This is the question that is so hard to get an answer to any way other than by having a conversation with the person in question.
A colleague recently added another dimension to this by saying 'we know more than we can tell' in the context of expertise and if this is so, and I suspect it is, it makes things even more complicated.
Systems that pool expertise can include self declared expertise, experience and referral based data, all of which seek to create a rounded profile of what the individual knows and knows best.
Part of the problem with any organized structure in which expertise is classified is that it may miss the 'soft' things turn out to be very important in the overall picture. For example the individual may have as a tangential but complimentary experience that speaks very well to some expertise, or, may have lived in place where first hand experience of something local was very informative and catalytic in understanding a certain issue.
I recall hearing a presentation of this subject where the inclusion of free form and non taxonomic expertise categories was a key part to finding the right people for the job, in this case the speaker was giving the example of someone who had 'flying fox relocation' experience...something that would never have been picked up in any classification system but appeared to be very material to the needs of the searcher.
How do we build better systems to accommodate this sort of thing? For now the inclusion of free form text is a good catch all and perhaps the addition of an anonymous expertise rating system based on the experience of others with an individual. This is of course a little tricky and may be best done on a personal level within the social networking software we use to manage our interactions.
LinkedIn is probably the best expertise location system out there today but even then, you really need to read between the lines when looking at someone's profile to get a good sense of what they know and how they know it.
How LinkedIn evolves in this respect will be very interesting and, a bit like Google, this evolution will probably set many of the standards in the space going forwards.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Sunday, January 6, 2008
The Value Proposition
As often happens when the ideas people meet the accountants, there comes the question: "What is the return we get for this investment?"
In KM this has been a very difficult question to answer because so many of the value levers are quite a way removed from the source of the value and they tend to be 'soft' rather than hard in nature.
Can we really measure how much more efficient it was to complete the task at hand with access to an up to date KM repository, People-finder or other system versus doing it the old fashioned way?
We know there is value of course, but it is not easy to measure.
When we look into the value of adding Social Networking features to our KM mix, the question arises once again.
In this case we are seeking to make an investment that facilitates how people build and use Social Networks so that we can reap the benefit of facilitating these connections.
To begin with we have to start with some sort of a value proposition.
Thinking about this recently, I came across a paper from 2003 on the subject by Ronald S. Burt called "Social Origins of Good Ideas" which you can access here.
In the body of this paper I read the following which seems to speak rather well to the value proposition we seek:
"People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a competitive advantage in delivering good ideas"
This is a very nice way of defining the value that the peoples personal networks offer outside of the organizational hierarchy wherein they work.
Further to this, the writer goes on to delve a little deeper into the actual process that makes this so:
"People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another"
There you have it: creativity as a trading business, informally a network becomes an exchange or a market place of ideas, the members are the brokers.
There is a certain elemental truth to this that begins to seem blindingly obvious but, like most things, has to be defined in words for it to really come into view.
The logical conclusion you can draw from this would be as follows:
Proactively facilitating Social Networks inside an organization is valuable because they provide an alternate way to link individuals across disciplines that the organizational hierarchy may not recognize.
Further to this, facilitating the mechanisms by which participants can state with a degree of clarity, context and accuracy, the things they know and the ideas they have in such a way as can be easily transmitted to others across the network is the best way to achieve a strong value proposition for the network.
One self-limiting factor in the value of the network that appears in this consideration is the tendency for people to network most with like-people.
To the extent that this happens it would appear to reduce the value of the network if we are to believe that diversity is the key to old ideas from one discipline becoming fresh new ideas in another.
It would seem likely that there is a balance to be achieved between heterogeneity and homogeneity to best achieve the most fertile network.
There may be a way we can measure this and derive some sort of a balance coefficient that would help us manage the network to keep it in it's most productive state.
Of course that's all a bit far from the day-to-day of pushing forward with the best KM systems we can build, but it does provide a fascinating way to view the value of what we are building.
In KM this has been a very difficult question to answer because so many of the value levers are quite a way removed from the source of the value and they tend to be 'soft' rather than hard in nature.
