John's Music Blog

My early-October blog entry on market development has sparked a good number of responses, but all through e-mail.  Again, I’m going to pass along an anonymous comment that came in last week, while I was in Dallas at Storage Networking World.  Here it is, unedited… (more…)

Thanks to the miracle of RSS readers, one of my readers was alerted to and then responded to yesterday’s post.  Though it would have been nice to have him post it directly in the comments section, he did give me permission to republish his comments.  So here it is, name withheld, formatted, but otherwise unabridged: (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this question more and more lately.  Who should drive product development?  Personally, I see three possibilities, and, in my opinion, only one is correct:

1. Sales
2. Engineering
3. Marketing

For the most part, I tend to think of these issues for technology companies, since that’s the area where I work. But I could as easily ask this question in the restaurant business, though I would substitute “the chef” for “engineering.”   In fact, let me do that, just in case one of my technology clients, through their own self evaluation, thinks they recognize themselves in the example and mistakenly thinks I’m criticizing them personally.

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Last month, at the request of a friend at Genesis Partners, I facilitated a roundtable discussion with Chief Security Officers (CSOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from a few major global companies.  The assembled group was part of a technology advisory council that the firm leverages to help guide them in investment decisions.  There’s nothing like a few generals in the trenches to tell you what the “real world” is like.

Prior to the roundtable discussion there was a brief introduction by Dr. Henry Kressel, who has just written a book entitled “Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World.”  He closed his remarks with a cautionary comment that those of us who live in the United States need to prepare emotionally for a world in which our children are substantially worse off than we.   The premise is founded in part, at least, on his accumulated evidence that digital innovation is moving rapidly away from its previous center of concentration in the United States.  I’m not sure if it’s some sort of accelerated innovation entropy, but there’s little doubt that very innovative technologies are now coming out of countries and regions that had previously contributed very little to the digital revolution.

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OK, it’s summer, and while that doesn’t mean any less work, it does mean additional responsibilities, such as car-pooling three children (mine and one other) to a day camp.  It puts a squeeze on time, and the only release valve is 9 pm until whenever.  My last conference call yesterday was 11 pm, thanks to some very helpful development folks in India.  I’ve also written drafts of , but have yet to complete, several blog postings. 

In the meantime, I thought I would share with you this link to Metropolis, published by Japan Today.  It includes some very creative and entertaining inventions, which are, for the most part, completely outside of the world of high tech.  My favorite is the “commuter’s helmet.” Enjoy.

I’ve made more than a few mistakes in my various careers.  One of them was buying a near bowling-alley length automated tape library (ATL) with a robot whose size, if not speed, would rival any in Detroit.  I made the purchase based upon the promise of future enhancements that would ensure this would be the last tape library I would ever buy.  You see, the ATL was going to be upgradeable to a Virtual Tape Library (VTL), and all my backup and restore problems would be, if not solved, at least contained.   To be fair, it was a committee decision, but I was a strong internal proponent.  Suffice it to say that the VTL upgrade was late and more virtual than real, and the ATL wasn’t the last library the company had to purchase.  In fact, I heard rumors that a second ATL was  offered for free, since the VTL upgrade was late.  But I can’t verify the rumor.  By that time, I had moved on to a new company, where my job was predicting the future.  The irony is not lost on me. (more…)

I had the pleasure today of spending some time with Acopia, a leading supplier of file virtualization solutions.  For those of you who haven’t lived and breathed storage for the past 20 years, suffice it to say that file virtualization brings a number of benefits to file-server and storage administrators, not the least of which is flexibility for the buyer.  Which brings me to opportunity.  

If we’ve learned anything over the last 300 years, it is that flexibility can be just as valuable as capability.  The Revolutionary War in the British colonies more than 200 years ago showed the benefit of flexibility over the much more capable British Regulars.  I flew back from Europe a few years ago sitting next to a NATO general, and we spoke at length regarding NATO’s re-engineering efforts, as they increased focus on flexibility.  Prior to the re-engineering efforts, no one would have doubted NATO’s capabilities, but certainly NATO’s flexibility could be called into question. (more…)

When I worked at market researcher, IDC, I met Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn, who is a pioneer in the field of outcomes-based innovation.  The folks who introduced me to Tony were from Innosight, which is a company founded by Clayton Christensen.  IDC’s notion at the time was that by partnering with Innosight and Strategyn, we could provide a service to technology companies to help them with product innovation.  This assistance would help those technology companies innovate to better serve the jobs (or achieve the outcomes) that their customers or prospects were trying to do.

One of the basic premises of the methodology is that customers can “hire” a variety of things to get the job done.  Here’s a simple example.  You’re stuck in an airport for several hours, as I was today, and you are looking for something to do.  What are the things that you could “hire” to pass the time or prevent boredom?  (more…)