Andrew Lark

Things don’t replace things…

Far too often the media a focused on a “winner takes all” mentality – it drives great headlines, like “iPhone killer”, but seldom reflects reality. As David Pogue says when reflecting on 10 years of writing the column:

Things don’t replace things; they just splinter. I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to keep hearing pundits say that some product is the “iPhone killer” or the “Kindle killer.” Listen, dudes: the history of consumer tech is branching, not replacing.

TV was supposed to kill radio. The DVD was supposed to kill the Cineplex. Instant coffee was supposed to replace fresh-brewed.

But here’s the thing: it never happens. You want to know what the future holds? O.K., here you go: there will be both iPhones and Android phones. There will be both satellite radio and AM/FM. There will be both printed books and e-books. Things don’t replace things; they just add on.

Great Story…

On Dell’s modular data centers…

How A Laptop Shopper Shops

Worth a scan.

portable-pcs-hopper-final

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The Transparent Enterprise

Allows information to flow freely. Social apps are the transparency engines of the modern enterprise. That’s why apps like Chatter matter.

The real threat might come from below, as Benioff knows well. Upstarts Yammer and Jive Software are selling similar social networking tools for businesses. In only two years Yammer has lined up 1.5 million members, entirely by word of mouth. That's three-quarters as many people as Salesforce has using its software, though there's one, big difference: Anyone with a corporate e-mail address can sign up for Yammer, free, and connect with others in the same company. But if your IT or legal departments are concerned about having to archive those communications or beef up security, Yammer charges up to $5 a month per member; only 15% pay. But they include big names such as Pitney Bowes, Nationwide and AMD. "Salesforce will be a tab inside Yammer," boasts cofounder David Sacks.

Salesforce customers seem divided. "Chatter lets me see the whole, unvarnished picture," says Michael Dell. "It has dramatically increased my knowledge of what's going on here." One big Salesforce customer is more hesitant. "Does every CEO really want to give every one of his employees that much visibility inside?" he asks. "It could backfire. There's a fear of that rogue employee who uses the system to embarrass the company."

Benioff, of course, doesn't view the world that way. "Salesforce is a culture of no secrets, and that includes me," he says. He believes transparency keeps his company in synch with customers and is one way to constantly poke the status quo. Using Chatter, he publishes his professional goals each quarter and expects others to do the same. Compensation is in part based on reaching those goals. He recently asked his nearly 5,000 Facebook friends to vote on two competing Salesforce advertisement mock-ups; theirs was the final call. Before Dreamforce, his big annual conference in December, Benioff spends weeks laboring over his speech, but the real test is when he has ten or so customers come in to critique a rehearsal over pizza and soda.

"Nothing is sacred," says Parker Harris, his buddy, cofounder and head of Salesforce technology. Case in point: The two clashed over Chatter, with Harris insisting it was merely a feature to tuck inside the core sales offering. On a flight back from a sales event in Las Vegas last year Harris showed Benioff an early version of the app. Benioff said it wasn't enough, and Harris explained that other projects, including forecasting and calendar tools already in the works, would suffer. Benioff's response: "Everything can't be important."

Transparency vs. Privacy

I once worked for a CEO that said, “You have no privacy, get over it”. I doubted the statement then as much as I do now. His point was that the Internet was making all our lives public and that we should get over it. Implicit in it was the notion that we should just give up on the idea of privacy. Not something I think most people are willing to do.

One of his execs, Eric Schmidt, later went on to become CEO of Google and hit out with his own, equally brazen comment on privacy, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Here, we should give up on privacy because, subjugating ourselves to a common set of standards – what I think is ok is ok because it meets your standard of ok – means we should have nothing to hide.

That’s a harder rule to live by that it seems. Implicit in it is the idea of total, 100% transparency. Either passively transparent – where we make everything available to anyone that wants it without promoting it. Or proactively so, promoting the content.

If the reporting is true, it would appear that neither Google or Schmidt can live by this principle:

”Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced the salary hike in a memo late Tuesday, a copy of which was obtained by Fortune. The memo was also leaked to Business Insider, which broke the news. Within hours, Google notified its staff that it had terminated the leaker, several sources told CNNMoney. A Google spokesman declined to comment on the issue, or on the memo."

Surely this is exactly the kind of information that a company with shareholders would want to be transparent about. If not for that reason, the recruitment value alone would be worth it. And, if the information is shared with thousands of employees, the assumption that it is, by any standard, private, has surely gone out the window.