Can we really measure how much more efficient it was to complete the task at hand with access to an up to date KM repository, People-finder or other system versus doing it the old fashioned way?
We know there is value of course, but it is not easy to measure.
When we look into the value of adding Social Networking features to our KM mix, the question arises once again.
In this case we are seeking to make an investment that facilitates how people build and use Social Networks so that we can reap the benefit of facilitating these connections.
To begin with we have to start with some sort of a value proposition.
Thinking about this recently, I came across a paper from 2003 on the subject by Ronald S. Burt called "Social Origins of Good Ideas" which you can access here.
In the body of this paper I read the following which seems to speak rather well to the value proposition we seek:
"People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a competitive advantage in delivering good ideas"
This is a very nice way of defining the value that the peoples personal networks offer outside of the organizational hierarchy wherein they work.
Further to this, the writer goes on to delve a little deeper into the actual process that makes this so:
"People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another"
There you have it: creativity as a trading business, informally a network becomes an exchange or a market place of ideas, the members are the brokers.
There is a certain elemental truth to this that begins to seem blindingly obvious but, like most things, has to be defined in words for it to really come into view.
The logical conclusion you can draw from this would be as follows:
Proactively facilitating Social Networks inside an organization is valuable because they provide an alternate way to link individuals across disciplines that the organizational hierarchy may not recognize.
Further to this, facilitating the mechanisms by which participants can state with a degree of clarity, context and accuracy, the things they know and the ideas they have in such a way as can be easily transmitted to others across the network is the best way to achieve a strong value proposition for the network.
One self-limiting factor in the value of the network that appears in this consideration is the tendency for people to network most with like-people.
To the extent that this happens it would appear to reduce the value of the network if we are to believe that diversity is the key to old ideas from one discipline becoming fresh new ideas in another.
It would seem likely that there is a balance to be achieved between heterogeneity and homogeneity to best achieve the most fertile network.
There may be a way we can measure this and derive some sort of a balance coefficient that would help us manage the network to keep it in it's most productive state.
Of course that's all a bit far from the day-to-day of pushing forward with the best KM systems we can build, but it does provide a fascinating way to view the value of what we are building.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Scrum, agile, waterfalls, iterations....
SDLC or the Software Development Life Cycle has taken many forms over the years. From the rigid and carefully documented step by step approach common to mainframe programming shops through to the more versatile "Rational Unified Process" of the Nineties. Now we are really seeing something else starting to make inroads in a formalized way.
Agile process coding is not new, it appeared first in the code slinging days of the early Internet. Throw up a web site, does it work? No, change it and try again. All in the context of continuous user review and feedback.
More recently with the standardized Agile models like Scrum taking off, we are again searching for the best, quickest and of course, cheapest ways to make applications work the way they are expected to.
Our recent experience with Scrum shows it can deliver, in smaller projects at least.
The repeated review cycles, the weekly or bi-weekly sprint reviews and poker sessions (not Vegas poker but a session where people put up estimates based on how long a 'story' will take to complete) the constant reprioritization and the daily standup meetings all have great value in getting things out the door.
Where things seem to come apart, a bit anyway, is when you try and create a project plan (I use MS project) and locate the start and endpoints for feature creation on the plan.
Given the way Scrum keeps moving things around and the apparant freedom from other constraints which may not be well articulated in the poker sessions but are very real from a deployment perspective, the larger projects with lots of moving parts are not so well served by Scrum. At least this is the perspective I have gained so far.
While Agile seems to play very well in an environment where multiple iterations and a get-something-up-quick attitude are key business drivers, it has yet to be proven a good way to build mission critical systems that pay the bills, calculate your ATM balances or process your medical claims.
On the other hand, those system are still almost exclusivley huge legacy code mountains of COBOL, BAL using IMS/IDMS data files and nothing so far extant will change that.
Agile process coding is not new, it appeared first in the code slinging days of the early Internet. Throw up a web site, does it work? No, change it and try again. All in the context of continuous user review and feedback.
More recently with the standardized Agile models like Scrum taking off, we are again searching for the best, quickest and of course, cheapest ways to make applications work the way they are expected to.
