I have been thinking about this topic for a while now. Enterprise 2.0 book from Andrew McAfee chapter 8  (Looking ahead), a nice twitter conversation with @oscarberg, and a New York Times article about Microsoft Creative Destruction : all combine to convince me there was some room for a blog post. Snip from the NYT article :

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As Wikipedia defines it :

“Office politics is the use of one’s individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one’s legitimate authority. Those advantages may include access to tangible assets, or intangible benefits such as status or pseudo-authority that influences the behavior of others. Both individuals and groups may engage in Office Politics.”

One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt.

The Transparency test

Throwing such concepts as Trust and Transparency into the discussion is a good method to identify the politics freaks out there. Transparency is their worst enemy : manipulating and controlling information is their favorite way to achieve their goals : intriguing to keep and strengthen their positions and power (as Oscar puts it).

They’ll soon show the standard behavior pattern of politics : denial and/or cynisism and standard resignation. “It’s not that simple, it just can’t work like that, You just can’t change that, that’s the way it has been and that’s the way it always will be etc …”.

I am very defiant towards these people. More often than not, this is somehow to excuse their own questionable  behaviour. My take on politics jerks : The No Asshole rule.

Office politics specialists of the world unite ! Because you will soon die and no-one will shed a tear on you. Enterprise 2.0 is near the corner : trust and transparency will eventually rule the work place and the exact nature of your contribution will clearly appear : poisonous, irrelevant and damaging. We shall then follow Robert Sutton advice : get rid of you.

Model 1

Chapter 8 (Looking Ahead) of Enterprise 2.0 book is, according to me, the most engaging and impressive. In that section, McAfee describes how the egalitarian and transparency values of the social platforms born on the internet may not be very welcomed in some companies.

To illustrates this, he mentions The Liar’s Club, this weekly executive meeting in a company where some people lie to each other regarding their budget, progress etc … to make sure they are not the ones the blame is put upon.

He then goes on and mentions Chris Argyris people behaviour models in organisations. Argyris describes two types of model. Model 1 is defined with the following principles :

1 – Define goals and try to achieve them.

2- Maximize winnings, minimize losings

3- Suppress negative feelings :

4- Behave rationally

ChangingMinds offers a clear description of Model 1 limitations :

In order to acquire a sense of control we need to prove to ourselves that we can control our environment. We thus set ourselves goals and do our best to achieve these goals. In order to maintain our sense of control, we tend to do this unilaterally — to include others is to risk losing control

We all like to win, because this proves to ourselves that we are achieving our goals and are in control. On the other hand, if we lose, we not only do not achieve our goals, but we are seen by others as inferior and are likely to receive less support in the future (thus we lose social control–i.e. power). Winning (or losing) becomes a spiral as the more people ally with us, the more others will feel socially isolated and be motivated to join us.

There are many ways we can experience dissonance in the actions from the above approaches (how well we achieve our goals, what we lose …). We will tend towards avoidance, denial and suppression. This suppression can be a collaborative action — I won’t talk about your limitations if you don’t talk about mine. This is a hugely poisonous spiral that leads entire organizations into sub-optimal and dysfunctional ways of working that can eventually bring down the entire company.

We all need to predict  the world around us, including what other people will say and do. A defensive way of being rational is to judge the rationality of others, thus setting ourselves up as authorities and hence automatic winners. Blaming people and situations is to  attribute cause, which is itself a rational action.

Even if these 4 principles may sound legitimate at first, soon the the trade-offs become obvious : it focus on individuals hence foster ego centric decisions and actions. Defensive communication, problems and mistake denials, stealing other people’s ideas and results (in France we are world champions), blaming, bitching and gossiping about people, brown-nosing, manipulating information … In one word : politics.

Model 2

As an alternative, Argyris proposes another behavior model based on (from Wikipedia which tends to prove that Tables are not Wiki specialty):

1- Valid information : Design situations or environments where participants can be origins and can experience high personal causation (psychological success, confirmation, essentiality). Actor experienced as minimally defensive (facilitator, collaborator, choice creator). Quality of life will be more positive than negative (high authenticity and high freedom of choice)

2- Free and informed choice : tasks are controlled jointly, Minimally defensive interpersonal relations and group dynamics, effectiveness of problem solving and decision making will be great, especially for difficult problems, Increase long-run effectiveness

3- Internal commitment to the choice : Protection of self is a joint enterprise and oriented toward growth (speck in directly observable categories, seek to reduce blindness about own inconsistency and incongruity), Learning-oriented norms (trust, individuality), Public testing of theories

4- Constant monitoring of the implementation : open confrontation on difficult issues, Bilateral protection of others

The second model is based on valid information, choices, commitment and monitoring, all within a team activity. This is transparency. And transparency is a bedrock for trust.

As this is less individual centric, this second model is more open to the possibility of admiting mistakes (a great enabler of office balanced relationships) : it makes assertive communication natural and the only way to go.

From Model 1 to Model 2

This will resonate with a strong echo for any of us that have witnessed these top managers meetings where one hardly talks not to make a mistake and undergo a scathering attack by other managers. This is just dreadful.

McAfee concludes that :

ESSP can help organizations move from a Model 1 to a Model 2 theory-in-use. These tools can change the nature of collaboration and discussion within the enterprise giving people the ability both to contribute their perspective to a dialogue and to inform themselves by incorporating multiple perspectives. In short, they can help organizations move from defensive to productive reasoning(…) Enterprise 2.0 is about abandonning the assumption that unilateral control is the best way to achieve desired outcomes.

This is my favorite part of the book as this sounds to me the most enlightening.

While implementing Enterprise 2.0 and moving from Model 1 to Model 2, would we eventualy defuse office politics and focus, at last, on the main goals of private organisations : profits, customers satisfaction and employees well being ?

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The second consequence is that I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of virtual OSs. With Google OS recently having been announced, which is supposed to integrate flawlessly with Macs and Windows, assumably Android, as well as being designed for Netbooks, I wonder if Intel, with it’s multi-core processors, has not created a situation where nothing else matters, hardware-wise, except to have a powerful enough processor? In other words, have hardware-manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, and to some extent, Apple simply become irrelevant?

Take Sony for instance, which has just announced its first “Netbook.” It’s one selling point?

“Like other netbooks the Vaio W has a 10-inch screen, but its display has a resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels rather than the more common 1,024 by 600 pixels. That means more of a Web site can be fitted onto the screen, and the user will have to scroll less, the company said at a launch event in Tokyo on Tuesday.” (emphasis my own)

Not much to write home about, except if you absolutely need to use a Sony, and bear in mind that that company was at some point a premium manufacturer of technology. The PC market has long been commoditised of course, ever since IBM opened its hardware up to the world, but with the rise of ultra-cheap PCs & laptops, I think they are digging their own grave.

I think that, as I wrote in a comment to a recent post, Netbooks are a failed experiment and, to add to that, unless either drastic changes in the cost-structure can be made to increase profit-margins, or new business models can be found (e.g. a similar hardware-service bundling to what has been happening in the mobile phone space), I think that we won’t be hearing from netbooks after 2010 onwards.

What also seems clear is that software companies, with their much more favourable profit margins, are winning this war, and, pretty soon, they won’t have to think about hardware at all any more. Instead of writing for a “spec,” you just need to write for a virtual space, which can run anywhere or everywhere.

Arguably, hardware has always been enslaved to software (except for one company), but I see the Sony’s & Samsung’s of today becoming the Nokia’s & Motorola’s of the future.

Since I’m not a technologist (more of a technology philosopher), I may be drastically oversimplifying. What do you think?
P.S. going to stop signing my name for a while. I’ll see if that makes a difference. V.

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Full QWERTY and dual screens. Eat that iPhone. Also works as a fishing net weight.

It was a good rumor because it sounded plausible until one starts to seriously think about it. Yes, Nokia is one of the few handset manufacturers who doesn’t have Android plans so it just a matter of time, right? Not exactly. Sure, some might think Android is a better platform than S60 and yes, in my opinion, the current S60 UI and user experience are a crapfest but at least it’s Nokia’s own crapfest. And that’s the important thing.

