Netizen

Thursday, August 02, 2012

RIM's Options

"Getting it" is not enough. It is said the top people at Sony all "get it." They all know exactly what needs to be done. But the dysfunctional corporate culture gets in the way. When a company is on a downswing much damage gets done to its corporate culture. A turnaround is not just about "getting it."

I don't have any particular insight into where RIM's corporate culture stands today. But as for vision, there seem to be a few options.

The obvious one is to claw back into the smartphone space. How do you do that? Do you get rid of the physical keyboard? What do you do? How do you compete with the iPhone? Do you ditch the keyboard a-n-d jump onto the Android bandwagon? And become a hardware company? I don't think that is in the cards. RIM wants to continue doing both hardware and software. Well, first, it wants to survive.

Is there room? Is there room in the smartphone space for a Nokia? A Microsoft? A RIM? How do you differentiate? Those are hard questions I don't have answers for.

Another option would be to take RIM's resources and go into something else. Do a fundamental rethink and become a company that produces something else. Or break the company into a hundred different startups.

When Steve Jobs went back to Apple he did not try to win the PC war. He instead created the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. There is always that next big thing.

RIM's Waterloo

This below is another commentary on a city's tech ecosystem. (Come Early)

There is a hint that a patent battle seriously marred the culture, and the downswing began. There is a lesson there for the big names in tech in the valley.

Will Yahoo turn around? Will RIM?

High and low: what RIM's failure is doing to the people of Waterloo

Redmond. Cupertino. Mountain View. ... Microsoft, Apple, Google .... Waterloo, Ontario, is another city stamped by the accomplishments of a tech giant. Research in Motion began there in 1984, and with its era-defining success came an influx of talent and a growing community. But RIM has stumbled ...... Coming from Detroit, the route to Waterloo is flat and grassy, a gently undulating expanse of land much like Ohio but with less obvious signs of industrialization. ..... Waterloo, population just shy of 100,000 ..... The University of Waterloo, alma mater of RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis .... RIM itself lies just off the UW campus — indeed, there’s no real physical boundary between the two. .... About half of RIM’s workforce is located here, some 8,000 or so people ..... Their new CEO has been on a PR offensive, telling the press that the company’s not “in a death spiral.” RIM stock sits mired in the single digits, having lost 90 per cent of its value in the last three years. ..... the “worst corporate culture in the world.” After RIM lost a long and brutal patent battle with NTP in early 2006, he says, lawyers came to dominate the culture. The company’s earlier rapid growth had meant hiring a layer of lifelong managers, many of them risk-averse. Fiefdoms were carved out and protected; a degree of complacency settled in. After NTP, that complacency — especially about creating new products — was joined by an obsession with secrecy and legalistic wrangling. The environment inhibited new ideas; instead of daring to be bold, he says, employees worked in fear because, “if something goes wrong, someone has to get fired.” ....... the BlackBerry sips data compared to its competitors, it’s secure and reliable, it conveys a professional image (all of those belt holsters), and it has a physical keyboard. He thinks the layoffs could be good for the company; having grown too big too fast ........ The local tech industry has matured: Silicon Valley companies (including Intel, Google, and Facebook) have opened local offices and there’s a flourishing startup community. If RIM goes, he says, it’ll free up talent for other companies. ....... OpenText, the content management provider and Canada’s largest software company, for example, was spun out of the university in 1991, allowing several faculty members to found a company. The university values entrepreneurship. Mike Lazaridis, for one, received early encouragement to found RIM from a UW economics professor. He dropped out to start Research in Motion. ...... Iain Klugman .. “The American dream is to make it big, to build a big company, to become a rock star,” he says. “I think for many years the Canadian dream was to win the lottery.” ...... Waterloo and the surrounding area has the right combination of ingredients to enable tech entrepreneurs: strong academic brands, including UW and several other schools; a culture that accepts deviance (risking your future by going into business for yourself rather than someone else), and a network of capital comfortable with risk. He’s long been working to build on that foundation, and where the area had maybe 50 tech companies 15 years ago, today there are 1000 by his count. He says on average one local startup is founded every day. ........ I come from Kitchener-Waterloo, and yes, RIM has made it known on the world’s radar.” RIM is like a family member that’s done well ...... Co-founder Mike Lazaridis has donated $250 million to create the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, while Jim Balsillie spent $30 million to found the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Both men have donated generously to the University of Waterloo, with Lazaridis and his wife contributing over $100 million to the school’s affiliated research center, the Institute for Quantum Computing ...... “As much as I’m rooting for RIM, I have an iPhone.”

