Category: Platforms

Consumer Tech and the Small Business Boost or Digitalization and the Large Corporate Leap?

    Jim D

Occasionally, a few events cluster in daily life that make you sit back and realize: “Wow, things have really changed.” This spring, as a typical homeowner, I had the local heating and AC service company come out and inspect and tune up the A/C. I registered the appointment over the internet and did not think anything was really different (though the web appointment was much better than previous experiences of calling and being put on hold). Yet on the day of the appointment, I received a call from the service technician while en route, telling me he would be there in 30 minutes. That was nice, and even better when he arrived right on time (this is a feat in itself in America, not in Denmark 🙂 ). As the technician inspected the units, took care of the issues (faulty thermostat) I noticed more changes. He had checked out what the proper replacement thermostat was from a modified iPhone  and then gone and pulled it from his truck. Throughout, he did everything on his phone,  making notes, compiling the invoice, getting my signature on it, emailing it to me, taking a picture of my check (or he could have swiped my credit card). He topped it off by setting up the fall tuneup. Fully intrigued, I asked about the impact of the new device and capabilities to his service day. As it turns out, all of his appointments for the day were on the iPhone as well as the driving instructions. His company had transitioned everything the field service techs did to the iPhones and ‘pretty much eliminated all paper’. His view? Things were a lot easier, he spent more time doing real work and no lost paperwork. My view? Wow!

To see a small enterprise make such a dramatic impact with IT on the everyday tasks and productivity of a small business like AC or furnace repair is remarkable. And the potential of impact by consumer technologies on small businesses was driven home when I went to the local barbecue restaurant for lunch. When the attendant took my order with an iPad and then explained they no longer had regular cash registers, I was wondering if I had been in a time warp and somehow missed these changes. She further explained that the iPads were also a huge convenience when they set up their booths at festivals and fairs.  Another win for consumer tech in small businesses.

I still remember being slightly surprised when I walked into the first Apple stores back before 2010 and instead of walking back to a register line with my purchase, the Apple salesperson processed it right where I stood with a slightly modified iPhone. Pretty cool. But now the barbecue place also? And the furnace repair guy? And workflow and invoice and payment software to match? The consumer tech and accompanying software are becoming serious business tools of choice for small businesses. They are not just being used to improve payments and act as cash registers (and of course, there are other good tools that have been introduced like Square or Stripe or many others), but handle appointments, customer communications, inventory, workflow, delivery routing, ordering, invoicing, and accounting. These vertical apps on consumer devices allow small businesses to minimize the administration overhead and focus far more on their true services to their customer.

What is also compelling about the adoption of the new mobile technologies by small businesses is the level of positive impact they are having on the businesses themselves. Eliminating paper? That has been a lofty goal of many large businesses for decades. Looks like small businesses are actually getting it done. Provide much better customer service through all-electronic customer interactions? Also being done. This enables to small business to compete much more effectively for that customer. Enable employees to be more productive from anywhere?  Check. And all while leveraging consumer-based and cloud technologies at a fraction of the small business IT costs and complexity from just 5 or 10 years ago.

And yet, as compelling as these small business examples are, recent articles (here, the WSJ) suggest that the largest enterprises are grabbing the biggest gains from technology implementations. As noted in the article, “economists have discovered an unsettling phenomenon: While top companies are getting much more productive, gains are stalling for everyone else. And the gap between the two is widening, with globalization and new technology delivering outsize rewards to the titans of the global economy.” Thus, gains in productivity from apply technology appear to be extremely uneven across the enterprise landscape. The larger firms, or the ones most adept at applying technology, are reaping most of the rewards.

The gap becomes even larger when gains are achieved through proprietary solutions that then allow outsized productivity gains. One example provided was PWC building lead analysis software that enabled 30x productivity gains in scanning contracts. PWC built the software itself, and even though there is commercial software now available for smaller firms, the cost of the software reduces the gains. Of course, if the software becomes not just a productivity gain but a industry or sector platform – like Amazon’s marketplace software – then the gains become enormous and far beyond just productivity.

As the scope of digitalization expands and the possibilities of doing ever more functions and capabilities increase with technology’s advances, it appears that the leading companies who have scale can craft custom software solutions to greatly streamline and reduce costs and enable them to win the lion’s share of the gains – particularly in productivity. Or even win the lion’s share of the market with a compelling platform (like Amazon’s marketplace). And by having the scale, when you do hit the mark with your digitalization, your gains are much larger.

