apple | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Who will win the race for wearable computers?

The race for computers that work in glasses is hotting up and there’s no guarantee Google will be the winner.

The news that wearable technology company Recon has secured funding from Intel and shipped fifty thousand devices reminds us that it’s not just Google who are in the market developing glasses that work as computers.

Other companies competing with Google include Glass Up, an Italian startup that’s teamed with Australian company Nubis to provide a wearable device that’s controlled by a smart phone app.

It’s tempting to think that the battle for wearable technology will be won by Google as they are biggest and best funded company, but history shows us size and incumbency don’t always guarantee success.

Google themselves have failed many times when they’ve tried to enter new markets, regardless of the money and resources they’ve thrown at the market.

The best recent example of this is Microsoft’s forays into smartphones and tablet computers during the Windows XP period – A decade ago it was obvious to everyone that Windows based phones and tablets would dominate those markets.

As it turned out the clunky and awkward to use devices scared customers away and it was Apple and Steve Jobs who ended up being the dominant players.

So it may well be that a company we’ve written off – maybe Microsoft – who might end up being the leader in wearable computers, although it’s more likely an upstart like Recon or Glass Up will eventually be the leader.

It may even be that glasses don’t work out as wearable computers at all.

Microsoft’s continued evolution

Microsoft are evolving to a changed market, but can they evolve quickly enough to beat their competitors?

Today’s investor briefing by software giant Microsoft shows the company’s evolution as their markets shift.

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner broke out the key numbers for the company’s revenues which illustrate just how the company’s business model is changing.

Over half of Microsoft’s revenues are coming from enterprise customers and of the product lines, Office unit makes up just under a third, Server and Tools slightly more than a quarter while Windows has fallen to 25 percent.

Despite the decline in Widows’ revenues, there’s no doubt about Microsoft’s determination to drive the PC upgrade cycle through the retirement of Windows XP as Turner explained.

We have a giant XP install base. But guess what? We’ve made so much progress on that XP install base. It’s down to 21 percent worldwide, and we have plans to get that number to 13 percent by April when the end-of-life of XP happens.

A big part of the change is the shift to the cloud with Turner claiming two hundred percent growth in Microsoft’s Azure services.

Despite the change in Microsoft’s focus, the threats remain with Apple releasing both iOS7 and their new range of iPhones along with Google making their QuickOffice mobile app free to iOS and Android users.

While Microsoft are steering their ship around, the incumbents in other sectors are protecting their positions. In an evolving world, survival is not guaranteed.

A question of incentives at Microsoft and Apple

Incentives create a company culture as we see within Microsoft, Apple and Amazon

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.

Could advertising have saved Blackberry?

Would 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.

Cranking up the phone wars

Can Apple recapture its mojo with the next iPhone?

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.

Five years of the app store

The Apple App Store enters its fifth year of disrupting the smartphone and tablet computer industries.

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.

Little shots at the moon

Everyday there’s thousands of people risking all on their own little moonshots.

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.

Steve Ballmer’s big platform change

Microsoft contemplates big changes as the computer market evolves around portable tablets and smartphones.

All Things D today reports that Microsoft is considering a major restructure to reflect changed computing markets.

One of the big messages from The State Of The Internet report is we are seeing three simultaneous changes to the computer industry – the shift from personal computers to smartphones, tablet computers and wearable systems – and Microsoft is at the centre of these transformations.

One graph, first released by Aysmco and expanded in the Meeker presentation, illustrates how fundamental these shifts are to Microsoft’s business.

Microsoft’s domination of the computer industry was almost total at the beginning of the century and remained so until the iPhone was released in 2007. Then suddenly things changed.

With the success of Android and the iPad, the market shifted dramatically against Microsoft and the WinTel market share is now back to 1985 levels when the Commodore 64 was a credible competitor.

The change that Microsoft faces shouldn’t be understated, although the company’s strengths with products like Office, Azure and Hotmail (or whatever this year’s name for their online mail product is) give the once untouchable incumbent some opportunities, particularly in the cloud.

