Tag: Microsoft

All by ourselves

In the 70’s, the Me decade, we heard “All by myself” a lot on the radio.

Now, it’s the age of collaboration. All by ourselves.

Whiteboarding, synergy and M&A.

Nokia, Sony and Dell. All are taking the back seat.

Players we did not see coming are now in the field: Haier, Acer and Lenovo.

Users we did not know, can now afford buying our products e.g. I-phone 5s in Vietnam.

Dictators we thought couldn’t stand a chance, now sit in defiance of UN inspectors (Syria).

All by ourselves: APEC and TPP. NATO and UN Security Council.

Multi-polar world. Multi-tasking organization and multi-party lock jam.

It’s not that we can’t find good leaders. We weren’t prepared and planned for today’s contingencies.

Obama, once an Editor of Harvard Law Journal, just wanted to consult Congress on the War Powers Act.

In doing so, he exhibits the best of Constitutional compliance, yet entangled in “what if” scenarios, and  missed out a chance to be a great world leader.

All by himself.

Now people are speculating about Gates returning to Microsoft.

Must be hard the second time around (it would be the equivalent of Tom Hanks in Big, asking his x girl friend to go back and do it again).

He can be a figure-head, presiding over a round table of talents snatched up from competitors since the year of 2000.

Bill Gates is not needed for his prescient. After all, he missed seeing the Internet the first time around.

He can however humbly play the collaborator and coordinator role.

All by ourselves.

Or he can shut the door, and sing his heart out, like Bridget Jones, “All by myself”, all the while, envying Steve Jobs, in life as in death. Can you imagine a book and a movie on Gates? I’d rather read and see one about his partner in Idea Man – the one and only Paul Allen, rehearsing with the Stones in his private world-class yacht. The Stones don’t do “All by myself”.

 

Confidence

2.5 per cent. That’s US growth figure. Enough? Confident? Could be better?

I am glad we are growing even when it feels like we are running in place.

Perception vs Reality. Like how they feel now at Microsoft, at Yahoo. Even at RIM and Facebook.

Something is missing. Mojo? Passion and Pride. Exuberance and Exhilaration.

Grown men are sleeping on Mommy’s couch. Grown women too, to make it equal.

Crushed right out of the gate. Austerity.

Where is that needed confidence I used to see on Seniors’ faces on their first-job interviews.

It’s like dating back then on campus. Except it’s on weekdays, and you get to put on a suit. You could always tell they were experiencing “senior panic” : get a job, get settled down, bought into the American Dream with white-picket fence and automatic sprinklers.

Now, it’s the couch, not sure where it was made from.

Trickled-down economy. Wealth imbalance. Daddy brought wild animal kingdom home for Daughter’s surprised birthday. While others waiting in line at county food bank.

1939 all over. This time, with Bernanke, not studying the phenomenon as an academic subject. He is handling it, and inadvertently, helps shape the textbook of the future.

How are we looked at from year 2020’s vantage point? That we mishandled this “opportunity”?

In crisis, there is always opportunity. Electric Vehicle? Wind and Solar? Software for the mass and medical world?

C’mon. Exercise a little imagination. Muster up some courage. Be confident again.

Build that high-speed railways. Don’t let me want to learn Korean (broadband-envy). Don’t let Friedman keep writing about Beijing and Shanghai modern airports. Build them and be proud again. Make me USA-proud and the world USA-envy.

Chinese CEOs are (also) quitting

You know you got it right when others tried to copy your every move.

An Apple-like store in China, a Sony or Microsoft retail store in the same mall (Galleria, Houston).

Steven Jobs, the enchanter, is quitting as Apple has reached its apex, once surpassing Exxon (Google also had this Everest experience).

Maybe some Chinese CEOs like Jack Ma will get a similar idea (in their case, they aren’t going to take a calligraphy class. Instead they want to drive around in gold-plated automobiles).

Something, like style, just can’t be copied.

Design and innovation, like brand, is in you.

Zoom out from history, you will find clusters of creativity, among which Silicon Valley in the late 80’s.

Guy Kawasaki briefly mentioned the secrecy and partitioning at Apple. Planned self-disruption.

In that spirit, I am sure they had a succession plan in place at Apple.