What are RIM's options?

Nokia used to be a paper manufacturing company.

Come Early

Image via CrunchBase

And for some reason I thought Andy wrote the first check. (Andy Bechtolsheim: 100K To 1.5 Billion Through Google) Anyways.

Professor Billionaire: The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check

“I once read that a boat is a hole in the water where you pour in a bunch of money,” says Cheriton. ....... With a net worth of $1.3 billion, Cheriton is likely the wealthiest full-time academic in the world. But yachts are not his thing. The Stanford computer science professor calls himself “spoiled” for taking the occasional windsurfing vacation to Maui. ...... In all he’s spent more than $50 million out of his own pocket, investing in 17 different firms, which range from VMware to his latest, Arista Networks. ...... He still drives the same 1986 Volkswagen Vanagon he had before he made his money, lives in the same Palo Alto home he’s owned for the last 30 years and employs the same barber—himself. “It’s not that I can’t fathom a haircut,” says Cheriton. “It’s just easy to do myself, and it takes less time.” ...... When he was rejected from the music program at the University of Alberta, he simply pursued another interest, mathematics, and later computer science. ...... It was at Stanford that Cheriton first met Andy Bechtolsheim, a brilliant German Ph.D. student who was constantly tinkering with a workstation computer he had designed called the SUN, short for Stanford University Network. Looking for someone to develop software for the workstation, Bechtolsheim turned to Cheriton ..... billionaire Netscape cofounder Jim Clark, a former Stanford professor. ..... In between their startups Cheriton and Bechtolsheim made their savviest investment, the $100,000 each forked over to the Google founders. ..... (Yahoo and Excite had turned down the opportunity to license the algorithm.) ...... “I remember thinking in the back of my head, ‘Well, if they get a million hits a day, 5 cents a click, that’s $50,000—at least they won’t go broke!’” Bechtolsheim reminisces. ....... Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s ubiquitous angel investor whom Cheriton introduced to Google for a later investment ..... a plaque that reads, “Dr. David R. Cheriton, Chief Superintendent of Saying Important Things.” ...... “Technologists probably find it easier to share things with David, since he will understand a lot more than if you go to a VC who will sort of give you a blank stare and not really understand the promise of what you’re doing” ....... Cheriton says he avoids pursuing market whims—he considers social networking one of them—and stays focused on breakthroughs that make measurable improvements to human life, such as the way Google helps a college junior complete a research paper at 3 a.m. ...... Cheriton and Bechtolsheim have put in a combined $100 million into Arista, 95% of its total funding. Its CEO, Jayshree Ullal

This is an insight into the ecosystem that Silicon Valley has that NYC does not have, something being talked about at AVC.com.

Why Hasn't NYC Produced Many Tech IPOs?

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Distributed Video Watching On YouTube

4,000,000,000 is 1,000 times four million. Let's say there are four million YouTube videos out there. So each of them are being watched for 1,000 hours each. But each video is only five minutes long. So that's 12,000 views per video.

12,000 views - that's not a whole lot. It's not 12 million. In TV lingo, 12,000 views are not a hit. But four billion hours worth of video watching is a lot of video watching.

This is fragmentation. This is crowd power. A hit might be harder to accomplish. But crowd needs are being met.

We Now Watch 4 Billion Hours of YouTube Videos Per Month