Tech IT Easy » Supply Chain

Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses

ceciiil — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:25:23 +0000

Many thanks to @flapinta for pointing this one to me (french link). What a revelation !

Isaac Getz is is a professor of Idea, Involvement, and Innovation Management at ESCP Europe. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Stanford University and at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated in Computer Science, then obtained a M.Sc. in Management Science, a Doctorate in Psychology and a post-doctoral degree (HDR) in Management.

I usually don’t spend too much time providing information on the business thinkers I quote, but considering the content, I just wanted to make sure Isaac Getz is not mistaken with some kind of hippie smoking ganja on a beach in Goa.

With Liberating Leadership : How the initiative-Freeing Radical Organization Form Has Been Successfully Adopted (pdf) Isaac Getz received the accolade of French Management Union of engineers (SYNTEC) with the Academic Prize of Management (french link again).

This 26 pages essay provides us with further evidence that methods of management that arose in the 50s (Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor), have been successfully applied by dozens of world class companies and market leaders in their area (Toyota, Southwest Airlines, USAA, Avis, WLGore, QuadGraphics, FAVI in France etc …) to foster employees engagement. The amazing thing is how they align with the management principles that are consubstantial to Enterprise 2.0.

In a time where leadership has never been so critical for businesses, some lessons to remember from this essay :

The key to F-Form organisations

Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor researches converge in the 50s to the conclusion that traditional organization forms (organisation silos, command and control type of management) lead to failure.

In the 90s many companies such as Southwest Airlines or Toyota illustrated successfully Argyris and McGregor preferred organisation type : what Getz calls the F-form. In F-form organisations, employees have complete freedom and responsibility to take actions that they (not their bosses) decide is best.

Getz decided to study these companies to answer this obvious question : how come this type of organisation, yielding impressive economic results, have not been more generally adopted throughout the business world ?

What he found out : there is a common factor in all the companies where F-form of organisation prevail : liberating leadership. Enterprise without this type of leadership just can’t adopt this type of organisation.

All studied leaders understand the defining function of the organizational form they were building, to allow complete freedom and responsibility of employee’s action.

Nourishing people three universal needs

McGregor redefined the How to motivate people ? conundrum into a “How to build an environment where people self motivate themselves“.

Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan studied organisations and proposed a self-determination (wikipedia) and work motivation (pdf) theory. This identifies a framework of non controlling environmental factors required for self-motivation : relatedness, competence and autonomy.

Beyond these environmental factors, they identified three universal needs that, once fulfilled, lead to self motivation :

need of being treated intrinsically equal,
need of growth
need of self-direction.

Creating an environment for intrinsic equality

Robert Townsend (CEO of Avis) published the Up the organisation best seller in 1967. Motto : once you’re in charge, remove everything you didn’t like as a subordinate and implement what you missed.

Robert was an admirer of Management Theory Y by Douglas McGregor. Alike other liberating leaders, he proceeds in what could seem to be an empirical fashion, adopting work practices that help treating people intrinsically equals and removing the ones that does not.

Principle thoroughly adopted for instance by Cristobal Conde, CEO of SunGard :

How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment? The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart

It’s all about listening

This is a very strong and common trait of liberating leaders : stop controlling and start listening. There are some telling examples in Isaac Getz essay but the most impressive I know of probably is Paul Chambers CEO of Cisco (though not in the essay) :

I had to move from a command-and-control leader to a collaborative one.” Collaborative leadership means “letting go” by involving others in decision making, listening to ideas.

The are good reasons behind the listening key. Jeff Westphal CEO of Vertex provides the Wisdom of Crowds one in Getz’s essay. But the main one is that when people genuinely are listened to, they feel intrinsically equal.

Creating an environment for people to grow and self direct

With all the studied companies and organisations, Getz’s team has witnessed a strong focus on making sure the company encourage self-direction. Among other examples, the essay explains how USAA (insurance company) does not measure the performance of the call center on the number of calls handled per hours but on the number of customer problems solved during the first call.

What really is interesting here is that the company provides the guidance (take care of the customers by fixing its problem in one call) rather than the control (count the number of calls addressed by employee). This did not prevent USAA to top Business Week 2007 and 2008 (2nd in 2009) customer service ranking US wide.

Fostering culture-keepers

Another common principle with liberating leaders : they are the culture keepers. There is a strong will to foster this. We live the culture (Terri Kelly CEO of WLGore – link to her video).

And there is a will just as strong to make sure nothing can damage it. Getz gives the example of FAVI, an amazing french company building brass gear forks auto parts. This company has experienced a 3 decade long double digit free cash flow and solid margins, moving from 0 to 50% of market share in an industry where its European competitors are, at best, at a loss, and in most cases has disappeared.

In the 25 years of the company, Jean François Zolbrist (great french blog post by @pmeance including a video of JFZ explaining FAVI principles) didn’t dismiss people whose job became useless. But he did promptly fire 3 people for malfeasance as they were not treating people intrinsically equals.

This brings us back to how Brad Bird protects innovation in Pixar by getting rid of passive-agressive people.

Main values

All the leaders of the studies company share the same values :

Freedom and responsibility values. As Bil Gore said : “Freedom is is the great motivating power of individual human beings”.
Creativity : A survey from IBM’s Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all other : creativity. One of the observed main feature of their creativity, is the ability to rephrase problems to find solutions more easily.
Wisdom : The ability to contextualise and the reluctance to fundamentally attribute errors to individuals

Be nice

Last remarkable trait of Liberating leaders, they make sure their F-Form organisation are considerate not only with their employees but also with their suppliers, customers and partners.

This brings us back (again !) to E. Goldratt definition of any company goals : be profitable, take care of the customers and take care of the employees.

By doing so, the F-Form companies develop trustful long term relationships.

A remarkable essay which sheds a great light on the “mysteries” of many successful and exemplary companies. It perfectly complements Gary Hamel best seller The Future of Management.

Now the questions : have you witnessed such type of leadership ? Have you experienced it ? How to implement such type of leadership in an organisation ? (My hint : it starts with E and finishes with 2.0). Let us know.

On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:12:39 +0000

I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair.

OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up.

Global package delivery, on the other hand… UPS was founded in 1907. That’s right, gentlemen & ladies, it is over ONE ZERO ZERO (purposefully emphasised) years old! That means that people have been carrying UPS parcels around on horses, then on Fords, on ships, on aeroplanes, and will most likely carry them to space also. Unlike regular mail, the Package Industry is here to stay as well, ladies and gentlemen, all thanks to you for ordering from places like Amazon every single day.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on UPS. I actually have a problem with FEDEX (founded 1973) this week and with DHL (a German company, founded 1969), both of which like telling me things on their website that aren’t true, or are true, but so incredibly late to publish that truth that it’s just a false truth.

Dear companies that I just mentioned: we are in the age of real-time. When my best friends go to the bathroom, I know about it 5 min. before they even think about it, that’s how quick Twitter is. Sadly, that doesn’t bring a hot new gadget into my life, like your great service does. I appreciate your service, it allows me to be lazy and order to Visa’s delight. But it’s meant to be a service of convenience, and I don’t consider having to drool over my doorbell-phone by any kind of definition, “a convenience.”

Here’s what happened with DHL: Package shipped on the 6th out of Germany. On the 7th, at 4:30 a.m., package left Germany heading for the Netherlands. I sent them a mail asking whether if it doesn’t arrive today, they ship on the weekends. No reply! At 20:00, I found out, that package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42. I decide to call the next day to ask whether they ship on the weekends. The kind person at DHL the Netherlands informs me that a. he has no idea where my package is and b. they do not ship on the weekends. 2 hours later, the doorbell rings. It’s the mailman, who works for TNT (the Dutch equivalent to DHL) with the package from DHL. Status on the website on the 8th: “7th of May, package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42.”