Of course, making the right investments and successfully optimizing the processes of a large and complex business requires enormous vision, skill, persistence, collaboration, and leadership. It’s not about buying the latest tech (e.g. AI engine), but instead it is about having a strong vision of your place in your market, an even stronger understanding of your customers and what they want, and the willingness to work long and hard together to deliver the new capabilities. Thus, instead of a ‘new’ way to success, digitalization and technology just increase the rewards for the largest companies that focus on their customers and deliver these solutions better.

And the small businesses that are truly gaining advantage from becoming digitalized? Maybe they will grow faster and emerge as large enterprise winners in the future.

What has the impact of consumer tech been on your enterprise? Are you seeing the same changes in your local small businesses? And for large enterprises, are you seeing productivity gains from digitalization? And if you are one of the biggest, should you be expecting more from your digitalization investments?

I look forward to your comments.

Best, Jim Ditmore

Infrastructure Engineering – Leveraging a Technology Plan

    Jim D

Our recent post discussed using the Infrastructure Engineering Lifecycle (IELC) to enable organizations to build a modern, efficient and robust technology infrastructure. One of the key expressions that both leverages and IELC approach and helps an infrastructure team properly plan and navigate the cycles is the Technology Plan. Normally, the technology plan is constructed for each major infrastructure ‘component’ (e.g. network, servers, client environment, etc). A well-constructed technology plan creates both the pull – outlining how the platform will meet the key business requirements and technology objectives and the push – reinforcing proper upkeep and use of the IELC practice.

Digitalization continues to sweep almost every industry, and the ability of firms to actually deliver the digital interfaces and services requires a robust, modern and efficient infrastructure. To deliver an optimal technology infrastructure, one must utilize an ‘evergreen’ approach and maintain an appropriate technology pace matching the industry. Similar to a dolphin riding the bow wave of a ship, a company can optimize both the feature and capability of its infrastructure and minimize its cost and risk by staying consistently just off the leading pace of the industry. Often companies make the mistake of either surging ahead and expending large resources to get fully leading technology or eking out and extending the life of technology assets to avoid investment and resource requirements. Neither strategy actually saves money ‘through the cycle’ and both strategies add significant risk for little additional benefit.

For those companies that choose to minimize their infrastructure investments and reduce costs by overextending asset lives, they typically incur greater additional costs through higher maintenance, greater fix resources required, and lower system performance (and staff productivity). Obviously, extending your desktop PC refresh cycle from 2 years to 4 years is workable and reasonable, but extending the cycle much beyond this and you quickly run into:

  • Integration issues – both internal and external compatibility as your clients and partners have newer versions of office tools that are incompatible with yours
  • potentially higher maintenance costs as much hardware has no maintenance cost for the first 2 or 3 years, and increasing costs in subsequent years
  • greater environmentals costs as power and cooling savings from newer generation equipment is not realized
  • longer security patch cycles for older software (though some benefit as it is also more stable)
  • greater complexity and resulting cost within your environment as you must integrate 3 or 4 generations of equipment and software versus 2 or 3 versions
  • longer incident times as the usual first vendor response to an issue is ‘you need to upgrade to the latest version of the software before we can really fix this defect’

And if you press the envelope further and extend infrastructure life to the end of the vendor’s life cycle or beyond, expect significantly higher failure rates, unsupported or expensively support software, and much higher repair costs. In my experience, where multiple times we modernized an overextended infrastructure, we were able to reduce total costs by 20 or 30%, and this included the costs of the modernization. In essence you can run 4 servers from 3 generations ago on 1 current server, and having modern PCs and laptops means far less service issues, fewer service desk calls, far less breakage (people take care of newer stuff) and more productive staff.

For those companies that have surged to the leading edge on infrastructure, they are typically paying a premium for nominal benefit. For the privilege of being first, frontrunners encounter an array of issues including:

  • Experiencing more defects – trying out the latest server or cloud product or engineered appliance means you will find far more defects.
  • Paying a premium – being first with new technology means typically you will pay a premium because it is well before the volumes and competition can kick in to drive better pricing.
  • Integration issues – having the latest software version often means third party utilities or extensions have not yet released their version that will properly work with the latest software
  • Higher security flaws – all the backdoors and gaps have been uncovered yet as there are not enough users. Thus, hackers have a greater opportunity to find ‘zero day’ flaws and exploit them to attack you

