Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: hardware

  • Niches and needs: necessity and the mother of invention

    Niches and needs: necessity and the mother of invention

    An old saying is necessity is the mother of invention and nowhere is this shown better than walking the exhibition floor of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco today.

    The Wallflower is a good example of this, thought up of after the founder had to rush home when his partner thought she’d left the stove on (she hadn’t), he thought there had to be something that could monitor this on the market and when he discovered there wasn’t, he invented it.

    Snowboarding needs

    Probably the sexiest device on the floor is the Hexo+, an autonomous drone designed for video shots. Use the app to tell you what shot you want and it the drone will take off and video you.

    Hexo+ was founded by Xavier de Le Rue, a French professional snowboarder who wanted to get shots of his maneuvers but couldn’t afford a crew or a helicopter to do so. The preprogrammed flight patterns represent the most common camera sequences optimised for the GoPro camera.

    Probably the most trivial is the MySwitchMate, a mechanical device that fits over a wall light switch. Set it up and you can use its app to flick your lights on and off.

    The device was born out of the founder wanting to remotely control his college dorm lights from his bed. While the market seems to be those who don’t want to get out of bed, its main market are those who would like remotely controlled lights but can’t install a smart lighting system.

    A niche from a need

    What all three of these devices show is how a need by an inventor spurred a  product’s development, in that respect the Internet of Things is no different from any other wave of innovation.

    So if you wonder “why doesn’t someone sell this?” it might be an opportunity to set up your own business or invent an IoT device to meet that need.

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  • Microsoft’s server clock counts down

    Microsoft’s server clock counts down

    One of the challenges facing Microsoft are the millions of users quite happily using the company’s older products.

    While Windows XP is by far the biggest problem – only last year the number of systems running the fourteen year old operating system still outnumbered those running the latest version – Microsoft faces similar issues with its server 2003.

    This week Microsoft warned support for Windows Server 2003 has entered its last one hundred days and urged customers to look at shifting onto new systems.

    Interestingly most of the case studies they cite involve customers moving from on premise servers onto cloud services.

    While that’s very good advice as most customers, particularly small businesses, don’t have the capabilities it shows how the industry has shifted in the last twelve years.

    For most of those companies a decade ago cloud service, or Software as a Service (SaaS) as it was known then, weren’t available for most business functions. Today they are the norm and usually the best option for smaller operations.

    That shift to the cloud has meant an entire industry now faces extinction as the army of suburban IT service companies that once maintained those servers are now largely redundant.

    As the clock ticks down on Windows 2003 server so too does it for all the businesses that once depended upon the PC industry.

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  • The internet of insecure things becomes a problem

    The internet of insecure things becomes a problem

    Following yesterday’s posts on BlackBerry, security and the Internet of Things, HP Fortify released a report saying seventy percent of IoT devices are vulnerable to hackers.

    The list of weaknesses is chilling and illustrates why IoT security is an issue that has to be resolved now.

    It may well be that John Chen, BlackBerry’s CEO, has backed the right horse for his company.

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  • So you think services are easy?

    So you think services are easy?

    ZDNet columnist Ed Bott is possibly one of Microsoft’s closest followers and among the few to defend Windows Vista, Ed though can’t be faulted for doing the hard yards including reading Microsoft’s stock market10-K  filings.

    In their most recent filing, Ed finds Microsoft has used the word “service” 73 times as opposed to 44 appearances last year.

    A key phrase in the filing is “a growing part of our strategy involves cloud-based services used with smart client devices.”

    This is consistent with the hands on previews of Windows 8 which Microsoft have been giving journalists over the last few months. Something that leaps out is the integration with online services; something that both Google and Apple have also been pushing.

    What should worry investors is that moving into services isn’t easy. Service businesses are far more labour intensive and, as a consequence, far less profitable.

    Despite having relatively low labour costs, cloud computing services are problematic as many sectors have been commoditised, which is the genius of Salesforce in establishing a profitable niche.

