2015 Jun 17

More Fun To Higher Sales

For many years, business was assumed to be "staid" or "proper". Certain dress and behaviour was appropriate for outside the office, and never to be seen inside. While the distinction between professional and unprofessional behaviour (thankfully) still exists, businesses have begun to open up to the distinction between "inappropriate" and "just plain fun." Those businesses that do embrace their humourous and playful sides have begun to realize significant customer loyalty and even pricing benefits.

2015 Jun 16

Why Does My Infrastructure Cost So Much?

Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one). One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "

2015 Jun 10

Pricing Inversions, or Smart vs. Lucky

Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently. One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product. What your costs do is have two effects:

2015 Jun 9

Nothing is New Under the Sun Server

As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses. It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended). Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.

2015 Jun 3

The Best Laid Schemes Of Mice And Men

I have always loved the contrast between companies that are quick and light, focused on doing the right thing, and are nimble in execution and change on the one hand, and those that must plan everything down to the minutest detail before beginning, execute on their plans precisely... and are thrown off balance by change. In my Wall Street days, I worked for two such companies. Both could be defined by "

2015 Jun 2

There Is Nothing New Under the Sun

Following on our review of Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report, today we will look at the "Re-Imagining" section. On slides 28-44, the report looks at business processes and how they have changed over the last several decades. Here are some salient examples: Document signing - ink-and-paper to DocuSign Physical payments - cash registers to Square Benefits - paper files and brokers to Zenefits As exciting as the enterprise space is, not one process is new.

2015 May 28

Internet Trends and Internet Values

This week, Mary Meeker of KPCB has released her "Internet Trends" report. I look forward to the release of this report. While I rarely can sit through a nearly-200-slide presentation, the insights in here always are thought-provoking and make it worth my while. I remember Meeker back in my Morgan Stanley days - unfortunately, I never had the privilege of working directly with her. If you have anything to do with the technology business, read it.

2015 May 18

Can Early Markets Survive Without Product Management?

In earlier articles, especially here, we have discussed why great product management is crucial to a company's success. It is the role that is responsible for a product as a whole, the only one that aligns what the product should do, what features it has, where to offer it, at what price points for which packages. Yet many companies seem to do just fine for an extended period of time without product management, especially in the technology sector.

2015 May 12

Keep Corporate Away From Production

For a very long time, corporations treated their corporate networks as safe protected environments. The data and applications inside that network are: confidential and must be kept safe from unauthorized access (protect from loss), and crucial to business processes and must be kept accessible to employees (protect from denial of service). Over time, however, two trends have challenged these assumptions. First, more and more business-critical data has migrated to the Internet.

2015 May 11

Heroku and Product Management

I have been impressed with Heroku for a long time. Their simple to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has made it incredibly easy for software developers to deploy applications lightly and cheaply, and then easily scale them up to production scale. As an aside, the very design encourages them to develop their software in a well-architected fashion; see "The 12-Factor App." Just as Amazon Web Services infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) EC2 abstracts away hardware, so a PaaS abstracts away the operating system, allowing software managers to focus on software.