Not as at HP, where the tablets are on sale for $99 (not for Third World charity).

We do live in a different era, when songs are downloaded for 99 cents, and tablet sold for $99.

We will soon get cheaper versions of the I-phone, perhaps via Sprint’s private-label re-sellers, such as Metro PCS. (as of this edit, T-Mobile is rolling out the I Phone 5 for $99 w/out contract).

Perhaps the Chinese CEO’s are calling it quit. After all, their society couldn’t make up their mind: to abandon their naval fleet (ancient history), or to build aircraft carriers (modern technology)? To build luxury car lines, or to buy Indian’s nano autos? To move up the value chain, or to expand overseas?

When emerging nations beat Chinese at its own game (cheap knock-off using cheap labor),

it’s time to quit. Oh, one more thing. At least Steve Jobs advised Standford grads to stay hungry.

Not to flaunt their wealth by driving gold-plated cars around. One high-tech start-up owner in the Valley did just that (crashing his Lamborghini and died after having sold his company just an hour before). Know when to hold and when to fold. It’s Steve’s secret sauce. Try to copy that.

Technology doesn’t sleep, but we do.

I had my share of empty TV studio, that is, between broadcasts (6PM and 10PM). Now, there is no recoup time. We have evolved to Office 365, with servers resided in the “cloud” instead of the (telco) closets. Mobile working has evolved from CB radio, to Motorola brick phones, from Skypage to Skype chat.

Cryptography moved from a code book to complex self-improved algorithm (Amazon shopping experience : buy this + this = this.)

Pop-up ads even have a “K” for keep (time-shifting ads), while some companies are now offering a service to measure your Twitter‘s scores (influencer’s graph).

McLuhan was on the mark about “the medium is the message.”

Dot.com domain was just a start.

ICANN is opening up more domains.

And within a few years, we will be inundated with dot.this, dot.that, same way we now have with mobile phone area codes (which used to have a zero and a one in the middle of the three-digits).

As with cable TV channels where pundits feel the need to fill the emptiness with noise, new technologies such as Twitter and Facebook (and Google Plus)  will challenge us to come up with “sound bites”. Our attention span has evolved from attending for hours on end under preacher’s tents to today’s tweets.

Our brain has learned to process messages and images much quicker.

Bum, here is a Bieber’s (Be Bop a lula), Bang, there’s a GaGa (innocent like a Chic out of her egg-shell).

Good thing that we can upload and talk back. But not for long, just 140 characters.

You can tweet again, but it won’t be a part II of an earlier tweet. No guarantee.

So we learn to tame new technologies, and cope with their sheer availability.

User-generated content. BTW, from Page One, a documentary on “a year at the New York Times”, journalists on Charlie Rose, commented that the paper was now in better shape than it had ever been.

So the proliferation of citizen-journalists doesn’t threaten or dethrone existing media. Not when it’s the NYT.

Meanwhile, I keep reading volumes of “likes” from one Facebook friend.

All of a sudden, I miss my solitude in a broadcast studio when show’s over.

Lights off. Let’s go home. We need some sleep. The audience already turned off their sets.

In Vietnam, they would put back the Indian poster for white balance.

I guess it’s called the “sleep mode” because studio cameras need longer warm-up time. In today’s parlance, it means our influencer’s scores got dropped a bit when we are offline. The real self needs rest, so the virtual self must give.

Fallible leadership

Former Google CEO, in a recent interview, admitted that he was too busy to see Social Network coming.

Former Microsoft CEO, at the turn of the century, admitted he too missed the significance of the Internet.

The Vatican, after years of floundering, decided to settle sexual abuse cases ( as of this edit, Pope Francis now personifies simplicity and humility).

In Japan, the advisor to the Prime Minister on nuclear issues resigned, saying “there is no reason for me to be here”.

Leadership fails too, as we do.  It’s just harder to publicly acknowledge it.

(yet in NY and S Carolina, politicians are trying to give their career a second life, with Clinton as role model).

There are forces at work, no matter who is in charge: innovator’s dilemma, creative destruction, perfect storm.  Mike Malone speaks about a new organizational model (core leadership team, and boundary-less around the edges) in ” The Future Arrived Yesterday”. Essentially, he speaks of being nimble, adaptive with a core group as curators of company experience and memories.