Typically, those groups that I have inherited that were on the leading edge, were doing so because they had either an excess of resources or were solely focused on technology product(and not business needs). There was inadequate dialogue with the business to ensure the focus was on business priorities versus technology priorities. Thus, the company was often expending 10 to 30% more for little tangible business benefit other than to be able to state they were ‘leading edge’. In today’s software world, seldom does the latest infrastructure provide compelling business benefit over above that of a well-run modern utility infrastructure. Nearly all of the time the business benefit is derived by compelling services and features enabled by the application software running on the utility. Thus, typically the shops that are tinkering with leading edge hardware or are always on the latest version first are shops that are doing hobbies disconnected from the business imperatives. Only where organizations are operating at massive scale or actually providing infrastructure services as a business does leading edge positioning make business sense.

So, given our objective is to be in the sweet spot riding the industry bow wave, then a good practice to ensure proper consistent pace and connection to the business is a technology plan for each of the major infrastructure components that incorporates the infrastructure engineering lifecycle. A technology plan includes the infrastructure vision and strategy for a component area, defines key services provided in business terms, and maps out an appropriate trajectory and performance for a 2 or 3 year cycle. The technology plan then becomes the roadmap for that particular component and enables management to both plan and track performance against key metrics as well as ensuring evolution of the component with the industry and business needs.

The key components of the technology plan are:

  1. Mission, Vision for that component area
  2. Key requirements/strategy
  3. Services (described in business terms)
  4. Key metrics (definition, explanation)
  5. Current starting point – explanation (SWOT) – as needed by service
  6. Current starting point – Configuration – as needed by service
  7. Target – explanation (of approach) and configuration — also defined by service
  8. Metrics trajectory and target (2 to 3 years)
  9. Gantt chart showing key initiatives, platform refresh or releases, milestones (can be by service)
  10. Configuration snapshots at 6 months (for 2 to 3 years, can be by service)
  11. Investment and resource description
  12. Summary
  13. Appendices
    1. Platform Schedule (2 -3 years as projected)
    2. Platform release schedule (next 1 -2 years, as projected)
    3. Patch cycle (next 6 – 12 months, as planned)

The mission and vision should be derived and cascaded from the overall technology vision and corporate strategy. It should emphasis key tenets of the corporate vision and their implication for the component area. For example if the corporate strategy is to be ‘easy to do business with’ then the network and server components must support a highly reliable, secure and accessible internet interface. Such reliability and security aspirations then have direct implications on component requirements, objectives and plans.

The services portion of the plan should translate the overall component into the key services provided to the business. For example, network would be translated into data services, general voice services, call center services, internet and data connection services, local branch and office connectivity, wireless and mobility connectivity, and core network and data center connectivity. The service area should be described in business terms with key requirements specified. Further, each service area should then be able to describe the key metrics to be used to gauge its performance and effectiveness. The metrics could be quality, cost, performance, usability, productivity or other metrics.

For each service area of a component, the plan is then constructed. If we take the call center service as the example, the current technology configuration and specific services available would define the current starting point. A SWOT analysis should accompany the current configuration explaining both strengths and where the services falls short of business needs. The the target is constructed where both the overall architecture and approach are described as well as the target configuration (high to medium level of definition) is provided (e.g. where will the technology configuration for that area be in 2 or 3 years).

Then, given the target, the key metrics are mapped from their current to their future levels and a trajectory established that will be the goals for the service over time. This is subsequently filled out with a more detailed plan (Gantt chart) that shows the key initiatives and changes that must be implemented to achieve the target. Snapshots, typically at 6 month intervals, of the service configuration are added to demonstrate detailed understanding of how the transformation is accomplished and enable effective planning and migration. Then the investment and resource needs and adjustments are described to accompany the technology plans.

If well done, the technology plan then provides an effective roadmap for the entire technology component team to both understand how what they do delivers to the business, where they need to be, and how they will get there. It can be an enormous assist for productivity and practicality.

I will post some good examples of technology plans in the coming months.

Have you leveraged plans like this previously? If so, did they help? Would love to to hear from you.

All the best, Jim Ditmore

 

The Infrastructure Engineering Lifecycle – How to Build and Sustain a Top Quartile Infrastructure

    Jim D

There are over 5,000 books on applications development methods on Amazon. There are dozens of industry and government standards that map out the methodologies for application development. And for IT operations and IT production processes like problem and change management, IT Service Management and ITIL standards provide excellent guidance and structure. Yet for the infrastructure systems on which the applications rely on fully, there is scarcely a publication which outlines the approaches organizations should use to build and sustain a robust infrastructure. ITIL ventures slightly in this area but really just re-defines a waterfall application project cycle in infrastructure terms. During many years of building, re-building, and sustaining top quartile infrastructure I have developed a life cycle methodology for infrastructure or ‘Infrastructure Engineering Life Cycle’ (IELC).

