The Wisdom Blog: Business & technology presented with a twist. Comments welcome.
About Our Blog
Wisdom Consulting Group, Inc. is a Chicago-based information technology firm. The Wisdom Blog provides relevant and timely technology insights. Our bloggers are Raymond T. Hightower and Kevin Zolkiewicz.
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos uses an interesting metaphor to describe his company’s cloud computing offering. About a hundred years ago, a beer-maker in Luxembourg decided to use electricity to power their brewing machines. The problem? Centralized electric companies didn’t yet exist. So the beer company installed their own on-site power generator, becoming experts in electricity as well as beer.
Substitute computers for electricity… that’s what many businesses are doing today with IT. When a beer company develops its expertise in electricity, does that make the beer taste better? No. Better idea: If a task lies outside a company’s core competency, the task should assigned to people outside the company.
Startup School 2008
Amazon’s tongue-in-cheek motto for Amazon Web services is
We make electricity, so you don’t have to.
Bezos says more in this 45-minute video.
What Are You Doing?
Are you doing things in-house that would better farmed out to another company? This doesn’t just apply to IT. What do your customers value about you? Would your time be better spent on tasks that increase your value (and indispensability) to customers?
Apple unveiled the MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest notebook, with a clever manilla envelope ad that you’ve probably seen. Now someone has created a response featuring the Lenovo ThinkPad X. The Lenovo response doesn’t appear to be “official”, but it’s still effective.
Apple’s Original Ad
First, here’s Apple’s original MacBook Air ad.
An Unoffical “Ad” for Lenovo
This response to the Apple ad was posted on YouTube yesterday.
Bottom Line
I love the IT industry. Lots of competition and one-upmanship. Size isn’t the only thing that matters in a notebook computer, and the creator of the Lenovo “response” does a great job of highlighting that fact.
Now if they could only include something about the software differences: reliability, stability, development tools…
Listen to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tell how the Kindle e-book reader came to be: “We had been selling e-books for a long time. But nobody was buying e-books.” Rather than wait for a solution, Bezos and his team developed one themselves. It’s called Kindle, and it disappears!
What is Kindle? Kindle is a stand-alone e-book reader. Unilke many ebook readers, Kindle comes with built in wireless capability. If you can get a decent cell phone signal, you can download and buy e-books on Kindle. The $399 purchase price includes unlimited access to the cell-phone network for downloading e-books.
Kindle’s Uncertain Future?
When I look a the features of Kindle, I am reminded of the old word processing systems (like Wang and IBM’s DisplayWriter) of the 1970’s and 80’s. One machine, one function. But by the mid 1980’s, word processors were a relic of the past, replaced by PCs running word processing software. Why buy a one-function word processor when a PC can do word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and more?
Fast-forward to 2008. Why buy a one-function Kindle reader when devices like the iPhone can handle PDFs, email, and the web very well?
Kindle Disappears
Bezos believes that books are on of the last bastions of analog because books are so good. The book’s most important feature is hard to notice: it disappears.
When you’re reading a regular paper-based book, you don’t notice the paper, ink, stitching, etc. You immerse yourself in the world of what you’re reading. Amazon sought to re-create the book’s disappearing ability in the Kindle. It weighs 10.5 ounces and it connects to Amazon’s site via the cell-phone network in a way that you don’t have to think about it. It disappears.
Technology can be expensive, and high cost limits availability. Johnny Lee is excited about making technology available to a wider spectrum of the population. To that end, he has used the Nintendo Wii, a $40 video game device, to create an interactive whiteboard and a 3D display.
Money vs. Creativity
Lee’s work is a clear example of how a shortage of money can stimulate creativity. Would Lee have begun experimenting with the Wii if he had an unlimited engineering/research budget?
A Faster Way to Spread Ideas
Side Note from Lee: Youtube has changed the speed at which an individual can spread an idea around the world. In Lee’s words: He’s just one researcher with a video camera in a lab. One week after posting his videos to YouTube, over one million visitors had viewed his demos, and a large percentage had downloaded his software. Some even went as far as to produce derivatives of his work.
How fast would his ideas have spread in a pre-YouTube world?
Google and Salesforce.com are joining together in an effort do dominate the customer relationship management (CRM) software market. Even more exciting: You can use their products right now without installing any software on your PC or Mac.
How it Works
Find out how the two work together in this 3-minute video.
Webware Works Right Now
Salesforce.com and Google are using Webware to achieve their goals. Webware allows users to run the software they need when & where they need it as long as they have an Internet connection. No need to go through the headaches (and expense) of installing (and supporting) software yourself.
Installable software has a limited future. The Google/Salesforce.com deal is just one more reason why.
