Innovation

The Changemaster got Changed

October 18, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Today’s revelation that Ray Ozzie is leaving Microsoft comes as no surprise. I briefly met Ray in April of 2007 and wrote about that encounter here. I then saw him a year and a half later at the Web 2.0 Summit and wrote about the radically different Ray here. The second time it was as though he was somehow channeling a Microsoft entity and had shifted into “corporate speak mode” in a major (and not good) way. I was instantly turned off. The question I had then was: Will Ozzie change Microsoft…or will Microsoft change him?

Ray got changed.

Though he undoubtedly led many great initiatives at Microsoft, to the world of us outside of the company he was, for the most part, invisible. People I’ve talked to at Microsoft often discuss the factions and turf battles that are endemic to the Microsoft culture and questioned whether he could hope to fill the shoes of what many people at Microsoft have termed “the soul of the company”, Bill Gates.

I suspect he wasn’t able to do things big enough or fast enough within the confines of a culture that doesn’t seem all that innovation-friendly (for a company that spends billions a year on R&D…they seem to have little to show for it besides a few flipper-flappers and dweebezaarbs in the latest version of Office).

About 20 years ago I read a book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, called The Change Masters which might give us some insight in to the challenges Ray faced with Microsoft culture. In it she discussed how, “Change is a threat when done to me, but an opportunity when done by me.” She says on her blog, “I coined this truth in my book which compared innovation-friendly and innovation-stifling corporate cultures, and then saw it in operation in personal relationships, too. Resistance is always greatest when change is inflicted on people without their involvement, making the change effort feel oppressive or constraining. If it is possible to tie change to things people already want, and give them a chance to act on their own goals and aspirations, then it is met with more enthusiasm and commitment. In fact, they then seek innovation on their own.”

I suspect Ray was challenged to completely shift the Microsoft culture away from one where the desktop OS is at the center of the universe to one where the internet, and most specifically cloud computing, most certainly is. Though it’s easy to see that fact outside the company, that’s the sort of change Microsoft people really don’t want and so the resistance to Ray and his initiatives must’ve been enormous.

CEO Steve Ballmer wrote this email to employees about Ray’s departure which certainly seems like he’s admitting “the cloud” is tangential to, “bringing the great innovations and great innovators he’s assembled into the groups driving our business.” Looks like it’s more business as usual at Microsoft…

….and why every developer I talk to, conference I attend and hot tech news article I read NEVER mentions Microsoft anymore, unless they’re discussing how irrelevant the company is in today’s cloud-centric world. If I were Ray, I’d be delighted to be getting the hell out of there.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Innovation

Will Google Experience Control Data’s Fate?

October 14, 2010 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

An early Control Data system with supercomputer genius Seymour Cray at the controls

Google’s recent announcements about their focus on wind energy and these five initiatives bring up the possibility that they’re following in the footsteps of Control Data, a Minnesota corporation that took its eye off the ball and lost their lead as one of the nine most influential computer companies and are now out of business.

Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc. (CRI). CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well known and highly regarded throughout the industry at one time. –from Wikipedia

William Norris, founder and CEO of CDC, was a computer visionary but also a social activist. One of his key initiatives was computer-based learning, an initiative that took an increasing amount of his time and made many people who worked there (and I know dozens and am related to many former CDC employees) continued to be befuddled over the lack of focus on core competitive moves and what seemed like an acceleration in “cause related” investments over the years. Yes, losing Seymour Cray was devastating but there was so much more to the core business than chasing the supercomputer end of it.

Sadly, those of us in Minnesota who looked up to CDC watched it slowly fade away and sell off bits and pieces of itself until it was non-existent.

The Google Self Driving Car

Google’s stated business mission? To, “…organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Beyond the mission they post items like this “Ten Things We Know to be True” manifesto which outlines core beliefs like, “Focus on the user and all else will follow” and when it comes to their primary business, search, that “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.“

So help me understand Google: How do windmills and self driving cars fit in to the focus of Google and everything you stand for and believe? There’s a lot of buzz in the tech community about the “Google brain drain” as people bolt to go to Facebook and other startups and I’m not the only one that wants to see them focus, and I’d hate to see you haunted by the ghost of William Norris who’d hate to see another leading company lose its way.

Filed Under: GreenTech, Innovation

Why Is Apple’s Success Now So Bad?