The importance of infrastructure should not be overlooked in our digital age. Not only have customer expectations increased for services where they expect ‘always on’ web sites and transaction capabilities, but they also require quick response and seamless integration across offerings. Certainly the software is critical to provide the functionality, but none of these services can be reliably and securely provided without a well-built infrastructure underpinning all of the applications. A top quartile infrastructure delivers outstanding reliability (on the order of 99.9% or better availability), zippy performance, excellent unit costs, all with robust security and resiliency.

Often enterprises make the mistake of addressing infrastructure only when things break, and they only fix or invest enough to get things back running instead of re-building correctly a modern plant. It is unfortunate because not only will they likely experience further outages and service impacts but also their full infrastructure costs are likely to be higher for their dated, dysfunctional plant than for an updated, modern plant. Unlike most assets, I have found that a modern, well-designed IT infrastructure is cheaper to run than a poorly maintained plant that has various obsolete or poorly configured elements. Remember that every new generation of equipment can basically do twice as much s the previous so  you have fewer components, less maintenance, less administration, less things that can go wrong. In addition, a modern plant also boosts time to market for application projects and reduces significantly the portion of time spent on fixing things by both infrastructure and application engineers.

So, given the critical nature of well-run technology infrastructure in the world of digitalization, how do enterprises and CIOs build and maintain a modern plant with outstanding fit and finish? It is not just about buying lots of new equipment, or counting on a single vendor or cloud provider to take care of all the integration or services. Nearly all major enterprise have a legacy of systems that result in complexity and complicate the ability to deliver reliable services or keep pace with new capabilities. These complexities can rarely be handled by a systems integrator or single service provider. Further, a complete re-build of the infrastructure often requires major capital investment and and can put the availability even further at risk. The best course is usually then is not to go ‘all-in’ where you launch a complete re-build or hand over the keys to a sole outsourcer, but instead to take a ‘spiral optimization’ approach which addresses fundamentals and burning issues first, and then uses the newly acquired capabilities to advance and address more complex or less pressing remaining issues.

A repeated, closed cycle approach (‘spiral optimization’) is our management approach. This management approach is coupled with an Infrastructure Engineering Lifecycle (IELC) methodology to build top quartile infrastructure. For the first cycle of the infrastructure rebuild, it is important to address the biggest issues. Front and center,  the entire infrastructure team must focus on quality. Poorly designed or built infrastructure becomes a blackhole of engineering time as rework demands grow with each failure or application built upon a teetering platform. And while it must also be understood that a everything cannot be fixed at once, those things that are undertaken, must be done with quality. This includes documenting the systems and getting them correctly into the asset management database. And it includes coming up with a standard design or service offering if none exists. Having 5000 servers must be viewed as a large expense requiring great care and feeding — and the only thing worse is having 5000 custom servers because your IT team did not take the time to define the standard, keep it up to date, and maintain and patch it consistently. 5000 custom servers are a massive expense that likely cannot be effectively and efficiently maintained or secured by any team. There is no cheaper time than the present moment to begin standardizing and fixing the mess by requiring that the next server built or significantly updated be done such that it becomes the new standard. Don’t start this effort though until you have the engineering capacity to do it. A standard design done by lousy engineers is not worth the investment. So, as an IT leader, while you are insisting on quality, ensure you have adequate talent to engineer your new standards. If you do not have it on board, leverage top practitioners in the industry to help your team create the new designs.

In addition to quality and starting to do things right, there are several fundamental practices that must be implemented. Your infrastructure engineering work should be guided by the infrastructure engineering lifecycle – which is a methodology and set of practices that ensure high quality platforms that are effective, efficient, and sustainable.