    The fat margins Microsoft are used to in their core software business can’t be replicated in the cloud based markets, which is one of the reasons why customers are switching to the cloud.

    Microsoft’s problem is shared by telecommunications companies who are finding their cloud offering don’t generate the same ARPUs — Annual Revenue Per User — that they’ve become accustomed to in the mobile phone market. Which means pain for executives whose KPIs are tied to historical performance.

    For Microsoft, the problem is compounded by their simultaneous move into hardware with the Surface tablets. Meaning the company’s has to deal with two significantly different business models to the ones they are used to.

    Again Microsoft aren’t alone in this, Google is having similar problems adjusting to the hardware market though its acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

    Integrating hardware with services and manufacturing isn’t impossible, we only have to look at Apple for how a company can succeed in that space although most managements struggle with the very different demands of each sector.

    During the 1980s we saw the rise of the “all business is soap” philosophy where MBAs and management consultants preached that the challenges of running a business were the same regardless of whether you sold cleaning products, soft drinks, computers or automobiles.

    Those folk were wrong. Most famously the Australian media company Fairfax hired as CEO a business school professor who preached this philosophy and managed to ignore the rise of the Internet, the echoes of the failed McKinsey ideas haunt Fairfax over a decade later.

    While its possible for a software company to succeed at services or hardware, the magnitude and complexity of the management challenge shouldn’t be understated. Both Google and Microsoft will be defined by how well their leaders succeed.

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  • Who will be the future Betamaxes?

    Who will be the future Betamaxes?

    This morning Paypal announced its PayPal Here service, a gizmo that turns a smartphone into a credit card reader.

    On reading PayPal’s media release in the pre-dawn, pre-coffee light I found myself grumpily muttering “which platforms?” as the announcement kept mentioning “smartphones” without saying whether it was for iPhone, Android or other devices.

    It turns out to be both Google Android and Apple iOS. It adds an interesting twist to the Point Of Sale market we’ve looked at recently.

    The omission of platforms like Windows Phone raises the question of which platforms are going to go the way of Betamax?

    Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS systems were the dominant competitors in the video tape market in the early 1980s. They were totally incompatible with each other and users had to make a choice if they wanted to join one camp or the other when they went to buy a video recorder.

    On many measures Betamax was the better product but ultimately failed because VHS offered longer program times and Panasonic’s licensing out of their technology meant there were more cheaper models on the market.

    A few days ago Bloomberg Businessweek listed the Betamax device as one of the “technology’s failed promises”

    With a superficial comparison, Apple would seem to the Betamax while Google and possibly Microsoft are the VHS’s given their diverse range of manufacturers their systems run on and Apple’s refusal to license out iOS, which was one of the reasons for Sony’s failure.

    But it isn’t that simple.

    In the smartphone wars, it’s difficult to compare them to VCRs as the video tape companies never controlled content and advertising the way smartphone systems do – although Sony did buy Columbia Studios at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle in 1987.

    This control of content is what makes the stakes so high in the smartphone and tablet operating systems war. A developer or business that dedicates their resources to one platform could find themselves stranded if that platform fails or changes their terms of services to the developer’s detriment.

    Another assumption is there is only room for one or two smartphone systems; it could turn out the market is quite happy with two, three or a dozen different systems and incompatibilities can be overcome with standards like HTML5.

    In a funny way, it could turn out to be Android becomes the Smartphone Betamax due to having too diverse a range of manufacturers.

    One of the first questions that jumps out when someone announces a new Android app is “which version?” The range of Android versions on the market is confusing customers and not every app will run on each version.

    More importantly for financial apps like PayPal Here and Google Wallet, smartphone updates include critical security patches so many of the older phones that miss out on updates pose a risk to the users.

    In the financial world confidence is everything and if customers aren’t confident their money is safe or will be promptly refunded in the event of fraud they won’t use the service.

    Whether this uncertainty will eventually deal Google out of the game or present an opportunity for Microsoft and other companies is going to be one of the big questions of the mobile payments market.

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