May 7, 2010 By Steve Borsch 6 Comments

I find it ironic when pundits, developers, partners and even customers cry out in seeming anguish when a company gains a successful foothold in any given marketplace — especially when those same people are the ones who lament a company who is not doing well — and this behavior is particularly pronounced in technology, especially when it comes to Apple.

I worked for Apple in the late 1990s after Steve Jobs had returned to the company. In presentations, sales calls and even at family events, I was in MAJOR DEFENSIVE MODE at all times since I was frequently bombarded by negativity from customers, prospects, family and friends. “Apple is about out of business,” was a familiar refrain as was “Borsch…you’re just a Mac fanboy” from my I.T., Windows machine toting friends and relatives. I was even given crap about owning so much of the stock (which, believe me, I’m damn glad I kept!!) and have felt vindicated as those same people have now flocked to Apple computers and “iStuff” in droves. Many rely on me for advice and assistance as well, but the irony of their previous attitudes are lost on them.

The success of the iPod, and Apple’s quick cornering of the market for music downloads, began to cause angst amongst record executives who saw not a savior of their failing business model, but a company now positioning them for success in a digital world.

Exactly the same thing is happening now with the iPhone and the iPad and Apple’s insistence on no Flash and controlling how the applications are developed and deployed on these devices. The iPhone (according to Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker) had the fastest rampup in sales of any consumer device ever. It appears that the iPad’s 1 million in sales in 28 days (which Steve Jobs said, “One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone.“) may make it the fastest ramping product ever.

I’ve read many of the arguments for-and-against the closed nature of the “iApp” marketplace and am not going to delve into that in this post, but all of the recent brouhaha about Apple’s “no Flash in iStuff” policy and their supposed “stranglehold on tools to develop iApps” is an example of the concern of success and Apple’s incredible strategic thinking about the marketplace, technology landscape, and anticipating the direction we’re all moving towards and innovating with devices we’ll need to make that journey more effective. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Computing, Innovation, Technology

Is Your Favorite Product Homeless?

March 17, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

What happens when one of your favorite products sees sales dwindle and it, in effect, becomes homeless?

My favorite coffeemaker, the Senseo^®, uses coffee pods that are becoming increasingly difficult to find at retail and when I do, it’s usually for a flavor I don’t drink (like the Dark Roast pictured above). Any smart techie and ‘net user like me would just go online and order them in bulk, right?

The answer is “yes” but in a strange twist on the “I can buy that cheaper online” phrase many of us use when trying to negotiate while shopping in a bricks-n-mortar store, the online purchase of coffee pods are much higher ($.50 – $1.60 more per pack) than I could buy them at Target, Cub Foods or other outlets.

What’s driving this lack of inventory at retail? I’ll boil it down to one development over the last several years: choices in coffeemakers. From traditional percolators to drop-in little ‘cups’ to several different types and sizes of coffee pods, for retailers it would be like trying to stock DVDs in half a dozen formats so they just don’t and they’re bound to be out of one of them at frequent intervals.

But it’s not just specialized coffeemaker coffee that is homeless. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Commerce Tagged With: coffee, Senseo

Coffee is for Closers

March 4, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Do you deserve coffee?

At least a dozen times at sales meetings over the past 15 years or so, many sales leaders have trotted out this video snippet from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and then expounded on its virtues, clearly using it as a great kick in the seat of our pants as salespeople. I’m here to point out how that this clip (after the jump and NSFW, by the way) is relevant to anyone who has to produce…whether you’re a developer/coder, factory worker, farmer, call center or support person, or in any field where results matter.

Alec Baldwin is on screen for less than seven minutes and, in my and many other people’s views, his is the defining performance of that movie and incredibly powerful. The premise, according to the Wikipedia article about the film, “Early in the movie Blake (Alec Baldwin) is sent by Mitch and Murray (the faceless owners of the real estate office in which the main characters work), to motivate them by announcing, in a torrent of verbal abuse, that only the top two sellers will be allowed the more promising “Glengarry” leads, and everyone else will be fired.“ This confrontation sets up the rest of the film: the motivations that the characters feel that this rainy night is a make-or-break one; the reason the incident with the Glengarry leads that occurs later on; and the promise that — if only each salesman was better at closing like Blake — that they could achieve the same sorts of results as a guy that made $920k, drove an $80k BMW and sports a $25k gold Rolex.