Our recent experience with Scrum shows it can deliver, in smaller projects at least.
The repeated review cycles, the weekly or bi-weekly sprint reviews and poker sessions (not Vegas poker but a session where people put up estimates based on how long a 'story' will take to complete) the constant reprioritization and the daily standup meetings all have great value in getting things out the door.
Where things seem to come apart, a bit anyway, is when you try and create a project plan (I use MS project) and locate the start and endpoints for feature creation on the plan.
Given the way Scrum keeps moving things around and the apparant freedom from other constraints which may not be well articulated in the poker sessions but are very real from a deployment perspective, the larger projects with lots of moving parts are not so well served by Scrum. At least this is the perspective I have gained so far.
While Agile seems to play very well in an environment where multiple iterations and a get-something-up-quick attitude are key business drivers, it has yet to be proven a good way to build mission critical systems that pay the bills, calculate your ATM balances or process your medical claims.
On the other hand, those system are still almost exclusivley huge legacy code mountains of COBOL, BAL using IMS/IDMS data files and nothing so far extant will change that.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
LinkedIn Stories
Ongoing research into the value of social networks and, more specifically, how we can use them within the professional organization led me to reach out via LinkedIn and ask the following "If you have a good story about how LinkedIn helped you do something I would appreciate if you could share it.”
The response rate was quite good and the responses insightful. There have been many anecdotes that illustrate a great deal of utility to some people along with others who responded they could not see the point and after creating an account had stopped using it. This seems fairly consistent with the model of early and late adopters of a service or technology.
Correlating the low-use anecdotes with service professionals, it seems that many professionals who network well offline are simply uncomfortable doing it online, for now anyway.
Here are a few of the more interesting stories that came back:
1) “For me it has helped me establish some contacts that I had in the past, but lost contact with. I also see it as a better tool for managing contacts, because if a contacts information changes they update the information..”
2) “I helped IBM come up with a fix for a big bug in the smart upgrade process at Lotusphere 2007. A guy who was working for IBM wanted to get a hold of me, found a mutual co-worker through his linkedin list of resources who knew me and the fix. They contacted me via the interface and I returned his call. I was able to pass on the fix to this guy which helped him upgrade to V7.”
3) “I hired a team member after receiving the monthly LinkedIn "updates about people in your network" mail, which stated that he updated his profile.
Since he used to work for another department at my firm, I called to ask if his profile update indicates that he is looking for a new job, and indeed, he was on his way out... so thanks to LinkedIn we were able to keep him with us.”
4) “LinkedIn has been very useful for me from a business development perspective. I've been working on increasing the distribution of our content with wireless carriers and LinkedIn has helped me find great contacts at the carriers through my existing contacts.”
5) “It amazes me to see how many people I can reach through 2 degrees of separation and 3 degrees of separation. My personal business network expands from 90+ people to over 1 million individuals.
It is up to each one of us to utilize that network to find a job, to find a new client, or a deal.
I am a convert to Linkedin which I check every day. I have benefited from it by expanding my business reach by a factor of 1000 “
How can we provide tools of similar utility within the corporare world?
Do the measures of usefulness that apply across organizations apply within the organization and specifically which ones..?
This is the challenge but there are many ideas beginning to form which I hope to share with you here shortly.
The response rate was quite good and the responses insightful. There have been many anecdotes that illustrate a great deal of utility to some people along with others who responded they could not see the point and after creating an account had stopped using it. This seems fairly consistent with the model of early and late adopters of a service or technology.
Correlating the low-use anecdotes with service professionals, it seems that many professionals who network well offline are simply uncomfortable doing it online, for now anyway.
Here are a few of the more interesting stories that came back:
1) “For me it has helped me establish some contacts that I had in the past, but lost contact with. I also see it as a better tool for managing contacts, because if a contacts information changes they update the information..”
2) “I helped IBM come up with a fix for a big bug in the smart upgrade process at Lotusphere 2007. A guy who was working for IBM wanted to get a hold of me, found a mutual co-worker through his linkedin list of resources who knew me and the fix. They contacted me via the interface and I returned his call. I was able to pass on the fix to this guy which helped him upgrade to V7.”
