This post is based on the blog post made by technology and strategy blogger Navneet Alang http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/90577–microsoft-s-surface-tablet-signals-the-age-of-everyware

As explained by Navneet, Microsoft is moving towards integrating its services by producing its own Surface table, which is its first attempt in producing its own PC hardware. This is a direct attempt in stopping Apple’s dominance in the tablet space, after suffering a humiliating defeat in the smartphone space when Apple introduced its iPhone in 2007.

While Google may seem like the new Microsoft in that its Android operating system is licensed to various Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), it is already actively trying to reduce Android fragmentation by increasing its focus in the Nexus initiative: Meaning working together with OEMs to create a more Google-integrated product.

Additionally, integration is further tightened through the implementation of a single store solution for all of the customers’ needs. Microsoft has its Store, Apple has its App Store and iTunes while Google has its Google Play.

While integration can definitely improve customer experience due to better control, however, the same obsessive control would also mean that the freedom that many associate with the internet and computers may be threatened.

For example, Apple is known to block app submissions while Microsoft is extremely strict with its cloud policy.

So will Navneet’s vision of ‘computing everywhere’ would also mean a sacrifice of ‘computing any way you want’?

One of the major advantages of technology firms is their ability to leverage their advantage relatively easily throughout the world because they basically tear down physical borders.

However, recently, governments around the world are finding ways to clamp down on companies by setting regulations which essentially allows government to control the data provided by these companies. (e.g. Blackberry, Google).

UrtheCast is facing an even bigger uphill challenge partly because it is still a new company with little resources and political clout but mostly it’s because of its fundamental business proposition: Allow everyone in the world to view the world in real time.

Digital mapsmaker such as Google and Apple have faced serious political consequences from exposing sensitive military bases but the static nature of their maps allows them to censor such information when needed. However, UrtheCast faces serious problems as the data it projects to customers are all in real time, with negligible delay.

Imagine the ability for everyone to pin point secret military bases and operations, or ability to view active government oppressions.

As Wade Larson explained in my class, western liberal democracies such as the U.S. and Canada allow such information due to the transparent nature of such governments. However, the 21st century, post-2008 financial crisis world saw the emergence of the middle class in developing countries such as India and China.

While UrtheCast can be successful in the short run capturing the North American and European markets, its long term future prospects are in doubts as purchasing power from developing nations become stronger in the future, rendering it irrelevant in the globalized landscape.

Wade Larson’s presentation on UrtheCast is definitely the most interesting class to date. When he started explaining how the company plans to integrate various online platform and social media into the feed along with exclusive rights being purchased by media company, I knew this is the most innovative idea that is going to happen in the 2010’s. (Like the music industry, technological innovations are measured by decade.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVZA1V4Ttc0

Why is it such a major innovation?

1. The cost structure.
As Wade explained in my class, UrtheCast basically ‘cheated’ their cost structure. Through strategic partnerships with media companies and the Russian government, they managed to keep their costs much lower. However, the biggest concern, as Wade pointed out, is the massive data they have to store, and they will need to scale the data accordingly. The solution? Use the cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon

2. It complements, not compete with modern online platform.
What do Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Foursquare have in common? They are all massive online social platforms but more importantly, they do not compete directly with each other. In fact, many of them complement each other. Just like how Youtube allows you to share videos to Facebook and Foursquare allows you to tweet your check-ins seamlessly, UrtheCast allows users to basically interact with the entire real time data of the world and then post videos to Youtube or share important events to Facebook.

By adding another dimension to this social platform instead of directly competing with a platform with a similar model (e.g. Twitter vs App.net), UrtheCast is innovating and opening new markets, instead of competing in an already crowded market.

This blog post is in reply to my classmate Reico Lee’s blog post: China Lacks Homemade Luxury

Reico did an excellent job in showing that luxury brands are facing a certain decline in the market as Chinese luxury brands try to reposition themselves as equals of European luxury brands. It is a matter of time before Asian luxury brands start to seep into the market and is desired by many.