The IELC covers all phases of infrastructure platforms – from an emerging platform to a standard to declining and obsolete platforms. Importantly, the IELC is comprised of three cycles of activity that recognize that infrastructure requires constant grooming and patching where inputs come typically from external parties, and, all the while, technology advances regularly occur such that over 3 to 10 years nearly every hardware platform becomes obsolete and should and must be replaced. The three cycles of activity are:

  • Platform – This is the foundational lifecycle activity where hardware and utility software is defined, designed and integrated into a platform to perform a particular service. Generally, for medium and large companies, this is  a 3 to 5 year lifecycle. A few examples could be a server platform, storage platform or an email platform.
  • Release – Once a platform is initial designed and implemented, then organizations should expect to refresh the platform on a regular basis to incorporate major underlying product or technology enhancements, address significant design flaws or gaps, and improve operational performance and reliability. Release should be planned for 3 to 12 month intervals over the life of the platform (which is usually 3 to 5 years).
  • Patch – A patch should also be employed where on a regular and routine basis, minor upgrades (both fixes and enhancements) are applied. The patch cycle should synchronize with both the underlying patch cycle of the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) for the product and with the security and production requirements of the organization. Usually, patch cycles are used to incorporate security fixes and significant production defect fixes issued by the OEM. Typical patch cycles can be weekly to every 6 months.

Below is a diagram that represents the three infrastructure engineering life cycles and the general parameters of the cycles.

Infrastructure Engineering Cycles
Infrastructure Engineering Cycles

In subsequent posts, I will further detail key steps and practices within the cycles as well as provide templates that I have found to be effective for infrastructure teams.  As a preview, here is the diagram of the cycles with their activities and attributes.

IELC Preview
IELC Preview

What key practices or techniques have you used for your infrastructure teams to enable them to achieve success? I look forward to you thoughts and comments.

Best, Jim Ditmore

 

The Recent Quarter Results Confirm Tech Industry Trends

    Jim D

Some surprising and not so surprising results for the tech industry this past quarter (2Q15) confirm both longer term industry trends and also high volatility for mismatches in expectations and performance.

First, Apple delivered strong growth in revenue and profits again (38% growth in profits to $10.8B), and yet, because it was slightly below expectations, lost $60 Billion in value. While Apple sold a record 47.5 million iPhones and saw Mac sales of 4.8 million units (up 9%), investors were apparently disappointed in both the number of iPhones sold and the lack of clear information on the iWatch. Even though it appears the iWatch is more successful at this point in the sales cycle than the iPad or iPhone, investors were apparently expecting a leadoff home run and sent the stock down 7% on the results.

And the reverse occurred for both Google and Amazon. Google delivered solid growth with 11% increase in revenue to $17.7B with net income of $3.9B which sent shares up 12%. Investors were surprised with the breadth of growth, particularly in mobile, and that managers showed some cost control. Amazon actually delivered some profit, $214M on revenue of $29.33B, and showed continued robust growth of 15%. Investors sent Amazon’s stock up on the profit results, a rarity given Amazon’s typical long term vision focus and  willingness to spend for reach and scale even in areas well beyond its core.

What the quarterly results also reveal is that the tech platform companies (Amazon, Apple, Google) are continuing to be viewed as dominant but investors are uneasy about the long term stability of their platforms and thus have a quick trigger finger if they see any cracks in their future dominance. So, with Apple’s potential over-reliance on the iPhone, when there are fewer shipments than expected, or there is not clear evidence of a new platform extension (e.g. iWatch) then investors react sharply. On the reverse, when Google appears to be overcoming the mobile threat to its core search platform, it is well-rewarded by investors.

What do the quarter’s results say about the tech product companies? Unless they have strong portfolio of winning products, it appears they will continue to struggle to regain form. IBM, AMD, HP and others all posted disappointing results as they grapple with the technology revolutions in each of their industry sectors. AMD saw a 35% loss in revenue, dipping below $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time in years to $942M with a loss of $181M. Of course, the slow to declining PC sales worldwide is the primary cause and only console sales were healthy for AMD. Expect further difficult quarters as AMD adapts to the changing component industry (driven by impacts from the platform companies). HP continues a listless journey, its 2nd quarter reflecting a 7% slide in revenue from $27.3B to $25.5B, a 50% drop in operating margin, and a 10% drop in PC market shipments. While HP will split into two entities in November later this year which has some analysts upbeat, prospects look tough across all product segments with slow or declining growth except possibly enterprise software and 3D printing. IBM had mixed results, with better than expected profit on $20.81B in sales, yet saw continued revenue decline, which left investors nervous, sending the stock down. IBM did see strong growth in cloud services and analytics, but lackluster products and results in other core segments (e.g., hardware) which make up the vast bulk of IBM revenue yielded disappointing revenue and profit showings. IBM recently sold off its low end server business as it views that sector becoming increasingly commoditized. Yet, IBM will continue to find that selling services when you have limited ‘winning’ products is a tough lower margin business. And cloud services are far lower margin business than its traditional hardware business – and one where Amazon and Google are first-comers with volume edges. IBM can certainly leverage its enterprise relationships and experience, but that is far easier to do when you have products that provide real advantage to the customer. Other than analytics (Watson) and some software areas, IBM lacks these winning products, having neglected their product pipeline (instead focusing on services) for many years. While the alliance with Apple provides some possibility of developing modern, vertical industry applications that will be compelling, there is far more IBM must do to get back on track and part of that innovation must be in hardware.