At the end of Mary Meeker’s presentation at the D11 conference, Walt Mossberg asked her about Microsoft’s view that tablets and smartphones are just new computing platforms. Meeker dismisses that with the observation that the data is clear, the market has shifted to Apple and Google.

“Google and Apple are driving innovation,” says Meeker. “Microsoft is not.”

The numbers aren’t lying for Microsoft. That’s why Steve Ballmer has to move fast and think creatively about the company’s future.

They do it different over here

Microsoft and Apple discover the downside of being multinationals in China

Among expats in Thailand the saying was “the locals can ignore the law, but multinationals can’t.”

Thailand has some pretty strict laws on employee wages, workplace safety and council permits. Pretty well every business ignores them except the multinationals.

Generally Thais don’t complain about businesses not complying with the rules and the authorities are reluctant to take action.

Unless you’re a multinational, in which case the slightest irregularity in pay risks a visit from the police.

A few days in the Bangkok Immigration Gaol while the misunderstanding is sorted out is a good lesson for any sloppy farang country manager who hasn’t been ticking all the boxes.

The recent protests in China against Apple and now Microsoft over warranties illustrate a similar situation in the PRC.

What’s fascinating though is how the complaints against Microsoft and Apple are part of the rising Chinese consumer movement.

It’s a tough life being a consumer advocate in China, leading protests against well connected local companies or their government cronies could be a career limiting move, or much worse.

On the other hand it’s safe to criticise an American corporation and its much more likely to get results.

So managers of foreign companies in China have to be far more responsive to complaints than their local counterparts as Apple and Microsoft have learned.

For multinationals there is an upside to this, foreign companies tend to get better staff as they don’t mess people around with pay and their products are seen as being better because they do honor warranties.

It ends up being swings and roundabouts, but it does emphasise the traps for inexperienced expat managers who can unwittingly get themselves in trouble.

Apple and Microsoft have learned their lesson about customer service in China, you wonder how many others are still to do so.

Corporate palaces and the new Ceasars

An opulent corporate headquarters is often the indicator that management’s mind is on things other than customer service or shareholder’s return.

One of the key traits of managerialism is executives spending vast quantities of shareholders’ money on opulent corporate headquarters, is Apple the latest company to succumb to this disease?

Building a new headquarters is fun for managers. One company I worked for in the early 1990s was debilitated for months as executives spent most of their time moving walls, rearranging desk positions and changing lift designs to reflect their status as grand visionaries.

For the company gripped with delusions of management grandeur a flashy head office is the must have accessory. It’s the corporate equivalent of the Skyscraper Index and is almost as good a predictor that a change in fortunes is imminent.

Apple’s new headquarters is nothing if not impressive. Bloomberg Newsweek reports the building which, at two thirds the size of the Pentagon, will house 12,000 employees is currently estimated at costing five billion dollars, sixty percent over the original budget.

The plans call for unprecedented 40-foot, floor-to-ceiling panes of concave glass from Germany. Before the Cupertino council, Jobs noted, “there isn’t a straight piece of glass on the whole building?…?and as you know if you build things, this isn’t the cheapest way to build them.”

With over a $120 billion in cash, Apple can certainly afford to spend five or ten billion on new digs despite the grumbling of shareholders who have had to settle for a stingy 2.4% dividend from their shares.

The big question though for Apple shareholders though is whether a project like this indicates a company that has peaked with management more intent on building monuments to itself or its genuinely visionary founder rather than deliver returns to owners or products to customers.

On the latter point, there’s no evidence of Apple losing their way with their products yet, but it’s something worth watching in case management becomes distracted with their building project.

For the company I worked for, the distracted managers all vanished one day when the main shareholder of the Thai-Singaporean joint venture discovered they’d been fiddling the books. They probably needed to pay for the office fit out.

Apple and the argument for hybrid cloud computing

The argument between cloud computing purists and hybrid advocates continues with both sides suffering setbacks

There’s two different philosophies about cloud computing, hybrid and ‘pure’. In recent days the hybrid school hasn’t been doing so well, but the matter isn’t settled yet.