The reason why other traditional cell phone manufacturers are pushing out Android phones is that it doesn’t really matter what software runs in their phones as long as it sells. And of course Android sells, because carriers finally get to bill for data usage when mobile users discover the web.

Does SonyEricsson, Samsung, HTC have a smartphone that matters? They all pump out smartphones on different platforms and don’t really focus on building an ecosystem across their phones. Their main customers are phone operators, who’ll eventually brand the phones and fill them with their own software and sell them to their customers. This is ture for Nokia too as far as Nokia the mobile phone manufacturer goes. Nokia, however, isn’t just about manufacturing hardware. Take SonyEricsson as a counterexample. As a part of Sony, SonyEricsson is more about extending Sony’s brands (Walkman, Cybershot) and not solely about mobile phones. Same goes for Samsung. Nokia, on the other hand, is a brand on its own and has interests in all aspects of mobile communication.

SonyEricsson is a good example also because it shows what would happen to Nokia if it’d adopt Android. Those who remember time when it was just called Ericsson, the company actually did have pretty nice technologies and phones. Today, that history is pretty much nonexistent in their phones.

Unlike the other phone manufacturers, but like Apple and Google, Nokia has a wide application ecosystem. Nokia is betting a lot on services, even though Ovi Store and other Ovi services haven’t caused similar nerdgasms like Apple’s Apps Store. In fact, one might say that Ovi services are a source of a lot of nerdrage instead. Nokia would also need to port its Nokia Maps and Mail for Exchange support over to Android, just to mention few. Also, why invest in Qt if you’re going Java?

The only way for Nokia to remain relevant in the marketplace is to own the software its phones and services run on. It’s about vertical integration and it’s about mattering in the smartphone market. This vertical integration is why Google and Apple suddenly matter in smartphone business. Vertical integration is why Apple still matters in the computer business.

This is also why no other mobile phone manufacturer has taken Symbian seriously. It would give Nokia, their #1 competitor, immense strategic power. The reason Windows Mobile has zero traction in mobile phones follows the same logic.

As Trip Hawkins, whose Electronic Arts was first to bypass the game resellers and went straight to retailers, has put it, “it’s all about leverage. If you don’t have it, you lose”. With Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS for netbooks, there are many unhappy netbook manufacturers who decided to build something on Android. On the other hand, by bypassing the need for a real OS and focusing on the Web, netbook manufacturers can try to cut costs – at the expense of becoming dependent on Google.

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From the Official Google Blog:

Today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

I have nothing to say that I haven’t already said before.

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If you are interested in contributing to Tech IT Easy, either as a blogger or guest writer, please write to us!

This month, I’d like to thank Georgia for writing about guerrilla marketing. Last month, I forgot to thank Jeremy for publishing his interview with social marketeer, Michelle Greer, and Georgia, for writing about Mint.com.

Let’s get to the favourites (in no particular order):

• The “captain’s chair” phenomenon, in which I identify a problem that many one-person-companies-growing-into-SMEs face, the centralisation of leadership around the founder, and the lack of processes that facilitate delegation. Expect more posts about this.
• A short guide for surviving Windows [aimed at Mac-users], in which in a series of a few posts, I start discussing how to survive that “traumatic” move. While I have certainly managed to, I am now happily back on my Mac at work. Even so, I am writing this post on Windows Live Writer, through Parallels (it’s what I call an anchor-app, something that ties you to an environment). Related: Awakening from the OS X vs. Windows War and Battles in the Virtualization Space.
• Media’s Basic Duty to tell the Truth (P.S. Blogs are not Media), in which I, again in a series of posts,  defend Techcrunch’s reputation, in regards to their accusation towards Last.fm. My premise: blogs (like ours) are not media, but some professional blogs, like Techcrunch, have become its equivalent and thus (have to) respect the same principle of reporting the news as accurately and honestly. I don’t want to generalise though, I think that Arrington’s posts in particular, can be much too emotional, provocative, and definitely more blog than pro-media.
• Where do Good Ideas come from?, in which I propose four areas and write about the ease of implementing these ideas. Two supplement posts: On having Heroes in your Craft and The Right Mix between Idea and Execution and One reason not to blog (at least not to blog about your plans) (I sure do blog a lot about idea generation… ).
• What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?, which comes down to that I would like a device that records everything that I do, in whatever format needed. Some complications: a. do we even want it? How would we process the information? I think that suitable devices already exist, from your camera phone to more specialised and expensive methods.

That’s it for this month. May’s recap can be found here. Until the next time, on Tech IT Easy.

Vincent

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• I can’t run Windows Live Writer—simply the best blogging software on both the Mac and Windows—through Crossover, because it was built in .Net. And .Net apps don’t work in Crossover.
• You can use the free Virtualbox from Sun to run your virtual OSs (a great development environment!), but if you want to launch Windows apps from your Mac, you need to pay for either Parallels, Fusion, Crossover, or any other commercial variants for this purpose. Basically, a software like Parallels allows you to place a shortcut to a Windows app onto the Dock or the Desktop, which will launch Windows + the app, when you click it.
• The best Windows user-experience on the Mac is through Boot Camp. It would be a million times quicker to boot if you were able to hibernate on the Windows side and safe sleep on the Mac side. If you don’t want to risk losing your unsaved data however (why would it be unsaved?), you’re probably better off booting the traditional way (3-5 min. out the window right there). Well actually, it used to be an official feature, now it isn’t.
• Sharing your OS X documents with your Windows ones (in other words, using the same folder for both OSs) is very possible when you use Parallels. When you use boot camp however, it all of a sudden gives you a convenient error.

Georgia, in response to my post about the OS War being over, wrote that she thought that this whole discussion is about standards. I think that the edges are getting very blurry and I eventually see hardware, on the PC-side at least, becoming pretty irrelevant. In the meantime, however, you get these little annoyances, beyond stuff like Office for Mac being inferior to Office for Windows, which make me wonder if they are here by design or because they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. I’m betting on the first.

Standards, for now at least, are still causing wars.

Vincent

(Picture is of course of the game Virtua Tennis 3, and has absolutely zero to do with this post)

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Jeff Hawking is also the author of “On Intelligence,” and describes his development-path of creating neuro-scientific solutions towards interfacing with technologies (which is, I think, the right perspective towards interface-design). He’s doing some pretty interesting things in the field, also through his foundation called Numenta, but I expect also through future hardware coming out (I’m not sure if he’s involved in the Palm Pre, but he was in the Foleo). He describes some crisis-moments in Palm’s past, including how to compete with Microsoft (the irony!). Very worth checking out and I love the title: “Inside the mind of a reluctant entrepreneur.”

Steve Balmer, what a character! I found him to be thoughtful and concise, whilst never forgetting to pimp the universe that is Microsoft and how that is important for startups… He shares a bunch of stories, like why he decided to drop out of Stanford and join Microsoft as employee no. 30, the current economy and its opportunities, the future of computing, and even makes a few jokes about (not mentioning) Vista.

I thoroughly enjoyed both lectures and think you will too.
Vincent

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So what makes Macs so cool. Rather than discuss the superficial, the hardware, I just want to briefly write about why I like the Mac OS “interface,” and then leave the floor to you, answering the question: “What makes OS X so damn great?”

My impression: I don’t know how to explain it exactly, maybe it’s because OS X is Unix based. But what I really dig about OS X (Tiger & Leopard) is that every menu-function, every possible action you’d want to undertake, can somehow be translated into a script or service, and thus entered in Quicksilver or another “launcher.” That means that my hands rarely have to leave the keyboard, which I think saves me a few seconds vs. going for the mouse/trackpad, point & clicking. It also means that my Dock [Apple's application launcher] and desktop are clean most of the time, as I don’t need a “visible” shortcut to get to the destination I want.

I could never get that same workflow going on Windows, and perhaps it’s because of the architecture, that it just isn’t written to be that open. Sure, things like SizeUp and Fresh, both of which I discussed last week, are not part of the Leopard interface, but the fact that they exist, the fact that Quicksilver exists, is actually what makes OS X 10 times as effective an OS to me. Once again, I don’t know why exactly this is the case, I attribute it to the open architecture of Unix.

So, now it’s your turn: why makes OS X so damn great (or not, if that’s where you want to take it)?

