iakttakelser

From the shore of the Norwegian forest, and the Spanish Mediterrean sea – what I read, see and hear.

Archive for the ‘disruption’ Category

Talent follows where business models lead: The Media Business Disruptions

A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story:


Michael DeGusta created beautiful and informative charts on how The Newspaper Business Implodes.

With charts, he also told the story of how the recorded music industry followed a similar path:

He writes:

As in the music business, digital revenue is failing to make up for the loss of traditional revenue. Ominously, online revenue is largely flat, basically unchanged from 5 years ago and still below its 2007 peak.

What I find fascinating is how both industries reacted to the crisis of old media. They embraced the new “digital” distribution model, earnestly tried to transplant their business models and found no succor.
Many observers may say that both print and music businesses were “foolish” and that they ignored the new medium of web. That somehow management dithered and missed the new wave blaming failure on incompetence. Putting aside the fact that all industry participants seem to have conspired to be foolish at the same time, this is not supported by the data. As the charts show, both industries built digital businesses. Newspapers have some of the most desirable web properties and digital music is a growing business with clever new distribution deals. They became quite smart in their respective adaptations of web distribution.
They may have started slowly but there are many cases where incumbents reacted slowly to technological change, and won.
But it’s not working.
The reason is that what we have here is a disruption. Unlike a sustaining technological shift, the new medium of the web did not permit the same business models to continue. Money was being made, just not in the same way and thus could not support the cost structures of the incumbents. Consumption of news and music is increasing but the way that it is valued is changing.
Furthermore, it’s become modularized. All the objects contained in a newspaper could, with the web, be offered independently of one-another (opinion, news, classifieds, lifestyle can each be built by specialists.)
This is because the technology of the printing press benefits the integration of content while the technology of the web benefits the disintegration of content (similar phenomenon to the music industry’s bundling into albums, vs. unbundling of digital downloads.)
Now I’m going to take a leap and suggest that a re-birth of the container of the newspaper in the tablet medium will require a re-integration once again. As I’ve pointed out before in The integrated iPad news daily: Read all about it! the answer is not in integration or disintegration per se. It’s in approaching the question of value chain evolution with an eye toward what is good enough and what isn’t. Integrate when the product is emerging and unsatisfying, modularize when the product is mature and over-serving.
We’re observing the same phenomenon with television. Netflix, a distributor, is vertically integrating by entering production with an exclusive top talent series.
Developers are not the only innovators that see disruption happening. Just like in “The Daily”, in music and television, talent follows where business models lead.

  • By medi2120
  • disruption
  • No Comments

The Post-PC Enterprise – A GigaOM webinar review by an app creator

15 Enterprise apps on my iPhone main screen

I just listened to a webinar about the post-PC enterprise at GigaOM Pro. It was a strange experience. Somehow I felt being thrown back 5 years. To the years when neither iPhone, Android or iPad did exist. And when mobile was for SMS and phone-calls. And it was also similar to view an old movie where people are using old Nokia phones – strange.

It was interesting hearing how the members of the webinar tried to meet CIO questions on how to cope with both the mobile, the cloud and the app revolution, when trying to maintain the security and accountability rules governing them.

I was looking for inspiration in my work with post-PC ERP, specifically billing, but after three quarter it was clear that wasn’t on the table, and I started to get bored. CIO’s problems aren’t that interesting…

However, I wrote down some interesting facts that could have interest to my readers:

  • Laptop is considered «old-school» in health care – iPad a necessity
  • From 2010 to 11 iPad moved from 0 to 21% as a possible only mobile device
  • Expecting travellers to check in online, would be unheard 5 years ago.
  • An ideal CIO will be a visionary and a coach.

The webinar conducted various polls. One showed that 55% of the audience used 3 or more mobile devices. Of people with iPads, the most had more than 5 enterprise apps installed.

Post-PC ERP and billing is churning in my head, and I will have to create something myself.

My end comment is that the webinar wasn’t anything for mobile apps producers or users. So if you didn’t see, you didn’t loose anything.

The Race to a Billion

A post from asymco.com by Horace Dediu has the original story. Here it is with kind permission:

I last looked at the race to a billion in September 2010. I’ve now added a few more data points to the tracked platforms and also added points for the major console game platforms and Symbian.

