Category: Strategy
Things are changing
The flowers are out, the cold is gone. And on the calendar, I see that Q1 of the year is already over. I’ve been doing strategy for a long time, once within companies like Apple and Autodesk, and now as…
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The New Leadership: Social Change and Connectedness
With every advance of mobile or web technology, I see a balance of power moving from institutions to people. Did what I wrote make sense to you? We are in a time of great change. I suppose that’s obvious. Post…
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Telephony meets the Internet: What it means to you
The Emerging Telephony (eTel) conference brings together the open source and web telephony community. It doesn’t get much attention in the mainstream tech press, but it’s an interesting place for scouting out telephony trends that might affect the tech industry…
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When the Best Defense Is Growth
If your business is targeted by a larger competitor, the natural response is to want to play defense—to squeeze pricing, take special care of the channel, maybe do some promotions and guerrilla marketing. We’d never advise you to take your…
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The Holy Grail Is Reachable
SME / SMB’s—once the Holy Grail of the industry—appear to be a highly coveted group. Moving from being an enterprise player to play in the mid-market is incredibly challenging. We’ve worked with a few companies of late who have asked…
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Crossing the Rubicon
Its meteoric rise is the envy of executives and geeks around the world… for those in technology, it is a marvel of Web strategy, and for Wall Street, it just may be the company all aspire to own. No view…
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Web 2.0 vs. SaaS
Web 2.0, meet Software as a Service. SaaS, meet Web 2.0. You two need to talk. You’re working on many of the same problems, but you don’t communicate well, and sometimes it seems like each of you barely knows that…
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Understanding the full impact of the web
This will probably sound crazy, but despite all the hype about Web 2.0 and web startups, the most common mistake we see tech companies making with regard to the web is underestimating its long-term impact on their businesses. I’m not…
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Give Your Product Away, Make a Profit
We recently completed a project for a firm that was considering an investment in the digital photography business. They wanted a survey of the competition, so we dug into all of the startups and new companies bubbling up out there….
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Help! Microsoft Is Targeting Our Business
Recently we’ve been hearing that more and more. The companies being targeted usually assume they’ve being singled out for special attention from Microsoft, but when you add up all the reports a different picture emerges. What is not new is…
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Will Cisco’s Latest Move Bring in Big Bucks?
For every successful market entry, another four fail. We learned that in grad school. One of the few facts that made practical sense, and thus stuck. So it’s a brave company that tries to do market expansion, and Cisco is…
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The Real Price of the Blackberry Lawsuit: Executive Distraction
The RIM Blackberry folks finally settled their patent dispute with NTP, averting a feared shutdown of the service. That dispels the ominous cloud hanging over the Blackberry, and now the company can go back to growing wildly, right? Not necessarily….
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The Art of Selection: The Killer Idea
There’s a process we use at Rubicon that sounds kind of mean. Us, mean, you ask? Never! But the name of our process certainly sounds tough; it’s the Murder Board process. It’s where the collective brains of the organization get…
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Reformation in the Hardware Pricing World
The role of software is becoming increasingly important, and not just for traditional software companies. Perhaps this is nowhere more true than at hardware-focused companies facing the commoditization of their hardware. Hardware without software is nothing more than useless metal…
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Bring on the “Singularity”
Our usual rule when facing any long-term challenge is that you need to change the rules. If a big competitor’s about to bombard the place where you’re standing, move someplace else. If your economic model is becoming obsolete, find a…
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Between A Hammer and the Anvil: Microsoft Gets More Aggressive
Any successful company in the tech industry eventually ends up competing against Microsoft in one way or another. But recently we’ve noted a rising tide of competitive action by Microsoft across much of our client base, all at once. In…
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Is the Mobile Market Ripe for the Pick’n?
Questions software executives must answer if they expect to stay on top of the rapidly emerging mobile market space Lately, it seems you can’t swing a PDA or Smart Phone without hitting a business or trade publication article that contains…
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(Dis)satisfaction with Pricing & Licensing Strategies
Here is a shocker: nobody much likes their licensing models. According to Macrovision’s research, less than one in three enterprises are satisfied with software vendors’ pricing & licensing strategies. Dissatisfaction is not limited to the customers, as only 57% of…
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