Say hello to the new empire.

From Electronista:

The iPhone 4S sold out in Hong Kong even faster than previously thought, a memo from Ticonderoga Securities’ Brian White indicates. The analyst claims that both the city’s Apple Store and all authorized resellers sold out within a space of three hours; Apple’s local online store states that there is “no supply” of the phone left. Earlier accounts had just the Apple Store selling out by lunchtime.

China isn’t just going to be a huge market for Apple, but for every big company.
People who have been saying the mobile battle between Android and iOS is going to be like desktop battle between the Mac and Windows — and that Apple is going to lose again — have it all wrong.
So many variables have changed since then, it’s a completely different game.

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Business

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A Red Ocean for Nokia and Microsoft

Dan Frommer asks the key ‘why’ questions about Windows Mobile phones from Nokia:

  • Why should any person buy this instead of an iPhone or the preferred Android phone du jour?
  • Why should carriers favor Windows phones over Android or Apple phones, in either their in-store sales techniques and marketing?
  • Why should carriers or consumers favor Nokia Windows phones over similar Windows phones from Samsung, HTC, etc.?
  • Why should developers make apps for Windows or Nokia phones?

Windows Mobile phones are swimming a red ocean. So what is a ‘red ocean’ you ask? From Wikipedia:

Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today–the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.
Red oceans are the opposite of blue oceans:

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today–the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

Apple established the new smartphone paradigm (full touchscreen, no keyboard, multitouch UI) with the launch of the iPhone in 2007 that Google subsequently copied with Android. Apple’s modus operandi since Jobs returned has been about focusing on blue oceans. Untapped markets.

Now Microsoft and Nokia are entering the market with the Windows Phone 7 platform, a platform that introduces a unique approach to the user interface.

Despite their fresh approach, they’re still in a red ocean. Boundaries and known and rules are understood and as Frommer notes, they’re going to continue to have a hard time distinguishing themselves in this already crowded market.

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Business, Technology

The rest is history.

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(image via thisisnthappiness.com)

For over half a century now Hasselblad has been proud to offer the world’s most comprehensive system for medium format photography. The basic idea behind our system – combining a love of photography with a mastery of technology – is as valid today as it was in 1948 when the first Hasselblad camera was introduced. And we intend to keep it that way.

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Business

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Good Design Is Efficient

Fortune shows us just how much more productive Apple is than the rest of the tech industry:

In the quarter that ended in September — not its best, mind you — the company generated sales of $28.3 billion and net income of $6.62 billion, or nearly $110,000 profit per employee.

Yes, Apple’s products are great, but that’s just part of the story. They’re also extremely efficient at how they go about creating those products.
Good design is efficient (this should really be in Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design).

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Business

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Compensation

Just A Car Guy ponders the insane raises some CEOs make:

TRW CEO John Plant got 510% raise over his 2009 salary of 6.7 million
Ford CEO Alan Mulally 524% raise… yet his company has 14 billion in debt
Johnson Controls’ Stephen Roell 424% raise

So… did those 3 companies make 4 to 500% better business decisions? Better profit? Better products?

Disgusting, but not surprising.

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Business

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GroupOff

The AP is just the latest in a series of news organizations pulling off GroupOn’s business model and profitability masks to reveal shady Old Mad Smithers in classic Scooby Doo style:

It’s the latest twist for Groupon’s IPO, which was one of the most anticipated offerings this year. In June, after Groupon filed for the offering, the SEC raised concerns about the way it counts revenue. Then the stock market plunged.

Now Groupon faces concerns about the viability of its daily deals business model. The novelty of online coupons is wearing off. Some merchants are complaining that they are losing money — and customers– on the deals. And competitors are swarming the marketplace.

“Groupon is a disaster,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research analyst. “It’s a shill that’s going to be exposed pretty soon.”

And how do small businesses feel?

Adding to growing customer discontent, Groupon, which was initially seen by small mom-and-pop shops as a way to drum up new business, was losing favor with some of them. Merchants began to do the cruel math on the daily deals.

Restaurants offering $50 of food for just $25 only collect $12.50 — not even enough to cover the cost of the food. Some businesses also complain that the deals for new customers anger long-time patrons. Others say that the bargains attract high-maintenance types who don’t turn into loyal customers.

“Your restaurants are full packed with people who aren’t making you any money,” says Paul Evans, a Kansas City marketing executive who advises clients against using Groupon.