When judging the performance of a platform, the adoption slope and sustainability over time is perhaps the most interesting measure.
One can see how many platforms slow down before reaching 100 million and so far none have hit the billion mark (Windows has but not in the 10 year time frame of this chart.) Looking at game consoles also shows the limits of a narrowly focused platform. They performed better than i-Mode and Netscape but not as well as iTunes or iPod which themselves have growth limits.
If you’re looking for the “fastest growing” title, it’s a toss-up. Both iOS and Android are following almost identical trajectories.[see Notes]
The absolute highest cumulative sales total is Symbian, though now that it’s been deprecated, it’s set to be bypassed.
It does appear that Android and iOS each have the potential to reach a billion users in less than a decade. Perhaps Android will do so faster but the mobile computing platform race will not play out as the personal computing platform race did.
—
Notes:

  1. For Android I used my own summary data for historic performance except for the last estimate and forecast which came from IMS Research.
  2. iOS forecasts are my own.
  3. Symbian data comes from VisionMobile. Forecast is based on Nokia’s 150 million additional sales prediction.
  4. Game console data is current as of end of 2010 via Wikipedia.
  5. Other data sourced from Morgan Stanley.

Nvidia CEO: Mobile computing poised to disrupt PCs and servers

Listen to this man! He is a real visionary when it comes to computing and processors.

A post from VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi has the whole story. Here is a part:


Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang believes that the revolution in mobile computing electronics, driven by demand for smartphones and tablets, will eventually disrupt both the PC and server markets as well.
By engineering chips for mobile computing, graphics chip maker Nvidia is focusing on energy efficient computing so that mobile devices can be both powerful and have long battery lives. That kind of computing is exactly the kind that will be necessary in the PCs and servers of the future, Huang said.
“We expect if we focus on mobile, it will come back and disrupt the PC industry and come back and disrupt servers,” said Huang, speaking at the company’s analyst meeting today in Santa Clara, Calif.
Huang articulated many of these ideas during our recent Q&A with him. But he elaborated on them at the analyst meeting. The mobile computing shift is why Nvidia has invested so heavily in its Tegra mobile computing chips in the past five years and paid particular attention to parallel computing, where many small cores — or brains — can operate much more power efficiently than a single big core. As an analogy, Huang said that a multiple-cylinder car engine running at a reasonably fast RPM (revolutions per minute) is much more efficient than a single-cylinder engine running extremely fast.
Over the next four to five years, Tegra will go from eight cores now to more than 100 in a single chip, Huang said. That gives a good clue as to how Nvidia is approaching the design of Project Denver, the code-name for a high-performance ARM microprocessor that the company revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Project Denver is expected to be able to run Windows, which Microsoft is adapting to run on ARM chips in addition to the x86 Intel-compatible chips that they have run on in the past. Microsoft demoed a future version of Windows running on Nvidia Tegra processors at CES.
Project Denver is clearly the path that Nvidia will pursue as it uses mobile chips to disrupt the PC chip market.
“That’s a wonderful opportunity for us,” Huang said. “You will have a PC that is thin and light, has a long battery life, and has the productivity capability of Windows.”
Huang said servers will be disrupted because of rising energy costs. “If your energy bill is $10 million a year,” Huang said. “Then you would rather move from 20,000 server cores to more than 20 million if it means it will increase performance and reduce your energy bill at the same time.”
By moving into the mobile market, Huang said that Tegra boosted Nvidia’s total available market by six times. Nokia shifting from Symbian to Windows software will be a “fabulous opportunity” for Nvidia, Huang said. He noted that upcoming four-core Kal El chip, which now has working prototypes, has five times the performance of the previous-generation Tegra chips.
Huang said that the software makers are moving to smartphones and tablets because that is where the opportunity for bigger sales is. Those software makers are moving very quickly to the best operating systems and hardware, because the shift toward mobile computing is happening faster.
It took PCs about 15 years to fully disrupt the minicomputer and mainframe business. But mobile computing is changing the world faster and will likely disrupt the PC and server markets in a much shorter time, Huang said.
“The mobile computing revolution is a seismic shift,” he said.