Here’s what happened with FEDEX: Package shipped on the 5th from the US. Paris then somewhere in the Netherlands on the 6th. Estimated delivery: on the 7th at 6 p,m. I’m home at 3:30 p.m. At 20:00 I get a message that FEDEX passed by my house at 14:55 p.m. and no one was home. Status: sadly FEDEX does not receive phone-calls on the weekend.

We need a change, we need that thing you do with the tracing, not to be restricted to when it arrives in parcel sorting centre 42. We need it to have an RFID chip in the parcel, which is connected to a GPS device in the truck, which at all times tells a satellite to send me a tweet of where exactly you are at what given time. And when I’m not home, I can tweet back to said truck to give notice, to save fuel, to save the planet, and/or to change the address to my work-address. Saves your time and mine and the planet’s.

This is not rocket-science. GPS exists (globally since 2000), RFID exists (required by Wal-Mart since 2005), real-time web exists (Twitter since 2006). Yet for some reason, in 2010, I still have to wait 10 hours for an update about something REAL & RELEVANT that happened 10 hours ago. Sigh.

OK, all ranted out now. Now go fix.

Why Entrepreneurship is ultimately Not a Management Science

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:49:31 +0000

I’m reposting this comment I wrote in response to Eric Ries’s stimulating blog post on Harvard Business Review online, with the title “Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?” Feel free to share your thoughts on it there as I think it’s worth thinking about whether Entrepreneurship can eventually learned or whether it is an art-form. My thoughts on that are below.

Having both studied a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and working in my 3rd startup (trying to apply the lean techniques that Lessons Learned made me aware of), I can say that my ideal is that entrepreneurship is a science. In reality, it’s a collection of Sciences as well as the act of Imagination AND Guts AND Agility, none of which are particularly scientific.

It’s a collection of sciences because no entrepreneur or team of entrepreneurs is undertaking just one activity, he, she, or they are doing many in parallel, some of which are business related and some of which are technological. Both have scientific foundations behind them.

Why the Business of Entrepreneurship is scientific is simple to explain. Businesses, starting or existing, can’t operate in a vacuum (for long). We have to obey financial restrictions, sell the idea to our investors, who themselves employ scientific means to measure whether the return on their investment justified, communicate to the market in effective ways, study the market, and project manage all the activities and people in the company. For most of these “wheels” already exist, so there isn’t always a need to reinvent them.

BUT, there is no replacement or science for guts, imagination, and agility in starting a business. You have to ignore many rules, you have to play dirty, and you have to be quick & flexible if you want to succeed. Maybe a management scientist can eventually plug those dirty variables in a formula somewhere. But I doubt it can be applied to any two startups successfully.

Vincent

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Please welcome Anand Kishore Raju, a new blogger on Tech IT Easy !!!

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:20:14 +0000

Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:17:21 +0000

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
Beneﬁting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:18:47 +0000

It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

A willing human recorder
A recording device designed for capturing experiences
A way to process that information into “usable bits”
A favourable legal environment
And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

A very old economy business to new economy business action plan

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:15:58 +0000

Background: This is an advice that I am giving to someone, who is a traditional artist. She paints and tries to sell her paintings. By writing this down for you, the public, I don’t think I am revealing critical information, in that it is a common sense approach to building a sustainable business. It does not address two critical factors: the intellectual property (which is the art) and the marketing (which comes in part from quality and in other part from choosing the right sales channels).

Here is the situation: I like (her) paintings, but they are very work-intensive. Each painting can take anything from 2 weeks or more to produce and the end-price reflects this as well. In today’s economy, in any economy, this means that there is a segment of the population that will not be able to afford it it. Museums, who display art worth millions, have overcome this problem quite elegantly, by selling posters and postcards of these art-pieces. Countless other art-industries are based on turning a singular piece of art into mass-produced widgets. Similarly, I think it is much more efficient, for more reasons than the work alone, to do something similar for the independent painter. Again, I don’t think this is a trade-secret or anything; the quality of the art and the sales channels are most critical aspects.

In any business, there are two types of cost. These are fixed and variable. Fixed costs are often significant costs and difficult to remove. A workplace is a fixed cost, so is some of the material used to produce a painting. Variable costs are smaller, often more flexible costs, incurred regularly. Paint would be such a cost and you can affect the cost of producing a painting by using different paint. It’s not quite as easy to change the workshop you work in from painting to painting.

Following is the action-plan:

Find out what the total fixed and variable costs are for producing a painting and x amount of reproductions (e.g. 100 posters). In other words, list all the costs in a nice Excel-sheet or piece of paper and add them up.
Divide the total costs by the number of posters you want to sell. Those are the costs per product.
Decide how much you want to charge per poster. If you or the market decides that this price is below your cost, then there is something wrong with your formula and you are making a loss. If, on the other hand, your price is above your costs, you are doing well.
Now… find out how you plan to sell the amount of posters you decided on…

Some … pause in that last point because how can a business man or woman really know that these are the sales they will make? My advice is therefore to keep costs as minimal as possible at the start, focussing a lot on developing the actual sales process.

That’s it really! And it reflects how hard it really is to go from having an idea (and preferably also the skill) to a profitable business. From a right-brained creative approach, you have to do some left-brained accounting, and from a product-focussed, perhaps introversive approach, you now have to become outgoing, market-focussed, and sell. Not easy!

As with all big projects, from writing a thesis to climbing a mountain, it’s my opinion and what I have learned so far, that it is always better to break it down into simple steps, see the relationships between different processes, and understand how the whole project is put together.

I always welcome discussion, so if there is an error in my logic somewhere, please, please contribute through a comment!
Vincent

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iPhone's app strategy and its implications for other smart phones

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:45:53 +0000

If you think about how the iPhone was launched so many months ago, or rather at what stage the iPods were at, you know that apps were always on the horizon. The iPod G5 introduced a wider range of games that you could buy through the iTunes store, which already introduced us to the idea of buying apps, well games really, through that venue.

When the iPhone arrived, there were NO apps; App-support was basically web-coded widgets with limited functionality. The reason for this was, I believe, that there was no competition to speak of + perhaps the complexity of setting up such a venture. Apps for other phones existed, ok, but it was either in a decentralised fashion (Java for instance), or very centralised and very limited in its offering (e.g. Blackberry & Palm), at least compared to the current iTunes store.

It took pressure from the market [jail-breaking & media] and perhaps already the idea in the back of Apple’s heads to release the app-store a little over a year after the initial device was launched. When it did launch, there was lot’s of hype, lot’s of love, and good news for Apple iPhone numbers both on the device-sales side and that of app-sales.

How the other device makers reacted was two-fold and really quite half-heartedly. Most hardware makers focussed on what they did best: hardware. Touch-screen after touch-screen device entered the market. The most interesting software-based strategy came from Google, which, I guess, realised the potential of mobiles as computing platforms and, more importantly, as search/internet/”revenue for Google” enabled devices in everyone’s pocket.

The current app-store offerings are still lacking with many big parties attempting to launch one for their platforms. The key-factors in terms of adoption seem to be having a critical mass of both users and developers, both of which represent a chicken & egg problem for many, something that the initial iPhone circumvented quite elegantly.

