2013 Aug 9

When an the Old Bait and Switch Really Isn't... and How to Manage It

The other day, I was looking at prices for a simple round trip international flight. Like most people, I searched on online sites like Expedia, known airlines' Web sites, and my travel agent. I also look at the ITA Matrix, a very powerful tool by a company that was bought out by Google in 2010. For those who don't know it, the ITA Matrix is a very powerful flight search engine.

2013 Aug 8

Flying Cables

I love it when two businesses take completely opposite approaches to the same strategic problem. It always makes for entertaining reading (and writing). For a long time, network providers have argued that they are about content, phones, payments, everything but the network. AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, 3, BT, Deutsche Telecom, Cablevision, Liberty Cable, just about every major carrier has argued that they are "not just dumb pipes" but everything that goes through them, i.

2013 Aug 7

Let's Be Fair: You Get What You Pay For

Fair? Does anyone care about fair? Well, outside of politics, yes, people do. But it really has much less to do with fairness per se than self-interest. Let's say you are the CEO of a company. You have 4 division heads. They all work hard and believe they do their jobs well, and it is your job to evaluate them. If you evaluate them incorrectly, say giving a better grade (and therefore bonus and promotion) to one over another, they will view it as unfair.

2013 Aug 6

Don't Get Confused: When Service Matters More Than Features

Simon Wardley, one of the better thinkers in the technology market, whom I have only recently had the pleasure of discovering, has been writing for years on the inevitability of the move to "cloud" on the one hand, and on the other why Amazon Web Services (AWS) has so dominated the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market and how to properly compete against it. He believes - and I agree - that this competition is crucial for the benefit of the market, the customers, and, in the end, the providers as well.

2013 Aug 5

Someday, Your Godfather Will Call Upon You for a Favour

Ironically, that isn't the actual line from one of the greatest films ever produced. It is actually, "Someday, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me." In business, there really are only two kinds of transactions. ACID is not one of them, unless you are either in the SQL database business, or your name is Harvey Dent, which, in one of those strange coincidences, a colleague recently called me, since on side of me is deep engineer, still contributing to projects and open source, and another is deep business consultant, designing strategy and fixing operations.

2013 Aug 4

Pricing Redux: Customers Behaving Better

Congestion pricing is not, despite its name, the cost of Sudafed at your local Walgreens pharamacy or Boots chemist. It is a time-honoured strategy for charging different prices at different times based on "congestion" in the system. If anyone has driven on the Singapore airport toll road, or perhaps Israel's High-Speed-Lane into Tel Aviv, they know that you pay more, often much more, during rush hour, than in off-hours. For example, the Israeli road charges 7 NIS (~$2 USD) for the 13km stretch in off-hours, and up to 75 NIS (~$21 USD) during peak hours.

2013 Aug 2

NodeBot - The Democratization of Hardware

Advance warning: while this article is about business and the future, it gets a bit technical in nature. Apologies to those without engineering backgrounds. One of the people I have had the pleasure to connect and work with is Chris Williams. Chris, the founder of the now-global JavaScript conferences, has recently become heavily involved in robotics, and, in character for him, is now putting on RobotsConf. Over the last few years, we have seen a trend towards reduced-cost and commoditization of hardware.

2013 Aug 1

Getting To Ubiquity - First Solve Real Pain

It is hard to imagine a world without WiFi. It is, literally, everywhere. In a conversation I had about 2 years ago with first-class VC Fred Wilson, I asked him how he thought the wireless carriers - the beasts everyone loves to hate, the 21st century version of cable companies - would be disrupted. His answer? "WiFi". Eventually WiFi will be nearly everywhere, and one will be able to use mobile devices (he didn't say phones) to make broadband phone calls.

2013 Jul 31

Failure to Launch - Cloudsourcing Can Blow Up On Take-Off

Surprise, surprise. NASA's attempt to "go to the cloud" has led to major security gaps. According to a report on TheVerge, an internal NASA review discovered that of its five major cloud sourcing contracts, not even one came close to meeting NASA's own data security practices and standards. When I was studying for my MBA, we studied the classic Carter Racing case study. The short form: a car racing team has to decide whether or not to race.

2013 Jul 30

Pricing and Perception, Part III: Lessons from Living in a Lesser Place

In an earlier article, I discussed how one moves markets and sells products that financially make sense from a business perspective: the total lifetime cost (upfront plus operating) of a new product is less than that of the existing product, but is more weighted towards upfront than operating. In the LED example, the cost of the LED bulb was 20 times the cost of the incandescent bulb, but the lifetime operating cost far more than made up for the more expensive purchase price.