3) “I hired a team member after receiving the monthly LinkedIn "updates about people in your network" mail, which stated that he updated his profile.
Since he used to work for another department at my firm, I called to ask if his profile update indicates that he is looking for a new job, and indeed, he was on his way out... so thanks to LinkedIn we were able to keep him with us.”
4) “LinkedIn has been very useful for me from a business development perspective. I've been working on increasing the distribution of our content with wireless carriers and LinkedIn has helped me find great contacts at the carriers through my existing contacts.”
5) “It amazes me to see how many people I can reach through 2 degrees of separation and 3 degrees of separation. My personal business network expands from 90+ people to over 1 million individuals.
It is up to each one of us to utilize that network to find a job, to find a new client, or a deal.
I am a convert to Linkedin which I check every day. I have benefited from it by expanding my business reach by a factor of 1000 “
How can we provide tools of similar utility within the corporare world?
Do the measures of usefulness that apply across organizations apply within the organization and specifically which ones..?
This is the challenge but there are many ideas beginning to form which I hope to share with you here shortly.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
KM World, San Jose, 2007
I had the chance to get out to San Jose in October and attend the now very large and impressive KM world held over four days in the San Jose convention center.
While in San Jose I was lucky enough to run into a number of very interesting speakers including David Snowden, Ted Graham and Charles Armstrong.
David Snowden of Cognitive Edge is a leading light in the field of cognitive science. His two keynotes were perhaps the most inspiring and stimulating professional presentations I have seen in years and, delivered in a deadpan take-no-prisoners style, he kept his audience thinking furiously for 90 minutes while he expounded broadly and authoritatively on a vast area of cognitive expertise that covered things as diverse as classification systems, Australian Aboriginals and the London water utilities.
The thread of continuity woven into all of this was the current state of understanding how people learn things.
In terms of KM this is important because on reflection we can probably all agree that KM per se does not actually have a foundation theory of learning upon which it is based and on further reflection, we can see what an obvious deficiency this is for the field.
The ideas presented in these Key Notes went a long way to helping understand this missing component. Primed by the host to be provocative, Professor Snowden most certainly was. I simply could not write fast enough while also trying to listen and understand what was being said.
If you get the chance to hear him then you must not miss it.
Ted Graham is a McKinsey consultant currently but he was in San Jose presenting on work done for his previous employer (a large publishing company) including the development of their Intranet and the lessons learned that came from it.
The thing that struck me most about Ted’s presentation is how the publishing company measured the success of their Intranet: it was success not based on how many times a benefits form was downloaded or how much time was saved by posting Yankees tickets for sale, not even in the value of having a standardized people finder, no, they measured success by how much the site got people talking to each other. Just as simple as that.
This had me thinking because it is a fact that while we schedule our professional interactions with a degree of physical-presence agnosticism, we also recognize that there is no substitute for sitting down with a person in the same room and talking to them face to face.
Promoting this particular type of interaction was the thing this Intranet’s success was measured by. I thought that was a revelatory approach though it took me a while to appreciate it.
Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems in the UK gave a fascinating talk about how to track complex relationships within groups of people and the path that his company is taking to develop tools to do this.
I had coffee with Charles later and his former career as Ethnographer (I had to look that up) had resulted in his needing better tools for the purpose and so Trampoline was born. What seemed like a small opportunity in a niche market had grown substantially as it became clear there were a great many organizations focusing on the same sorts of fundamental questions but within the organizational structures of business.
The main principle at work here seems to be that if we accept the premise that the more people connect and leverage their social networks, the more efficiently they can get their jobs done, and by extension, promote the objectives of their job and thus organization, then we can also see that mapping these connections will provide a valuable insight into how an organization is performing at any time and might provide key insights to when it is not.
This is not such a new concept of course and there is legacy research going back several decades on the topic. What is new is the development of rules-based mapping tools that can create compelling graphical models of these relationships in all their complexity.
Additionally, as a growing amount of interconnectivity is via email, the opportunity now exists to use email traffic measured between individuals, departments and organizations, and loosely classified by subject, as an indicative proxy for how all these entities relate to, and interact with each other.