The most promising devices today are Google-/Android-powered phones and the, still somewhat vapoury Palm Pre. The latter seems to be the most competitive, hardware-wise, with much ex-Apple talent having contributed to the Pre’s development. On the App-store front, it’s still very early days, but reports are disappointing.

So, the question is, what can phone-makers and software-makers do to compete with the new “Microsoft” (=Apple) of the mobile space? The choice, to me, appears two-fold:

Emulate Apple in whatever way possible: create a great device and create an app-store with a sufficient supply of apps.
Or, create a great device and find a way to elegantly get apps onto it, without all this centralising nonsense.

By the wording, it’s obvious that I prefer the second option. As good as the iTunes store is, it isn’t amazing for developers and it isn’t as profitable for Apple as one would think either. The biggest problem for competitors is similar to the music-situation, that Apple has critical mass, which attracts the greatest amounts of customers and is a nearly insurmountable challenge for new entrants.

Where Apple clearly leads is in its developer-support, which isn’t quite as apparent from other software/hardware makers, except perhaps Microsoft (but mainly on the PC-side) and perhaps Google. Palm, as yet, does not offer a comparable service to developers, or to put it in another way, Palm developer conferences are not yet sold out in the way Apple’s WWDC is each year.

Final thoughts:

I think that developer support is key in any smart phone strategy these days, as mobile devices continue to become computers in your pocket.
I don’t think that centralised app stores are necessarily the way to go, except (and I suspect this) if the mobile carriers are demanding it.

The simplest thing would be to create a web-based categorised list of a apps that developers can add to;
implement mechanisms that vote and demote apps according to their usefulness and other attributes;
and create / implement mechanisms that prevent abuse (e.g. P2P apps or VOIP apps, though I think the latter can no longer be considered this)

And continue to innovate on the hardware, because I think there is plenty of innovation left. What makes the iPhone so desirable is the app-support, but the hardware is really nothing to write home about.

Note: I purposefully left the links towards the end, because it allows for a more time-efficient, easier to write (and, maybe, read) article. Links with additional info are included in below list:

Mossberg on Palm Pre
Apple App store numbers
The incredible app store hype (one of many developer complaints)
Palm developer network

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Will cars eventually cost nothing?

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:36:29 +0000

Just read the Face Value in the Economist from a few weeks ago, on Shai Agassi, an Israeli entrepreneur and former SAP employee, who is developing an ‘electric infrastructure for cars’ business, called Better Place. The idea is that there will be hotspots across a region and for cars to be subsidised by the subscription that you buy.

After the financial marble that the Indian company Tata Motors has produced, a car that costs between $2,200 and $3,800, and having seen several other concept cars in that price-range from companies like Volkswagen, is it possible that we will approach a time where cars will essentially be free?

I’m more sceptical, I think it’s a sign of the times, a recession + oil-prices and availability + the rise of emerging economies + more abstractly, that whole global warming thing, and the resulting desperation, which is causing businesses to come up with alternative business models around personal transportation.

And if given a choice, I would prefer for a system like Vel’oh!, here in Luxembourg, where you simply borrow a bike and bring it back at a pre-determined parking-zone after you’re finished with it. That said, I do hear that they get stolen a lot over there in France…

Thoughts?
Vincent

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RFID in a human context

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:24:59 +0000

Recently, the city of Rotterdam introduced a mandatory way of paying for public transport, using RFID-cards, called OV-chipkaart. This system will eventually be deployed across the Netherlands. This blog post describes my experience with it.

First you have to be aware that, much like in any city, public transport is an umbrella-term that describes busses, trams, trains, and metros (or subways). The RFID cards don’t yet work on trains, you have to check and uncheck yourself for any of the other options. You cannot get into or out of the subway station without doing that, while that is not the case on busses and trams, where you do have to check yourself in, but nobody prevents you from not checking out. Confused? Good, so are plenty of other people.

When you check yourself in, the machine automatically takes of 4 euro from your card. When you check yourself out, the amount that you haven’t used is deposited back. So if you forget… you just lost a few euro, because most trips don’t exceed the 1.50 euro mark. You can’t forget this in the subway, as you can’t enter without checking in, and you can’t leave without checking out—there are human height gates that prevent this (see pic). And the system works fine. On busses and trams, on the other hand, you have to check yourself in, and you have to remember to check yourself out, as there is no one to stop you from leaving without doing so. Confused? Good, so are plenty of other people.

I’m not sure why this system was put in place in such a way:

one reason might be practicality: instead of giving a destination at the beginning, the check-out machine decides what your destination ends up being. That way, there’s no confusion and no long queue at the beginning of people entering their destination into a machine.
a second reason might be technical / a privacy issue: it would be optimal if I got on a bus and, without touching the machine, the money would be taken from my card, and vice versa when I leave the bus. It’s more than likely a privacy concern as RFID-chips can have a maximum range of ca. 320 feet (=100 m).
a third reason might be that subways are the no. 1 way to travel in Rotterdam: I don’t believe this is the case, especially since this system will be rolled out to cities where there aren’t any subways.

I very much dig the idea of RFID, as I like its efficiency, both from a user and a supply chain perspective. The flaw in this system is contextual design. While it works perfectly in subways due to the gate system (as well as in trains, where they are installing similar gates), there is too great a chance of forgetting to check out on other means of public transport. Last night at 11 pm in Amsterdam, the tram was filled with people that where “on something,” and how many of those are very likely to forget to check out? A 4 euro a pop, you’re entering London tube tariffs, which, everyone agrees, are astronomical, especially if you have to pay for that every day.

The only practical solution I see for this problem, is for there to be gates installed in busses and trams, so that people don’t forget to check out. So far, this has not happened and it comes at the expense of travellers who, while being trained to be stupid (don’t worry, the card takes care of everything), now have to be aware of their actions at the beginning and at the end of the journey. And believe me, when this system is rolled out across the Netherlands and perhaps even your country, there’s going to be an exponential increase in complaints, as tons of people will have forgotten to check out and will have lost 3 euros in the process. Good for the government’s short-term cashflow, but definitely creating more overhead in terms of support-costs.

Build those damn gates!

Vincent

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Next up on Tech IT Easy!

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:15:29 +0000

The coming weeks, I’ll be pretty busy with a business development project in the technology sector. As usual, I cannot discuss it in depth (ok, it’s Fight Club, we bash each other half to death every week and can’t talk about it), but I want to discuss some stumbling blocks that we’re sure to be hitting. To give you an idea, some of the questions are now:

Patents and their limitations: while we have filed for a number already, the issues are whether there is prior art and how to deal with it, as well as whether patents are really enough protection against competitors. Since, I’ve attended a pretty interesting New Venture seminar last week on IP, I think that will be my next post.
The usefulness of market research: I breached this topic before already, but I don’t believe in researching innovations that consumers cannot touch yet, and will instead focus on expert-input, I think, as well as getting a testable prototype ready as soon as possible (we’ll be looking for subjects!). I hope to have something more to write about it soon.
Pricing strategy: this is really exciting! I’m reading the excellent book “The strategy and tactics of pricing” and am in the position to apply some of it’s lessons now. Thoughts about it to follow on Tech IT Easy soon, but to give you an idea, it’s about the battle between costs, what the competition charges, and what your customers want to pay for your product.
Dealing with bureaucracy: Since, we’re going to be applying to an incubator, it might be interesting to see how that process goes.

