Andrew Lark

The Tablet Debate

It seems that I ignited a bit of a debate around tablets in the Enterprise.

First, let’s be clear there will be an exciting opportunity to serve enterprises and consumers alike with devices of all shapes and sizes, including tablets and smartphones. But the key to delivering solutions that meet the needs of the enterprise market remains grounded in the notion of open, capable and affordable.

• Open means open. Apps and content can be written and easily deployed – without vendor intervention. Carriers freely selected. Service partners and channels chosen based on relevance to the Enterprise, not relevance to the vendor. There is a choice of OS.
• Affordable isn’t just referring to the single solution, it means the total bundle – virtual desktop, virtual apps, system, carrier plans, accessories are beneath the price bands seen today from the market leader. In part, that’s why we partner with Google and Microsoft and others to ensure we are enabling a comprehensive solution.
• Capable means existing workloads run well – whether virtualized or through the browser. It also means the device is packaged with comprehensive enterprise services – from the remote recovery and termination through global remote support. And many Enterprises are looking for the same lifecycle and lifecycle management they have seen on the notebook.

Just because a device is doing well in the consumer market isn’t a proxy for success in the Enterprise market or for meeting all the needs of the Enterprise user. This is because there are a raft of issues that enterprises struggle with. Security is a big one and extends to being able to remotely manage the workloads they need (install, update, wipe, cloud base sensitive data, run Office, etc). As is the complexity of managing so many devices per user.

What I outlined yesterday was that some of our competitors in the consumer market have products that are doing well there and rightfully being looked at – as are ours – by enterprise buyers. 

What I didn’t say competitors would fail. Not even close. But then interviewees don’t write headlines and rarely do journalists.

A few folks had questions on my pricing comparison. First, the reporting is in Australia and being down under I was using $NZ based on a trip that morning to a retailer with a CIO customer to check out how they were merchandising computers. Take a look online and you will see 3G tablets around NZ$ 1,875.01 or, without the keyboard and a cheaper cover you are looking at NZ$ 1,634.00. Why would you want a keyboard? Well, the only way most Enterprises can justify that price is to set it up as the primary device.

Liberal headlining aside, innovation around tablets is opening the door to a raft of new technology and shining a light on the needs of users in the enterprise market. And that market – our largest – is one that we are very focused on and aim to compete in with purpose built solutions.

Also posted over on the Dell Blogs.

New AC boats

They look amazing.

Enchantment

Like David, I’m in the middle of Enchantment – Guy’s new book. And really enjoying it. His many ideas combine old stalwarts with some fresh thinking. David pulled out four I liked and I’ll add more over the week. I especially liked the second one:

• Build an ecosystem. If the offering can be surrounded by a meaningful system of entities and complement (add value) and support the brand, it will have a more solid connection and will have created barriers to competitors. Apple is the gold standard with the huge number of apps, the communities of users, the blogs, the consultants, the Apple store, the conferences, and on and on. To create an ecosystem, a firm needs to find a worthy concept, communicate, create evangelists, encourage involved communities, and be open to participation and criticism.
• Separate the believers. In implementing a concept intended to achieve enchantment make sure all the employees and partners are on-board. You cannot create enchantment if the “sellers” are not all drinking the Kool-Aid. The Macintosh in the mid-1980s put the division in a separate building with Steve Jobs in charge so that the effort was not contaminated by the rest of the firm with their “mass market” mentality. Zappos.com discourages non-believers by offering $4,000 to new recruits to leave the firm.
• Frame the competition. The focus is always on managing our own brand, making sure that we know what it stands for, and that this vision is communicated to the marketplace. But framing the competition can have an equally strong impact on preference. In 2010, Steve Jobs responded to critics that thought that Apple excessively controlled iPhone applications, by pointing out that it was true that those who want porn are better off with Google’s Android products. Android phones were thus positioned for porn users.
• Illustrate the salient point. There is a tendency to focus on factual data supporting functional benefits because it seems persuasive, credible, and informative. But it is usually boring and hard to connect. So bring the data to life by illustrations. Talk about cost of few per year instead of miles per gallon. How long a donation will feed a child instead of monetary amount.

Blood, Bones & Butter

I don’t often give a book five stars. Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, bones and butter gets six.

Simply one of the best books I've read in years. The storytelling is as remarkable and the writing. Thought provoking, stimulating and heart-stirring. A brilliant, brilliant book. Not just about the transition to becoming a chef - but also a map of a journey through life.

If you love cooking. If you love life at the edge. You will love this book.

Can’t wait to dine at Prune.

Amazing Twitter numbers

The Twitter growth numbers are amazing:

tweets

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

  accounts
• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

  #employees
• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

The Future Will be Curated

Spent today at Signal – Federated’s conference here in Austin. Was as good as the LA version. Like SXSW for adults. Some bloody smart start-ups coming our way. Loved the conversations around curation. Then saw this profile on Yuri in Forbes. He is right:

The amount of information people digest, says Milner, is doubling every two years, now that so much of our time is spent in front of screens. That overload leads to shorter attention spans, shorter units of communication and a dire need for curation. Our friends are filling that role on Facebook, but before long, Milner believes, the machines will be more involved, much the way Facebook now suggests new friends for you. "You need a second degree of curation.”

