The gaming industry certainly has been getting a lot of attention, especially with new entrants like Zynga creating wide-spread buzz and adoption. Add to that the iPAD and mobile gaming phenomena, and you know that traditional style game companies have to be thinking about how to compete in this new landscape. The execs at EA [...]
Archive | Market Power
The strategic stuff that lets you create market power — from business models, AND market definition, AND Value Propositions, AND solid go-to-market strategy, AND market defense plays AND pricing models — and win in the marketplace.
Solving Tough Problems
That big-ass problem that’s been keeping you up from 2-4:00 am? It hasn’t been solved for a while right? Perhaps it’s been a month, a year, or seemingly forever … Have you really thought about it? (And no, those adult witching hours of 2:00 am to 4:00 don’t count; they just torment.) It is easy [...]
Swiss Army Knife of XYZ
Because of a twitter exchange, a CEO of a company sent me their website link and asked me to check it out. After a minute of arriving, I left. I couldn’t tell who it was for, I couldn’t even tell what it was. Rather than ignoring this email, I wrote back with some advice to [...]
I Will Survive – Signed, Corporations
It is in the classic words of Gloria Gaynor’s song, “I will survive”, corporations will “learn how to get along…” A great deal of my community has given up on large organizations, stating that the “true” innovation is now happening at start-ups. What that story misses is that many of the “free agents” we see [...]
Why FaceBook is so Powerful
We live in a creative age. John Hagel says so in the Big Shift. Gary Hamel says so, in the Future of Management. Seth Godin clearly articulates how each of us play a role in this age in Linchpin. There really is no doubt that what we produce and how we produce it is different [...]
Competing With Adobe, Apple
When a company like Apple launches a sexy new product (iPad), one can react (Amazon) or get caught flat-footed (Adobe). It’s easy to look at today’s market situation and say who’s winning or losing. The more interesting conversation is to determine what someone can do to compete or take advantage of this changed topography. That’s [...]
Lessons: PayPal Dev Conference
PayPal’s developer conference in early November, the company’s first such event, gave some good lessons for tech companies that want to create their own developer communities. Since that seems to include most tech firms these days, we thought it might be helpful to point out some of the lessons, both positive and negative… The backstory. [...]
Growth In A Down Economy
Can your business grow in a down economy? According to a VARBusiness survey of 117 solution providers (“7 Ways to Grow in a Down Economy, VARBusiness, February 2009), fully half are expecting to grow in 2009. Does this seems crazy? It didn’t seem so to me until after I read the list of top strategies that the VARs had for achieving this growth. Any business that helps customers do more with less should do very well; something to which the booming SaaS / on-demand software market can attest. But, unless you are in a hot growth market, the same-old, same-old will not produce results in 2009. And, if you are in a hot-growth market like enterprise SaaS solutions, doing the right things during a down market will act like a competitive force multiplier.
Open Letter to Carol Bartz, Yahoo
Congrats on your new role. For many of us in the tech industry, Yahoo is more than a company, it’s a Silicon Valley icon. By putting in the kind of strong management you represent, I hope the board is signaling the company’s intent to reinvent itself and thrive once again. Your opportunities speak to opportunities for every tech firm, so we’re going to make this an Open Letter in the hope that everyone can learn from the experience you’re about to have.
Community As Social Media Strategy
The passage of California’s Proposition 8 (the gay marriage ban) has created a nasty problem for Yelp and other online reviews sites. The situation is a good example of the complexities of running a social site, and the ability of web-organized groups to distort a social ratings system. I’m not sure what the lesson is [...]