In other, equally important news:

Verteego: You may have noticed a new badge on our site. It’s the Verteego sustainability badge, which links to a report analysing our weblog. I’ll be trying to increase our grade a little there/here and will write about my impressions. I didn’t even know that I can take leave for pregnancy-reasons, wow!
Public transport in the Netherlands: I don’t know how it is in your country, but we’re doing exciting RFID-related stuff here. Starting February, we’ll be going through the transition of going from a stamp to a beep, and I’ll write a little about my impressions here.

That’s all I can predict for now, and I hope to make it all a reality soon! Until the next time, on Tech IT Easy!

Vincent

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When analogies don't work

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:35:52 +0000

Just one post this week, it is again the busy period in Vince’s house. This last week, I’ve read two predictions, both, by coincidence, based on the role-model of Apple. The first was David Carr’s, who asked for an iTunes for news in the New York Times. The second was Ian Betteridge’s, who predicted an iPhone-style app-store, controlled by Apple, for all of the Mac. Let me address them both here.

News… what has that looked like over the years? We had print, which lead to books and perhaps pamphlets. Let’s just jump to the 20th century. We’ve had the onslaught of the marketing age, which also made newspapers big. People have never paid for news really, they pay a minimal fee for the price of the paper, the rest of which is covered by advertisers. Then came the internet and it all went down the toilet. You, me, everyone imagined they could be a journalist, even if it meant just copying the text word-by-word of what someone else had written.

Compare that with music. It started with the production of sound, live performances, then the reproduction of sound across various media. The business-model was 90% of the time a straight sale. Music speaks to our brain, differently from the way news does (it’s all drama anyway, right?), and we are hooked on it, like a drug. So we pay and we pay and we pay. Then comes the internet and the magic of painless reproduction and distribution. The power-houses that are media-companies were slow to catch on and it’s pirate-city all round. CD sales go down! In comes smart Apple with their silly little white box with one button and saves the whole damn industry! We think, oh my god, Apple saved retail! What Apple in fact did was close the loop again. Instead of artist -> CD -> shop -> CD -> consumer, we now have artist -> mp3/4/5 -> iTunes -> iPod -> consumer. Everyone wins, though most of all, Apple.

What is the key here?

For one, music isn’t news. As I pointed out, music is a drug, while news is a duty. Music is fun, while news is … interesting? We can live without the news, believe me, we can’t live without music.
Two, news was never a powerful business model to begin with. Since the days of Soap-operas, all media has been owned by advertisers, who somehow have made this industry survive, even though no one was really willing to pay for it. Yes, we can also live without television, but we can’t live without music.
Music is also a tightly controlled product, it’s expensive to make music and to get it into your ears. News, on the other hand, the media has long learned how easy it is to copy-paste.

The internet has shaken both industries and much more so news. Because its sugar-daddies, the advertisers, suddenly realised that they could get away with no longer paying for the expensive process of print and distribution, as well as having many more options to advertise online. The power-position, which was already unbalanced in the first place, has shifted even more in the direction of the advertisers.

For music, the power of supply continued to be in the hands of the media-companies. In case you haven’t noticed, those are some powerful companies and the world of music and other entertainment media is locked down with some big nails—Pandora, Hulu, Joost, iTunes, take your pick, chances are that most of these are not in your country. The internet has had an effect, to be sure, but they control the supply and they have lot’s of money to change things. They finally got iTunes to succumb as well, with their now variable pricing.

There is no analogy here and no matter the superficial similarities and the coming of the “iReader,” there never will be. News will never be something that we want to pay for. Who wants to pay to hear that Hurricane XX has killed millions, or Region YY is filled with starving children, or that Region ZZ has weapons of mass destruction? Because, that, unlike the stories we may read on the internet, is what news really is: making us aware that our planet isn’t all that. Give me a good song any day over having to hear that!

Just briefly, the iPhone store translated to Macs. Why it’s different: it’s i…Phone, the most locked-down technology on this planet. Vs. the PC, which is the most unlocked technology on the planet. Need I spell it out?

The greater point I’m making is that frequently “visionaries” and “entrepreneurs” write their business plan or manifesto stating that because X is so, my business will work that way too. Analogies, taken too loosely, will kill your business and rather than taking the words of visionaries at their face value, we should work it out: Was X like that really, and is your business like that really too? Chances are… it’s not.

Vincent

(man, I love it when I can pump out all this text in 15 min. or less)

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Leaps in Logic — a post about blue and red oceans

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:54:39 +0000

Thinking a lot about blue and red oceans these days, which was a topic of a New Venture seminar last week (summary post about that coming up). Still not having completed Blue Ocean Strategy, the book (someone told me, reading the summary would suffice. See slides below), I’m still not entirely sure how to get to a blue ocean. More after the slides.

[slideshare id=61974&doc=blue-ocean-strategy-summary4461&w=425]

I know, from the first few chapters, that you analyse features of a competing business. You list them in some kind of chart and map out how far they go and how to beat them with your own features. Taking the case of gaming consoles, which is as good as any, for the two powerful ones, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, we would list:

Online platform (more Xbox360)
Huge graphical capabilities (more Playstation, but negligible difference)
Looks better on HDTV
DVD-drive (huge, unpredictable format-war at launch)
Games, Games, Games
Same (more or less) controllers as usual
Expensive components overall
Price point in the $500+ (at that time)
Aggressive marketing strategy, based on above features, targeted mostly at young men.
Huge multinational corporations with huge budgets
Lot’s of industry consolidation, virtual and actual
Added, due to comment: both players may have other motives, apart from pushing their gaming-plaform (e.g. Blu-ray for Sony & Live-platform for Microsoft)

And I could probably go on.

Fighting Microsoft and Sony would require some serious leaps in logic, you would think. You can see that the leap that Sony and Microsoft made was not too far off. It was based on the assumption that any next generation of console would have to be significantly more powerful than the last. And you could see that, them being huge multinational corporations, the thinking was probably that if any drastic industry change could happen (take that format war), they could make it come true. There’s another industry-change that had to happen for both of these to take off like gangbusters, which was that everyone would buy an HDTV. That didn’t exactly happen.

So, essentially, we had several weaknesses, namely that:

The format war was undecided, confusing customers.
HDTVs were expensive.
The consoles themselves were expensive.
They were eating up each others already small markets (made small by the three preceding factors).

You could also add that they focussed on the same consumer segments as a weakness, but how could they know, right?

Now, if you read into Blue Ocean Strategy, then you would expect for Nintendo to have anticipated these issues. How would that be possible?

For one, they are industry-insiders, just like Sony and Microsoft, so they would have had access to data about production costs of both competing consoles, as well as of the state of HDTVs and HD DVDs, now and in the near future. Two, being a successful console and game producer, they would also have a good grasp on their audience. Three, they would have their own vision and be able to iterate quickly on it.

When you think about it, the leap of logic wasn’t actually happening from those entering the blue ocean, it was from those operating in the red one: Sony and Microsoft.

I wrote this, because sometimes, as a new player on the market, you aim small. You don’t want to upset the big players in the red ocean and instead want to *grow* a blue one. I don’t think blue oceans are grown, they are instead hidden. Growing an ocean is the worst leap of all, because it means changing people’s behaviour. Core-users of Xbox & Playstation haven’t changed one bit, rather you found new customers that weren’t being addressed by those two marketing strategies.

If you do have to make a leap in logic to launch a product, make sure that the price you pay isn’t to expensive.

End of thought.

Vincent

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A brief review of "Valuation" — A Strategy Book

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:09:40 +0000

In many ways, I consider this the best strategy book, I’ve ever read. “Valuation,” by George Norton, is, as the name suggests, a book that uses financial models as a basis to build (sound) strategies. It is also a textbook—my version is hardcover and 190 pages long—but written in a format that reads easily and is structured to be implemented—ca. 30% of the book are (group-)exercises meant to implement what the book suggests.

