Tag: IBM

Amuse ourselves to the next level

Neil Postman didn’t see the rise of game online when he penned “Amuse ourselves to death”.

But he was on to something worth discussing: we are heading toward becoming a couch-potato nation

or in China, Internet-addict camp.

When Chinese kids get sent to these internet addict camps, we witness another unintended consequence of our high-tech living.

This puts Mr Watson in the early days of IBM to shame. He said the world market could use a few, but no more than a dozen machines.

Nobody could foresee the fall-below-the-line price of the chip, maybe except for Gordon Moore who predicted the doubling of chip speed every 18 months.

My kid watches her cartoon on Hulu. Asked why she didn’t want to watch it on TV. She said on broadband, she could watch it when she wanted it.

This kid even wants control, and not waits for a scheduled time by the network.

I will have to put a cooking alarm clock next to her desk just to limit her screen time.

Or let her “amuse herself to the next level”, the highest of which is at the Internet addict camp. Long way from Florida. And she will have to speak Chinese to

understand guard’s command. Maybe it’s not a bad idea, the unintended consequence of it all: internet addicts from the West get sent to Chinese internet-addict camps,

thus picking up a foreign language.

Neil Postman built his premise on the 4-hour average  (TV watching). Now it’s 5 hours, not counting the many hours online.

No wonder advertising appears in most unlikely places: pop up (download wait), stand-on (beer aisle), stare at while in a moving elevator or taxi cab.

We are living on New York minutes, even if we are  not physically there. Because New York is now more than a New Year countdown. It’s every day’s ticking, a state of mind. No more Crocodile Dundee coming to New York.

New York is now in Dundee’ Australian back waters. Hello, hello, hello…..

Luckily, we have a built-in alarm clock : it’s our bladder. Nature break. Machines will have to wait. Human will survive and be adaptive. Continuous re-invention.

To the next level of distraction and anesthesia.

You’ve got comment!

When lunching near Dulles Airport  years ago, we ran into some Teleglobe colleagues who had gone over to AOL.

Back then, I looked at those guys with a bit of envy. After all, we were just a voice backbone.

Those guys were in their honeymoon with Time Warner, both pipe and pipe dream.

Now, this merger has now been unraveled .

One thing has changed over this decade: customers can and will talk back, even from Dell hell.

We used to laugh at “voice mail jail”. Companies cannot afford a “taxi driver’s” attitude (Are you talking to me?).

Amazon rating, feedback loop, survey, independent research, mystery shopper, disgruntled employees etc…. The old untouched “suggestion box” is as outdated as the IBM Selectric typewriter.

Wiki everything. Google everything. Twitter everything. The many “faces” on Facebook. Many lives on Second Life.

Many files on Drop Box,  Amazon’ rent-a-server or Salesforce.com CRM. Modularity and virtuality are counter-trends of our disposable society.

At Teleglobe, that’s what we did: Rent-a-switch (telecom). International entrepreneurs only had to come with a willingness, a niche market and some upfront costs. The rest, from licensing to private billing, we handled.

It worked beautifully. And I know Cloud Computing will take IT investment to the next level, freeing up companies to soar, and expand side way or upward, without attending to the flickering lights in server farm.

The post-machine age (on-prem) has finally arrived. The unbundling of MS Office and many other packaged solutions. Pay per user. Companies can now launch seasonal campaign or handle a PR crisis with speed and less cost.

Bad news tends to travel faster than good.

You’ve got comment!.

First responder to those comments can reduce damage into dent, or turn negative into positive. Customers have always been Kings. It’s just that Kings don’t get to speak too often, until now.

Apple in my eyes

 

Everybody loves a winner.

Today’s is Apple, starts with the “A” in the alphabet.

Not bad for a college drop-out who then learned calligraphy, hung out with “evangelist” Kawasaki, forced out then came back to the tune of billions. He embodied the “I” in I-phone.

I remember my first encounter with personal computers, and of course, it was a Mac.

Silicon Valley back in the early 80’s was brimming with S Asian programmers;  the Vietnamese-American community were working 2 or 3 shifts a day as assemblers (before the offshore trend).

You got to have a garage: garage band, garage sale, and start-up in garage. It’s cool to be in a garage, although it was meant for cars.

In California, you don’t freeze to death by sleeping in a garage, unlike in the cold Winter of the Northeast. Thus, it allows for start-up mindset and venture capitalist, risk takers, trend setters or just drifters.

You definitely find yourself there, because to go further West (young man), you will have to fly to Hawaii.

The best you can do is driving North, through Red Wood, onto Portland and Seattle.

Meanwhile, South of SF is sufficed.

It will keep you busy “coding” for a while.

What Steve Jobs brought to the business world is his signature turtle neck and a little bit of rebellious streak.

Meanwhile, he doesn’t mind to surround himself with the likes of Kawasaki, long before having an Asian partner becomes a hip (Yahoo, YouTube).

People of the Valley are not only Californians, but also tribal members of the Tech world. You don’t talk shop, you talk Tech. You are not the Man, you’re the Burning Man.

I remember attending a speech by Armstrong when he became CEO of AT&T. And having been at various start-ups

such as MCI and Teligent, I had a nagging feeling that you could not fake “coolness”.  In other words, you cannot be both the old IBM (blue suit) and the new new thing (like Apple). The elephant cannot walk.  Sure enough, after some “reality checks”, IBM sold off the hardware division to Lenovo to pursue the higher margin world of convergence and Cloud, while AT&T back then sold off NCR and other assets.

I admired the crowd Apple stores were able to draw in.

Apple takes it to the mass, at a boutique level, and bridges the gap between high-tech and high touch.

It’s been a long way since 1976 garage days. A lot of Chinese take-outs, brainstorming and risk taking.

It’s really tough to be number 1. Now the hard part is to stay King of the Hill. Apple in the post-Jobs era. Gotta Think Different this time.