Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there. UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies. Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the [...]
Since last September, I’ve been taking a Ph.D. level course on the future of internet, IT and related fields called Bit Bang at Helsinki University of Technology’s Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy. The students are all Ph.D. students from either TKK (HUT), University of Art and Design Helsinki or my own Helsinki School of Economics. [...]
I wanted to write a brief follow-up to my Eulogy from a few weeks ago. To recap: my Sennheiser PX 200 headphones died for a second time, not because anything was wrong with their original purpose—to produce great sound—but because a more marginal feature failed: the wires, that connect my mp3-player to the speakers. I [...]
Context: I’m currently in discussion with a number of companies that are involved with SOA-vending & -consulting. As a result, I’ve been studying up a little on this market and hope to learn more by writing about it. Note: Since I know, judging by the response to other articles on enterprise-software, this isn’t exactly the [...]
Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams. Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by [...]
Last week, the unsexy world of lower software layers witnessed some significant consolidation moves: Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB, and Oracle Corporation acquired BEA Systems. I know you guys browsing the blogosphere want to hear about Paris Hilton (this one keyword to boost visits from search engines), and most of all Twitter, Google, Apple, MS-bashing (which I [...]
Those of you who know me, also know that I am not a friend of Twitter. Not yet! But this medium for micro-publishing seems to grow and grow. Swiss blogger Nico Luchsinger has counted some 800.000 users. So there is quite a good track record and the only thing missing is the business model. But [...]
No it is not. And when you think about it’s kind of a good thing. Because it means that the path from technology to revenue is that much shorter. Of course, the other side of that coin is that there are many people competing for that same revenue. After writing my last post on this, [...]
I am still a bit obsessed on how companies manage their innovation processes and how they make it fit with their culture. In this context, I recently read an HBS case about Intel research. The “Intel lablets” particularly attracted my attention and raised general questions about the management of innovation. In 2004, Intel realized that [...]
In chess, a gambetto – say it with an Italian accent, consists in sacrificing a piece at the beginning of a game to gain a competitive position on the exchequer – for example through the control of the center of the chessboard or one of the long diagonals. Getting back to business (we’ll get back [...]
Microsoft’s 1st fiscal quarter earnings were blow out. Its profit soared 23 percent to $4.29 billion, or 45 cents per share, from $3.48 billion, or 35 cents per share, during the same period last year, as brisk sales of the new ‘Halo 3′ video game, Windows and Office helped it breeze past Wall Street’s expectations. [...]
IBM’s nice white paper, which I briefly touched on before on my food and retail-blog, describes a model for mapping how customers make decisions in a given setting. It looks at three types of retail-outlets: Grocery, consumer-electronics, and apparel (clothing), and explains how each type of store has different types of customers, with different motives [...]
Yesterday was a landmark in the young history of the European software industry. World leader in enterprise resource planning software, Germany-born and global company SAP, stroke a USD 7.5bn bid for Paris outskirts-born and global company vendor Business Objects – also a San Jose CA-headquartered world leader on the business intelligence market (USD 1.7bn turnover [...]
Here’s a little fact sheet mixed with some thoughts on Green IT. Green IT is a truly serious topic that should be thought over and tackled over a long period of time. There is not one answer to the sustainable development challenge. On thing that’s pretty sure though is that Information Technology, an industry that [...]
Over the last 6 years, the Oracle has consistently outperformed its arch rival SAP (see chart below: SAP’s in red) Could M&A be more virtuous than organic growth after all? This is a real, tricky question: Oracle mostly grows through a well-thought acquisition strategy whilst SAP has always preached organic growth. Most people, including my [...]