At the end of the day, the actions would also seem to undermine a broader principle, “Don’t be evil”, but that’s a whole new conversation…

Transparency vs. Privacy

I once worked for a CEO that said, “You have no privacy, get over it”. I doubted the statement then as much as I do now. His point was that the Internet was making all our lives public and that we should get over it. Implicit in it was the notion that we should just give up on the idea of privacy. Not something I think most people are willing to do.

One of his execs, Eric Schmidt, later went on to become CEO of Google and hit out with his own, equally brazen comment on privacy, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Here, we should give up on privacy because, subjugating ourselves to a common set of standards – what I think is ok is ok because it meets your standard of ok – means we should have nothing to hide.

That’s a harder rule to live by that it seems. Implicit in it is the idea of total, 100% transparency. Either passively transparent – where we make everything available to anyone that wants it without promoting it. Or proactively so, promoting the content.

If the reporting is true, it would appear that neither Google or Schmidt can live by this principle:

”Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced the salary hike in a memo late Tuesday, a copy of which was obtained by Fortune. The memo was also leaked to Business Insider, which broke the news. Within hours, Google notified its staff that it had terminated the leaker, several sources told CNNMoney. A Google spokesman declined to comment on the issue, or on the memo."

Surely this is exactly the kind of information that a company with shareholders would want to be transparent about. If not for that reason, the recruitment value alone would be worth it. And, if the information is shared with thousands of employees, the assumption that it is, by any standard, private, has surely gone out the window.

At the end of the day, the actions would also seem to undermine a broader principle, “Don’t be evil”, but that’s a whole new conversation…

The Power of Focus

Like Nick Carr, I read the NYTimes piece on focus this morning with interest. Loved how he distilled the issue down:

It has recently become fashionable (as we swing to the sway of our new technologies) to denigrate solitary, deeply attentive thinking, the kind celebrated and symbolized by Rodin's The Thinker. Ideas and inventions, we're urged to believe, leap not from the head of the self-communing genius but from the whirl of "the network." In fact, you need both - the lonely wizard and the teeming bazaar - as Edison's life so clearly demonstrates. Edison certainly drew on the work and ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries, and his Menlo Park laboratory was by all accounts a noisy orgy room of intellectual cross-fertilization. But, like other deep thinkers, Edison had the ability to screen out the noise and focus his mind – and that capacity, half innate and half hard-won, was also essential to his creativity.

What We Expect

My post on IT is up over at The Huffington Post. One in a series I will be doing for them.

What We Expect

For the last 25 years of the computer industry we have been subservient. Less than five years ago, we gladly accepted whatever computer our employer handed us. We grimaced but hit delete when our mailboxes and hard drives ran out of storage. Our personal email and chat rarely made it into the workplace. We did what our IT departments told us to do.

For some companies the status quo still prevails due to tight regulation and security -- and might continue for some time -- but for everyone else, change is afoot as we've all turned into super-consumers of everything digital. Smart phones got smart. Really smart. Super-sized applications got micro-sized and shopped at a price point to match. The cloud unleashed infinite storage accessible with the swipe of a credit card. Universal broadband connectivity meant work, well, didn't happen "at work" anymore. Email has taken a backseat to Twitter, Chatter and Facebook. The PC shifted from being a productivity tool to a life tool. And it wasn't just that our PC at home was better than the office-issued system, it was cooler to. It was personal.
Some call this "consumerization," which is a bit like calling the French Revolution a "political event." The phrase masks all the emotion and determination the average employee has today for overcoming and outmaneuvering any IT department impeding on their ability to participate and produce. The barriers to the revolution are low. As mobile broadband penetrates every device it will get even lower.

For years Blackberrys have been the staple diet of any corporate IT consumer. So, when I started using a larger tablet device powered by Android I was unsure what to expect. To say I was "blown away," would be an understatement. Because I quickly discovered it isn't the size or form factor of the device that made it indispensible. It was how it enabled my work and personal life to move seamlessly across all of the devices I use--from my car Bluetooth-enabled infotainment unit to my laptop to my tablet to my multiple smart phones--thanks to cloud-enabled applications that are available to me at the push of a button. Some of my favorites include:Evernote, DropBox, Seesmic, TripIit, SlideIT.

Rather than restricting my ability to get productive in the way I see as best, our IT team is enabling it. Virtualization means all the apps I need stream through the cloud to me. Business email arrives in an app that is managed through the cloud. If I lost my device, my IT department could kill the work data with the touch of a button. I scale storage up and down as I need it. My "lifestream" merges seamlessly with business.

The "I" in IT always stood for information. Not infrastructure. And the smart IT teams are getting back to delivering the services that allow information to flow. To do this, they're challenging the status quo. Rather than erecting barriers they are taking them down by shifting IT dollars to innovation.

