Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: HP

Steve Jobs: ‘iFlubbed’ – I Don’t Think So!

September 11, 2007 / / 1 Comment

So, have you heard about the term being applied to Uncle Steve’s move last week regarding the iPhone? Yes, you could have guessed — it’s “iPology” 🙂 …. There’s some interesting insight on this whole overblown thing on a great new blog called MarketingApple. This guy (also named Steve) I think really sets the record straight. An excerpt from that post:

Folks, you are living through what has to be the Golden Age of marketing and Steve Jobs is its king.  Enjoy the ride.

Stevejobsiflubbed

Then, a followup post yesterday on the same blog heralds the latest news that — you got it — one million iPhones have now been sold.

I was discussing this whole thing as it happened with my close colleagues — all of us huge Apple users and supporters — and I got a great summation from one of them over the weekend. He doesn’t want me to use his name, but he’s a very smart guy (serial entrepreneur), and I just have to share his recap and insights with you:

Jobs is the king of concept and design. It’s easy to market the coolest phone ever and the best MP3 player ever, but good luck conceiving, designing, and developing them.

By cutting the iPhone prices, Jobs created a problem, then conceived and developed a solution. Typical Steve Jobs.

When the first rumors surfaced about Apple getting into the cell phone market, people laughed and predicted instant failure. Before the iPod, the Diamond Rio had more than 50% market share, and they were dropping the price quarterly to meet new competition. Apple came out with the iPod (with a hard drive) at 3-5 times the price of the average price of MP3 players at the time and couldn’t make enough of them. Other MP3 players with hard drives came out shortly after at half the price, and those companies couldn’t sell the ones they produced for the launch, while Apple couldn’t make enough of theirs. Then, when you could buy flash MP3 players for $20, Apple released the Nano at $250 and the Shuffle at $150, and, again, they couldn’t make enough of them.

Steve jumped on 2.5″ and 1″ hard drive technology for the iPod and, later, on multi-GB flash, when they were both expensive, new technologies, and Apple’s volume alone drove the technology towards commodity pricing. Apple never dropped prices, they just come out with new models at the same prices with thinner designs and more storage.

They can’t release iPhones the same way, even though their prices have fallen, because they are using so much flash. It costs them less to make the 8GB today than the 4GB four months ago. They could drop the price to gain wider market acceptance, so they did. Adding more storage and making the iPhone thinner won’t be enough to release a new model. They need to bump up the speed, make the display as big as the case (40% larger), add faster broadband, and add a VoIP softphone. (Nokia has them and HP just released the new iPaq with more features and a VoIP softphone built in.) All the new cellular chips designs have WiFi embedded, so ALL new phones next year will have WiFi. The cellular carriers may block the SIP (the de-facto standard for VoIP, session initiation protocol) ports to disable VoIP, and there will be a new RTP (real time protocol) invented to transmit VoIP over any open port — maybe that’s what Steve is up to next? 🙂

People just keep laughing every time Apple does the unexpected, but their concept and design is so good that they become the market leader. I can’t wait for the iTV-LCD, the iDVR, the iCarStereo, and the iGameBox.

Now, does that nail the situation, or what? (And also raise some interesting new possibilites.) I told you I hang around with smart guys….

UPDATE: To correct a typo….sorry.

No Wonder Marc Andreessen Has So Much Time to Blog Lately

July 23, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Marcandreessen
Seems a little deal has been brewing. He just got rich — again. This just in from the Wall Street Journal:

Hewlett-Packard agreed to acquire software maker Opsware for $1.45 billion as the PC giant continues to bulk up its non-hardware offerings. Opsware was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, the young brain behind Internet pioneer Netscape.

Not that he wasn’t already rich. Why does this guy even need to work, anyway? I guess he’s still too young to know any better…. 🙂

Here’s Marc new blog if you haven’t seen it yet. Where he reminds us that the deal was for all cash. Several bloggers, myself included, have been going on and on lately at how great a job he’s been doing with his blogging — really some nice, long, thoughtful pieces, tips about raising VC, etc. (I’ve cited them somewhere on one of my blogs — forget where right now). Suddenly he was being so generous with his time! Sure, he has a great CEO running his popular new firm, Ning (which, by the way, just announced a $40M+ VC infusion).

But I say, hooray! He gets richer, and we all get to benefit more from his great writing — his new career of blogging. Go for it, Marc….

Dan Gillmor on Silicon Valley’s Declining Image

October 12, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Speaking of the options-backdating debacle, Dan Gillmor wrote an incisive piece recently in PR Week, where he has a regular column. I met Dan several years ago at an O’Reilly conference, and I have much respect for the man. Few journalists have a better perspective on the Valley than he does, after so many years covering the tech beat for the Merc News. His latest PR Week column was entitled Silicon Valley’s image troubles run a lot deeper than just PR. Since that link is behind a paywall for most of you, let me provide some excerpts:

Like most others in Silicon Valley, I’ve watched Hewlett-Packard’s slow-motion train wreck – its unethical and probably illegal anti-leak spying program – with awe….

The current management is trying hard to spin its misbehavior into something that will let the company go back to business as usual. Good luck.

HP’s woes have shifted focus away from another corporate ethical debacle, namely the stock options scandal. That, you’ll recall, involves corporate chieftains and their obedient (or incompetent) directors, who’ve abused shareholders to further enrich the executives.

As a Silicon Valley resident, I’m sorry to say these affairs have the Valley and its longstanding arrogance in common. The 1990s stock bubble and its predations were bad enough. The latest news has made things worse…

Then he goes on to cite a metric that reminds us we’ve hardly heard the end of this saga….

…when the Valley’s most venerable big company gets caught running a sleazy spying operation, and when roughly half of the companies known to be under investigation for stock options shenanigans are in the tech business, you can’t just ignore reality…

He also mentions the troubles of a man who was previously one of the most renowned, iconish names in the Valley — top tech-industry lawyer Larry Sonsini:

….Sonsini’s role in the Valley’s dual debacles may be the most intriguing. As outside counsel for HP, he offered advice – not to worry, we’re doing nothing illegal, he effectively told the board as its spying operation neared public disclosure – that met a low standard indeed: What’s acceptable is what you can get away with, not what’s right.

Sonsini’s firm has also represented many of the tech companies under investigation in the options matter. No big surprise, given that the firm has been the Valley’s most influential and powerful for years, but it does raise more questions. Handling PR for Sonsini and his colleagues right now must be nightmarish, too.

In his closing, though, Gillmor succinctly lays out the real challenge for the tech establishment:

No doubt, the Valley’s image will recover eventually. But making that happen will require some honest introspection in executive suites and boardrooms, not just clever PR. How likely is that?

Makes one think of the company motto adopted not long ago by a certain new tech leader (whose name starts with “G”). Maybe that motto — “Don’t Be Evil” — wasn’t just window dressing? Maybe these kids had a deeper knowledge and insight about Valley culture than we realized….

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