Have a nice Easter weekend!
Vincent

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As I am buying my first SLR camera (a Canon Rebel XSI) pretty soon, I thought a little what I want and don’t want out of photography. I like to make good pictures of course. I like to become a master of the medium. I like to express myself. And, I’d like to be able to take pictures whenever I want to. But one thing I noticed, from taking over 5000 pictures with a Canon Ixus, with less than 5% with me in it, is that I also like to be a part of the picture-experience.

What inspired my idea was my recent upgrade to an Intel Mac with my very first webcam—that’s right, I never saw the attraction until now. It rules! To anyone used to video-Skyping, you’re familiar with the huge video of your friend, and the tiny video of yourself at the bottom.

So, I’m thinking, why not have the same thing for pictures? Taking a picture would then look like this:

Instead of having a pesky and rather ugly watermark, you can see who actually made that picture. You could of course have a little mini-cam in your camera, pointed at you and taking an up-to-date shot of what you look like — that one was taken while I had the flu, some months ago — but a static picture will do the trick most of the time.

What do you think? Should photo-pubishers like Picasa, iPhoto, Flickr, etc. integrate such a feature? Would it have any useful function to you, as a photographer or as a viewer? Share your thoughts!

Vincent

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I arrived at Le Web, investing a lot of time (2 full days) and money (more than EUR 800, that is to say around USD 1100 – which is a lot of money for what I got), with very high expectations, and I have to say that this conference was a huge disappointment to me. Actually, it was more of a disappointment: I actually found Le Web ’08 conference to be a huge piece of crap. Here’s why.

The organizers: Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur

Prior to the conference, I was a big fan of Loïc Le Meur. The guy looked like Midas to me: everything he touched became gold. The guy gets people lining up to invest in his startups (look at his list of investors in his last startup Seesmic here, impressive). Loïc understood that blogging was going to be big before everyone, and positioned himself accordingly (a huge blogger and founder of Six Apart, the editor of TypePad). Loïc is also an early investor in LinkedIn, my favorite web app, and recently founded and funded Seesmic that I find to be a very cool video conversation platform. Well, the guy seemed to be the perfect investee for VCs, and the perfect investor for entrepreneurs. However, when it comes to organizing conferences, I would tend to say it’s not there yet. Loïc and his wife Géraldine have been organizing the Le Web event for something like four years. Last year already, criticism had emerged, but overall comments were positive. Well, after attending one Le Web conference, I can only blame myself for not having due diligenced better: I wasted my time and my startup’s money.

The theme

Love. This year’s Le Web conference was about love. At first sight, I found this theme brilliant – too bad the idea wasn’t well executed. Love is a universal value that is only discussed in novels and Vogue. Plus, Love is the perfect theme if you want to think an outside-the-box conference program. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all. Although there were a number of supposedly quality speakers, most didn’t actually mention the theme, and I guess some didn’t even know that the theme was Love (Marissa Meyer of Google, Didier Lombard of France Telecom, Maurice Levy of Publicis, to name some of them…). I think it’s a big waste, because having a truly deeply-thought consistent program around Love, with at least some continuity between speakers, could’ve made of Le Web a truly mainstream event rather than just a reunion self-proclamed visionaries.

The speakers

Speaking of self-proclamed visionaries, I had a hard time looking for new ‘stars’ on Le Web panels. Or even just interesting content.

Paulo Coelho is a brilliant man, but he had nothing to do at Le Web: his speech didn’t bring anything new, it was self-promotion, and an uninteresting one as a matter of fact. Same with Susan Wu from Ohai, preaching her church (virtual goods): boring slides, boring intervention.

Didier Lombard was absolutely out of scope too. He basically paid to get on stage. And you could feel it.

I was very disappointed by Maurice Levy from Publicis (and by the questions asked by Loïc Le Meur: boring) – the guy could’ve given us interesting insights on web advertising. Instead, we had a boring “fireside chat”, as they say. I liked one thing about Maurice Levy though, he publicly gave his email address saying he was looking for startups to invest in.

Startup competition updates were extremely repetitive; the only thing you could here was “despite the crisis, there are still a lot of innovation around; I’m thrilled by what I saw in the startup competition room”. Except that when you looked at the jury in the room, they were all on their Blackberry or iPhone aswering emails.

I liked Yossi Vardi, Chris Anderson, John Buckman (good tips for entrepreneurs), Marissa Meyer (a few insights on the Google roadmap, like wanting to take Chrome out of Beta) & Joi Ito though.

The sponsors

Le Web’s official sponsor was no company else than Microsoft, the tech giant that probably least understands the Web provided the very poor quality of its online applications, like Hotmail, or its total absence of the collaborative web apps landscape outside its expensive minority stake in Facebook. The good news is, Microsoft folks are smart asses and let some selected startups (some of them embedding no single Microsoft technology) demo their applications rather than demo Microsoft products. Microsoft alone paid Le Web USD 110,000 or EUR 80,000 to get its brand on top of others, rent a lounge space, and get speaking time.

Google also was a sponsor of Le Web – they had Microsoft move first when it came to getting the “official sponsor” title. Google had a special room dedicated to presenting its own stuff during day 1. Nothing new there, except that Google brought in speakers on a number of topics like Adwords, APIs, etc. I guess the fee also included the 2 keynotes Google got. If I were Google, I would, to ensure a maximum buzz around my brand, not attend or sponsor Le Web. That would make the entire conference speak about the absence of Google whilst the whole web revolves around the Google search engine. Google being a sponsor amongst others makes of it a regular company. Too bad.

There were other partners, like SwissCom that sucks big time (they had a booth, and did not manage to make the Internet work during the entire conference + Loïc Le Meur says they got paid more than USD 100,000! to make nothing work), Facebook (?), SixApart & Seesmic who got it for free obviously,…and a number of others that are not worth talking about in this not-so-long post.

The budget, the price

1,400 participants x an average of EUR 1,000 per entrance

Sponsoring & demo room for at least EUR 200,000

The overall budget for this 2-day conference amounted to EUR 1,500,000. Yet, there was no wifi running, definitely not enough food for all participants (I had to go grab a sandwich each 2 days), no consistent editorial line, a crowd of people investing time and a lot of money to listen to the same self-called visionaries on stage.

I haven’t paid myself in one year (I live on my fiancée’s salary), every since I started Verteego. I bought myself a ticket to Le Web almost as a Christmas gift, hoping to enjoy a lot. It was a sort of sacrifice (EUR 850 + 2 days of turnover for Verteego – I’m the sales guy there – is hell of a lot of money! the price of a superb laptop or a great long weekend, say, in Venice) but I was plenty of hopes. The least I could say even 2 weeks after the conference is that I have a very angry feeling at myself: I feel I’ve been financially abused. And I lost two days of hard work during an important period.

The place, and the temperature…

Well, it was free-zing. Which is okay for me, except that with so many people inside, there must have been a sort of natural warmth, which wasn’t the case. I felt this place had the worst energetic efficiency in Paris. This absence of environmental awareness stroke me: the second day, it was warmer. I couldn’t believe how much energy was used to heat the place. I am very disappointed by the overall lack of consciousness of web entrepreneurs for environmental issues: if you are really about changing the world, then you should think about measuring their environmental footprint and take action to reduce it from one year to another & compensate the remainings. But they sure didn’t. And I’m not writing this just to sell Verteego Carbon here: I just don’t understand entrepreneurs to pretend they want to change the World and who don’t care about behaving socially & environmentally responsibly. I think that Le Web, an event that took place in Europe at the same time as the Poznan conference (pre next Kyoto talks in Poland) AND which theme was Love, was just perfect place to ensure Social Responsibility and Sustainability became buzz words in the blogging, startups & VC microcosm. Géraldine & Loïc completely missed the train here.

The startup competition

I didn’t apply to the startup competition. I felt it wasn’t right to make startups pay EUR 1,500 for just a pitch. I was wrong in doing so. The startup competition was probably the only interesting thing during this conference. I paid, as I said, EUR 800+ to go to Le Web Paris ’08 and basically meet with friends. It would’ve been worth paying the double to try and get 7 minutes to pitch Verteego in front of around 300 people. That makes it 5 euros per viewer’s attention, + the backlinks, visibility, and blog coverage you could get later on. Not applying to the startup competition was perhaps my only regret. And that would probably be the only reason I would attend next year.