Email is one of the data sources that Trampoline has been using when working with clients to create the data points for network mapping. We saw a number of examples of how the tools represent data in an easily understood manner and also how the output of these tools can lead to some very interesting inferences about how well an organization is connecting within it's constituent parts.
I expect we will be hearing more about these sorts of tools and how they may become organizational management decision support tools just as data warehouses once spawned a suite of tools catering to management decision support.
The move to mainstream business acceptance will have arrived when these tools show up in Businessweek as 'must haves' for the proactive COO.
This seems to be a great example of how data, and very raw data at that (emails) can be turned into Knowledge by the application of the right perspective, new tools and an increased demand for a measurable way to manage organizational efficiency.
While in San Jose I was lucky enough to run into a number of very interesting speakers including David Snowden, Ted Graham and Charles Armstrong.
David Snowden of Cognitive Edge is a leading light in the field of cognitive science. His two keynotes were perhaps the most inspiring and stimulating professional presentations I have seen in years and, delivered in a deadpan take-no-prisoners style, he kept his audience thinking furiously for 90 minutes while he expounded broadly and authoritatively on a vast area of cognitive expertise that covered things as diverse as classification systems, Australian Aboriginals and the London water utilities.
The thread of continuity woven into all of this was the current state of understanding how people learn things.
In terms of KM this is important because on reflection we can probably all agree that KM per se does not actually have a foundation theory of learning upon which it is based and on further reflection, we can see what an obvious deficiency this is for the field.
The ideas presented in these Key Notes went a long way to helping understand this missing component. Primed by the host to be provocative, Professor Snowden most certainly was. I simply could not write fast enough while also trying to listen and understand what was being said.
If you get the chance to hear him then you must not miss it.
Ted Graham is a McKinsey consultant currently but he was in San Jose presenting on work done for his previous employer (a large publishing company) including the development of their Intranet and the lessons learned that came from it.
The thing that struck me most about Ted’s presentation is how the publishing company measured the success of their Intranet: it was success not based on how many times a benefits form was downloaded or how much time was saved by posting Yankees tickets for sale, not even in the value of having a standardized people finder, no, they measured success by how much the site got people talking to each other. Just as simple as that.
This had me thinking because it is a fact that while we schedule our professional interactions with a degree of physical-presence agnosticism, we also recognize that there is no substitute for sitting down with a person in the same room and talking to them face to face.
Promoting this particular type of interaction was the thing this Intranet’s success was measured by. I thought that was a revelatory approach though it took me a while to appreciate it.
Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems in the UK gave a fascinating talk about how to track complex relationships within groups of people and the path that his company is taking to develop tools to do this.
I had coffee with Charles later and his former career as Ethnographer (I had to look that up) had resulted in his needing better tools for the purpose and so Trampoline was born. What seemed like a small opportunity in a niche market had grown substantially as it became clear there were a great many organizations focusing on the same sorts of fundamental questions but within the organizational structures of business.
The main principle at work here seems to be that if we accept the premise that the more people connect and leverage their social networks, the more efficiently they can get their jobs done, and by extension, promote the objectives of their job and thus organization, then we can also see that mapping these connections will provide a valuable insight into how an organization is performing at any time and might provide key insights to when it is not.
This is not such a new concept of course and there is legacy research going back several decades on the topic. What is new is the development of rules-based mapping tools that can create compelling graphical models of these relationships in all their complexity.
Additionally, as a growing amount of interconnectivity is via email, the opportunity now exists to use email traffic measured between individuals, departments and organizations, and loosely classified by subject, as an indicative proxy for how all these entities relate to, and interact with each other.
Email is one of the data sources that Trampoline has been using when working with clients to create the data points for network mapping. We saw a number of examples of how the tools represent data in an easily understood manner and also how the output of these tools can lead to some very interesting inferences about how well an organization is connecting within it's constituent parts.
I expect we will be hearing more about these sorts of tools and how they may become organizational management decision support tools just as data warehouses once spawned a suite of tools catering to management decision support.