I would add to that: even within a core leadership team, I wouldn’t surround myself with a team of Yes men.

Look at Nixon. They had said Yes for a while, until they were asked to testify before Congress.

Then, we know what happened from there. Colson was conveniently born again while others went on to publish best sellers.

I’d rather agree to disagree, or went so far to appoint an office of “Devil’s advocate” within the organization.

Organization development often expounds the homogeneous unit principle (HUP) i.e. organizations grow best when members are ethnically alike. But when it comes to business, especially in current global climate, customers are found in every corner of the Earth 24/7. They are just a click away from your virtual doorstep. Who would you like to be your “receptionist” then? (SI model a few years back came from Russia, while Miss America a Muslim American).

Even Buddha himself , purported to be born in King’s Palace, walked among commoners to compare what’s on the ground vs what’s in the blueprint. Seeing so much “reality”, he turned inward, examined himself and found Enlightenment. Conversely, not everyone is on the path to Nirvana: dictators in the Middle East stay on and continue their personal enrichment.

Gaddafi not only surrounded himself with Yes men and his sons, he added an entourage of female bodyguards.

Talking about busy!

MCI taught me one lesson well: Reorganize even while the going is good.

I remembered management meetings on the East coast, right after I had just finished up a series of successful festival events on the West coast. No rest for the weary. And we discussed splitting up into three regions (instead of organizing along ethnic niche). Just to shake things up and cross-train our leadership team.

That same team now went on to do us proud: we were graced with meetings held all over the country, so all of us got exposed to the nuances of geography and zip code life styles. After all, we were a Mass Market organization: diversity, energy and can-do attitude.

I respect Eric Schmidt‘s forthrightness. Only it’s so ironic that I read his interview on LinkedIn Headlines, his competitor par excellence. Now only if LinkedIn Jeff Weiner would watch his rear view mirror. It’s not what you do that hurts you, it’s what you know you should do, but didn’t.

What’s eating the man up inside

Instead of more career choices, he now faces 20 choices of jeans.

People are debating about a gender-free society (painting nail polish on his son’s toes).

When he finally got his tie collection under control, they went “business casual” on him (Steve Ballmer couldn’t cope with this).

Even though it says “Facebook”, most people just post a long-shot photo of themselves.

The financial crisis is now a film treatment i.e. we can now objectify the pain with some distance in between since. Money crisis, job crisis, health crisis, environmental crisis, security crisis and even marital crisis.

That’s what’s eating the man up inside.

Still he rises to the occasion. He is after all our 21st-century man. Armed with I-pod and I-pad, he can be a Spartan against the invading army of machines (see my other blog on “machine and me”).

He can text, chew gum and walk at the same time.

He shows up at the gym at first light.

Talks to no one in particular (men are not chatty, although they don’t mind leaving you a voice mail).

He is the opposite of Barbara Streisand (in a Star is Born). He wants to conquer, but frustrated because the Colosseum is now packed with competition: foreigners inshore and BRICS that chip away business, machines with intelligent softwares that cut down work load, material sciences that lessen the heavy lifting, women in NFL, ESPN, NASCAR, Air Force commanding (Libya), and worst of, advances in bio-med which prolong life (he can’t die, just get eaten up inside).

So, the rise of the rest (no offense, but I can’t help noticing Indian faces on TV, from PBS to CNN). There are discussions about “outsourcing blog”, a logical extension of what is digitized can be outsourced.

Obama, during his state visit to Britain, even commented on the rise of China and India. Something to do with “America leadership is now” (instead of passe).

Luckily, there is a phenomenon called “middle-income trap”, which kept countries like Malaysia and Thailand at bay, for a while.

What’s eating up the man inside? He hit the ceiling. Too soon and too fast (at least previous generation of boomers got a good run, starting from 1950 until now). He couldn’t cope with role reversal ( Palin’s husband Todd holding the baby at press conference to denounce rumors of cheating “look, he has been home watching the kids all along).

So our man goes target-shooting. At least, it gives him something/someone to focus on.

The rest, the rise of the rest, are hard to pin down.

He can’t quite put his finger on it. The phenomenon is once called Future Shock is here now.