Pure cloud computing means doing everything in the cloud with all your software running over the net with the data stored on other people’s computers and everything is accessed through web browsers.

Hybrid cloud is where some of the work is done on your computer or smartphone with data often being synchronised between the device and the cloud storage.

Most smartphone and tablet computer apps do this and increasingly software like Microsoft Office and Apple iLife have a hybrid cloud computing angle.

Apple’s hybrid cloud service, iCloud, promised Apple users the ability to work on any device – laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone – with the synchronised with central servers. Every Apple product you own can then access your iCloud data.

Recently though stories in the The Verge and Ars Technica report how Apple’s developers and customers are becoming steadily irritated by the lousy reliability of the company’s iCloud service.

Incumbent software and hardware vendors like Microsoft and Apple are pushing the hybrid idea for a good reason, it allows them to maintain their existing PC and laptop based products while being able to offer cloud services like their competitors.

For Microsoft and Apple, along with companies like Oracle, Dell and MYOB, the hybrid cloud gives them an opportunity to wriggle out of what Clay Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Customers actually like the hybrid cloud as many distrust ‘pure’ cloud offerings as they don’t trust the providers or their internet connections. Basically they like to have a copy of their data stored in house.

The problem with the hybrid cloud is that it’s complex as Xero’s founder Rod Drury, one of the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists, said at his company’s conference last year, “hybrid technologies are cumbersome and add far more complexity into software. Cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

Complexity is what’s bought Apple’s iCloud unstuck as even some of best developers struggle with getting their programs to work with it.

All is not well for the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists either, as the shutting down of Google Reader has shaken many technologists and made them question whether the cloud is as safe as they would like.

Added to this uncertainty about the cloud is lousy service by providers, arbitrary shutting down of user accounts and the corporate boycott of Wikileaks – all of which have forced people to reconsider the wisdom of saving all their data or running applications in the cloud.

So the debate between the cloud purists is by no means over and it may well be that some form of hybrid, even just for local backup to your own computer, may turn out to be the common way we use cloud services.

What is for sure though is cloud software is biting deeply into the revenues of established software companies as people find the attractions of running programs and storing data on other people’s computers outweighs the risks.

Like all relatively new concepts it’s going to take a while for us to figure out how to use cloud computing most effectively in our business. The first step is how we manage the risks.

People like us – could poor hiring practices bring down Silicon Valley?

Are poor hiring practices putting Silicon Valley at risk?

A strange little story appeared in Business Insider a few weeks back, 9 Things Your Resume Needs if you want to be Hired by Apple or Google is a curious view into the mindset of Silicon Valley.

Purporting to be an extract from a book written by a former recruiter who claims to have worked for Apple, Google and Microsoft, the story exposes a weakness in Silicon Valley and the technological elite which may cause the very disruptions they have unleashed to work against them.

The nine items are fascinating for the elitist, US-centric view of the world they portray and each is worth investigating on their own.

If you graduated from an elite college, your chances of getting an interview vastly improve

Yes, where you went to school does matter to the tech giants. Of course there are exceptions, but McDowell says an Ivy League or other top university will get you noticed.

There’s not much more to add to this, except to note that the vast majority of students whose families can afford such an education are from the upper middle class.

The Googles and Apples like to see relevant internship experience.

If you waited tables when you were 19, that isn’t attractive.

If you are lucky enough to get into a an Ivy League school on a scholarship or manage to scrape together the money you may still not make the cut.

To the author, only those with sufficient wealth to participate in unpaid internships are going to get jobs at the top Silicon Valley companies.

Your major matters

Sorry liberal arts people or chemical engineers, you’ll need another way in to Google or Apple.

This is an interesting one, Silicon Valley boosters often talk about the creative process and how coders are artists however according to the recruiter that’s just lip service.

She encourages students to pick majors that are directly relevant to Google or Apple. Finance, accounting, marketing or computer science majors have the best shot of being noticed by a tech recruiter. At the very least, minor in one of those fields.

