It’s good to see three non-vendor, non-traditional analyst firm events survive and grow. Enterprise 2.0, GigaOm Structure and LeWeb are all this week and again in the Fall. All have grown a loyal patronage over the last few years. More interestingly, they all appear (at least based on scan of agendas) to feature more practitioner sessions.
Enterprise 2.0, for example has Nike and Wells Fargo execs presenting. Structure has Amazon and Zynga, LeWeb has American Express and Google among others.
Not only can they better bring out operational nuances, I find practitioners somewhat modest about their roles. So, a Nike executive is highly unlikely to just sing praises of social savvy and not of product innovation and supply chain excellence. Similarly a Google executive may talk Plus or other products, but is very aware of the amazing data centers and developer ecosystem his operational colleagues have grown. The Amazon CTO knows plenty of impressive work is happening in its logistics and merchandising areas.
Many talking heads on the other hand tend to hype their current passion. Social experts have little time for product design or financial constraints. Startup/VC watchers get bored with scaling up considerations. Cloud watchers are mostly about efficiency, not revenue or growth.
BTW – looking at the three agendas, maybe they should put on a joint event. Heavy on practitioners. And a realistic tension that exists in most companies with competing technologies, executive expectations and limited budgets.
Microsoft: A new era of vertical integration?
As he introduced the Microsoft Surface tablet this afternoon, Steve Ballmer kicked off by pointing out Microsoft has long been a hardware player. He is right of course. Lots of accessories – mice, webcams. Lots of devices which did not overlap much with its licensees – Zune, XBox, Kinect, Surface table.
With Surface Tablet we may be seeing a pivot around the Wintel model which has worked well for decades. At least on surface (pardon the pun).
Under the surface, in the last decade the cracks have been growing.
Microsoft has watched HP (and by extension Compaq) go through waves of turmoil there and whispers that it drools after the PC-less IBM business model.
It has watched Dell get “out-Delled”. An excerpt from my book:
In turn, Microsoft partners have themselves been frustrated. One particular emotive word: Vista. HP and others have long had tablets only to watch lukewarm support from the MS Office and other groups.
Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft balances the OEM investment in Ultrabooks and Win 8 machines with its own path.
Even more interesting will be to see how vertically integrated Microsoft decides to become. Apple has extended that definition considerably with its wildly successful retail model, with its tight control over its huge apps ecosystem, with its ability to control component supplies and outsourced manufacturing with extremely large and long-term commitments.
Microsoft is no rookie. The XBox and Kinect in particular have given it plenty of hardware experience. Heck, the entire Foxconn XBox team has threatened suicide. Even Apple has not had such a tricky manufacturing challenge!
June 18, 2012 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)