It’s like Bush hearing the news on 9/11 morning, in a state of shock and stillness in that Elementary classroom (incidentally, he got another shock when a recent ball player followed an out-of-bound ball to get within inches).

The doctor can’t tell what’s eating the man up inside. He wants more tests done.

He wants to put on the white glove. More trips to the pharmacy. More waiting. Agitating. That’s what eating the man up inside. He is inherently impatient. The business of “the beginning of the end” sidelines him (CIA officers tend to die within their first year of retirement).

Like America, our man wants action, heroism, around the clock (24-hours like Jack Bauer).

Unfortunately, the rules have changed. It’s time for drones not drills, nation building not “terminating”. He can’t “be back”. He has to father one more. He can’t even be put and stay in jail. The Supreme Court says “No”, you can’t double up prisoners. Triple up on the outside is their business. But not inside.

So the unwanted prisoners in California got off early and easy (whoops, per computer errors). All dressed up, and no place to go.

21-century man scratches his head. He doesn’t understand the rationale behind 20 choices of jeans, while there are only a few career choices (being a nurse or a teacher has traditionally fallen under the domains of female and gay, while construction of new home or soldiering are both winding down). Maybe he should start painting his toe nails. And accept the fact that we are moving toward a gender-free society. Eat, pray and love. Text, chew gum and walk. 21st-century walking man walks on by.

Tech buying spree

Even the President couldn’t help visiting Facebook campus in Palo Alto two weeks ago, and in Austin. California companies now talk of an Austin strategy, just like GE back in the 90’s with  India.

I finally realized the wisdom of Alex who made millions from his dollar-per-dot concept. Except this time, it will be the buttons (Like by Facebook, and +1 by Google). T for Twitter, I for LinkedIn and F for Facebook. No wonder MS needs the S button (for Skype). Companies stake out their turfs, online and on-screen to gain shares in this attention economy.

Speak succintly, and speak frequently. Retweet yourself after me.

“I, would like, to buy, a hamburger” (Pink Panthers).

Again.

I remember when companies would hire people to click on their websites so they can rise in Alexa’s ranking (if broadcasters could do the same to secure ratings).

Skype has been a tech marvel, and a business basket case. It had not made money, yet sold to E-bay, who lost money on the deal. And now, it earns a chunk of change passing on to Silver Lake.

Welcome to the 21st century. Members only. Multi-taskers only. Eat,pray and love.

Type, talk and think.

Tech topics cover M2M, which is the next big thing. Where does that leave us, human operators?

To preside on top of the food chain, we need to fight for our supremacy, not over each other, but over machines. Seek first SEO then all these things shall be added unto you. Establish your Web presence. And be relevant (unlike Bin Laden, who was rendered “irrelevant” by the 2011 Arab Spring).

It’s not a coincident that we are tackling, via crowdsourcing, the $300- house challenge for the bottom 2 billion.

Can I have Skype with that?

I just notice that Steve Balmer, during his announcement of MS’s biggest buy, did not even wear a suit.

MS, personified in Steve, is trying hard to stay relevant in this fast and forever young digital world. Time Warner was doing the same with AOL, who in turn, has just made a chess move with Huffington Post. Maybe Skype isn’t the end game for MS. Just its beginning to embrace Skype-type users (early adopters) in the hope that osmosis between MS and Skype will work miracle. If not, then “eat, pray and love”, as Time Warner and AOL once did.

Culture shock, future shock, aftershock

We just saw an aftershock in Japan at magnitude 7.0. In and of itself, it’s a major earthquake. But, since it had been preceded by the big one (9.0), it is pale in comparison.

As to culture shock, a man from the Amazon who got transported to Seattle, WA will only hear one thing in common: Amazon.com.
The rest like Starbucks, Microsoft etc… seems strange to him. Off the bet, he needs winter wear to survive.

Like Austin Powers who needs to adjust expectations, majorly, upon stepping out of deep freeze.

Things are partitioned with biometric passwords and cumbersome authentication process (unlike the Woodstock fence which got pushed down and stayed down for the duration of the three-day concert). No room on the VW van or Love bus for Luddites.

Welcome to our digital future, where everything is mobile and online.

Austin cannot use his traditional charm to pry for information.

In other words, his spy craft needs serious brush-ups.

