Category Archives: Uncategorized

Libya

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I have been following the events in Libya in the past 24-48 hours. It sickens me how every 30 minutes BBC, CNN and others play the footage of a bloodied and dead Gaddafi. Don’t get me wrong I think the Libyans are better off with out him but a brutal death of someone is not something I take pleasure in.

There is another thing that caught my eye – after all the gore on TV the first thing that the politicians in the US, France and the UK are interested in is when will the output of oil from Libya get up to speed. When the protests started in Egypt I wrote a post called Is Oil the Spice of our world? In it I argued that as long as the oil flowed the west did not want to be involved in any turmoil. It reminded me of a book I read. I wrote:

 The parallels between the fictional world of Dune and countries in the Middle East are too numerous to count but what it boils down to is this: the cheap oil that we need to keep the price tag of our lifestyle low comes mostly from a world that is currently in turmoil. You can see the mixed feelings in the face of the western politicians – the uncertainity, the careful way with which they comment this subject. Until today few dared to speak out against the rule of Mubarak and others in the region although the issues have been there for a long time. I believe that while the western powers do want freedom and a higher quality of life for the Middle East, they want stability and a constant flow of cheap oil even more. In Dune the Fremen did gain control of their homeworld again and held the universe hostage with the Spice.

The death of Colonel Gaddafi completes what the Libyan people wanted to achieve. Now what? Will they indeed establish a stable country in North Africa that will follow the west? Will they go their own way? It is up to them to decide.

The dependence of the West on cheap oil from the Middle East and North Africa is going to come back and bite us in the ass. It is one more reason to move ahead with more sustainable solutions to our energy needs. 

Is Apple calling Samsung’s bluff?

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The relationship between the two tech titans Apple and Samsung is an interesting one. While they compete heavily in the smartphone and tablet markets with their flagship products, Samsung is also one of Apple’s key suppliers. In fact reports suggest that Apple planned to make component purchases of about $7.8 billion from the Korean giant in 2011.

Recently the companies have been engaged in suing each other. Apple maintains that Samsung’s Galaxy S phones and tablets infringe their patents and basically are a rip off of the iPhone and iPad. On the other hand Samsung is counter-suing Apple for similar reasons.

How did it come to this? Well this is purely my opinion but I think that Samsung gambled. You see the supplier – customer relationship between Samsung and Apple is deep because of the fact that Samsung can provide unbelievable amounts of memory and logic chips. Apple in fact constrained the NAND Flash market by buying up all the memory they could via bulk exclusive deals. The company prepaid a lot of money to get good prices on memory and chips for its iPods and later iPhones. I was working at a prominent semiconductor a few years ago and Apple was a customer as well. So I think the people at Samsung thought if they copy a bit (or a lot depending whom you ask) of the iPhones/iPads design Apple will not dare to sue them and even if they do the relationship and a perceived dependency on Samsung will force Apple to settle in a favorable way for Samsung.

If this is indeed what happened than it seems Samsung miscalculated. Apple is suing them in a number of jurisdictions and has successfully blocked the sale of the Samsung Galaxy S tablets in some of them. Samsung is countersuing and most likely would like to force Apple into settlement talks. But if you read the news you will see that Apple is fighting this war on another level. DigiTimes is reporting that Apple is shifting its memory purchasing away from Korea to Japan and processor manufacturing to Taiwan. The purpose is of course to reduce its reliance on the company on the other side of the lawsuits. It seems that Samsung could lose substantial business from Apple.

Samsung may have hoped that Apple would not call their bluff but historically Apple does not like to play games. Especially if partners screw them.

 

The new behavior norm?

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Gizmodo just posted a funny video about what Facebook behavior (adding random friends, liking stuff and poking) looks like in real life. The message is clear – the way social interaction works online is very different from the real world. Our comfort zone online is much bigger than in real life because of a false sense of anonymity  and security. 

 

I believe that the internet is fundamentally changing the way we interact just because so much of our daily routine is done nowadays through social media. Whether it is texting, Facebook, Skype or email  - online we do things differently than in the real world. But is it necessarily bad? Throughout history man has evolved with new forms of communication and while it may have taken time, eventually the new lines of interaction have been integrated into a new normal. 