If I had to criticise it, it’s that I don’t consider it very practical in an entrepreneurial setting. One thing that such methodologies require, is time, which is often a luxury that smaller/younger companies and projects do not have. Building up a set of co-ordinated, organisation-wide strategies can be a matter of years, and, I expect that if you were to follow the book’s advice, you’d engage in a 6 month trajectory, at least.

That said, it is a well-written book and achieves the objective of a book, which is to make understood its topic. In this case, valuation means understanding the value of companies, their products, and business activities. The financial part only really plays a part in the first third and last third of the book, while the middle is more about the actual coming up of the company’s mission, its broader goals, its objectives, and its strategies—the latter being the nitty-gritty activities of how to fulfil the grander vision.

And, where valuation comes in, everything will affect the cash position of the business: some activities may be research-intensive (= costly), but lead to greater rewards in the long-term; others will be quick-sale actions, which generate revenue, but may not always improve the long-term position of the business, unless that revenue is re-invested in more sustainable growth.

I find that these principles easily translate into small business- and individual activities, but only if taken on a holistic level, in which case reading this book may be overkill. But if you’re a finance-geek that wants to learn how to better translate the numbers into practical company-activities, or, vice versa, if you’re a creative business-person, who wants a relatively easy intro into the financial fundamentals behind strategies, then this book may be for you.

Vincent

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The HP Touchsmart PC

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:51:16 +0000

Checking out the HP Touchmark PC demo on YouTube. Watch it and then let’s discuss it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scs7DZhQ72E&hl=en&fs=1]

The question on everybody’s lips is, why didn’t Apple do this? Your first hint: look at the way the guy is standing. Few people use their PCs in that position.

I tried emulating the feeling a little, by making stupid gestures in front of my laptop. I’m pretty fit, but it did get annoying after a while. Having a touch-screen at 90 degrees, half a meter in front of you, is inelegant.

The reason the keyboard + mouse combo work so well is because it’s actually within perfect and comfortable reach by the human body. You sit, your arms bend, and you use. Like the picture below, which is the ideal typing position, as taken from Yale’s Ergonomics website. Vs. the Touchscreen, where you would sit, extend your arms and use.

The perfect touch-screen would actually be similar to an architect’s table, like on the picture below. Note that Jeff Han, godly inventor of all things multi-touch-screens, also has a similar set-up.

Why doesn’t Apple do something like this? My guess is three-fold.

The market is still pretty small (designers, etc.?).
It’s not really that amazing an innovation—as an average user, can you really do that much more with a touch-screen, vs. a keyboard + mouse?
And where are the manufacturing economies of scope? I made this point before, when I noted how many overlaps there on the component level for different Apple-products: a big e.g. the 13″ screen, which is now used by 3 product-lines. If Apple did this for one product-line, it would probably want to translate it to the other ones as well… but how would that work?

What do you think? Will we be seeing an Apple touch-PC (note: I say PC, not iPhone XL, which is more probable), and, if so, in what format? Also state if you’re thinking as a consumer or as a prosumer!

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to answer our poll !!!

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Social media is dead (not a post about social media)

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:08:34 +0000

I’ve been posting way too much about (social) media on Tech IT Easy and I’m sick & tired of it… of both social media *and* writing about it. There’s nothing left to say; everything that has been done, has been done. There will be some “process innovation,” sure, the internet is famous for it. But you know what? You can’t place a human being into a user-bucket and expect your site to fill up. Eventually, all kind of things go wrong, because people aren’t users, they are: MFECWCNBPIABs (multi-faceted, evolving creatures, which cannot be placed in a box—.com: that URL’s gonna be worth millions some day…).

The reason, I’m sick of it is because I take more and more a managerial attitude towards tools, how they fit into my life (and that of organisations). I ask myself: how can they be measured—do they increase productivity, in what way, what other measurable benefits are they? Are there use-cases—are super-efficient individuals and organisations using them effectively, if so how, and where is it published (Analysts’ reports don’t count)!?

The thing is, social media isn’t Tech. People make it out as if it was, because social “media’ists” are the Loudest people on the internet. But these are the guys that write books, (get paid to) speak at conferences, place ads on their blogs etc. A conflict of interest, if there ever was one! Every single A-lister has a stake in social media, whether it is their blog, filling up their blog, or using social networks as a way to market their blog.

I’m done with it. No more social-media “marketing” from me!

So where’s the exciting tech at? What are the next horizons that I want to focus on?

Mobile tech perhaps: I’ve had a post entitled ” the headache that is mobile tech” in my pipeline for a while now, just never got around to finishing it. Essentially, mobile tech (by which I also mean software) is a nightmare, for many obvious and subtle reasons, and I’d love to find an answer on how to circumvent these challenges. At the same time, I still see mobile as a necessary evolution to PCs for many reasons: no.1 being that they also place human beings into “user”-categories.
Green tech perhaps: reasons to love this subject is that it is a source of competitive advantage for companies. Just look at Wal Mart and how it’s setting a standard, but also look at Shell and how it’s focussing on alternative technologies. Adversity breeds innovation!
Finding new (more democratic) investment models: I’m not finance-guy, but my thesis was 99% about the financial problems being faced by tech startups. Similarly, there is a big need for financing people all over this planet, which organisations like Kiva are trying to solve. It may be more of a social movement, than a technology, that’s not to say that there aren’t overlaps. And I’m sick & tired of banks abusing our money and creating scandals like the current real estate crisis.

Those are my three, for now, though not exclusively. For myself, I’m interested in new ways to e-commerce for instance. I might write something about that in a few months. If there is an exciting tech on the horizon that you feel should be covered more often, feel free to suggest it in the comments!

In any case, if I post another word about social media on Tech IT Easy, please internet-slap me.

(That does not count for my fellow bloggers on Tech IT Easy, of course!!!)

With best regards,

Vincent

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Were my Sennheiser headphones "made to break?"

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:58:18 +0000

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 have decided that headphones, especially the more expensive kind, are a big rip-off, because, while the sound may be better per euro/dollar spent, the wires are pretty much identical with whatever model you buy. And it’s the wires that fail 95% of the time, not the USP with which headphones are usually advertised: better sound.

In my opinion, there are three solutions for this problem:

consumers buy cheaper headphones and forget about the sound;
manufacturers make unbreakable wires or go wireless;
manufactures make wires modular.

I thought of the latter, remembering an interview, I heard years ago, with Giles Slade, author of the book “Made to break,” and believer in a great conspiracy: that, ever since the industrial economy took off, manufacturers have create products that were designed to break, because the alternative—a perfectly replaceable modular system—would diminish their profit-potential. The consequence of this philosophy is that, instead of throwing away failing components, we are forced to throw away the whole thing—whatever it is—resulting in great, big thrash-heaps all over the world. The consequence is a higher cost for the environment and for consumers.

The manufacturers’ perspective kind of makes sense. If you look at two computer-companies, IBM and Apple, the one that opened up its technology to be replaceable, was the one who is no longer a computer-company today: IBM. And those technologies that have decided to go modular—razor-blades, printer-cartridges, the iPod-ecosystem—have done so in a way that it is become monetarily painful to replace any part of that technological system. On the other hand, smart companies like Dell have proven that modularity can also create opportunities, but for assemblers more than manufacturers.