This is extremely problematic for the companies in Europe, or even Europe in general as luxury goods are historically unaffected by the cost advantage brought on by Asia, due to its high margin and willingness of the wealthy to purchase luxury goods at very high prices.

The luxury industry has been one of the areas where Europe faces little to no competition, and evidently, emerging economies such as China is proving to be a more important market as purchasing power drops in European countries.

As luxury brands of Asia emerge, European luxury brands will face stiffer competition, reduced customer based and cost disadvantage.

Before Asian brands start to take hold of the market however, the ball is in the European companies to find innovative ways to attract the Asian market and differentiating their product as the ‘most premium’ product, something that is way out of the league of the Asian luxury goods.

Such strategy must be swift, precise and lasting.

However, do you think that European luxury brands are doing all they can and should to protect their future market viability?

http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/05/15/what-its-like-to-work-at-facebook/

Based on the report written by The Next Web, it seems that Facebook is the ultimate company to be in with its high degree of autonomy given to employees.

One of the phrase which caught my attention was this:

“our emphasis on moving fast and being bold”

This is, in essence, the core of the culture in Facebook where the company encourages faster development, not more thought-out approach to doing things.This was termed by the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg as ‘The Hacker’s Way’.

But as Facebook grows, it faces more expectations from users and advertisers on its site. Changing the website without a proper thought-out process can be dangerous in scaring off advertisers, as the recent controversy demonstrates.

In addition to advertisers, Facebook found that its users are beginning to demand more and expect it to be more reliable – just like a mature company. One of Facebook’s reason for using HTML5 in its smartphone apps was that it could push out updates faster and seamlessly. But the performance issue from using HTML5 caused a big outcry among users, forcing Facebook to adopt native code, and slower development process for its mobile apps, seemingly contradicting its ethos of “moving fast and being bold”.

Native Facebook App Demonstration

Now that Facebook has become a publicly-traded company, more pressure will be forced on the company to please advertisers and customers. Ultimately though, Zuckerberg retains absolute control over the company and the question that many will ask in the coming years is:

Will Zuckerberg maintain “The Hacker’s Way”?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/wow-apple-turns-over-its-inventory-once-every-5-days/257915/

As described in the article, Apple has an amazing turnover of only 5 days, this makes it seem that it has a much more efficient, and impressive supply chain than even the electronics company which defined the low turnover model in the electronics industry – Dell.

But in order to actually see if a certain company is truly innovative in its supply chain management, we need to first find what makes such management difficult in the first place.

1. Customer base
2. Products and services offered
3. Product customization.

When we take these factors into account, we start to see why Apple has a big advantage in supply chain management compared to Dell.

While Apple only has to deal with largely ordinary customers, offer only a few kinds of products and have minimal customizations offered, Dell is the complete opposite in the sense that it provides very different types of products and services to many different types of customers. In the business consumer market especially, Dell needs to provide flexible customization to fulfill different needs of businesses.

Therefore, the ability of Dell to turnover its inventory twice as slow as Apple is already a huge accomplishment in its supply chain management. Dell has to collect extremely precise information about demand in order to make the right decision about supply purchases.

Meanwhile, Apple just has to produce as much as possible to satisfy demand as its limited range of products are extremely popular.

As a conclusion, a company’s turnover may not paint a complete picture in its capability in managing its supply chain.

This post will be about an article titled “What Will Marissa Do?: Yahoo CEO Zeroes in on Search, While Her Ad Team Eyes Tech Upgrade Options.”

After years of declining profits and losing the competition to Google and Microsoft in the key area of search, Yahoo decided to hire Marissa Mayer as CEO.

In the article, Marissa Mayers seeks to use her expertise in consumer search experience to find small opprtunities that could give the biggest benefit possible to the company.