Milner agrees with Oxford University anthropologist Robin Dunbar's theory that our brain can handle only 150 stable social relationships at any given time. But while the size of our circle may not change, the mix will. Someone in China who speaks no English may be a better social connection than someone you've known for years. In a decade or so automatic language translation will make it seamless to communicate with new friends in China. "Facebook now is mostly about people you know," he says. "In the future it could be about people you know less but are more important."

Milner also sees Facebook competing with Google to become the place you go to search for information. "Facebook can be an accumulation of different intelligences," he says. "Ask a question, [get it] translated into many languages and somebody, somewhere in the world, will have an answer."

"Facebook will get to 1 billion users" in the next couple of years, says John Lindfors, an ex-Goldman banker who joined DST Global last year. "It's the platform for a new Internet ecosystem."

The Power of Sponsored Stories

Love this data point from the Facebook team. Are Facebook and Twitter at the core of your marketing strategy? If not, they need to be:

Ad Age: You recently launched a new ad product called "sponsored stories" so that when a user "likes" a business, that action gets turned into an ad, complete with the user's name and image. What is the strategy there, and were there any concerns of backlash from the users?

Mr. Fischer: The direction we're going in is really around building brands. We've proven that having an ad for a given brand with a friend's name at the bottom of it-- it might say, "David Fischer likes Coke" -- that impact of having a name will increase brand awareness by 68%, and it has a four-times increase in purchase intent. That really is the power. And that's the kind of brand associations we're trying to build for companies. Branding should happen around people.

What We Are Doing To Help NZ

The recent New Zealand earthquake hits home for me. As many of you know I’m originally from New Zealand - a Kiwi. This natural disaster was absolutely devastating for NZ, destroying Christchurch and creating a significant loss - of life, property and quality of living.

As a company, Dell stepped up. We’ve donated (and continue to) Latitude laptops and made a $125,000 USD cash contribution to the New Zealand Government Fund.

We now have an employee match program that allows all of us to make a difference. Dell has allocated $200,000 to match team member contributions to help New Zealand. Dell will be matching team member contributions dollar for dollar, up to $10,000 per employee.

Here are some places you can go to make a difference:·

• Christchurch Earthquake Appeal
• Fundraiseonline
• Red Cross

A Book You Should Read

Hugh’s latest book is a fantastic read… well work the time and money. Freud once said that in order to be truly happy people need two things: the capacity to work and the capacity to love. Evil Plans is about being able to do both at the same time. It’s a book you will keep coming back to.

Those Predictions

One of my team asked me where my predictions for 2011 were. I never got around to finishing them or fleshing the out… Here is where I got to… better late than never…

1. 2011 will be the year in which transmission-based communications (Letters, Fax, Email) will further accelerate towards obscurity. As more of us move our communications into the “stream”, the older forms die. Text, Twitter, IM will continue to accelerate in usage and adoption, supported by the flip to Smartphones. As an aside, I thought it would be nice to buy Sophia a stamp album for Christmas – that’s not as easy as you would think.
2. We will increasingly make technology choices based on our information consumption model. Multiplexers – those that create, consume and process information – will continue to demand increasingly powerful notebooks and desktops. Consumers – those that consume – will move towards tablets and smartphones. Processors – those doing simple information retrieval and processing – will work through the browser in virtualized sessions on personal devices and a new generation of hyper efficient Enterprise systems. Specialists will demand hyper-scale computing power delivered through the cloud and on powerful desk-side and desktop systems.
3. Cloud Consumption will accelerate as we move to the other side of the hype-cycle. Their is no question that cloud is over-hyped and over-played. Many businesses and CIOs have been executing a iteration of the cloud for years. What is new is the hyper-scale, hyper-efficient capability provided by the likes of Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. These companies are game changers for any business looking to scale with agility.
4. More business will adapt businesses processes to software as a service versus building custom apps or using high-cost apps on infrastructure they run. SaaS is going to will see explosive growth in the coming year.
5. The walls will continue to come down between the personal enterprise and professional enterprise. The majority of the business still maintain a rigid wall between their employees personal lives and then their business. The walls will come down this year with more businesses blurring the line than not. I’m tracking this and will report out. The impact of this will be improvements in productivity and further acceleration of the pace of business.
6. Managing the life-stream will become a priority. Attention deficit will increase as a by-product of us not having the skills to manage the intersection of life and the stream. This will place even more emphasis on individuals and organizations being accountable for developing new skills.
7. Web 2.0 leaders will start to set new standards for marketers and businesses operating in their streams and spheres. And some of this will be bought about looming Government intervention and regulation. Affiliate marketers will come under particular scrutiny.

More to come…