Taking it back to headphones, I (egotistically) maintain that a non-modular stance does not apply for the case of wires—though there may be arguments regarding portability. Rather, wires have long been modular for pretty much any application, ranging from mere electrical plugs to the wires that you hook up to your stereo-system. While the quality of wiring plays a real role in the quality of sound, the ultimate value that is attributed to a speaker-brand, is in the quality of the speakers themselves. Sennheiser would lose little by making wires replaceable; rather it would avoid potential PR-scandals and expensive warranty-problems.

This is of course assuming that Sennheiser isn’t one of those companies, whose products are “made to break.”

Vincent

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Is mobile commerce disruptive or incremental?

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:34:18 +0000

Another way to phrase this is, whether mobile commerce will drastically change life as we know it or not?

Disruptive technologies, according to Christensen, lead to products that are cheaper, simpler, and, often, more convenient to use. By that definition, e-commerce could certainly be seen as a disruptive innovation over brick & mortar commerce, and to some extent, m-commerce could do the same to e-commerce. Or could it?

I look at technological disruption on three levels:

Production: will people get fired/hired/retrained? Will production-methods change? etc.?
Will technological behaviour change?
Will societal behaviour change?

As for the first, I don’t think production will change as dramatically as it did from brick & mortar. Clearly, models like Amazon and eBay wreaked some havoc on book- and second-hand stores. But production and maintenance for an m-commerce application will likely just happen on PCs and will logically be built for both platforms (with some possible exceptions in emerging economies). With the mobile versions of browsers like Safari and Opera, changes also need to be minimal. I do see there being less reliance on keyboards, (i.e. an interface-change), just based on my own clumsy fingers, but e-commerce is not exactly word-intensive.

Regarding changes in technological behaviour, this is clearly already happen and will continue to happen. Things like the Starbucks-Apple partnership for digital music-downloads are just the tip of the iceberg. Eventually, we could be seeing more use of phone’s video- and audio-recording abilities. Imagine taking a picture of your neighbour’s clothes and doing a visual search for that sweater? And of course there could be innovations in terms of mobile payment methods, mobile logistics, rfid and barcode-scanning, etc. The possibilities are endless and only constrained by traditional businesses’ lack of imagination.

Changes in societal behaviour is one I am most excited about. The way I see it, PCs have been an immobile force in our lives for many years, forcing us (in my opinion) to think and act in left-brained ways, not to mention never leave our seats out of fear we might miss something. Now, clearly the 24/7 “crackberry” isn’t exactly the answer, but I’d like the new found freedom that mobile technology enables to lead us down a new or perhaps old path, one where I can even see room for brick & mortar again. Something like:

take picture of product in store (after smelling/tasting/touching/trying it on),
send picture to warehouse,
warehouse ships home.

Removing one the most annoying component of shopping, carrying your shopping-bags home.

Two out of three… I think that qualifies as disruptive! But this is just my opinion of course, and I’m just beginning learn about the world of m-business. Tell me how you visualise mobile technology changing (y)our lives, or perhaps not?

Vincent

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The attraction of (online) fashion

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:14:46 +0000

Hot chicks, of course! What else can I say, as a guy? And really, I always wanted to start a blogpost with “Hot chicks!” No, truth be told, I’ve been looking at fashion for some time, during the writing of my, now retired, food and retail blog, and a little afterwards too. As I mentioned before, industry-research is an important part of my job-application process, online, preferably on location at similar businesses, and through my conversations with the management. I’ve visited a number of fashion-retailers also, Zara and a more very upper-class fashion-retailer, and had some thoughts about it, which I’ll share here.

Zara & H&M

Two of my “business-heroes” in this industry are Zara and H&M, who have dramatically different organisational structures, but similar objectives, and a very strong technological foundation for managing their logistical complexities, which also helped them in their online strategy, I imagine.

If fashion can be characterised by anything, it’s that intellectual property doesn’t matter. Rather it’s the company that combines creative (or creatively copied) designs together with a strong execution (across the value chain) that wins the game. Zara, a vertically and horizontally integrated fortress, is strong in constantly renewing its collections (and hardly does any marketing), while H&M, a company that’s similar to Nike or Apple, only really does the designing and the marketing, while outsourcing pretty much everything else.

You can read a few more thoughts about these two on my retail-blog.

The online fashion-game

When you think about it, a store doesn’t have to be that different from a commerce-website; you have the enticing outside part of things, which can be marketing and the shopping window, and you have the interactive inside part, which encourages you to mix and match, try and (impulse) buy. A good website will understand (or learn) the way customers think and appeal to the right drivers from the marketing and the interactive part of things.

Fashion is however a somewhat complex consumer-good. The way a piece of clothing is judged (based on my opinion) is on three levels:

The visual: how does it look?
The sensory: how does it feel?
and The social: what reaction do I get?

The web is getting more creative every day about the visual, e.g. you have sites like Etsy that use elaborate colour-matching techniques, of which there are several different versions elsewhere.

On the sensory-side, this should kind of be approached like you’re convincing a very sceptical person of a risky project. Everybody has been burned by some bad-fitting clothes before! On the one hand, extensive information matters, e.g. Styleshake’s size guide. On the other hand, support matters very much, e.g. Zappos‘ customer service approach, which Fidji wrote about before.

The social dimension should be something that the web is good for. On the one hand, celebrity-marketing like H&M and many other stores do, is a good enticement to get people to buy your clothes. On the other hand, what matters more to people like me is what clothes will look like in my social circle, and not everybody has Tom Cruise’s body-type (I’m twice as tall ). But you can definitely imagine a Hotornot- or Facebook-styled fashion-store, with some creative techniques.

To summarise

The attraction of fashion is still the hot models for me, but really, in the online domain it’s much more.

Fashion is a global and dynamic industry, and technology is definitely an enabler in that business.
The lack of IP makes the industry a somewhat easy one to enter, but also requires very strong executive skills.
There is still plenty of smart innovation left in addressing the right visual, sensory, and social needs of customers.

From a job-perspective, I found out that the fashion-business is not that easy to get into. You need either a related degree and/or (preferably together) relevant experience. That said, if you got a fashion-business or are thinking of starting one, preferably online, and are in need of a creative business-guy, give me a buzz! I’m always up for some brainstorming!

For the commentators:

what do you think are the drivers for fashion shopping?
What innovative e-commerce sites have you come across?
Where do you see fashion going, hybrid, more off-line, or more online?

Vincent

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Some thoughts on Services-orientated Architecture (SOA)

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:56:30 +0000

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 most sexy of topics, I expect the number of comments to be minimal.

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

What are the ingredients to launching a company?

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:47:41 +0000

Hello again. This here is a typical “fill in the blanks” write-up. I like thinking about starting companies, haven’t as yet engaged on starting one, though I feel relatively confident that I understand what it takes, but also that there are several ingredients that I still lack.

Following is a diagram of all the components of a company, that I could think of, without opening a book or consulting other people. That is where you come in. If I made vital errors in my logic, I would appreciate being corrected, no matter how harsh your criticism may be.

Ultimately, I see companies as coming out of a number of basic building blocks. An important one is the idea, and in order to bring that idea from production to market, you need an excellent multidisciplinary team (which includes partners), sufficient cash, and the right legal structure, the latter serving as both protection for an idea and for its stakeholders. I call them basic, they are in fact essential, and the hardest to achieve of all.

Decisions on the production side include where to locate your “plant,” the production-facilities needed to produce your product as cost-efficiently as possible. You need to decide on materials, which in the case of IT is hard- and software, needed to produce your product. And design also plays an important part in the way customers perceive your product. All of which feeds back to the basic building blocks that ensure that these things are executed well, funded, and protected legally.