Therefore, Mayers is seeking to transition her company’s strategy from a broad, differentiation strategy into a narrow, focused strategy which heavily emphasizes on its ability to differentiate.

Mayers is probably the best candidate to steer the company towards that strategy as she has the expertise and expertience necessary to understand what are the key areas that consumers want and need but is not covered by the larger competitors.

In order to achieve the strategy however, Mayers has to make tough decisions in cutting down unprofitable divisions and redirect skills and talents into new areas. More importantly, she has to completely transform the beureaucratic Yahoo to something that is lean and mean.

The ability for Yahoo to move forward hinges upon how fast can it focus its strategy, but will the massive resources of Google and Microsoft fill up opportunities faster than Yahoo can move?

As my classmate Kathy Lee has pointed out in her blog, automakers are aggresively promoting their brands by positioning what they believe to be the most important factor in the mind of the consumer.

While Audi claimed to be good at racing, Subaru claimed it has the superior engine.

While brand positioning at this level may be effective to a certain degree, what’s more important is selling the entire ‘package’ of experience to the users.

Source

As you can see above, that is a typical brand positioning graph, with two axis.

However, to be truly successful, it is important to think about multiple axis.This in turn, is selling an ecosystem.

Perhaps the importance of an ecosystem is best illustrated by Nokia. Nokia transitioned away from using their own Symbain operating system on their phones even though a lot has been invested for many years. As CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop explains, the war is a ‘war of ecosystems’. Having the best phone hardware will not win customers because they want apps. Having the most apps will not win customers because they want integrated web services. Hardware, apps and web services are just few of the examples of which phone manufacturers are fighting to be the best in each criteria.

Therefore, to Subaru and Audi (and other car manufacturers out there):
Is having the best engine or winning the most races enough?

Euro crisis flares again, with a vengeance

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/euro-crisis-flares-again-with-a-vengeance/article4570083/?cmpid=rss1

In the worst financial crisis humanity has ever faced since the Great Depression, it is evident now that 4 years is not enough time for European leaders to agree on a clear path to recovery, let alone recover its economy.

The article discusses how European countries such as Greece and Spain are facing extremely high unemployment rates (25% for Spain) and at the same time facing the brunt of government austerity measures, which aims to reduce the governments’ ballooning debt problem.

However, the problem lies in the very fundamental economics itself.

The reason why these countries are facing such high unemployment cannot be blamed solely on austerity because the public sector counts for a small portion of what the proivate sector employs. The reason why unemployment is so high is because of the lost of competitiveness of the European workforce.

By regaining competitiveness, countries can reduce unemployment, increase tax revenue and then tame the debt, reduce austerity which can be used for future oriented programs such as education to increase future competitiveness.

Governments must realize this fundamental error and work to remodel the economy in a way which emphasizes its strengths and reduce foreign dependencies.

Any specific plans to share about how this could be done?

Nokia apologizes for faked footage in Lumia 920 smartphone ad

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/09/06/tech-nokia-fake-ad.html

A few hours after the unveiling of a product which many praise as an impressive attempt to crawl its way back to consumers’ mindshare and global smartphone market share, controversy immediately emerged when it was revealed that the camera used in the advertisement was not the actual camera of the Nokia phone itself.

Deceptive advertising has been commonplace among businesses regardless of size. Apple, the world’s largest corporation based on market capitalization, has a long history of deceptive advertising, as shown in the video below:

Siri Commercial – “Rock God” – Is Apple’s Ad Accurate?

Despite this fact, Nokia’s deceptive advertising somehow caught on with consumers which caused a backlash. This lead Nokia to create disclaimers and at the same time invited journalists to test the performance of the actual camera of the Lumia phone, which turned out to be as impressive as advertised. Source

So this blog post will end with a (or three) question(s):

Is deceptive marketing acceptable as long as it’s done in a way thay consumers are okay with it (i.e. Apple’s way)? Or is it okay when the actual product performs similarly to what is advertised? Or is it ethically unacceptable at all?