The food

It was a shame. There’s no other word for it. I could get no food at all, not during the first day, not during the second day. The first day because there was none left. The second because there was no vegetarian food! Both days I went outside for a sandwich. I could then make friends because people were coming to me to ask where I had gotten this.

Worse: during Day 2, I needed to drink water during the day because I caught a cough during Day 1, because of the cold. And I was basically given a negative answer, because the bar was opened neither at 11am, nor at 3pm (which actually made me leave the place). You get 1500 people pay EUR 1000 on average, and there’s no food, and no water???

The Internet

There was very little Internet during the whole conference. Here’s a recap of this lousy situation: not only were you locked in with boring old speakers & because of the price you paid, you couldn’t answer client requests, or blog because of this.

Loïc Le Meur wrote an apologetic post, but I found this post actually ridiculous for him: Le Web gave EUR 100,000+ to SwissCom not to get a service. The excuse is: no provider is used to so many attendants. This is untrue: the very week before Le Web,  I attended a huge (20,000 visitors per day!) Trade Show, Pollutec, in Lyon. And there was perfect Wifi.

The attendants

Obviously, I met with many of my existing friends, and I was glad to. I also met with new people from everywhere around the world. Lots of great people there, from everywhere around the World. But come on, at what price…Furthermore, the mindset was rather negative: people weren’t ambitious or optimistic. They should be: the crisis is a great opportunity to move fast whilst remaining lean.

The TechCrunch party

It was so-so, I was disappointed and angry: 1) I had bought my business partner (who hadn’t attended Le Web) a EUR 30 ticket, to be told at the entrance that a pass to Le Web was worth 2 entrances. I think it should’ve been explained somewhere because I basically wasted EUR 30 with no possibility to get a refund. 2) I waited for 30 minutes outside, in line, to get in. And during this time I saw 2 groups of people showing up in front and squeezing the line: I found this very abnormal, because the Web is about democracy, having all the same access to information. 3) the place was very small, but this is less of an issue.

Conclusion

For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible at that cost. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should’ve refunded participants for providing such a low standard service rather than making this huge profit (I also think they should display publicly the P&L of the conference). This is the least they could’ve done since giving me back 2 days of work isn’t physically possible. Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur didn’t show any social responsibility here, no respect for their customers.

Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ’08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkZdkHylJ3w&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]

Jason writes:

“That’s the problem with Microsoft’s ads. They’re still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple’s successful ad campaign, they’re acting like Apple is #1.”

I think this pretty much echoes John’s point of view.

The problem here is that both treat PCs as being one market… the Apple-one, which is students, “stupid users (like me) who don’t want to know what’s under the hood,” and a certain type of individualistic professional. In that market, yes, Apple appears to be doing quite well.

Microsoft has a somewhat different segmentation of customers. It has the three above, it also has the cheapskate (those that have it pre-installed with a $400 PC or those that pirate it), the business-traveller, and the Dell-crowd (lot’s and lot’s of grey machines in big equally grey buildings).

What has Microsoft done with the “I’m a PC” advert? It has attacked a strong player in one segment that it and Apple are both competing for. Apple’s “I’m a Mac” has been promoting Macs as the easy and elegant solution, while Microsoft-PCs are the clunky and slightly psychotic alternative that nobody wants. By showing a diverse set of PC-users, Microsoft simply removed the foundation that Apple built this last year and a half, and has levelled the playing-field.

Is it a me-too ad? Definitely! But we all know about Apple by now and there’s no use pretending it doesn’t exist. Will it affect Apple’s bottom-line? I’m not much of a believer in advertising, but at the very least Apple will have to change their game. I think that Micheal Arrington makes a similar point here.

Does this have any effect at all on Microsoft’s no. 1 market, the Dell-one? It does if you believe that students, “stupid users,” and individualistic professionals will bring about a revolution in the work-place, which may happen eventually. In the short-to-medium term (the one the stock-market cares most about) however, my gut tells me that all of this is pretty irrelevant to that business-only segment, which cares about creating products that work on a massive scale, and about buying PCs that become cheaper with economies of scale.

Vincent

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The problem is, I believe, related to my own preference, which is definitely visual. I like drawing things out, I don’t like calculating them. I like seeing the effect that numbers have, I believe in the power of numbers, but I don’t really want to see the math. I know there’s other people that prefer the complete opposite, but we all get confronted with Excel-related tasks in our lives.

I’ve been thinking for about 5 minutes about this, but I’ve already come up with three improvements I want to see in Excel and other spreadsheet-packages. They are:

1. Instant zooming in when dragging

Sometimes, e.g. for a pivot-table, you need to select a very specific region on your spreadsheet. It sucks to drag the selection down together with scrolling the screen. Instead, it would be much nicer to just have the screen change, according to the action that you’re doing. Does that make sense? Anyway, here’s a picture. Excel also usually shows a little pop-up with the exact co-ordinates of where you’re at.

2. Visually displaying data

I think what I like the least about Excel is that I eventually lose the overview, especially after crunching away for a few hours. I’d like insta-graph™, by which I mean, I’d like to have instant graphical feedback on the effect that a change in inputs has on the whole. Just inserting a graph already does this, but is generally something you do after you finish your sheet. Instead, I’d like it to be in the sidebar, which both Excel and Numbers are using in Mac OSX.

3. Just drawing the line

No picture this time, but imagine just drawing a line on a graph and Excel filling in the numbers. Or, adjusting a bar-chart, by pulling bars up and down and having Excel doing the rest. Now that would be heaven for me!

Give me another hour, and I’d probably come up with another 10 suggestions. What it comes down to is that, right now, much of software is designed with a “my way or the highway” attitude, and especially things like Excel have shown little in terms of innovation over the years. I’d really like there to be more catering for the rest of us (probably a majority) that wants nothing to do with Excel, but is somehow forced into it. Excel is important after all, especially when trying to plan out your finances, which we all have to do at some point. Apple’s Numbers was promising, but didn’t really deliver either.

So where’s our salvation? And what would you like to see changed in Excel?

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I wonder if such a thing also applies to software, by which I mean anything that can be coded and presented to someone on a screen (so web-apps as well). Traditionally, the power of software has certainly been to mass-produce the same thing, save on storage, reproduction, and distribution, and collect the cash.

But for certain people, like me for instance (more right-brained than left) it’s often quite frustrating that I can’t shift software around the way I want. To me, Excel should be 3d, mapping not only the co-evolution of variables over time, but also how different forces, on a Z-bar affect these variables. I’m also a Visio guy and would love for that to integrate well with the numbers.

Beyond that there’s certainly the promise of multi-touch that I find exciting, not because I want to shake things around on the iPhone, but because it’s often much simpler to communicate with a drawing. Instead I’m forced to type this text into an editor and hope you can read between the lines.

I’m sure that companies can have all kinds of things customised these days. I was reading an interview with Micheal Dell (from 1998), who talked about how Dell pre-installed custom-software for companies at the factory already, to save the sys-admins the hassle. These days, I’m sure the magic of networks changed much of that, though the principle remains the same.

But the core of my thinking is that customers, individuals like you and me, are becoming more and more conscious of their rights. They are able to become activists at the click of a button. The internet and the media is making what is and what should be more and more transparent.

When I visualise “luxurious” software, I don’t necessarily see it as expensive either. It only takes a single company to realise that there is a market out there for doing things differently, without charging much for it. All it takes is a smart way to collect information about a customer and an equally smart way to translate that into a customised piece of software for you and me.

Vincent

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Let me start by saying that Google Chrome rocks! OK, it crashed about 2 mins after I started it, and I think it has a process running in the background, which speeds up the launch, but which I hate, and it is Windows-only, which I hate 100x, but… it rocks! It’s simple, love that, it completely takes in all the bookmarks you had in Firefox, love that, and Gmail, man, Gmail loads like lightning! The browser loads like lightning too, because of the background process, can’t be any other reason.

Gmail’s loading speed confirms it: Google Chrome is Not a browser. Repeat: it is not a browser. It is a Google app-launcher. It is meant to bring the Google ecosystem to Joe Schmoe on Windows, who may know Google, but hasn’t thought about using its calendar, office-suite, or email, for that matter.