To GroupOn’s brief defense, if you’re a small business doing business with anyone, do your fucking math. If it looks too good to be true, it usually is.

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Business

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My job is to not be easy on people.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

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Business

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No Shortcuts

I won’t lie, when I came late to GroupOn craze less than a year ago, I was somewhat seduced by the allure of bargain prices for interesting activities. Activities that got me up and away from my laptop and iPhone screens (Holy shit, my wife loves anything to get me away from my gadgets).
After a short while I started to do crude math in my head to understand the longterm viability of sites like GroupOn and Living Social. My own skepticism brought to mind questions my boss used to drill us with at my first job out of college (circa ’99). This was during the dot-com boom. He would watch us oogle over dozens of amazing interactive sites for products and services and ask, “So how do these guys make any money?”
We would just shrug our shoulders and say we didn’t know.
We now know, of course, how that story ended for many businesses.
Now it seems, the true colors of coupon sites are coming out. The New York Times says these sites are not a great for some merchants:

Some entrepreneurs are questioning the entire premise of the industry. Jasper Malcolmson, co-founder of the deal site Bloomspot, compares the basic deal offer with lenders’ marketing subprime loans during the housing boom.

“They were giving these mortgages to every consumer regardless of whether he could handle it,” Mr. Malcolmson said. “But sooner or later you find that you can’t make great offers to people if they’re not making you money.” He recently revamped Bloomspot to focus on merchant profitability.

There’s no shortcut to success, and once you’re successful, there’s no guarantee you’ll maintain it.
The advice for successing in any business is the same as optimizing your site for search engines.
Create original, relevant content repeatedly.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but that’s the recipe.
UPDATE: I should note a crucial ingredient to the success equation I left out. After you repeatedly create original, relevant content repeatedly, you don’t give it away. Or sell it for a loss. You charge money for it.

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Business

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A New Set of Beliefs

Raymond V. Gilmartin over at Harvard Business Review says CEOs need a new set of beliefs:

In my experience, these beliefs have led managers and boards to take actions that have had unintended, destructive consequences. When observing the behavior of management and corporate boards, when reading the management literature and the business press, and when assessing the outcomes of management behavior, it seems as though CEOs are recognized and rewarded handsomely for downsizing and outsourcing, acquiring or merging, and making the quarter — all justified by the responsibility to maximize shareholder value.

Any of these actions can be necessary in certain circumstances; most of us have taken one or another. My concern is that these actions have become the standard by which CEOs are expected to manage. Furthermore, these actions are taken seemingly without regard to the consequences for the community, the employees, the survival of the company as an institution, or the creation of long-term firm value.

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Business

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You can’t get rid of wealth.

Malcolm Gladwell on The Nets and NBA Economics:

One of the great forgotten facts about the United States is that not very long ago the wealthy weren’t all that wealthy. Up until the 1960s, the gap between rich and poor in the United States was relatively narrow. In fact, in that era marginal tax rates in the highest income bracket were in excess of 90 percent. For every dollar you made above $250,000, you gave the government 90 cents. Today — with good reason — we regard tax rates that high as punitive and economically self-defeating. It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design.

via Missile Test

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Business

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All About The Past

Harvard Business Review: You Can’t Analyze Your Way to Growth
Roger Martin on why analysis sucks:

The fundamental reason is that analysis of data is all about the past. Data analysis crunches the past and extrapolates it into the future. And the past does not include opportunities that exist but have not yet happened. So, analysis conspicuously excludes ways to serve customers that have not been tried or imagined or ways to turn non-customers into customers.

Why not focus on appreciation:

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation –deep appreciation of the consumer’s life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

For instance, suppose your consumers have to clean floors. It’s easy enough to appreciate that mopping a floor is a fairly miserable task. Think about what it involves: getting out and filling a bucket, dragging the bucket around and repeatedly jamming the mop in and out of it, and then dumping out and cleaning the bucket. If you appreciate your floor-cleaning customers, you’ll be looking to help them avoid having to go through this experience every time they have to clean a floor — because not every floor will need such a heavy-duty approach. It was out of this appreciation-triggered insight that the electrostatic Swiffer anti-mop was born and produced massive top-line growth, approaching $1 billion in sales in a decade.

This why analysts are completely useless gamblers. Betting on what could be based on the past. Analysis has no room for the curve ball that is innovation. Innovations are what come out of appreciation. Henry Ford said if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Analysis can only imagine faster horses, they can never imagine cars.
via Clayton Christensen

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