The move to mainstream business acceptance will have arrived when these tools show up in Businessweek as 'must haves' for the proactive COO.
This seems to be a great example of how data, and very raw data at that (emails) can be turned into Knowledge by the application of the right perspective, new tools and an increased demand for a measurable way to manage organizational efficiency.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Email 2.0
We leave a stream of digital evidence behind us all day and every day in both our professional and personal lives. Email is the most ubiquitous source of this and so from an organizational mapping perspective it is a logical choice for harvest when it comes to tools like those developed by Trampoline systems and others for mapping networks.
However, this is a very forensic view of the world and, while really useful in fact-gathering and analysis, misses the extraordinary possibilities that arise when we move some additional smarts into the basic email client for real time analysis.
Here are some thoughts that have occured to me as I process the daily email load, thoughts about how email should work given how much better we have made everything else.
Right click on any email would tell you (in some easy to visualize way) what thread this mail was from; who else was on it; what threads had spawned from it; which spawned threads had ended and which were still active; where in the thread this particular email was and what your current status on this thread was; are you remiss in replying, by one cycle, by two etc etc.
In another view, a click on your inbox would show you every open thread you had, which ones were open longest and were most urgent.
This would have the additional value of being also able to actively alert you (if you so choose) to open threads, possibly auto categorized by priority based on your current projects. This last determined by a simple subject matter analysis algorithm always active on your inbox.
Further to this thought, when the email client had figured out the likely content matter of the message it could possibly discern if there open tasks or questions in the email that pertain to you.
This in turn would allow it to build an Action Items list that would contain things like "Important Invitations I have not responded to", "Questions from key people I have not responded to" and follow up items from yesterday's project meeting needing action today.
It would also allow you to create connections between threads manually so you could create a working messaging tree for a project which would in turn mesh with a social network tree.
How and when this sort of thing will come into being is uncertain but, the subject is a very interesting one as we seek to establish more ways to understand how our virtual connections with others operate.
This would in my view be Email 2.0
However, this is a very forensic view of the world and, while really useful in fact-gathering and analysis, misses the extraordinary possibilities that arise when we move some additional smarts into the basic email client for real time analysis.
Here are some thoughts that have occured to me as I process the daily email load, thoughts about how email should work given how much better we have made everything else.
Right click on any email would tell you (in some easy to visualize way) what thread this mail was from; who else was on it; what threads had spawned from it; which spawned threads had ended and which were still active; where in the thread this particular email was and what your current status on this thread was; are you remiss in replying, by one cycle, by two etc etc.
In another view, a click on your inbox would show you every open thread you had, which ones were open longest and were most urgent.
This would have the additional value of being also able to actively alert you (if you so choose) to open threads, possibly auto categorized by priority based on your current projects. This last determined by a simple subject matter analysis algorithm always active on your inbox.
Further to this thought, when the email client had figured out the likely content matter of the message it could possibly discern if there open tasks or questions in the email that pertain to you.
This in turn would allow it to build an Action Items list that would contain things like "Important Invitations I have not responded to", "Questions from key people I have not responded to" and follow up items from yesterday's project meeting needing action today.
It would also allow you to create connections between threads manually so you could create a working messaging tree for a project which would in turn mesh with a social network tree.
How and when this sort of thing will come into being is uncertain but, the subject is a very interesting one as we seek to establish more ways to understand how our virtual connections with others operate.
This would in my view be Email 2.0
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Change in the wind...
The world keeps turning but technology seems to turn faster than ever.
The last few weeks have seen some very interesting things in the mainstream news, for example I read that Microsoft is giving up the antitrust battle in Europe.
I read that Internet Explorer 7 is being downloaded by millions who suddenly find most things that used to work do not any more because the new security settings are so complex and arcane and set so high by default that normal activities are blocked.
I read Walter Mossberg (WSJ October 25) thinks Vista is a clunker and the latest Mac OS 10 release (is it Leopard or Lion or Panther or something) is twice as fast, much easier to use and has much better features.
I read that Google is planning a phone and is busy looking to buy spectrum to service the phone because they don't believe that they can do business with the carriers of today.