It is, to use a buzz-term, an in-the-cloud facilitator, bringing us one step closer to no longer needing computer-processing and storage, but just doing everything (essential) through an internet-connection. I don’t think, I’ve been this excited about a browser since Phoenix (what Firefox used to be called), which was in 2002, 6 years ago.

What’s different? Or what did Phoenix and now Chrome have in common? Phoenix had tabs, it introduced extensions, it blocked the pop-ups that IE never would. It was an evolution over the status quo. Google Chrome is just a browser, built on Safari’s Webkit-engine, with no extensions, but it helps us do what we were already doing, better. Because the world has evolved from the extension-model, it has gone way beyond what a company like Microsoft has even imagined. We live in a world where web-services matter!

I don’t use an rss-reader, I use Netvibes. I don’t use a mail-app, I use Gmail or Facebook. I don’t use a blogging-app (well actually I do, but the majority doesn’t), I use WordPress.com. I don’t use MSN, I use Twitter or FriendFeed. When I’m on my PC, I’m in fact on the web, and the desktop only exists for work-documents and multimedia.

Google bites right into that trend, it executed well (ok, unstable browser, but localised in my language), it is a window in a world that 100s of thousands, if not millions, have accepted as their modus operandi.

Strategic angles

The love for strategy is really just the love for competition, disguised by fancy words.

Microsoft’s unbreakable chain?
Microsoft’s strength in the 90s was its software-platform. It was strong on multiple levels: market leader in OS, market leader in Office. And consequently, and still, market leader in browsers. It was able to build all these pieces of software on top of each other, tie them together, so that it would be an automatic choice to use them all. This is still the case today, as it is, by default, installed on 80% of computers out there (don’t quote me on this). Backwards integration, which also made it the number one choice for businesses, who like having the same software installed on 1000s of machines at once. And forward integration, through Office and IE, which add functionality in the value chain towards the consumer. From IE, Microsoft could build towards ActiveX and .Net, Silverlight, and other web-services that it was selling/giving to consumers.

Displacement by Firefox?
Yes and no… For displacement to occur there needs to be some kind of commercial angle. Firefox was built on top of open source principles, which is definitely disruptive, but it wasn’t until Google came into play, that Firefox became a commercial success. Google, these last few years, became the cash-cow for Firefox and other browsers, through affiliate fees it was paying for the use of the search-box.

While that’s cool, it also placed Google into a power-position. It knew that there was money to be made with browsers, it knew how much money there was to be made, so it just had to make the right move at the right time.

Google power
I already raved on why I think Chrome rocks, but for Google, the situation is actually pretty similar to Microsoft, except from the web towards the desktop, instead of the other way around. It is the market-leader in search, which some say is the operation system on the web. Nothing happens, without it going by Google, which can make or break a business. As is the case for browsers depending on Google cash as well.

Where Google leads is the web, and it has a pretty good read on where user-models are evolving too: web-services, with some anchoring on the desktop. So building a browser makes sense, it’s a step in bridging the value chain from web to desktop. Where it gets scary for Microsoft (which also collects Google cash through IE, I think), is when Chrome-users start getting the hint that Gmail works great, that Google Docs will hopefully work great (offline), etc. etc.

And I’m completely leaving Android out of this, whose future I still find hard to read… but I’m hopeful. Chrome definitely proves that Google can build software.

Doesn’t vertical integration rock? Doesn’t Chrome rock? I think they both do.

Vincent, the fanboy. Out.

P.S. I’m also not commenting on Firefox’s Ubiquity, it’ll be interesting to see where that goes… also largely built on Google-tech.

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I’m not going to go into the problem here, but I’ll just say that we tried to run the Windows system restore disks, which crashed half-way through, in the midst of formatting the drive. Vista PCs have, as you know, not been sold with the actual installation-CDs, though I understand that this is a right right now and the owner will go to the store and ask for them. After which, I will install Vista (my first time), as well as all the apps she needs for her productive day.

I’m angered that things like this are still happening! Having been a Windows user since 3.1, the only version that I’ve never had problems with was 2000, and XP now runs fairly good too. Vista, I’ve never tried, but I understand there were some driver-related problems, much like the 64-bit version of XP.

Typically, diagnosing and repairing a system like my friends will cost several hundred euros, if not more. And that is… if the store actually knew what it was doing! The error-codes, as mentioned, don’t point to a specific problem, and they previously suggested replacing the hard-drive, which she did and which didn’t fix the problem. Right now, the way I see it, I’m going to be installing a new Vista on it, the drivers, and the software. I’ll see if that holds. If it doesn’t, I’ll assume it’s a hardware-problem, and one piece of hardware will have to be removed after the other, to diagnose the cause.

Total time used to fix: 1 hour last night, 2 hours Vista CD pick-up, 2-3 hours installation & restore. And that isn’t counting that there’s 3 people involved, some gasoline, not to mention the months of trauma that she’s been experiencing through this problem. As well as whatever store-time + hardware-replacement-costs may be involved.

But why does it have to be so hard????!!!!! It really mystifies me how much of mess the open PC-architecure, in combination a fairly open ecosystem of hardware & software, is. You literarily have no idea, if there’s a piece of dust on a RAM-stick, if there’s a faulty driver, if an app is causing the mayhem, or if the problem is a Windows-update that went wrong. And, in case you are wondering, this is a HP-machine.

So, I ask once again, what the frustration-cost of Windows is? In my estimation, it’s pretty damn high, and I already suggested to them to get a Mac. It may be 50% more expensive and non-upgradeable, but the fact that I don’t have to worry about things like BSODs, is priceless.

I should disclose that I’ve been a Mac-user for 3 years now, which was both a hardware- and software-based decision.

Vincent

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Jeremy has already written about this topic (primarily in terms of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and Software + Service (S+S)) before (here, here, and especially here), so I won’t go very deeply into it, but SOA is roughly defined as:

“guidelines that allow software developers to design systems in stand-alone chunks of computer code, each specifying the critical outcomes, performance metrics, and interfaces between a discrete activity and other services.” (Src: HBR, June 2008)

If that’s a little abstract, I see it as a selling you a ticket to Lego-land, where you can play with legos all you like, those lego-blocks representing individual applications that can be used by businesses through a web (SaaS) or hybrid (Software+Service) interface, and Lego-land being the SOA-system that integrates all of them for you. This is opposed to the historical approach of buying a lego-box, which you eventually replace by another and another (side-prediction: we will eventually see Lego-world online).

SOA’s value-proposition

While traditionally it has been so that in order to compete in a technological world, you have to be technological, the idea of SOA is to remove that element, instead allowing individuals and businesses to focus on what they do best. I, personally, like that very much.

Other, more measurable advantages are that it is dramatically more cost-efficient. If you imagine that 5+ years ago, every company had to either invest into a powerful wide-area network (WAN) to be able to centralise IT-services, or replicate islands of IT-systems for each business-location, SOA removes that idea entirely, using a freely available infrastructure, the internet, and removing the need to build IT anywhere, instead paying-as-you-go for singular services that an external provider hosts and distributes. Added to this is the idea that performance now becomes accountable, in the sense that it is covered by contracts (e.g. QoS or SLA), something that was much harder to do with a permanently employed IT-staff.

With all these advantages and several more, it is no surprise that, in 2007, over 50% of mission-critical IT-projects were estimated to be SOA-based, a figure which is believed to increase to 80% in 2010 (these figures are from Gartner and may be US-only).

SOA’s hurdles

While this sounds pretty great, anytime you’re talking about system-wide change, you have to consider that this will meet resistance and involve a great many stakeholders, i.e. take a lot of time. And the question is here, who will you talk to as an SOA-vendor? Will it be the business-side of your client, as you are selling easy-to-understand lego-blocks, or will it be the technology-side, as you are selling technology? This is a serious question, so please answer it in the comments!

Added to this, a SOA-deployment is a strategic issue for your customer, meaning that your selling-proposition will also need to include the option of strategic support, aka consulting-services. This means that technology-only SOA-providers (vendors) will likely have to work with third-party consultants that pick-and-choose the best SOA-package for their client.