Anyone whose been in sales for any length of time knows that there are many variables that enable one to achieve wildly successful sales numbers. An enterprise software salesperson in New York, L.A. or Chicago has more opportunity than one in Kansas City, for example, and top performers are usually in major markets. Same thing holds true for those who sell into vertical markets where they canvas accounts across many geographies.

But any salesperson who has been even modestly successful also knows one fundamental truth, and it’s a truth that cuts across all professions and labors.

This Kind of Guy is the Future of Education

February 25, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Salman Khan of KhanAcademy.org

I’m biased, but there’s no question that I fundamentally believe that the future of education is online. Talking to my daughter yesterday, a student at the University of Minnesota, she’d mentioned how dismayed she was having to take the bus to campus, walk to the one class she had that day, sit in a lecture, and then go home. “What a waste of time,” she said, “But I have to go since my prof takes attendance.” So I inquired if they streamed the lecture online. “Are you KIDDING ME!?!” she exclaimed. “Most of these professors and TA’s can barely hook up their computers!“

What you’re about to view is an excellent example of the types of teaching that are exploding on the ‘net. From Instructables to Howcast (the latter is where I learned how to fix the overflow valve on my toilet) to this young man, Salman Khan of Khan Academy, most of this sort of teaching will be pooh-poohed by traditionalists and seen as augmenting existing meatspace education in buildings.

Fortunately, people like Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen see things differently. Christensen has described the three stages of disruption, the status quo will first see disruptors like Khan as “crappy” and ignore them, then they’ll become “less crappy” and early adopters will flock to them, and when they become “good enough” is the tipping point when disruptors kill status quo industries and yes, education is an industry since they still teach using an industrial age, factory model.

Watch this six minute video (discovered via Sid Yadav) and you’ll see what I mean about what one disruptor guy is doing for math education:

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kly25zVbco

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Innovation, Internet Tagged With: disruption, education, math, teaching

A Penny Saved is Actually $0.17 Cents

February 19, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

This is the new design of the U.S. penny being minted now. The kicker? According to this March 2008 ABC News article, “It costs almost 1.7 cents to make a penny,” according to U.S. Mint director Ed Moy. Each year, the U.S. Mint makes 8 billion pennies, at a cost of $130 million. American taxpayers lose nearly $50 million in the process. The penny’s not alone. It costs nearly 10 cents to make a nickel.

Why not just ditch the penny? “One reason there is a lasting attachment to those coins is because they are a part of our country’s history,” Moy said in that article. I’ll accept that or some of the other things I’ve read that it will kickstart inflation. Why? Because sellers will “round up” and not “round down” with prices so there will be an immediate jump in costs for everything from toothpaste to TVs.

How could technology make our paying with pennies more efficient? With more and more of us walking around with smartphones, micropayments may be one answer. This would be a method where each of us would have an account that incremental sums (i.e., amounts in pennies) would be sent to or subtracted from during a transaction. I shudder, however, when I think about all the systemic and behavioral changes something like that would require.

Funny (and admittedly tangential) story about pennies happened when I was 16 years old. There was a guy who owned a gas station near our house and he was a complete jerk and especially so to young people. My friend Jeff and I were in his Mom’s car and stopped for gas. The guy inadvertently put in $10 worth in the tank and we had $5 with us and Jeff had told him he wanted $5 worth…but the guy then blew his stack and threatened to call the police on us until we agreed to go get the $5 and come back (he also wrote down Jeff’s license number).

We came back an hour later and Jeff handed him a jar with 500 pennies. “Goddammit!” the owner screamed. “I don’t have to accept these pennies!” but Jeff put it on the counter and we turned around and left. The owner never did anything and, in fact, was out of business two years later (I assume for being a jerk and driving customers away).

When I think about micropayments, I’d actually like having an online slush fund for paying a penny, nickel or dime to read an article online. This would be trivial to do and might help fund an otherwise declining media base. But another thing to consider with payments becoming virtual are the privacy, free speech and other concerns. For a complete and exhaustive paper on the subject, read The Digital Imprimatur by Autodesk founder John Walker from 2003.

Filed Under: Commerce, Current Affairs Tagged With: micropayments, penny

GoodGuide: Holding Producers Accountable

February 18, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

When I wrote yesterday’s post Food, Inc.: I will never look at dinner the same way again I intended to point out some tools you can use to make informed decisions about what you eat and the companies that are producing your foods.