(incidentally, dentistry has advanced quite nicely since his time).

He will hardly get any service or human interaction: at the gym (finger print pad, more sophisticated than Austin’s spy school,) on the phone with “customer service” (speech recognition and voice activation before you get a live operator, from call center far way, whose accent Austin incidentally can ID, but may be doubtful if he had mis-dialed the country code).

Even kids check text messages while talking to parents. The Dad still checks out stock quotes while his wife nags that dinner was ready.

Yet one deadline remains the same: April 15th. As sure as death, tax time is due time for everyone. Government might get shut down, so pay up.

The future is now. But it comes not without a few shocks of its own.

Meanwhile, ROW (rest of world) is playing catch up. Emerging countries all try to export their stuff to the Walmart near you. Pretty soon, we are surrounded by Dollar stores, where everything is priced at one dollar, inflation-adjusted.

BTW, when our Austin Powers runs into our Amazon man in Seattle, they can agree on one thing: we need to take care of Mother Nature, because these aftershocks are not funny. Quite inconvenient indeed. Whether you are a primitive man or a hit man, you know that when the bell tolls for thee, it’s also for me. Culture shock, I can adapt. Future shock, I can embrace. But aftershock, …. it keeps me up at night. Just check with Fukushima and Sandy refugees in the shelters. They can tell you, it may take years, not months, before they can return to “normal”. I can empathize, having absorbed all three shocks myself.

Moore’s Law for Tech Giants

If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, he would be surprised to see Facebook. If he had waken up a decade ago, he would have read about Google.And the decade before that, Microsoft.

Except this time, Mark Zuckerberg is much younger than the other founders, dominated the media landscape quicker . And he donated part of his earnings to charity, much earlier (Bill and Melinda Gates took off to India a few Window versions later).

In short, everything (concept to contribution) seems to follow Moore’s Law which was first applied to the speed of chips.

When Microsoft opened its Silicon Valley branch, and Facebook its first summer frat house on the West coast, we know where Mecca for techies is.

One can only hope the rise of Facebook inspire others, despite its floundering IPO.

Tech year, like dog year, ends quickly. It just seems like yesterday, when Bill Gates

tried to size up Netscape, or Murdoch MySpace and WSJ mix.

Today, half of the staff  are clearing their desks, leaving behind half of My Space For-Lease. Moore’s Law is ominous when applied outside of chip manufacturing.

I want my Skype call!

By now, we all know about our right to make a phone call when being arrested.

That phone call usually is placed from a pay phone (soon to be a museum piece).

Skype has been down (and slowly back up to full speed), and 26 million users worldwide felt the pinch.

VoIP. Conversation chopped into tiny pieces to be reassembled at the other end (with some help from the listeners to “guess” and fill in the gaps).

The process is called quantization which creates a digital graph of an otherwise analog waves used in landline telephony.

Skype helped sell a bunch of headsets for sure.

And it has been disruptive to incumbent Penny-talk services (Skype could be called Zero-cent talk).

With Facebook founder visiting China, we can expect more E commerce apps. How about Facetalk, with caller’s profile and friending list.

People communicate in whatever way they deem convenient.

Skype and Twitter just happened to be King of the Hill at the moment.

Until the next innovation comes along. No wonder there are titles such as “First, break all the rules”. Who would have thought that which was intended for Data transmission (Internet protocol) can be used for voice and video. Even Google which already “got it” more than Microsoft, seemed to have missed the boat when it comes to Web 2.0. If only they paid attention to the human side of users, who are made up to be social animals (hence, the rise of home networking, which caught the attention of Cisco, now Linksys-Cisco).

Sometimes, the market trickles down (IBM mainframe to Texas Instrument, to Xerox then Atari/Apple computers). Other times, it’s the reverse (Social Media and Mobile apps for the work place, business casual attire etc..).

Whatever the case, I admire the distribution channel: they always make sure we have new stuffs to buy for Christmas e.g. Susan Boyle CD, Wall Street DVD (first, it cheated investors out of their money, then the fictional film version is taking Main Street pocket change), Ipad and Blu-Ray. It’s not a new century at all. It just happens to be the most crowded one. Translation: lots of gift wrapping: toys for tots, text for teens. Skype for all..