Related to this, the lego-like quality of SOA, which promises values like agility, flexibility, price, and reuse, and several more, all very important in this recession-prone time, also mean that someone can quite easily replace your service with someone else’s legos. Arguably this is much less the case if you provide an architectural framework and focus on building ecosystems (create lock-ins). But that is easier said than done, and as such this is a field dominated by few big players that buy up smaller ones.

Some more things, which I haven’t researched, are the degree that open source is a factor/issue here, and different revenue-models.

Grasping the paradigm-change

On the customer-side, there’s two ways of seeing this trend. On the one hand, extreme efficiencies, which also follows Nick Carr’s view that IT is no longer a competitive advantage. On the other hand, you’re giving away a lot of responsibility, which can be bad in two ways.

One, you’re giving away a lot of power to an industry, which will continue to consolidate. It’s something that may not be a problem now, but may become one.

Two, delegating a problem does not necessarily solve it. Taking the retail-industry, the biggest problem here is logistical inefficiencies, caused by delays, unnecessary replication of processes, or otherwise. Here, SOA, as long as it spans across the value-chain of manufacturers-transport-retailers-customer, is clearly a good thing. But it still requires a solid understanding of how IT does and can help your supply chain reap better results, something an independent SOA-vendor may not do as well. My opinion here is purely hypothetical, but it may be worth investigating how the masters of retail (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.) solve it. And if this is a problem, I imagine it is elsewhere too.

The SOA playing field

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll briefly go into this. Following Forrester-graphs show the players in the integrating corner of things (consultants) and, on the right, the vendors (also note the time-difference (the second one is Q4 2007) and region). You can find the originals here and here.

Clearly this industry is very layered, with some offering the complete package, including strategic assistance, and others providing either the SOA or a part of it (SaaS or similar). There is a lot of movement in this field with players buying each other out or moving into related industries, either on the hardware or software-side.

Final thoughts

Because I’m not a soft-/web-ware guy, I’m still very much undecided whether to head in the software-only direction myself, though I see much merit for an integrated business-consulting + software-deployment approach, and I also prefer selling Lego-blocks to rubber-trees. Feel free to convince me of your points of view.

All of this was initial thinking of course, and as such I’m happy to hear if you have anything to add or if I made some obvious mistakes. Again, considering the relative unsexiness of this area, I don’t expect too much

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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I’m going to make it slightly more ambitious:

Imagine you had to build a competing product to PowerPoint. Knowing the parameters of the application—it’s easy to create content, it’s a standard so everyone can use it, it’s portable, cross-platform, visually strong, and cheap—what could a competing product look like to you?

The way, I’m thinking about this is as follows. An obvious way to differentiate yourself, is to be louder than other people. But that brings some problems in terms of sustainability. You could use multiple speakers and act out something, but this requires you to always bring more people to a presentation (as well as train them), which is not always feasible. You could create something in code or on video, again requiring significant time, expertise, and resources to make this happen, and it might not be very portable. Etc. etc.

No, if you wanted to compete with PowerPoint, the market-leader, you would have to appeal to the same economic sentiments, which lead people to choose that software in the first place: portable, easy to create content, cheap, etc.

So…

• what would you do?
• what do you do?
• or what have you seen done?

Really curious what you come up with!

Premise: this was a small part of an exercise, I had to do as part of an application-procedure today. It was pretty fun, my solution was pretty creative, though no one was really thinking about the sustainable part, about actually building a product. But it made me wonder… what if? Go crazy!

Vincent

P.S. I know about Presentation Zen. I just barely have enough energy to type this post, let alone read a website.

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Hello, Fidji here. I remember that, for one of my first articles on Tech It Easy, I spoke about it with Jeremy and he told me “that’s interesting, but there is no way you are going to make your point if you don’t draw something to show it”. And I didn’t, because I couldn’t find a way of summarizing it all in a simple picture. I thought it was better with words only, but truly it wasn’t. That’s the point that Dan Roam is trying to make in his book “The back of the napkin”.

Dan was today’s speaker at the eBay Speaker Series conference, so I had the chance to enjoy hearing him explain his theory. He is convinced that any business problem can be solved by a simple picture, that anybody has the ability to draw. But we often believe that we are not able to draw anything because the current educational system doesn’t give us many opportunities to use our visual thinking – even if it is an innate form of thinking as a child.

He shared a funny anecdote with us: he was advising Microsoft on a UI type of problem, and to foster the discussion, he showed them some handmade drawings. The people in the room were enthusiastic about this new support for their discussion, and at the end of the meeting some exec went to see Dan and asked him: “what software did you use to make the UI seem as if it is handmade?”.

And I definitely agree with Dan when he says that some software help and stimulate our thinking whereas others (and a lot of them) just block us: as a strategic analyst, I personally thinks about a problem only in terms of “what is it possible to show about it in a PowerPoint?”. I know it sounds kind of pathetic, but it is clear that my brain is now used to think about solutions in terms of slides.

So Dan’s solution (which can of course be summarized in a picture drawn on a napkin as you can see in this article) is to use the swiss knife of visual thinking:

• Use our built-in tools: eyes, mind, hands.
• Use the “look, see, imagine, show” process when approaching a problem, like we would do in poker game (we look at the cards, we see the patterns, we imagine what we could have, whe show our cards).
• When you arrive at the “show” step, use the SQVID framework: try to understand wether you need, for your audience to understand, to make you picture Simple or elaborate, Qualitative or quantitative, to focus on the Vision or the execution, to adopt an Individual or a comparative view, and finally to show your problem as a Delta (change) or as a status quo.
• Match your picture with one of the way we see the world: to answer a What? question, draw a portrait; to answer a How many? question, draw a chart; to answer a Where? question, draw a map, to answer a When? question, draw a timeline, to answer a How? question, draw a flow chart, and finally to answer the Why? question, draw a multidimensional picture, often a combination of the previous questions.

What I also find interesting is his classification of people into 3 categories regarding visual thinking: the black pen guys, who are the ones that can’t help jumping from their chair during a meeting and drawing things everywhere on the white board; the yellow pen guys, who are the ones good at highlighting the important areas in a picture and improving what’s be drawn; and the red pen guys, who hate drawing but who usually think that what the black pen guys are writing is bullshit and feel so exasperated that they end up amending the whole thing. I took Dan’s test and it happens that I fall into the second bucket; and I’m really curious to know where you think you fit the most to see if it confirms the repartition that we had within the eBay audience!

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1. Sheirin Iravantchi, Aymeril Hoang & Paul Degueuse, three people who have been instrumental in the success of the study trip to Silicon Valley (full quality debriefing in French by Olivier Ezratty here)I organized back in November 2007, are organizing what they call a (French)TechTour between May 19th & May 23rd 2008. The concept is pretty clear and very appealing: a sample of 10 startups will be selected to go to Silicon Valley & meet with corporate development departments of major large corps. Here’s a list of planned meetings (note the diversity of industries considered):
   1. Google David Lawee, VP corporate development
   2. Ebay Erik Stuart, Director, Corporate Strategy
   3. Cisco Didier Moretti, VP Business Incubation, Emerging Technologies Group
   4. Microsoft Beti Cung, Director, Emerging Business Team - I met Beti before, and an hour with her is worth the return trip: super smart girl, if all meetings are planned to be of such quality then becoming a TechTour participant is what you should be desperate working on
   5. HP Damien Henault, Director, Strategy & Corporate Development
   6. AT&T Rupert C. Young, Director, Strategic Business Development
   7. Intel Capital Eghosa Omoigui, Director, Strategic Investments
   8. Symantec Hans van Rietschote, Senior Director, Office of the Chief Technology Officer

Assuming that the agenda speaks for itself, impressive uh?, my bet is that you should take a look at the following links and apply:

(French)TechTour, the blog here; details on the tour here; application file here; the launch post here. Enjoy!

2. Thomas Faivre-Duboz, a former classmate of mine & Raphaël Fétique are 2 very active entrepreneurs in Paris. They run a consultancy aimed at helping website owners with a conversion rate enhancement methodology. The name of their company? Converteo. The good news is that Converto recently launched an Error404 competition: design the most appealing Error 404 page and you’ll win a one week conversion rate optimization audit worth 4000 euros HT (1 million US dollars – just kiddin’, around 6000 USD). I believe this is a great initiative: some Error 404 pages can be such a shame that they might never make you feel like coming back on a site; on the other hand, some display a message like ‘our teams are now aware of the malfunction, thank you for helping us improve our service and sorry for the inconvenience’, a sort of message that may improve user stickiness at the end of the day. Here’s the link to the Error 404 Converteo competition.