Logistics is a function that I usually consider as (partially) outsourced, because it is both a relatively expensive process and there are plenty of efficient global operators that can take over most of that task. As production increases it may be logical to take over that function yourself, though it’s still better to hire a ship than to buy it, I think. And of course, economies on the internet are entirely different, though things like hosting are again more logical to be outsourced most of the time.

Decisions on the sales & marketing side include whether to target businesses (B2B) or individuals (B2C) and whether to operate nationally or internationally. This is a pretty complex decision-process, which comes with a number of trade-offs. If you target too large a market, your production may not be able to handle it. If you’re a B2C company, growing international may require working with local partners (B2B), and the same applies to national-to-international B2B-strategies. And you need to position yourself well enough to reach the right customers and protect against competitors & new entrants. Again, commercial strategies require the right team skill-set, sufficient funding, and legal structure that protects your business, nationally & internationally.

So, while I realise I’ve been speaking in generalities all this time, it’s nice to hear where my logic falters, or where I see things too simplistically or complex. Please let me know in the comments.

Time and inspiration permitting, I may write a number of more focussed posts in the future, asking about strategies towards attracting the right basic building blocks (ideas, people & money mainly), as well as regarding the production and sales & marketing functions.

Vincent van Wylick is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. Rumours of his demise have been far exaggerated (by himself mainly).

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The role of the internet for the retail of physical goods.

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:11:20 +0000

Hello there, Vincent here.

One of the stories, I covered last week in my links on my blog, uncovered an interesting statistic. Only about 3% of retail sales in the US happens online. I don’t think these stats are at all coincidental. While I see a bright future ahead for the online retail of media-products, I find that what the internet cannot provide is the “closeness,” that is sometimes needed for evaluating certain types of goods, like food and clothing. I have commented on this before, implicitly, with a post on the web as a third place, and about the lack of cohesion that Facebook provides.

At the same time, as The New Yorker story reports, what the internet has changed is how we shop; it is much easier to research and comparison-shop than it was before the internet-days. A survey by Accenture found that ca. 66% of those surveyed compared products online, and another study showed that the internet played a significant role with ca. 75% of electronics purchases.

IInnovate has an interesting podcast interview with Scott Dunlap, CEO of NearbyNow, which has come up with an interesting way to exploit the informational advantages of the internet and mash that with the qualities of physical shopping. Following short video shows how their service works:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FpKFYRKsY8]

Clearly technology has evolved a lot in the last few years, making this possible. NearbyNow works via the web and via mobile. I’m not sure if they are using any location-tracking & matching services, but certainly they are heading in that direction. On the retailers’ side, there is plenty of technology that makes this possible also. Electronic inventory and point of sale systems allow both for the checking of stock-levels and for consumers to reserve items to be picked up and tried on at a later date.

One issue that entered my mind, is that of efficiency. The way NearbyNow operates is through malls in the US, most of which are, as I found out, owned by 6 major companies across the nation. US’s scale-economies win again! In Europe, the situation appears a little different. Culturally, linguistically, technologically, and legally, it is a much more fragmented market, with far fewer malls also, and that may make it difficult for a unified service like this to operate as efficiently as it would in the US.

There is also the issue of too much transparency, which is worrying to some retailers, and addressed in the podcast-interview. But what does seem certain is that this is exactly the type of service that consumers value, and as such one that any consumer-centric business should encourage.

Will a service like this ever replace shopping in its entirety? No, I’m essentially betting my future that there are plenty of qualities *real* environments will continue to offer over virtual ones. But there is no reason, none at all, to try to integrate the good qualities that the web does possess—information at your fingertips—as elegantly and effectively as possible into those experiences.

This article is mirror-posted on my blog

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I Love how Apple's logistics work

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:33:00 +0000

Macbook Air components:

13 inch screen – same size as Macbooks
Harddrives – compatible with either iPods or iPhones/Touches (SSD)
Intel-CPU – possibly compatible with future portable devices

There’s a lot of overlap here with other devices that Apple is selling. And probably under the hood too.

Even if demand for the MBA is low, which I expect (certainly for the $ 1000 solid-state drive), Apple wins as production-capability is geared up and costs eventually fall.

What is that called in logistics, cross-fertilisation?

Vincent (sorry for the short tweet, no time for much more at the moment)

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5 free pieces of advice to Amazon, from a very unhappy customer

Jeremy Fain — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:15:16 +0000

I consider myself a “power buyer” on Amazon – having ordered and read for the last decade or so between 20 and 30 books every year, for sums of money far from negligible, at least to me.

This being said, I’ve never been more unhappy about my experience as a customer. Here are 5 free pieces of advice from too faithful a customer:

The company pretends to invest millions in its customer relationship management systems, but why on Earth Amazon never implemented any Fidelity / membership program? Even the worse companies in the world, customer service-wise (yes you’ve recognized them, I’m talking of airlines), have membership /faithfulness programs. I would be delighted to gain some travel miles or free mp3 as a reward for being a long time customer.
Books purchased via the one-click purchase button should be automatically removed from one’s automatic recommendations, wish list & shopping cart. Why would you want to recommend a book already acquired and shipped to the actual same customer in the past? Today, you face a high risk of ordering a book twice because of that.
Amazon seems to consider that none can purchase a book anywhere else than on their store. I think users should be granted with the possibility to mark a book as already acquired (somewhere else), either on Amazon (they should make this automatic though, but I’m so desperate…) or elsewhere.
Even worse, when these books are already in the shopping cart (or mention “In your shopping cart” already), that is to say between my wallet and Amazon’s and their warehouse and my shelves, Amazon still finds ways to recommend them. Don’t they think I already know the book if it’s included in either my shopping cart or my wishlist?
This one is more a back office thing. But aren’t you guys all about dematerializing the bookshopping experience? So why can’t I find ‘.pdf’ed invoices in my “account info” space? I still need to keep these blue bills for ages: I know you legally have to send these, but why don’t you help us get rid of the tons of paper we receive.

And I’m not even mentioning transnational use of Amazon (if you acquire a book on Amazon.com rather than on Amazon.yourcountry login in with the same email address, it’s not removed from your country’s wishlist) or the interface here. Or… let’s mention it before we leave the floor: Amazon’s interface wasn’t so much more convenient back in 1997 or so than it is today. I’m surprised because every engineer from Amazon I’ve met was super bright, but if I were an e-Commerce entrepreneur today I would definitely embrace rich media and video category marketing as a paradigm to set a new user experience standard.

To everyone: as you will have understood, I’m not so happy with my experience as a customer on Amazon. Any alternative?

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Amazon's Jeff Bezos on strategy & innovation (not Kindle-related!)

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:53:31 +0000

I’m writing this post for two reasons. One is that I am incredibly interested in the subject of leadership and try to learn about it in whatever way I can. A second reason is that, even though my main focus on my blog is food and retail, what Matthias calls “old economy” (thanks Matthias!), I try to also be very aware of “the past, present, and future of this industry,” and (internet-)technology plays very much a part in the future of retail.

In terms of leadership, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is a good person to study—a man who created perhaps the most iconic garage-based venture since Apple, and who managed to not only take his company, Amazon, public, but also stay on as CEO until now, something that is rare amongst founders. In terms of retail, Amazon is itself great company to study. It has transformed the book-industry, and is doing amazing work in terms of providing infrastructure for web-based infrastructure. And, even though they are not as yet selling any books in the Netherlands. I’m hoping that SEPA, to be introduced next year, will change that.