Currently we are still in a stage where all this online stuff is new. We are looking for what the social norm is, how much information are we willing to share and how to integrate the new online behaviors into are real life. While this may take a while – we will eventually find the new norm and it may seem strange from today's perspective.

Apple Mac App Store

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Apple is planning to launch it's Mac App Store later today and the initial response to the whole idea from the pundits was mixed. I am actually quite curious and here are a few of my observations/predictions:

  1. Developers will love it - not really an expectation as a number of popular developers already said so
  2. Users accustomed to app stores will love it - it will enable discovery which is important in the "small" Mac community
  3. Apple is not looking for revenue from the store – just exposure and getting people into their ecosystem
  4. Microsoft will most likely follow suit soon – possibly even announce something at CES
  5. This is the way to do app distribution on any platform – we now have the iOS store, Android Market, Amazon App store, Google Chrome Web App store, Steam, …

The last point is something I have been thinking about since Apple launched the first App Store. Why would anyone buy physical media in the world of broadband internet connections? You might argue that digital download is nothing new but the app stores are not just about distribution. A big part of the experience is the simplicity of installation and setup which have always been an issue with consumers and software. 

What do you think?

Crisis management 101

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So you and your company are facing a crisis. Maybe a big customer is not satisfied with the quality of your service or product, maybe you have messed up in some way that has shaken the confidence of your shareholders and/or customers. Whatever the crisis you're probably backed against a wall with very little room to maneuver and the next few days will be make or break for you and/or the company. Well I am here to tell you that it's happened before and it will probably happen again. I will try to summarize what I have learned from my experiences and maybe give you a few hints on how to take control of the situation.

Don't panic

This seems to be obvious advice. But believe me many people underestimate this and the moment they face a crisis they panic. They act before thinking, communicate before clearly understanding the issue and usually make things much worse. Take the time to calm yourself down, calm your team down and try to get everyone focused on the issue at hand.

Establish control

To face a crisis it will take concentrated effort, no big sweeping action will help so forget that. The most important thing is to establish a place where your team will be physically present if possible or at least from where you will coordinate and communicate your response to the crisis. To put your feet on the ground and to understand the issue you will need data. Setup a process to collect and analyze data in regards to the issue, document it well and have your best people analyze it. This will allow you to understand the scope of the crisis and hopefully show you where to start looking for the problem.

Work systematically

Establish a process – usually it goes like this:

  1. Collect data
  2. Analyze & Detect issues
  3. Suggest action
  4. Challenge action
  5. Approve
  6. Take action
  7. Go to 1.

I can't tell you how many iterations you will need but from my experience this works. In the first iterations you will maybe catch only few issues but once your team gets into this process the iterations will be quick and you will be able to pin-point issues much better and therefore solve them much quicker. Try to keep everyone focused on the process – people tend to celebrate the first detected issue as the root cause but usually it's not. It takes time to find the root cause (that is why it's a crisis) and there is no quick-fix.

Communicate to stakeholders

Communication with your stakeholders is obviously very important. Not only the pissed off customer but also your management, owners, shareholders, partners.  Communication is important because usually to solve a crisis you will need help. And your stakeholders are usually the key to additional resources so be sure to get them involved asap. Be clear about the scope and the impact of the crisis and give them data to support your assessment of the situation. Before communicating make sure what you tell them is accurate and that they really want or need to hear it right now. In times of crisis patience is in short supply so make sure you don't waste their time with useless information.

Show progress

As soon as everyone (you, your team, the stakeholders) understand the situation it is important to show progress. You have put everyone on alert, you have asked for emergency resources so everyone will expect you to deliver results. Usually this does take some time but as soon as you make progress do share it but again with hard data. Saying: "We are doing our best and have already made some progress!" is not going to cut it and is in the "useless information" category. Share exactly what you have achieved and what are the next steps.

There I hope this helps. It may seem this is focused on technological problems but I can tell you most of these recommendations are applicable in any type of crisis. Someone please send this to BP.