Wanna jump on one or the other, or both competitions? Please be their guest. Feel free to keep me posted on the outcome of your applications.

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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 a QA department (QA = quality assurance) where professional testers run through thousands of automatized-or-not scenarii; documentation; technical support staff help the install base with potential regressions occuring during updates and coping with changing information system environments; localization project managers monitor translations of the software: and last but not least, application engineers actually parameterize the software at clients.

Now my question, how many technical staff should you account for every software development engineer? I figured out an average ratio of 1 to 4, that is to say, for every technical team of 100 there should be around 25 software developers actually hacking code.

I know there exists extremes but by and large, from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m too far from the reality with a 1:4 developer / all-categories-technical-staff ratio.

What do you think? Feel free to describe what the company does when sharing your experience, because, since there are very large discrepancies between, say, an SAP that manufactures ‘heavy’ enterprise software and any web application designer that may not necessarily run industrialized testing and that has no professional service department, we might not get nuances at first sight.

PS: the ratio will also depend on the maturity stage of the company: at Microsoft, [# of develops]/[develops + Microsoft Consulting Services staff + developer evangelists + localization engineers + testers (1 for each develop) + architects] approximately equals 1/4 (1 to probably 5 ot 6 adding documentation specialists; & 1 to much more if you consider the system integrator ecosystem that actually does the application engineering). But the company is rather mature and therefore can afford to focus on quality of execution rather than productivity in execution. Which probably wouldn’t be the case for an enterprise software startup for obvious resource reasons. Anything to share? Best and worse practices, per specific industry (Web 2 / UGC, Video Games, enterprise, affordable consumer traditional applications, etc.) most welcome. I need to test my own budgeting assumptions

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[slideshare id=58242&doc=nextweb2007-saul-1518&w=425]

The slideshow speaks for itself, doesn’t it? And even if you don’t chose to become an entrepreneur yourself at this very moment, in Europe or elsewhere, my take is that you should join an early-stage startup. Let me tell you a quick story about this.

The first time I thought of leaving MS to start a startup (a thought that never occurred again, believe it or not, before I actually walked out to either join another company or take the big plunge), I hadn’t even joined Microsoft. I was at Capital IT, a major VC forum in Paris, as a Microsoftee although I was due to join the company a few days later. There I met, for the first and last time so far, Pascal Mercier, a French fundraiser whose firm Aelios Finance is pretty successful at matching the best entrepreneurs and smart money (to my knowledge both angels & VCs). I was introduced as a recent graduate and the second we met, Pascal Mercier asked: “Why didn’t you choose to join a startup rather?”. The best answer I found was: “but I do work for startups!” Which I thought was true since 1) MS is just a damn successful startup (you would be surprised to see the easy-going startup atmosphere within the company); 2) I was part of the team that took care of emerging ISVs in France. Acknowledging reason #2 only I guess, Pascal nodded and we parted ways. I later realized though that working for startups, and working in a startup, are clearly two different things. When you represent Microsoft, you may call whoever you want and the door will be opened the next day. Your brand power is so strong that at the end of the day, you never know whether you achieved great things because you’re damn so good, or because your company is so powerful in its industry. As an entrepreneur, and I’ve been facing this issue already, you need to fight like a pitbull to get passed through the right person on the phone, and fight again to get an appointment. I should also mention that you’ll need to deliver the best pitch of your life, after waiting for an hour in the lobby without even being served a cup of coffee, to actually get to the point where you may pretend to try and sell your solution. This struggle for survival is real life and that makes entrepreneurs fully accountable for their success or failure.

The same rationale goes for early-stage startups, without a brand name yet: life will be tougher for sure than if you worked for a big name, but the impact you can have on such companies is huge (eg double revenues in 6 months, etc. something unachievable in an 85K-strong corporation like Microsoft – or even at Google, a 20K-strong company & definitely not a startup anymore). Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or join a larger group later in your career (or both), an unknown and yet ambitious startup is where you should start your career to acquire the right survival toolkit. By the way, did I mention the stock option plan?

My two cents…

Addendum 11am: check out comment #3 to discover how to spot startups that will pay you better than large corporations and resign from consulting, banking and Fortune 500 companies to join them!

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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 won’t do unless deserved & today I believe it’s not the case), Facebook, and all that jazz. So I’ll make it quick, although I think this topic is more strategic anyone else, especially when it comes to applicative platform decisions – amongst them web apps.

• MySQL’s acquisition by Sun Microsystems

One thing that’s pretty sure is that 1bn$ (800m$ cash, 200m$ in Sun stock options) for a flagship asset like MySQL is dirt cheap. MySQL enjoys a very large developer community, a well-deserved strong brand awareness amongst web and SaaS application developers & DBAs – as well as geeks of all sorts, and most of all references like Linden Labs (the publisher of Second Life), Flickr & Facebook that have proven wrong those, like me (although I still think the TCO of MySQL is a lot larger than with MS SQL Server or Oracle 10g technologies), who doubted MySQL could handle massive loads (see this interesting slideshow by John Allspaw from Yahoo! on Flickr’s architecture) despite it’s very nice and simple administrative console. To me, MySQL will be to Sun what Flickr, MyBlogLog and del.icio.us are to Yahoo!: the jewels of the crown. 

So, from a price standpoint, I’m buoyant. However, it’s hard for me to say whether Sweden-born MySQL is a good or a bad acquisition for Sun, strategically speaking. The move looks a lot like a vertical integration effort by Sun to push its application server SunONE against Apache to run with MySQL, and its server-side OS Solaris against Linux server distros when it comes to running a MySQL database. This is where since may get mixed up, as Sun has been engaged in a very fruitful partnership with Oracle to almost bundle Solaris & Oracle 9i/10g. The same goes for Postgre SQL by the way. Therefore, my take is that a lot in the success of the acquisition will depend on how Sun’s management positions MySQL databases against Oracle.

A quick last remark: in Europe, it’s become very trendy to pretend you’ll IPO to actually get acquired by an American corporation. Anyways, I’m glad there’s one more financial success story in open source: MySQL AB wasn’t in business to be open source, but had chosen to be open source to actually do business. Open source ayatollahs pretending to developer communities hacking code in their spare time for the greatness of mankind are fools treating others like likes – that is to say fools: open source is one more software business model. Period.

• BEA’s acquisition by Oracle

This very aggressive move is one more confirmation of Oracle’s market share-acquisition strategy. Oracle is now at loggerheads with IBM Software Group, the world’s leading middleware vendor. Websphere 6.0 and Weblogic Server 9.0 + Aqualogic BPM, alongside with Software AG’s Webmethods, have been competing for a while in the business infrastructure middleware market – & I suspect Oracle anticipates Microsoft’s upcoming marketing effort to generate adoption of BizTalk Server amongst large accounts. Hence the fact that I believe that this time, Oracle’s acquiring a little more than juste market share: with Weblogic, Aqualogic, Oracle Databases and BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Oracle has a broad enough catalogue of good products to compete with Websphere, DB2, Cognos on the IBM side, and BizTalk Server, SQL Server and PerformancePoint Server & ProClarity Analytics on the Microsoft side. 8.5bn$ was therefore the price to pay to win back Weblogic Server + DB2 or + SQL Server accounts as well as afford not to loose the everyday larger account base willing to go through one software vendor, and one only, to get equipped in infrastructure software. Moreover, Oracle kills two other birds with the same stone by 1) isolating SAP whose catalogue, although enriched with BO’s acquisition a few months ago, lacks heavy weight munitions in lower layers; 2) harming Red Hat whose JBoss Application Server has long been embedded into Weblogic. It may look like gambling, but I doubt Oracle will let Red Hat support Weblogic too long.

It’s not the end of the middleware war yet, but we’re getting closer to it since the entry barrier for a potential new incremental-innovation entrant has become very high in the recent years. 

