The enemy of my enemy is my friend

19 07 2011

Strange what a few years means to the technology sector.  Google, once champion of the little guy, the individual, the anti-Mircosoft, now becomes the problem.  The Michigan – Ohio State rivalry of the tech industry was supposed to be Apple and Microsoft.  They have spanned great battles over the years – and better commercials…

Yet, all of a sudden Google is the evil invader in the space.  What else could make Apple and Microsoft consortium partners?

WHAT!!  Wait a second…

Nortel Networks, one of the great patent holders, is watching its power, influence, and ultimately its profits dwindle away.  Up for auction were a sizable number of its patents.  While Google was the early favorite, Apple and Microsoft teamed up with Ericsson, EMC, RIM, and Sony teamed up with each other to outspend Google.

While we get to wait and see what this means for Google, we can wonder what our competition might be willing to do to us given the opportunity?

  • How do external opportunities trigger discussions within the organization?
  • Who monitors the external market for us?
  • How do we leverage information to make timely decisions?
  • How well do we gamemanship our competition?  Are they better at it than us?

 

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Categories : Analytics & Business Intelligence, Communication, Culture of Action, Environmental Scan, Innovation, Process Improvement

Remember When…Google was the Anti-Microsoft

15 11 2010

Today, Facebook launched a new email service.  It has long been in the works as Project Titan.  While perhaps not a direct threat against Google, it is certainly an attack on Gmail.

Remember back to the good old days…when we walked uphill to school in the snow both ways, when children actually played baseball (and not the video game version), when information was delivered with ink and paper, when cell phones were the size of our heads…

…err I digress, remember when Google was the white knight against Microsoft.  We wanted to use Netscape just to make Microsoft mad, but IE was just better.  Ah, yes the good old days and the turn of the century.  Was it really just in 2000 when they signed the pact with Yahoo to make them the default search engine?  A mere decade it took them to go from White Knight to feared Big Brother.  It took Apple 26 years to go from 1984 to being mocked by Futurama with its Eyephone or from having their great anti-Microsoft ad campaign spoofed by TMobile in Piggyback.

Has Google really done this in less than 10 years?  We will soon see.  Earlier this month Google found itself in a little hot water over their StreetView cars that were driving around picking geographically based personal information.  I understand that personal privacy may be dead, but I would venture a bet that if there is a backlash it will be aimed squarely at Google (and ironically in this case Facebook).

Clearly not all markets move at breakneck speed, but it does tell a story of thinking about tomorrow in a more methodology approach.


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Categories : Customer Value, Environmental Scan, Trusted Advisor

Meeting Expectations

18 01 2010

In a recent MyMidwest (Midwest Airlines) inflight magazine there is a story by Kimberly Douglas of FireFly Facilitation on Meeting Management.  If we look at a couple of the numbers from Douglas’ research we can begin to quantify the impact of meetings.

38,000 msft employees say that their 5.6 hours per week spent in meetings are unproductive.  That’s over 11 million hours of meetings.  Now if we say the average msft employee makes 100k per year (including benefits), that translates to ~ $50/hr.  If we do the math, that’s ~ $550 million a year in meeting costs.

Microsoft’s 2009 annual income was $58.4 billion which makes just their meeting costs roughly 1% of their annual income.  Let’s make a couple more assumptions: that half of that value is waste (more people than needed, run longer than necessary, etc) and we could reduce that by 10% which should be easy.  The result is ~ $22.5 million.  I am guessing here, but it should be worthwhile to at least try and improve upon meeting management and find some other way to leverage that $22 million.

  • What % of time do you spend in meetings?
  • Would your employees feel that meeting management and effectiveness could be improved upon?
  • What would you do with an additional 1% of your annual income?
  • In what ways could you improve meeting management?

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Categories : Communication, Culture of Action, Meeting Management