Category: Strategy

Dan Bricklin on Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen at MIMC. I attended another of MIMC’s Fireside Chats last week. This one was to hear an interview with Clayton Christensen. He’s famous for writing The Innovator’s Dilemma, and is now promoting his new book, The Innovator’s Solution, which I reviewed here on this weblog last October. Great meeting. I’ve written up my notes and added a few pictures. Clayton comments on things from drug research to low-cost airlines to Open Source. [Dan Bricklin’s Log]

Dan Bricklin provides a very meaty summary of Clay Christensen speaking about innovation and strategy during this fireside chat. Helps provide additional insight into Christensen’s books (I just did a review of Innovator’s Solution a few days back). Dan also points to a Fast Company article on Clay’s work from last November, “The Industrialized Revolution.” If you want to understand technology driven strategy you have to spend time understanding what Christensen is saying.

Scoble draws faulty analogies between Starbucks and Microsoft

Alex Hoffman writes his own answer to Eric Kidd: “he needs to change his focus away from technology, platforms and the development community, to real world end-users and their requirements.”

One last thought. My family just went out to dinner. On the way back we passed by our favorite coffee place. Named Victor’s. Hey, wait a minute. This is Redmond. Not far from Starbucks’ headquarters. In Eric’s world, Victor would never be allowed to sell coffee.

Every day Victor reminds me that someone can beat “the dominant corporation” and deliver a better product.

Think that Victor doesn’t have a chance? 25 years ago you probably were the one saying “no fast-food franchise has a chance against McDonalds.” But, look at the per-store sales of In-N-Out vs. McDonalds and you’ll see that In-N-Out is another example of a dominant player getting their lunch eaten.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

The fundamental problem with this analogy and the several others that Scoble offers is that none of these other industries are subject to the network effects that software platforms are. Scoble’s argument is that other big, dominant, competitors proved vulnerable to competition so Microsoft is vulnerable too.

What he conveniently overlooks is the critical differences in the markets we are talking about. In software platforms, unlike markets for expensive coffee, it matters what other customers are doing. Imagine, if you will, a coffee market that was similar to the operating systems market. In that market, if I bought coffee at Victor’s I wouldn’t be able to have a conversation with anyone who bought coffee at Starbucks without permission from Starbucks. Or imagine a world where you had to get permission from the zoning board and Starbucks to open a coffee shop. Then you’re getting closer to the world that platform vendors like Microsoft get to play in.

So, Scoble, here’s a question for you. When you’re evangelizing Longhorn in days to come, will you be just talking about some whizbang new feature or might you mention in passing the eleventy gazillion users in the installed base?

OODA Loops and point of view

Boyd and The American Way of War. It’s one of the apparent paradoxes of conflict that technologies can change the nature of battle, but not win wars. Col. John Boyd’s insights into that conundrum produced some important thinking, and led to the concept of 4th Generation Warfare (4GW)…. [Blogcritics]

This leads into a whole series of fascinating items that link into strategy and knowledge management as well as food for thought about the broader environment we now operate in. A rich vein of material to mine and think about.

Boyd developed the notion of the OODA loop which has begun to gain currency in dynamic strategy thinking. The Fast Company article on The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot” looks to be a good starting point.

OODA is an acronym for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. Conventionally this is depicted as a loop, but I think is might better be represented as a mini-web with Orient at the center. Something like the following:

That would link this to another of my favorite Alan Kay observations that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”