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How fast it dives into the depth of commoditization depends on how profitable the product is going to be. These products are so out of the box that most of the people don’t see how that product is going to be useful. Here is classic example how IBM’s CEO Thomas Watson once quipped that there is “need for 4 or 5 computers in this world”. You can also read how Telephone and Telegraph were first dismissed as some fancy non useful applications. Just few years back Craig Barrett the then CEO of Intel said that at $100 Computer (OLPC) proposed by MIT Media Lab was a ‘toy’ and not going to be useful. When people figure out the product’s usefulness, the innovators that had the audacity to have the vision for that product will end up make lot of money. Bill Gates’ vision of ‘computer on every desk’ ended up making a lot of money for Microsoft. But those hefty profits will attract more competition and the profit slowly erodes.

Andy Grove, the ex CEO of Intel made a poignant point when he said “He who commoditizes last wins”. This was in the context of intense competition of Semiconductor industry. So, even a very ‘High Tech’ microprocessor will some day becomes a commodity. Same is true with respect to Software. At one point, Microsoft Office was the cutting edge application that dramatically improved office productivity. Today, software by itself is no longer high-tech.

If software is low tech, is it commodity yet? Some people belong to the camp that contends Software has already become a commodity. This is where Nicholas Carr created furor when he called software (IT in general) a commodity (just like electricity) in his infamous Harvard Business Article ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’. I strongly differ in my views.  In fact, I dedicate my personal blog writing on how to align IT with Business Strategy (a shameless plug!). Even though software is low tech, it does need some qualitative intervention to create differentiation. Think of Google and its Search Engine. Not only it’s search and indexing algorithm are unique (somewhat), it has created an entire ecosystem of advertisers bidding for keywords, search engine optimization techniques, and a new way to market online. Another example is Apple. With its ingenuity aided by unique combination of software and hardware, it had redefined mobile phone (which has begun to become a commodity product) to create a very differentiated must have product.

Some day when Intellectual Protection is no longer an issue, when every innovation is shared and distributes seamlessly, only then software will become a commodity. Until that day, in my humble view, even though software by itself is not high-tech, it’s far from being called commodity product.

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Let’s begin with the flops:

1) Netscape. Last October, the last version of Netscape, Netscape Navigator 9, was released. In fact the browser was no more than a revamped version of Firefox 2 – fair enough, the Mozilla project was launched by Netscape after all. But apart from a tiny number of geeks or nostalgics, the Internet users did not see the point in using it rather than Firefox and its thousands of available plugins. Even the buggy Safari made larger inroads in the PC market. AOL finally discontinued the browser at the end of 2007 and announced it would no longer develop newer releases. RIP Netscape, Long Live Firefox !

2) YouTube users. In 2006 many people and corporations discovered YouTube. In 2007, many people and corporations tried to use YouTube to their own benefit, mainly for promotional purposes. The result can be just disastrous, like this EU-sponsored video.

3) DRMs. Since the DRMs were first introduced many pundits were skeptical about its virtues. After all these systems were mutually incompatible, introduced unwanted restrictions (such as preventing you from ripping music on CDs, which is absolutely legal as long as CDs are kept for a personal use, etc…).

Step by step, the vast anti-DRM movement strenghtened in 2007. EMI was the boldest major, the first to disavow DRMs, soon backed by music industry giant Apple (which also happens to sell PCs). Universal followed, and now Warner may have hammered the last nail in the DRMs coffin. SonyBMG, anyone ?

4) Apple TV. Steve Jobs is always bragging and this is becoming quite unbearable. Yet there is a subject on which he should really shut up right now: AppleTV. This expensive and limited multimedia set-top box was a massive failure, such a failure that in fact Steve Jobs refused to unveiled the sales figures of the little marvel. In fact the whole concept of multimedia set-top boxes seems quite lousy or at least immature for now. It might become more interesting when people finally get HD TVs though.

5) Optimus Keyboard. The vaporware of the year? In fact this next-generation keyboard, with keys that are actually tiny screens displaying dynamic pictures, was highly expected – and not only by the fools who pre-ordered it in May 2007. The product is still “in development”as of today…

Runner-ups: Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista

Not everything is gloomy in the high-tech world. Here are the Tops:

1) Facebook. With almost 60 million active users and a valuation well above the $10bln, everything is rosy for 2007′s most successful social network. Despite some recent mistakes, Facebook might very well be the next Google.

2) iPhone. OK, it has no 3G nor GPS, the touch keyboard isn’t convenient, and Apple’s third party application limitation policy is just loathesome. Yet the iPhone generated a huge buzz for Apple, sold quite well, and instantly unlocked the industry – competitors just have to innovate or lower prices. Why complain ?

3) Wii. The epitome of Blue Ocean strategy, the Wii turned out to be a considerable success this year, with almost 5.8 million units sold. The production facilities just cannot follow.

4) Zune. Zune’s latest avatars, which seem to have been more than inspired by the highly successful iPod, are quite decent MP3 players. So decent that they made it to the top-list of Amazon’s best sales last November. But since one of our flagship contributors no longer works for Microsoft, there is no need to insist to much on that point now.

5) Tech IT Easy. With a steadily growing reader base, we are happy to say that Tech IT Easy finally succeeded in finding its place amongst the blogosphere, and satisfying our readers. We hope 2008 will see even more improvements, blogposts, recruits, comments, and an even larger traffic.

Runner-ups: Twitter, Netvibes, Blackberry.

What is your list then ?

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Innovation isn’t about copying and yet no doubt we’ll see copies of aforementioned services in 2008. This of course depends on how the US economy and therefore VC funds will hold up. As we have seen before, changes are quick and some of the huge web properties might end up irrelevant next year. Will something like OpenSocial really matter? We’ll see.

Below all this Facebook SaaS Web as a cloud ideology, there’s an undercurrent that I find very interesting. As I wrote in October when Google bought Jaiku, XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk is a technology to watch for. Since the acquisition, we haven’t heard much about Google’s plans for Jaiku. As I also wrote, I think it was the technology they were after, not the service itself. Could a social notification system built on RSS feeds, mobile phones and XMPP somehow fit Google’s strategy?

Google has strongly positioned GTalk as the communications platform across its many services. GTalk has been integrated for a while in GMail and to some extent this is similar what you get in Yahoo Mail/Messenger and Microsoft Live Mail/Messenger. You might have read about Google’s recent poorly received integration of GTalk into Google Reader. You may have noticed that Google Docs now offer collaboration through Google Talk. There’s even GTalk integration in Orkut and my sources tell me more is on the way. Even YouTube has availability information of people watching the same video as you (This isn’t probably based on XMPP, but could be?).

Because of their closed nature, MSN/Live Messenger, AIM or Yahoo Messenger cannot leverage their networks outside their own properties. Google Talk users can interact (to some extent) with any XMPP user and other developers can create services for Google Talk users. This is important in a world that is not desktop-bound, but where services and applications are in the web cloud.

For some time XMPP had the problem that it was too ahead of its time and could not compete with the big players. Social web and Google has changed these. Now Live Messenger is playing catch-up with upcoming features like “Multiple points of presence support”, which is something essential to the XMPP-protocol. Microsoft could overthrow other players in the IM market through distributing Messenger with their operating system, like they did with Internet Explorer. The rules of the game have changed on the web and Google has realized they can be the next IM king by integrating their solution everywhere they can. They can introduce Google Talk to anyone with a Gmail account and without any download.

If it isn’t clear enough from above, what I predict to continue in 2008 is integration of IM or instant communication on the web. We won’t see one unified network to rule them all or anything like it. We’ll see advances to a future telecom operators and their ads would want to us believe is today. Yet they’re the ones stonewalling the development of internet on mobile phones. In reality, they are defending their networks against their Internet and web-based rivals. We won’t see iPhone or Android making a big impact on the mobile market, not yet.

What I hope is that devices like Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch and platforms like Google’s Android will make SMS obsolete preferably through something open and web-friendly like XMPP and not something cooked-up by telecom operators. Microsoft is already offering Live Messenger on mobiles, but these are deals with telecom operators. My hope lies with Google and Nokia in this one. (See for example Nokia’s Gizmo client for S60. Coincidentally, Gizmo uses XMPP for IM.)

And yes, I’m predicting an instant communication nirvana even though my contact list is still mostly empty.

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