deal architect

Apple’s real “Team FDA”

There is a hilarious (especially if you don’t mind R rated language) anecdote in Walter Isaacson’s book about Steve Jobs. It deals with the acronym FDA. You can get a gist here if you don’t want to read the book, but the book is much more colorful.

Walter does not go much into what must have been a tempestuous relationship with AT&T (and other carriers) around the iPhone. but I bet it drove the perfectionist Jobs berserk to get customer complaints like this one CEO Tim Cook recently dealt with.

I have to believe this conversation dreamed up by the Fake Steve Jobs actually happened a few times. And not just with AT&T.

If the carriers have a sense of humor, and a commitment to continuous improvement, they should give the VLSI team a call and find out where they can order the Team FDA jackets for their own teams.

Not your Pa’s Platform

I blogged last week about “The feature that launched a thousand projects”. I was describing the flurry of activity the iPad retina display has unleashed particularly in its ecosystem of over 200,000 apps.

Brian Sommer is running a series on platform-as-a-service and he describes a conversation with Phil Simon, author of  The Age of the Platform.

As with Brian, the term platform evokes for me memories from the 80s and 90s. McCormack & Dodge’s Millennium and PeopleSoft’s PeopleTools come to mind. So do CTOs like John Landry and Rick Bergquist.

Things have certainly evolved. As I told Phil for his book:

Every successful technology platform has had a thick application catalog around it. You can even go back to the 1980s when IBM introduced minicomputers such as the AS/400. In the end, though, customers always buy applications, not base technology. This hasn’t changed. Compared to thirty years ago, the difference today is twofold. First, AppStores and ecosystems are being fueled by entire communities consisting of hundreds of thousands of mom and pop stores and entrepreneurs. Second, apps today are priced to sell billions of copies via high-speed downloads. The sheer scale is unprecedented.

My new book has two faces of the new platforms – Gerlinde Gniewosz in the Apple ecosystem and Charlie Wood in the Google ecosystem.

Gniewosz has experience at Yahoo! (the web company), Orange (the telecommunications company), and McKinsey & Co. (the strategy firm). She has an MBA from Harvard Business School. She was born and educated in Australia, went to business school in the United States,has worked in Germany and the United Kingdom, and has traveled the world. She’s what you might call cerebral—like the portfolio of over 70 Zuztertu mobile apps, aimed at a wide set of markets from apps for small children to education for adults.

Charlie Wood of Spanning: “We built our product on a stack of free software: LAMP on the servers, and Apple’s free developer tools and an open-source framework called Cappuccino for the client. We built a mailing list of people interested in our product with Google’s free FeedBurner system, and tracked
visitors using Google Analytics. Once we started selling our product, we used PayPal to handle the transactions so we did not need to open a merchant account at a bank. None of the systems we used required more than $100 to get started.”

When Brian and I were younger, our big opportunities were with our respective employers, Accenture and Price Waterhouse. Today’s platforms are more associated with smaller firms like Appirio and even smaller firms like Zuztertu and Spanning.

That’s a seismic change in the industry – one that SaaS vendors like salesforce.com and Workday and cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure are having to factor in their partnering strategies

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Top Cruise Ships

Dude, you are getting the new iPad

A picture is worth a thousand calories

Trailfinders – a brick and mortar survivor

Generation Flux

Fine Print

We have all seen pharmaceutical commercials with all kinds of nauseating side effects listed. I think technology ads need some similar caveats.

Here are some examples

1. AT&T

The first vignette in the commercial should say “Apple says the iPhone Siri will support Italian in 2012. The young man is shown using the Telecom Italia network. AT&T’s prime technology in this example is its billing system which would charge the young man at our roaming rates of $ 1.39 a minute from Italy, 50c a text message and 2c a KB of data. Plus plenty of taxes.”

2. Verizon

It should say “If 4G deployment repeats the 3G rollout schedule, this remote lake will likely have 4G coverage in 2018.”

3. IBM

“We apologize for the lack of ladies anywhere in sight. Blame the Masters for that.  The basic message remains true. You can do anything yourself. You don’t need to outsource so much”

Finally, my fine print “The wording was developed late on Saturday night with more of focus on a baseball game and related commercials. The respective companies and their advertising companies have not vetted the blurbs”

Is Best Buy Amazon’s showroom?

I have heard the question many times in the last couple of weeks since Best Buy had a disappointing quarter. Actually I have heard it for the last decade, and while CompUSA, Circuit City, Curry’s have dwindled, Best Buy continues to morph and survive.

Retail, particularly technology retail, has always been brutally competitive, but few people seem to recognize how much Best Buy has been innovating under the covers.  I was impressed enough to devote 4 pages in my new book to the company – see extract below.

Download BestBuy extract

CIO “Do over” wishlist

Chris Murphy at InformationWeek is one of my favorite technology editors ( He also kindly wrote a blurb for the back cover of my new book.)

He has a nice gallery of CIOs each expressing something in their career they would like to do over like Tim Theriault at Walgreens who would rethink his global travel schedule.

There’s pearls of wisdom for everyone in the industry in that gallery.

Burning Question: What should Ginni Rometty do?

As she enters her second quarter as IBM’s CEO, Ginni faces a tricky scenario which frankly could qualify her for Veep consideration this summer.

What to do about Augusta?

Readers?

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Drive another day!

Hospitality Technology Outlook

Ubiquitous Scanning

The low-risk MVP

Florida Tech

More trailer-tow marketing

My wife asks me “Is Cisco an innovative company?” And I respond “Yes”.

“Wow, they make great robots and cars and music.”

And I go, “not the Cisco I know”

So, she shows me the commercial below. Hey, if AT&T and IBM can do it, why not Cisco?

BTW – Nice Gary Numan number! (not Randy Newman as I originally posted who scored for the Pixar movie, Cars)

Outsourcing and the Circle of Trust

A colleague told me about an outsourcing firm which refuses to adopt SaaS for internal operations because they do not external eyes having access to their data. The irony is seemingly lost on them that their own staff can eye data of hundreds of their customers!

And not sure they realize a trend I saw in my book research. I asked several companies working on smart products for their industries if they would consider outsourcing some of the development. The answers were fascinating. Several said some variations of “who knows our industry, our customers and our products better than us?” Others said “If we bring in an outsourcer, it is almost guaranteed our competition will have our IP in two years”

Thousands of thick contracts later, this is a bad omen for the outsourcing industry. Getting back into De Niro's Circle of Trust - Regaining trust of the industry’s customers, and as importantly in its suppliers, needs to be a major objective.

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