Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics.
Good summary of the battle between LightSquared, and GPS users/makers. On the political/interest group side, it shows that established industries have ability to protect their regulatory interests, even against a well-financed lobbying campaign. (LightSquared) Perhaps it also shows that the FCC is also able to make technically appropriate decisions, at least when the two sides are approximately balanced in political power.
I spoke yesterday at The Economist conference, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. Very interesting speakers, I was excited to go. The stated and sincere intent was to get a discussion going, including the audience. But the format was like watching TV news (and I don’t mean PBS): toss someone on stage, let them roll a 6 minute video, answer a few questions, and on to the next. This format was good for Twitter-bytes, but not for thinking or reflecting or building ideas.
One of the topics was Nick Carr on how “pseudo-multitasking” is hurting our brains. The conference itself seemed to follow the same format. This morning, for example, the schedule for the first 50 minutes has 7 different people on stage, in four sessions:
Act II: Bottom up: Information for people8.35 amFlash of genius: How to translate the internetLuis von Ahn, A. Nico Habermann, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University8.45 amFlash of genius: Turning information into knowledgeAmit Singhal, Engineer, Google8.55 amData exhaustThe intersection of search and big dataLuc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram AlphaArkady Borkovsky, Chief Technology Officer, Yandex LabsModerator: Kenneth Cukier, Business Correspondent, The Economist9.15 amFlash of genius: The information entrepreneurScott Yara,Vice-president, Products and Co-founder, Greenplum
Qualcomm is trying to bring out consumer products, and failing — Flo TV, and more on the way. There’s nothing wrong with initiatives that fail, especially when you are as rich as QC, but they are making systematic errors. Intel got burned early in its history trying to do digital watches, and learned from the experience – it has never had a direct-to-consumer product since then, though it has done plenty of brand-marketing campaigns. Qualcomm seems intent on repeating its errors, without learning from them.
I asked a deep-thinking friend, Jim Cook, about this, and here’s his response. He is even more negative than I was!
Industrial companies are built on rationality, non-commodity consumer companies are built on empathy. These epistemological predilections invade and bias the functioning of the corporation – R&D needs to shift from cost/performance to fad and fancy, Finance needs to shift from predictable to volatile, Manufacturing has to shift from plans to whim response. Unless you either separate them completely (resource allocation becomes the major problem, not to mention confusing capital markets), you’re destined to have internal destructive struggles. One can point to Apple as a counter example, until one realizes that Apple, from its origins, has been a cult satisfier (no price performance in almost any of the Apple products) and without a cult leader (Jobs) will not compete successfully with real consumer companies. Motorola tried to do both industrial and consumer, eventually split up and both will die in the next decade.
Interesting post by Andy McAfee about what he refers to as the Oracular approach to decision making. (Andy took over the Entrepreneurship course I taught while on sabbatical at MIT a few years ago. By all accounts he did an (even) better job than me!)
The above lists of characteristics are focused on a single fictional character in the advertising industry, but in my experience they’re fairly common across business oracles and their decisions in many real-world settings as well. When I reflect on how I’ve seen strategy, marketing, planning, and product design decisions made at large organizations, I see a lot of the stuff listed above.To be sure, I also see business oracles gathering lots of data, commissioning studies, and sometimes even running experiments. But I often get the sense that the point of all this activity is to confirm the soundness of the oracle’s initial idea, rather than to test it a state of affairs captured elegantly by this New Yorker cartoon. Several people at last week’s workshop on business experimentation observed that it takes months for many companies to set up even a simple experiment today, and opined that this is because of the great care taken to ensure the outcome.
I’m not going to try to summarize his post here, but I would add that a good Oracle is called an expert. And expertise is real – and it’s necessary at the Craft end of the Craft-to-science spectrum.
Late retirement is a paradoxical problem. In most of the economy, we want people to delay retirement, if only to keep a reasonable ratio of workers to retirees (which is needed for Social Security and for retirement financing in general). But at research universities, “new blood” is especially critical, and 70-year old faculty tie up slots for new hires.
Many workers yearn for retirement — the goodbye parties, the golf course, maybe even a gold watch. But Stanford University has the opposite problem: Nobody wants to leave.Hoping to create more space for young scholars, Stanford has revamped its generous “Retirement Incentive Program” — for the second time in a decade — to nudge more old-timers toward the door.”Our senior faculty are wonderful. I love them all,” Provost John Etchemendy said at a recent meeting of the Academic Senate, publicizing the plan. “But we’re getting fewer people into the faculty, and that’s because people are staying longer,” he said. “The faculty is aging.”
via Stanford University confronts the graying of academia – SiliconValley.com.
Perhaps a solution is in the article’s observation that foreign universities are hiring like mad, hence have very young faculties. Better for US would be to bring those students here; but if we can’t do that, I know some of my colleagues who are “retiring” abroad.
Seph Skerrit was a student when I taught an entrepreneurship class at MIT a few years ago. (Thanks to Michael Cusumano and Ed Roberts for arranging the very interesting year as visiting prof.) He seems to have found a new idea in mass customization – congratulations! I don’t recall my reaction when he proposed the concept, but I might have guessed that “all the good ideas have been tried already” — a classic error. The students in that class were amazingly entrepreneurial – I now think that “serial entrepreneur” is a personality type.
Custom clothes are not my thing, but this would make a nice Father’s Day present. Seph’s team seems to have done a nice job on PR, too, with lots of press coverage in Style sections.
Today, Mr Skerritt is the founder of Proper Cloth, a New York-based e-commerce dress shirt company that allows shoppers to mix and match fabrics, using computer-generated tailoring for the right fit. Its early success largely derives from being one of a growing number of start-ups that use blogging and social networking websites in place of conventional, more costly marketing. Revenues since launch last year have grown at a rate of 40 per cent a month, and it is on track to be profitable by July, with earnings of about $30,000 a month.
Mr Skerritt emptied his personal savings, scraped together about $50,000 of leftover student loan money, and racked up his credit card debt before raising about $100,000 in seed money from friends and family. He says that the use of social media, as well as being a less expensive form of marketing, provides an easy way for customers to interact with the company and each other. “We want to hear what our customers have to say,” he says. “It’s useful to us and lets our customers feel connected to and engaged with Proper Cloth.”
Mass customization of clothing is at least 10 years old – even Levis does it. (The concept goes back to a book written in 1987, Future Perfect.) The NYT just wrote about it – the wrinkle is that it’s now called “customer design.”
Still, the article is nice because it shows how low the barriers to entry are. It also has a good description of how the company learns rapidly from customers, with real time chats and phone calls.
Since last Halloween, when the company’s dress shirt design application made its debut at http://www.blank-label.com, Mr. Bi and his three partners — ages 19, 22 and 30 — have joined a small but growing co-creation movement that uses the Internet to let consumers have a hand in making the products they buy. Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola MeAndGoji.com, jewelry gemvara.com, chocolate CreateMyChocolate.com, handbags LaudiVidni.com and clothing for girls ages 6 to 12 FashionPlaytes.com. There are also online competitors selling design-your-own shirts, while Brooks Brothers is one major retailer that offers the service on its Web site.
via Prototype – Putting Customers in Charge of Designing Shirts – NYTimes.com.
Art and Science in Technology - Roger Bohn's Blog 