GoodGuide is both a website and a free iPhone/iPod Touch application which allows we mobile users to “simply scan the barcode of the product and immediately see detailed ratings for health, environment and social responsibility for more than 50,000 products and companies. GoodGuide provides this information about personal care, household chemical, toy and food products for free on your iPhone / iPod Touch and is adding thousands of products every month. By making information about consumer products transparent, GoodGuide’s goal is to help people shop smarter and motivate companies to offer even better products.“

On their homepage you can learn about the issues, see food recalls and other related news, and my favorite thing to do, browse ratings of other products. If you signup you can create a “Favorites” list and begin amassing a database of your preferred products.

Besides the obvious power this is putting in the hands of consumers, what’s most interesting to me (and to our clients) is how empowered consumers will likely have applications that go far beyond food product and the food distribution companies. Imagine you’re a furniture manufacturer and consumers can make choices to buy products from companies that don’t use formaldehyde. What would you do if your sales started to drop? You bet….start making formaldehyde-free furniture. (For more see the Wall Street Journal on “New Bill Could Limit Formaldehyde in Furniture” and SFGate’s article “What’s in furniture? It’s enough to make you sick“).

So if you’re primarily interested in being an empowered consumer, download the free GoodGuide and apps like it. If you’re in the business of producing goods or selling services that rely on other’s products, you’d better understand the entire supply chain of those goods and get ready for heightened awareness and accelerated choices by consumers!

Filed Under: Commerce, Current Affairs, GreenTech, Technology Tagged With: formaldehyde, toxic

Food, Inc.: I will never look at dinner the same way again

February 17, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

One of the benefits of Netflix on-demand streaming is the number of documentaries I’ve had access to and am watching, one of which my daughter and I watched last night called Food, Inc., and the movie troubled both of us and I’m still thinking about it this morning.

I can’t find the reference for the article this morning, but there was a research study I read a few years ago that compared the “cost” of a calorie 200 years ago (what it took to grow, harvest, cook and eat a calorie) vs. the cost in effort and energy today. It was significantly greater in the past, of course, and the other statement that stuck in my mind was that the typical American household had more calories in their cupboards than the typical family ate in a month in 1850 (I’ll keep trying to find the data and do an update).

Watching this movie pointed out that the efficiencies of our industrial food system, combined with farm subsidies that keep costs for commodities at artificially low amounts, have kept costs low throughout the food creation and distribution system. While cheap calories have helped America become the envy of the world as we feed millions of us and others around the world, it has also caused us to opt for processed foods over raw veggies and meals that we have to cook and made half of we Americans fat (and I can attest to that!).

Usually I try not to be an alarmist, but the opacity of the industrial food system has become quite troublesome and this movie pointed it out better than anything I’ve ever watched. This is not my attempt to vilify the food industrial complex, but rather ensure that more of us demand to know what’s happening up the food creation chain so we know what we’re eating. I’ve often said that if people could take one tour of a cow, pig or chicken slaughterhouse we’d have a helluva lot of vegetarians in America, but same goes for the amount of crap that’s in our foods.

Take a peek at this trailer and I’d encourage you to rent it and then you can head over to their Food, Inc. website and take action. If it doesn’t open your eyes and change your habits, I’ll wave when I see you in the supermarket as you buy your big bag of Doritos and Jimmy Dean sausage for supper.

Filed Under: Commerce, Current Affairs, Earth, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness Tagged With: food, organic, processed food

Steve Wozniak on Color Computing

February 16, 2010 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

When Apple released the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, it was a big deal with its color display. Since I love poking around FORA.tv and watching the thought leader videos curated there, I was pleased to see this snippet of a Steve Wozniak (Woz) interview (you can watch the entire hour+ program here) about the spark of genius. The cool thing? As you listen and watch Woz describe how he came up with the idea to deliver color computing for a radically reduced price, it is the quintessential description of problem solving and creative solutions to problems.

This was recorded at the Bay Area Discovery Museum on February 1, 2010 and they describe it this way:

Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and philanthropist in conversation at the Discovery Forum 2010 with Emmy-award winning journalist Dana King from CBS 5 Eyewitness News.

Renowned technology pioneer Steve Wozniak speaks to the importance of hands-on learning and encouraging creativity, and how the Bay Area Discovery Museum is a critical resource for preparing children for the challenges of the 21st century.

The Discovery Forum serves to increase awareness about the importance of childhood creativity, and raises support for the Museum’s educational exhibitions and programs.

Watch this couple of minute segment (yes, there are ads first) and you’ll see what I mean about creative problem solving: