ניהול אחר אפל: צבא התפוחים הסודי: An article on Apple in Calcalist

ניהול אחר אפל: צבא התפוחים הסודי.

An article by Dor Zach, correspondent at Calcalist, the largest economic newspaper in Israel.

I offered some thoughts on Apple’s current strategy, and the various misconceptions about the company.

(Hebrew only so if anyone wishes to summarize it in comments, it would be helpful to others).

The China Mobile iPhone MOQ

“BEIJING and CUPERTINO, California—December 22, 2013—Apple® and China Mobile today announced they have entered into a multi-year agreement to bring iPhone® to the world’s largest mobile network. As part of the agreement, iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available from China Mobile’s expansive network of retail stores as well as Apple retail stores across mainland China beginning on Friday, January 17, 2014.

China Mobile & Apple Bring iPhone to China Mobile’s 4G & 3G Networks on January 17, 2014 – Yahoo Finance

January 17 seems to be an auspicious date.1

Precisely a year prior to that date, on January 17, 2013, I wrote The iPhone MOQ.

Within that post I showed the activation rates for US operators as a percent of total users. Figures ranged from 10% to 19% by year or operators. I further assumed the figures would be toward the high end of that in Japan based on statements by the president of NTT DoCoMo.

The last phrase I used was:

“The MOQ figure as percent of subs for China Mobile would also be an interesting point of debate.”

My assumption would be that CM would start at a base significantly lower than the US or Japan. I would not be surprised to see an MOQ of 4% of user base for 2014. In the press release above China Mobile states that they serve 760 million customers. That implies a minimum order of about 30 million iPhones.

In the absence of any other data it’s best to be conservative.

  1. January 17 is a lucky day in Chinese numerology: 1+7=8 is a multiple of number 8, which is the most auspicious number.  Joe Zou @zzbar via Twitter []

The Critical Path #106: Can Bitcoin Be Money?

This the the first of hopefully a series of talks on Bitcoin. The hope is to assess it as a disruption but first we need to understand the differences between a store of wealth, a currency and money. Then we need to understand what jobs each of these is hired to do and whether Bitcoin is better or worse than the incumbents and whether it has “headroom” to get better in those cases where it’s not good enough.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #106: Can Bitcoin Be Money?.

Airshow 2014 World Tour: Coming to a City Near You

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In a world where everyone needs to present, few know the power that lies under their fingertips.

Whether one-on-one or in front of millions on TV, presentations are the primary means of persuasion in business.

Have you ever cringed at text-only slides or puzzled over graphs that made no sense? Steve Jobs saw “PowerPoints” as “rambling and nonsensical” and had them banned internally. But he used visuals for all his keynotes. What made them tolerable, even persuasive?

The problem is that most people receive no training in how to compose the most crucial images they project to an audience and the tools available do not take advantage of motion, touch, processing power, mobility and high resolutions.

  • Airshow teaches principles of visual persuasion using techniques of cinematography and visual storytelling.
  • Airshow shows how tablets create a new stage for your performance.
  • Airshow applies Aristotelian rhetoric, Cinematographic theory and Cinematic storytelling as well as Tufte design principles into a new medium.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Persuade with logic, empathy and credibility.
  • Present rich data as compelling and emotionally engaging
  • Get hands-on experience with modern tools of persuasion including tablets and interactive, touch-based interfaces.

You have the data. You have the audience. All you need is a story and a screenplay. How do you build them?

There are techniques which are proven to work. They’ve been used by writers, performers and playwrights for centuries. Professional presentation coaches will teach you far less and at greater expense.

  • Airshow is better and less expensive, especially in terms of time.
  • Airshow is an intimate experience. Audience size is limited.
  • All the tools and techniques needed in one day of intense, inspirational and engaging training.

Airshow could be coming to a town near you but to make it happen you need to act now.

Here’s how it works: For every month in 2014 an Airshow event will be hosted. The location for that month will be locked-in when the first 20 registrations for that city will be recorded. Any registrations that take place before the location is locked-in will be half-price.

In other words, early registration means you get half off!1

Now is the time to learn presentation skills for the post-PC era. Just like there is no writing which does a movie justice, I can’t write here how it’s done, you have to see it live.

Register now.

HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT AIRSHOW

“Airshow was amazing. Business stories with cinematic impact made easy with perspective”
— Paul Brody, Global Business Leader, IBM

“Airshow has fundamentally changed how I give client and industry presentations. It is an important tool in my toolbox which allows me to showcase my data and my story in ways that help audiences gain deeper insight and perspective.”
— Ben Bajarin, TIME, TabTimes, Techpinions

“Nobody brings numbers to life like Horace Dediu does.”
—Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune/CNN

“The unhurried nature of Airshow is just terrific and in contrast to many other events. Anyone who goes will gain their own purposes.”
—Steve Crandall

“Airshow is a treat […] showing how to make the audience wonder.”
—Bertram Gugel

“Airshow is surpassing my expectations. Very interesting deep content.”
—Ryan Singer, 37signals.

  1. If your registration is not part of a quorum (fewer than 20 total) then it’s automatically re-issued for the following month. You may also request a refund. []

Moonshot

When describing the process of disruptive innovation, Clay Christensen set about to also describe the process by which a technology is developed by visionaries in a commercially unsuccessful way. He called it cramming.

Cramming is a process of trying to make a not-yet-good-enough technology great without allowing it to be bad. In other words, it’s taking an ambitious goal and aiming at it with vast resources of time and money without allowing the mundane trial and error experimentation in business models.

To illustrate cramming I borrowed his story of how the transistor was embraced by incumbents in the US vs. entrants in Japan and how that led to the downfall of the US consumer electronics industry.

Small upstarts were able to take the invention, wrap a new business model around it that motivated the current players to ignore or flee their entry. They thus successfully displaced the entrenched incumbents even though the incumbents were investing heavily in the technology and the entrants weren’t.

In the image below, the blue “path taken by established vacuum tube manufacturers” is the cramming approach vs. the green entry by outsiders who worked on minor new products which could make use of the rough state of transistors at their early stages of development.

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The history of investment in transistor-based electronics shows how following the money (i.e. R&D) did not lead to value creation, quite the opposite. There are many such examples: The billions spent on R&D by Microsoft did not help them build a mobile future and the billions spent on R&D by Nokia did not help them build a computing future.

There are other white elephant stories such as IBM’s investment in speech recognition to replace word processing, the Japanese government spending on “Fifth Generation Computing” and almost all research into machine translation and learning from the 1960s to the present.

But today we hear about initiatives such as package delivery drones and driverless cars and robots and Hyperloops and are hopeful. Perhaps under the guiding vision of the wisest, most benevolent business wizards, breakthrough technologies and new infrastructures can finally be realized and we can gain the growth and wealth that we deserve but are so sorely lacking.

Continue reading “Moonshot”

Bundling and Pricing Innovation

This was initially posted on LinkedIn December 16, 2013.

Innovation comes in many forms. Many times innovation is thought of as technological improvement or as invention. We can all cite examples of inventions which turned into industries which re-defined civilization. The steam engine comes to mind but there were many others before and after. Inventing something is certainly a way to create value but it’s not as common or as reliable a method as it might seem. Creating Intellectual Property is one thing, finding a defensible market and business model is quite another.

More often companies innovate in terms of processes or the “algorithms” which are used to deploy existing resources. Wal*Mart was immensely innovative in the way it organized itself and laid out a low-cost business model. More recently Amazon has innovated in distribution and fulfillment based on the ability to dispense with showrooms for products and sell directly online. There is little in terms of technology which Amazon “invented”. Rather, it deployed off-the-shelf technology in a novel way.

But what I want to address is a more mundane sort of innovation: marketing innovation, specifically pricing. Few would consider a price model to be an innovation but in fact it’s a core lynchpin to many breakthrough innovations. It was pricing which permitted Henry Ford to build an industrial empire. He could have built cars for those who could afford them as cars were defined in 1907 but he chose to build a car around a price point which was around the median of the population. A car “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.” His business logic began with a price and the product and process followed.

Continue reading “Bundling and Pricing Innovation”

The Critical Path #104: Cinematic Presentations

Fresh off of back-to-back AirShows, Horace discusses the future of his “cinematographic” presentation style and announces Airshow World Tour. We also look at episode #103’s prescient prediction of Amazon’s move into delivering their own products.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #104: Cinematic Presentations.