EMC and Oracle are the exceptional large technology product companies that have been able to navigate the turbulent waters of their industry the past few years. Oracle did have weaker results this quarter, primarily due to currency fluctuations but also slowing software sales. Only EMC beat expectations and had new products overcome slowing demand for core areas.  Winning products for EMC like VMware and Pivotal as well as high demand for services and products in its information security division (RSA) and analytics more than overcame issues in the core storage division (which showed some recovery from 1Q). One could argue that with the VMWare franchise and leading engineered systems, EMC has established the strongest cloud platform, thus it has a more assured place with growth and margin in this rapidly changing sector.

The bottom line? Product companies will continue to struggle with revenue growth and margin pressure as technology advances undercut volumes and platform companies offer lower cost alternatives (e.g. public cloud options instead of proprietary server hardware and services, or smartphones instead of PCs) Unless technology product companies stay on the leading edge of innovating (or acquiring) compelling products, generating additional high margin revenues through services or software will be tough sledding. As we have mentioned here before, digitalization and the emergence of platform companies will result in more casualties in product companies – both in the tech space and outside it.

And of course, there is Microsoft. Microsoft is in a unique spot where it still has a strong productivity platform (e.g. Office, Exchange) but a diminishing OS platform. And with only low margin business that are growing rapidly (e.g. cloud), the road back to dominance looks very tough. Further, their forays into other tech sectors have been middling at best and disastrous at worst. The second quarter results included an $8B write down of the Nokia acquisition, which was made two years ago. The ‘devices and services’ strategy has shown to be a ‘phenomenal error’ by some accounts. PC sales continue to decline, and Microsoft was unable to effectively crack the smartphone market. The past quarter revealed declining revenue volume for phones even with 10% more volume as the only market segment MS gained traction was phone models at lower cost points. And it is hard to see that Samsung or other handset makers will add Windows OS to their product mix. Further, traditional Windows OS revenue (from OEMs) dropped 22%. The bright spots for MS were gaming (Xbox) and of course enterprise software and cloud services. There remain major concerns for the enterprise area where the rapidly growing cloud services has far lower margin than their traditional software business. Microsoft should continue to worry that increasing import of dominance in the consumer space often translates later into winning business space – thus,  the Google and Apple productivity platforms could be the long term trojan horses that blow up the enterprise cash cow for Microsoft. Microsoft may lose the war by trying to maintain its OS platform by limiting the reach of its productivity platform to consumers on their device of choice. Already, Google and Apple have changed the game by offering such software on the platforms for free, with free upgrades. Some assessments already show Microsoft lagging in feature without even considering its far higher cost. Windows 10 should be a solid hit for Microsoft, reversing some of the ground lost with Windows 8, but it will not dent the momentum of the Apple and Android platforms – especially when Microsoft introduces such new ways to monetize as the formerly free Solitaire’s lengthy advertisements or $9.99 annual subscription fee. They continue to misread the consumer market. Despite these continual missteps, or as recently called out in a New York Times article, their ‘feet of clay’, Microsoft has a strong enterprise business, a well-positioned productivity platform, and plenty of money. Can they figure out how to win in the consumer world while growing their productivity ecosystem with compelling extensions?

There remain multiple gaps that Microsoft, IBM, HP or even Oracle could exploit to win the next platform or obtain strong enterprise market share. While Apple and Android are pursuing the future car and the home platforms, the internet of things is still an open race. And there is opportunity given that most of the gazillion apps in the Android and Apple space are games or other rudimentary (1st generation) apps oriented for consumers. But there could be tremendous demand for myriad vertical industry applications that can easily link to a company’s legacy systems. IBM has started down this road with Apple, but plenty of opportunity remains for enterprise software players to truly leverage the dominant platforms for their own gain. Let’s hope the tech product companies can rekindle their growth by bringing out great products again.

Best, Jim Ditmore