A focus on finance, accounting and marketing is the same as any old corporation – you could be going for a job with AT&T, Goldman Sachs or the government with qualifications like that. So much for unique.

Dissing chemical engineering is particularly interesting as Chem Eng graduates have passed one of the toughest university degrees. Whats more, the demands of mobile computing devices means battery technology is one of the most pressing issues facing Silicon Valley at the moment. Chemical Engineers are the folk who will solve this problem.

Big tech companies like to see people giving back to their communities.

Volunteering can be a great way to buff up your resume. That said, McDowell warns: “don’t serve soup in a soup kitchen.”

Instead she suggests hunting for a sales or marketing position, or offering to help a charity with its website and design.

This is a really obnoxious statement – basically saying we want to you volunteer, but we don’t want you to help people.

Just how many sales and marketing people are needed by soup kitchens, volunteer fire brigades or community pantries is open to debate.

A bigger issue with this mentality is that it favours bureaucrats and paper shufflers rather than doers. Which again is something anathema to the public statements of Silicon Valley’s leaders.

They also like good spellers and speakers.

Writing and communications skills aren’t just necessary for media jobs. They’re important in any career you’ll have.

Well, duh.

If you are buddies with college professors, that’s a plus.

Professors aren’t just impressed by how you do in their classes. McDowell suggests helping them with research projects, asking for help and attending office hours, or becoming a teaching assistant.

That doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty basic vanilla advice and again it’s tough luck if you have to do a shift at the local fast food restaurant so you can feed yourself.

Show you understand multiple positions at Google or Apple

If you want to work at one of the top tech companies, it helps to have at least a basic understanding of multiple positions in the organization. McDowell calls this being a Generalist.

On one hand this advice makes sense but on another many technical roles are not generalist positions.

Generally having a knowledge of the company’s structure and roles is going to look good to any interviewer, assuming you can get past the gatekeeper at the recruitment company.

Entrepreneurs have a better shot of being hired.

This is a funny one, if you’re a real entrepreneur then the thought of working in cubicle at Apple or Microsoft while answering to a middle manager straight out of a Dilbert cartoon ranks with getting hot pine needles thrust under your toenails.

One of the conceits of modern corporate life is that they value entrepreneurs and the free-wheeling spirits – the truth is they don’t and the first true hint of entrepreneurialism among the ranks will be smothered quickly with a deluge of paperwork.

Funnily enough, being a successful tech entrepreneur is a path to getting a good job at a tech company although it’s more likely to happen as an acqui-hire than through a recruiter.

Good news: Your GPA doesn’t matter very much

Most people think tech companies, Google in particular, harp over candidates’ GPAs. McDowell says there is little truth to that rumor.

This is only good news if you’ve ticked most of the other boxes, which means you’ll be considered if you’re middling graduate from Stanford or Harvard but forget it if you went elsewhere, regardless of how good your marks are.

The danger of recruiters

What the Business Insider story really illustrates are the risks of relying on third party recruiters as gatekeepers to filter out new employees.

Regardless of how good the recruitment consultant is they are going to apply their own cultural filters and biases onto the selection process and as a result knock out most good candidates.

More importantly, a company risks developing a monoculture if the recruitment process is too effective at filtering out people who don’t fit a narrow stereotype.

A new breed of officemen?

Reading the Business Insider story leaves one with the feeling that many of these companies are beginning to look like IBM in the 1960s – monocultures more concerned about the colour of an employee’s tie and choice of shirts rather than the talents they bring to the organisation or the value they can add to customers.

This is probably the greatest risk of all to the tech industry, that they end up with an insular group of people with fixed mindsets.

Should that happen, then the wave of disruption Silicon Valley has unleashed on the world will end up being the industry’s undoing as smart kids working out of garages in Michigan or slums in Delhi will out innovate the staid, comfortable incumbents.

It’s also interesting to consider how many other industries are now suffering after several decades of similar recruiting practices where leading businesses are now dominated by insular, unworldly monocultures.

Image courtesy of Alexfurr on SXC.HU