I read Mossberg (WSJ October 23) taking a stand against the carriers in a 24 gun broadside titled "Free My Phone" in which he decries the rigid, monopolistic and anti-competitive stranglehold the carriers have on the mobile phone services we pay way too much for today. On this one we have my Motorola SLVR-toting middle-schooler and all his friends in vehement agreement.
I read that Apple having locked the visionary iPhone to ATT are now starting to feel the pinch from fans for this move and also seeing the phone get hacked to unlock it. Case in point, the small phone mobile phone store down the road from my office in midtown Manhattan has a proudly displayed sign "iPhones Unlocked Here", a sort of new age cottage industry.
In Europe of course, phones have been "Free" in this context for a long time.
I read a small PDA/Phone manufacturer is trying to break into the US market because they see the huge latent opportunity created my the current rigid carrier pricing models and limited function devices.
Finally I read that ridiculous valuations, irrational exuberance and major VC investments in tech companies are again the norm in Silicon valley.
What does all this mean?
The big themes; fresh blood (capital) & Antitrust, in my mind are a semaphore to us that a changing of the guard is underway and market forces are again at work dissembling the world we know so that it more closely reassembles into something closer aligned to the world we want...today at least.
Microsoft, once unassailable in the PC market is now seeing slower growth in personal PCs shipped than Apple which has for the first time passed into double digits in this category.
The Mac is clearly superior to the PC as a consumer product but before you start to stammer in fury and rage I want to state here for the record I have been and am still a die hard PC user, have been since the IBM XT. You will note I did not say PC enthusiast. The darn thing has just fallen way behind the user experience curve.
I think Microsoft will continue to sell into the corporate market simply on it's own momentum and long history there but as a consumer option, the writing is on the wall.
The last few weeks have seen some very interesting things in the mainstream news, for example I read that Microsoft is giving up the antitrust battle in Europe.
I read that Internet Explorer 7 is being downloaded by millions who suddenly find most things that used to work do not any more because the new security settings are so complex and arcane and set so high by default that normal activities are blocked.
I read Walter Mossberg (WSJ October 25) thinks Vista is a clunker and the latest Mac OS 10 release (is it Leopard or Lion or Panther or something) is twice as fast, much easier to use and has much better features.
I read that Google is planning a phone and is busy looking to buy spectrum to service the phone because they don't believe that they can do business with the carriers of today.
I read Mossberg (WSJ October 23) taking a stand against the carriers in a 24 gun broadside titled "Free My Phone" in which he decries the rigid, monopolistic and anti-competitive stranglehold the carriers have on the mobile phone services we pay way too much for today. On this one we have my Motorola SLVR-toting middle-schooler and all his friends in vehement agreement.
I read that Apple having locked the visionary iPhone to ATT are now starting to feel the pinch from fans for this move and also seeing the phone get hacked to unlock it. Case in point, the small phone mobile phone store down the road from my office in midtown Manhattan has a proudly displayed sign "iPhones Unlocked Here", a sort of new age cottage industry.
In Europe of course, phones have been "Free" in this context for a long time.
I read a small PDA/Phone manufacturer is trying to break into the US market because they see the huge latent opportunity created my the current rigid carrier pricing models and limited function devices.
Finally I read that ridiculous valuations, irrational exuberance and major VC investments in tech companies are again the norm in Silicon valley.
What does all this mean?
The big themes; fresh blood (capital) & Antitrust, in my mind are a semaphore to us that a changing of the guard is underway and market forces are again at work dissembling the world we know so that it more closely reassembles into something closer aligned to the world we want...today at least.
Microsoft, once unassailable in the PC market is now seeing slower growth in personal PCs shipped than Apple which has for the first time passed into double digits in this category.
The Mac is clearly superior to the PC as a consumer product but before you start to stammer in fury and rage I want to state here for the record I have been and am still a die hard PC user, have been since the IBM XT. You will note I did not say PC enthusiast. The darn thing has just fallen way behind the user experience curve.
I think Microsoft will continue to sell into the corporate market simply on it's own momentum and long history there but as a consumer option, the writing is on the wall.
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