Before I continue, this is not really a Kindle-related post. While we’re on the subject, however, let me say that I’m a big fan of ebook-readers. At the same time, there are certain advantages to paper-reading, which I’m especially experiencing since I started my own blog—namely that I can write on them. I know I can take notes on Kindle, but it’s not the same. And I think the price-point of either the device ($400), or the books (a $10 intro-price), or both, is just too high for something that can be produced in mass and has no printing-, and hardly any distribution-costs attached to it.

Speaking of notes, I took some while reading a nice HBR-interview with Jeff Bezos, in which he discusses his take on strategy, innovation, customers, … and not Kindle. I’ll share these, and my thoughts on them, with you now.

Innovation at Amazon

There are generally two types of innovation, the radical kind and the incremental (or process) kind. My general belief is that, while retail on the internet radically transformed the way we shop, and will continue to do so, ultimately it is an evolution in process. Instead of giving our credit-card to the clerk, we type in a number behind a screen, etc. etc. And, since the internet has taken off, this kind of process-innovation has become much more prevalent. Now, instead of clicking 5 times to buy a product, I can click once: yay! Before you ask, “so what is ‘radical’ innovation to you?” I’ll just say: “Space, flying car, people living under water, that kind of stuff. So get busy!”

Amazon has of course just announced the Kindle, which could be interpreted as an innovative move. But again, what will make this innovation shine, if it does, is Amazon’s incredible process-strength, namely that they can deliver the device to nearly every household in the Western world at beautiful economies of scale. For now, these are paying of for Amazon, but knowing their business-model, it’s pretty certain that this will pay off for consumer too… eventually.

What I like about Amazon (and got from the interview) are that they have an incredible experiment-based culture and generally take a long-term view—both rare with public companies. In terms of experiments, these are encouraged on a company-wide level, and due to the nature of experiments, are both had to predict and not unknown to fail. One example of an experiment which became an enormous, but unplanned, success, is the Amazon-associates program.

As far as time-frame is concerned, innovations at Amazon usually take 5-7 years before they make any meaningful impact on the company’s economic situation. This is a big risk and is offset in a number of ways. One is to minimise the costs of experiments. Amazon has a web lab just for that purpose, which undertakes these experiments on a massive scale, collects real usage data on what works best, and is constantly trying to push the costs of these experiments down. Again, taking a long-term view, it helps when building innovation on things that won’t change in the next 5-10 years. For Amazon, these are basic customer preferences, such as: choice, low prices, and fast delivery (hello Kindle?).

There are three more core-attitudes, which I think have a big impact on the way innovation takes shape at Amazon. One is, to always ask the question “why not?” According to Bezos, the biggest mistakes at Amazon come from not doing something, rather than taking the risk. And asking “why not?” instead of “why should we do it?” opens up a whole other universe of possibilities. Similarly, there are lot of difficult decisions that Amazon has had to make over the years, such as allowing reviews on their site. The vital question there was “what is better for the customer?” Last, but not least, I like this line in regards to making experiments a success: “Be stubborn on the vision, and flexible on the details.”

Strategy at Amazon

The other part of innovation is execution, some of which was already discussed above. Much of decision-making comes out of the way a corporate culture is shaped. Some cultures are hierarchical, some are flat, some are individualistic, some are collective. From my understanding of things, Amazon has both a departmental structure (which would suggest some hierarchy) and takes decisions collectively. Both senior management and departmental management have mechanisms through which this collectivity manifests itself. Seniors meet once a week for four hours and once-twice a year for a two-day meeting. Homework is assigned before and the latter type of meeting deals mostly with long-term issues. Department-management has a similar system.

Some more general characteristics of corporate culture were mentioned in the interview, namely that they can be incredibly stable over time, and are self-perpetuating in the sense that they attract people who like that culture (and repel those that don’t). While a company’s corporate culture is probably the hardest to replicate, and can thus be a tremendous competitive advantage, the rigidity of the culture can both mean that there are limits to what it can do (and should do), and it can sometimes hamper innovation during turbulent times. At the same time, a culture can by nature be open to change, which should overcome some rigidity.

A few weeks ago, on my blog, I wrote a post on Porter’s five forces in which I outlined what I think matters in strategy, but also that it pays off to stay close to customers. Jeff Bezos shares a similar view-point, for a number of reasons. One, customer-needs change more slowly than a lot of other things, e.g. tech; and two, following the competition doesn’t work well in fast-changing environments, e.g. tech. A third point is that being too competitor-focussed can result in a passive attitude once a certain dominance has been reached in an industry. You can argue about this either way, but when you look at certain large companies (no names), this “hey, we won, so why innovate?”-attitude, is definitely one that is recognisable.

One way that Amazon tries to stay close to customer-needs is by enforcing rotation. Every new employee has to spend time in their fulfilment-centres with the first year, every two years, employees have to do two days of customer service, and everyone has to be able to work in a call-centre. That includes Jeff Bezos.

Finally, he also had some advice as how to survive the transition from the founder of a start-up, to the CEO of a multinational, public company. It’s simple (yeah right!). When you start, the main question is “How?”; as you grow, the question is “What?”; and when you’re huge, the question becomes “Who?” There you go, the secret to being the leader of a big company.

Final thoughts

One of the weaknesses of secondary information, such as what came from this interview, is that I (and you) have to trust everything that is in the article. I can’t ask follow-up questions and can’t tell, by body-language, tone, or otherwise, whether some points are more important than others, or more true than others. Therefore I try to be careful to treat each piece of information as part of a greater whole. In other words, I may come across information that conflicts with what Bezos said in the interview. If it’s noteworthy, I’ll write a new post about it. One piece of important data, released perhaps a month after the interview, is the release of Kindle, which, as mentioned, I am sceptical of.

Two things I learned from the interview is that innovation takes time, especially to make it economically viable, for both the business and the consumer. In my opinion Kindle, in order to fit the philosophy of Amazon (which is not Apple after-all), has to drop in price, as do the books. It’s a matter of ethics, of being customer-focussed, and of being a process-innovator. I can only assume, that over the next years, this is exactly what will happen.

The other thing I learned is to constantly be open to innovation that can benefit the customer. This point has been made many times in the words above, yet it bears repeating. A company can be incredibly rigid, the bigger it becomes. Competition can become incredibly threatening. Technology can change from one day to the next. But what doesn’t change is that customers will pay you for products that make them happy. And I fear that a lot, a lot of businesses have forgotten that as they became big, arrogant, and focussed on anything but what customers want.

Finally, while I may be focussed on “old economy” topics, I think Amazon teaches some interesting lessons on how to remain high-touch in a high-tech environment. As such, this certainly won’t be the last time I touch upon the topic of technology in retail.

Further reading

If you’re interested in the topic of leadership, you mean also want to check out a list of free podcast-interviews with a number of CEOs, ranging from Google’s Eric Schmidt to, indeed, Jeff Bezos, which I posted on Tech IT Easy a few months ago. Worth a listen. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the original article on HBR.

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find all of his posts here, or check out his food & retail blog, updated nearly every day, and where this article is mirror-posted.

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The attraction of (online) fashion

Some thoughts on Services-orientated Architecture (SOA)

What are the ingredients to launching a company?

The role of the internet for the retail of *physical* goods.

I Love how Apple's logistics work

5 free pieces of advice to Amazon, from a very unhappy customer

Amazon's Jeff Bezos on strategy & innovation (not Kindle-related!)

The role of the internet for the retail of physical goods.