keeping simple

Category: business

  • Future of innovation

    The company I work for now really does not care about IP. I design low-cost consumer products that get shipped offshore to be produced. The big deal is time-to-market and being first. After something is successful and commoditized, it will be copied and driven to the lowest possible cost. Thus, there is no longer a…

  • Wind Power slowdown in Germany

    The idea that Germany is playing catch-up with Europe’s most promising strategy for renewable energy is jarring. This is Germany, after all, the country that 11 years ago put the Green Party in government, decided to phase out nuclear power, and pushed wind energy and photovoltaics to grid scale. Today Germany’s installed wind-turbine capacity of…

  • chrome OS

    SAN FRANCISCO — In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing an operating system for PCs based on its Chrome Web browser. The move sharpens the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of the vast majority of personal computers. NYT…

  • unnovation

    This is a brilliant idea. Most innovation, well, isn’t: it is “unnovation,” or innovation that fails to create authentic, meaningful value. The biggest stumbling block to innovation is unnovation: most companies are too busy unnovating to ever learn how to truly innovate. In the race to innovate, most organizations forget a simple but fundamental economic…

  • Department of hell freezing over

    I have also learned something about my country. I run a global company, but I am a citizen of the U.S. I believe that a popular, thirty-year notion that the U.S. can evolve from being a technology and manufacturing leader to a service leader is just wrong. In the end, this philosophy transformed the financial…

  • Virtualization versus Physicalization

    Data on the overhead of virtualization is hard to come by. Rackable proposes an interesting alternative that they call physicalization. I wonder whether the CPU is the most important resource to multiplex and I remain totally puzzled by the motivation of Intel/AMD in this area.

  • Organizational man

    Irving Wladawsky-Berger started working at IBM in 1970 and retired in 2007 with what is, to me, the smartest corporate response to Linux/OpenSource as his capstone accomplishment. TG: Sun has committed to releasing all of its code as open source. Do you think IBM will do the same? IW-B: I don’t think so, because I…

  • The train to the terminal station

    Digital Equipment Corporation Silicon Graphics Corporation Sun Microsystems One might get the impression that the boards of directors of technology companies have as much ability to intervene to stop suicidal business strategies as the boards of directors of Bear Stearns did. But business is simple: you always have to look at the business model of…

  • The cell phone market in brief

    Although the payoff of a small niche may be less than that of a large, growing market, the competion may often also be less intense. The majority-fallacy concept states that appraisals of fast growing  segments overlook of minimize the likelihood that many competitors will be attracted. This explains why growth areas often stimulate destructive overcapacity…

  • Suns tracking SGI

    IBM dropped its offer to acquire Sun for $7billion. Sun has now a series of projects for which it has large costs, but no clear method of making money. What did Sun gain from open sourcing Solaris, from giving away Java, from embracing Linux, and so on? Irving Wladawsky-Berger (whose blog is worth reading) or…