% gains, they aim for 10x improvements. The combination of a huge problem, a radical solution, and the breakthrough technology that might just make that solution possible is the essence of a Moonshot.

    Great Moonshot discussions require an innovative mindset–including a healthy disregard for the impossible–while still maintaining a level of practicality.

    Missing in that definition is the concept of risk – it’s easy to propose a radical, audacious solution to a problem when it’s not your money or career on the line.

    On the other hand, most organisations that have the resources to experiment with breakthrough technologies stifle any thought of true innovation or radical solutions.

    The advantage Google has is that parts of the organisation encourage those moonshots, although there are divisions of Google which are just as bureaucratic and staid as a chartered accountant’s or quantity surveyor’s office.

    Interestingly Apple were the reverse with only one guy allowed to do moonshots and everyone below him followed him either to the moon or hell, as this wonderful story tells.

    Which brings me to the little folk – the startups, small businesses and backyard inventors who don’t have the resources of Google, Apple or the US space program.

    For that matter there’s also the writers, painters, musicians and other artists who are risking everything for their vision.

    Everyday these people are risking everything for their little ideas as their homes, livelihoods and sometimes their relationships are on the line for their one big idea or audacious vision.

    These are the real risk takers and every day they are taking little shots at the moon.

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