As a result, new ideas are emerging. BYOD -- or Bring Your Own Device -- is enabling many to make the most of their personal compute power, at work. Cloud applications like Salesforce.com and Yammer enable businesses to select and deploy apps with very little IT resources and no infrastructure investments. Businesses using Microsoft Azure and other cloud platforms can quickly move workloads into the cloud - realizing new levels of agility for marginal cost.

That's the kind of IT we want. It's the kind of IT that every digital native entering the workforce is going to demand. It's what we expect.

Rugby Needs Urgent Attention

The All Blacks have had a mediocre few weeks.

The Australians caught them sleeping in Hong Kong. They looked lethargic for much of the game and the subs bungled it. Stephen Donald continued his All Black form, bungling a series of plays and handing the game to the Australians.

But its not just the play on the field that needs attention. Sitting from a armchair in Austin, TX two things stand out that might not be too apparent to fans down under.

First, how rugby coverage is going backward in the US. Expensive, pay-to-view coverage via Setanta is all but dead for the year-end tours. And Rugbyzone is all but Rugby free. I’m not sure what Rugby’s marketers are thinking about the global expansion of the game but its time to wake up. It’s game over and that’s not good for the game. You aren’t going to grow it in the US without TV.

Second, the difference between American football coverage and Rugby coverage comes down to one simple thing. Stats. Any commentator here seems to be pulling from a fast array of data. Opinion tends to be well informed. Ok, American Football is pretty much the triumph of project management over sport but then the data brings real tight commentary to the game.

What struck me about this story from the NZ Herald was the stats – I can’t remember reading a piece founded on hardcore data in some time.

Having headed down to the pub at 9.30 on Saturday morning and paid my $20 to watch NZ vs. England over a good Irish breakfast, it was a repeat of the prior week. Rokocoko looked busy but ineffective. McCaw looked inspired. And now we have the data to support it. This is the kind of reporting we need more of.

Not only did he (McCaw) have the second best arrival rate at the breakdown (behind Brad Thorn this week) but he was top equal ball carrier with Kieran Read on nine. Sam Whitelock had a dream debut winning all three of his lineout throws and stealing one from England, while his overall workrate at the breakdown saw him come in third behind Thorn and McCaw. Isaia Toeava gets a mention for his try-saving tackle in the corner.

With the data, you wonder what Henry has been thinking.

Great job Tracy. Keep the data coming.

Bye Bye Blackberry

I remember the first day I saw a Blackberry. It was love at first sight. Standing in Roger McNamee’s office at Integral, he blew me a way with a demo of a two-lined screen beta unit. About six months later I got my first and don’t think one has left my side since.

That was until about eight weeks ago. Now, I’ve been carrying 2-3 mobile devices for sometime – all with a keen eye to dumping one or more. I just couldn’t imagine abandoning the utility of the Blackberry keyboard. I needed a personal smart phone so I could leave my MP3 player at home and keep by private business affairs separate. We didn’t have an iPhone equivalent so an iPhone it was. Then I got a Dell Streak. So which one to drop into my tech museum?

The Blackberry it is – and its for a simple reason. The Blackberry has just got progressively worse for the past 2-5 years. Worse performance. More crashes. A spinning black dial that just seems to take longer and longer to stop spinning. A lousy App store. A little screen that just never seemed to get bigger.

It is a great technology that hasn’t progressed. Its not going to die a slow death either. This is an industry in which brand loyalty wanes fast (anyone rushing to buy their next Palm?).

There’s lots I love about the Streak. I can live on it all day long. And carry it in my pocket. The screen is gorgeous and perfect for PowerPoint and .pdf files. The keyboard rocks with SlideIt installed. And it bridges my personal and business needs well.

I’ve found that apps ranging from Evernote through DropBox have made the screen matter more and more to me. I’m just reading more rich and dense docs while on the move. With a Streak I get the benefits of an iPhone, amplified, and none of the downside of a Blackberry.

Now we’ve made it official. As a company we’re rolling out Win 7 devices – the Dell Venue Pro -- and Streaks powered by Android. It’s going to save us money.

The switch begins next week and will save the company about 25% in mobile communication costs, primarily by eliminating the need for BlackBerry servers, Mr. Gladden said. Dell will begin marketing a service to its business clients within two weeks aimed at helping them make a similar switch.

The company is also talking with T-Mobile USA about purchasing voice minutes and monthly data in bulk, rather than individual employee plans. Minutes and data that go unused by the company would carryover, Mr. Gladden said.

I’m looking forward to taking the Venue for a longer spin having played with one for a bit in Hong Kong last week. It was fast. Really fast. And the interface beautifully simple.

Either way, its bye bye Blackberry.