While failure for the high-tech entrepreneur is less likely to result in death, the parallels between the Gold Rush and the current Web-based economy are many. In both cases, participants must to adapt to a new way of life, with new rules. Or rather, no pre-existing, fixed rules.
Silicon Valley’s famous tolerance of entrepreneurial failure has its roots more than 150 years ago in the Gold Rush when more than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following John Marshall’s discovery of gold near Sacramento in January, 1848. By 1854, more than 300,000–representing more than one percent of the total population of the United States at the time–had come west in search of fortune.
Tag Archives | Emerging Business Models
Come on Now Social Networking – You’re Losing Gas
Om Malik has a juicy article about social networking on Giga Om. Google CEO Eric Schmidt never misses an opportunity to dis the social networking sector, typically by pointing out how hard it is to monetize social media inventory. Which could just be his way of trying to excuse his company’s inking of an exclusive [...]
1,000 True Fans
Kevin Kelly’s latest entry from ‘The Technium’ continues his take on the long tail. The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite [...]
Shifting Business Models & What It Means For You
While SAP’s brand and development resources are enormous assets, SAP’s operations—the very way it does business—must be re-thought for BBD and the changes required for success are fundamental in every sense. SAP needs to re-think its sales, services, integration, support, development and revenue models. The enterprise sales force is too expensive to address mid-sized customers and the R/3 eco-system is ill-suited to address BBD deployment. Even the SaaS revenue stream will require major adjustments.
Anticipation …
Persistent rumors that Google is launching a mobile “platform” based on open business models could culminate tomorrow, November 4, 2007. Here’s the link “href=”http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20071103/tc_pcworld/139240″ I found. Bunches more online this afternoon so I have to believe that something BIG is going to be announced tomorrow. ONE big implication: we have now two amazing companies going [...]
Marvel Story
Marvel Comics used to sell comic books. That was their business. They created comics, they sold them in the form of books. Then, one day, they realize that the real asset isn’t the publishing business. Which is what they had directly built. What they had indirectly built is characters that had stories. And those were assets.
Competitive Strategy: Strong #2 uses Open (Permeable) Play
Worth noting: Tim’s perspective on Hadoop integration at Yahoo: With this being the key point: OK — but why is Yahoo!’s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a [...]
Porter Model is Dead
I’m at the O’Reilly conference of Emerging Technology and it’s giving me just the right setting (and time away from the day job of leading Rubicon) to capture an idea I’ve been brewing for some time. Because the work I do is about helping companies to win markets, I pay a lot of attention to [...]
The Holy Grail of the SMB Market
I’ve been working with many a new client who wants to reach the SMB market. These are traditional enterprise companies who want to expand. And they the SMB market as a viable one to pursue for growth. But this market has been elusive to many for a long, long time. That’s changing of course. But [...]
Dinosaur Defense Strategy / Consumer Software Companies
A colleague who works within one of my company’s clients writes this email to me about a month ago: “I still find myself scratching my head at how to apply this line of advice (referring to a white paper I sent on permeable markets) to a large highly profitable business. In the last session [Spark [...]