More strategic thinking
OK - it’s strategy week here at Marc’s Voice and I’m going to continue this theme with a post focused on various different strategies unfolding in front of our eyes. These series of posts will end up being the Appendices for my treatise “How to build the Open Mesh“ - which is in draft 5 form right now, but will soon be updated to draft 6.
1. The Citizen Dashboard is a proposal I created for Cuyahoga County for someone named Norm Roulet and a coop they have there - called REALNEO. I’ve been engaging with the community and going through the paces of trying to tap into some of this stimulus money to help drive new jobs and develop the Cleveland area’s tech and community environment.
2. Yesterday I wrote about Cisco’s new strategy of taking on HP and IBM and how I wished they’d go more ‘vertical’ and deploy their ’stack’ into the home by leveraging their consumer products purchases and social networking platform. I called what Cisco should be doing a ’social platform’.
3.Then there was my unsolicited advice I gave to MySpace recently. Needless to say I didn’t get a whimper out of any of the MySpace execs - but I DID get a response from an engineering manager - you know the kind of people who actually have to BUILD these things. Anyway - the MySpace strategy was all about shopping malls, kiosks, job centers and otehr ways to help us get out of this economic malaise.
Recent announcements from ‘the Guardian’ and the NYTimes point us in the direction of the future of media. Putting up persistent content ‘datastores’s is also a key component to this puzzle. Watching Hulu try to play both sides, watching YouTube continue to evolve and the momma of all lock-in strategies - Facebook - play itself out in an ‘open context’ has also been fun.
4. The the funnest thing that has happened recently has been the world’s awakening to Twitter’s lockin strategy and the ramifications of them being able to dictate and control the flow of ‘whuffie’ - the powerful underlying juju which gets Robert Scoble 50,000 - even 100,000 followers - by including a single link on the suggested link page. Or not. I doubt that Robert (and his sponsor Rackspace) will give a dime to Twitter - but I’m SURE that Jason Calacanis will. What else would he do with his VC money? Clearly Twitter is in the driver’s seat right now. Arrington is reporting their followers are up to to over 215k.
5. Intertwined within all of this is Microsoft’s continued push into all things open and different from what they’re accustomed to. For the fourth year in a row I’m headed to Vegas this week for Mix09 where we’ll discuss open standards for Activity Feeds on a panel run by Dare Obasanjo. But what’s more telling is watching the epitome of the old guard (Microsoft) turning itself on a dime - AGAIN - and reinventing itself into a company that offers Live Mesh, Azure and all sorts of Live services - which clearly is not your father’s Microsoft.
What happens to Office, their enterprise business, XBox and mobile is highly dependent on their success at this reinvention - and the whole world is watching. Because more than IBM, Oracle, Facebook of AOL - Microsoft represents technology around the world. It is the #1 technology brand and Bill G is now back on top as the world’s richest guy. All he had to do was sit there and NOT fuck up (which is what everyone didn’t do.)
So no more Mr. Slim, no more Mr. Mittal or Mr. Reliance, who cares about Shelly Adelson anyway? It’s Bill G. back on top. Hurrah! And as a model for the future - his #1 job is to give away $80B (or shall I say ‘invest’ his and Warren’s cash………..) but that’s for another post.
6. How many of us remember Coke Classic? Well it turns out I was one of those ‘activists’ who bitched and moaned about Coke Classic and helped bring back the original. Of course it’s NOT the original recipe and one has to purchase ‘Mexican Coke’ to get the real stuff, but it’s heartening to hear that there’s a Facebook page dedicated to Coke - second only to Obama’s page - which was started NOT by Coke, but by two fans from LA. Hire those dudes!
7. Strategy today has to deploy mashups that provide compelling, exciting, timely experiences to end-users. Strategic plays today HAVE to include dashboards which embrace the open world and leverage off of Facebook, Google and Yahoo. Highly intelligent strategies today MUST make sure that the entire food-chain is optimized for monetization, by leveraging existing ‘blackboxes’ and acting as a system integrator to guarantee the end-user’s experience.
8. So guess what I’m thinking about right now?
Vivek Kundra getting back to work
Tweetdeck and Seesmic’s integration with Facebook
The Beeb getting a little obtuse and thinking out of the box
Avatars being the ID Hub that connects one’s digital lifestyle together
And the realization that social networks are the new ‘email’.
Credit goes to Phil Wolff for first introducing me to Ryze and pointing out that it was really a private email system. Up until then - I was pushing my ‘Community Common’s notion as a new way to connect people together. But I completely missed the email quotient of the architecture and design. But it’s clear now - that social networking is here to stay and that all software will be social.
Now gee - now who’s got the right platform to leverage this - at this very point in time?
