Week of open innovation

This week I’m at the annual Open and User Innovation Workshop, this year at MIT. See my open innovation blog for more updates.

I’ve been having trouble keeping up with blogging this summer due to many obligations, including the new Solar Workforce Project which has caused me to pay more attention to cleantech business issues.

I still intend to update this blog with news about the mobile industry, Apple, standards and open source, even if I can’t react to the news of the day.

A thousand posts later

Yesterday’s posting marked the 1,000th posting on Open IT Strategies since I began in January 2007. It seems worthwhile to note the milestone and changes for the next phase of the blog.

From the first 1,000 postings, the top 5 topics are about what I would have expected after the first six months:

• business models (107)
• iPhone (104)
• Apple (101)
• mobile phones (94)
• Google (80)

Of the next 10 categories, open source (43) and smartphones (39) are surprisingly low, while academia (39) and off-topic (39) are surprisingly high. Commodiziation (53), Microsoft (46), Web 2.0 (42), Nokia and open standards (36 each) are about where I’d expect them.

The blog has become a bit more of a mobile phone industry blog than an open standards blog, in part because interesting issues of open standards strategies are relatively rare.

To set direction going forward, I ran a reader survey in August. Almost 300 people saw the survey, but only 19 replied. The first page (asking opinions of specific posts) was very useful but also destroyed the response rate. Overall, business models was the most popular topic with non-tech topics the least popular. (I was surprised that there wasn’t more interest in media industries and information goods).

The articles that attracted the most negative reaction were on issues of economic policy (57 articles total) and related topics about (mis)management of the US economy. Given the high representation of respondents in the Bay Area and Europe, that’s probably to be expected. (I never intended to write about these topics, but 13 months ago I succumbed to baiting by a friend and former John Kerry elector who wanted to see if I would defend “W”; as it turns out, my last posting about his economic policies was harshly critical.)

To understand what attracts interest, I also poke at Google analytics now and again. From both the user comments and the analytics, the most consistently popular story in 2009 was my 2,800 word eulogy for the Mervyn’s department store, apparently because it was one of the few personal tributes to a store that was loved by many.

From the survey, one thing came through loud and clear: more is not better. Readers can’t keep up with more than 3-4 postings a week — which is good, because some weeks I have spent 8 hours or more on the blog. Right now, the press of teaching has slowed down my blogging (as it did in Fall 2007), but even when I have more time I’m going to limit my postings and spend most of those on the topics of greatest interest.

Should I get even more time, I will spend it keeping my other blogs alive with weekly postings rather than writing more articles for this blog than people can read. I have more ideas than I can possibly cover in one week, so I’ll have to be selective to fit my time available to write and the time of my readers to read.

To supplement blogging, I’ve also discovered the benefits of Twitter®. I have begun to vent some of my ideas there, whether it’s griping about threats to free markets or reposting the interesting OSS/tech policy insights of my buddy Matt Asay.

Also to reduce time blogging on economics issues, I’ve decided to feature in the sidebar four of my favorite blogs by economists defending free markets: Greg Mankiw (Harvard), John Lott (Maryland), EconLog (a group of contributors) and the official blog of the libertarian Cato Institute. This supplements the four tech blogs previously/still listed on the right.

And speaking of economics, I believe the Google ad words experiment is now at an end. I earned $12 in three months, which certainly didn’t make it worth the tackiness of highlighting their ads. Instead, I’ll go back to occasionally mentioning a book that I personally find interesting, and rely on the Amazon Associates to bring in the $50-100 in referral fees that I earn every year — less than the minimum wage for the time I spend in any given month, but of greater value to readers than the ad words.

Please call

We are continuing our survey marathon during pledge week.
This week, we have only increased survey responses from 13 to 15.

This is your blog. We really need your support.

Won’t you fill out the survey now?

H/t to Carr Communications for pledge break tips.

Pledge break

We take a break from our regular blogging to once again ask for your help.

We need your help to keep this blog going.

No, we don’t need your money.
Instead, we need your answers in the annual blog user survey.

Our last pledge break raised the survey responses from 5 to 13, but we need your help to reach our goal of 20 (stretch goal of 25).

Please take just a few minutes of your time to answer the survey. When school starts next Monday, I will have to prioritize my postings and so your answers (in a statistically representative sample) will help me know what I should be writing about.

H/t to Carr Communications for pledge break tips.

Please please complete the survey

I only have five responses so far — please, please, please complete the reader survey. It’s really important. And unlike voting for president or senator, your vote matters.

Don’t make me pull a PBS pledge break and block all new content until enough readers call in.

Please help

I need your help, dear blog readers. After 2½ years of blogging, it’s time to get systematic feedback.

Please take a few minutes of your day to fill out a brief survey about what you do and don’t like about this blog.

The school year begins in three weeks and it looks like I will have some new projects that require my attention. Thus, I need to take a dispassionate look at my priorities to get my house in order.

After 921 postings, I know what blog postings are quick, which ones I enjoy writing and those that I personally consider important. However, I don’t know what you like or value (or dislike and find worthless). Thus, I’d really appreciate your time spent on the survey.

Based on the rate of emails and blog comments over the last few years, I don’t expect a lot of responses, which is why your feedback is important.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions, concerns, or ideas not captured by the survey. (The survey ends with an open-ended comment section as well as space for feedback on the survey itself.)

Web 2.0 supply side substitutability

In the 2½ years I’ve been blogging, I’ve thought occasionally about who writes blogs, who reads blogs, what value they provide and (most of all) whether it’s something I should be doing.

Among people I know or follow, some occasionally blog with long articles, while some blog with very short referrals to existing articles and little if any marginal commentary. Others have given up on blogging and just tweet, and a handful both blog and tweet while running their day job.

I always assumed there was a self-selection involved — some people craft long pieces with words, others frenetically toss out ideas, still others have the skill to produce a YouTube video.

But Peter Whitehead of the FT Digital Business section argued Thursday that at the margins, blogging is just yet another form of social media:

[S]tatistical and anecdotal research indicated the vast majority of existing blogs had not been updated for at least 120 days and that amateur bloggers seem to have shifted to Facebook and Twitter, the social networking websites.

But surely the activity of these blogs – let alone their present inactivity – has never been of any real consequence.

Apart from a very small percentage which are informative, original or entertaining, they have little or no value. They are vanity publishing, only made feasible by the removal of costs.

The fact that their creators appear to be giving up on them is hardly surprising, given the amount of time they take to write, to discover and to read. Only a tiny proportion of any working population has this time to spare.

Worthwhile blogs – and there are many of them around – tend, according to my own anecdotal evidence, to be linked to well-known organisations able to provide time and resources, or they have become professional concerns in their own right.

I think his claim of what’s “worthwhile” is a little too narrow, since some of the most interesting blogs are from very smart people who spare a little bit of their time from their day job to share ideas. (e.g. Madisonian, or Michael Mace’s blog).

Still, what I found interesting — what prompted this blog post — was his idea of supply-side substitutability for social media. In strategy classes, we teach future managers to think about defining potential competitors not just by similar technologies, but about substitutability of demand and (in some cases) substitutability of supply.

Whitehead argues the same pool of people with the same amount of free time will choose between some very different technologies. It’s not just Typepad vs. Blogger, but Tweeting vs. updating your Facebook page. (The exception of course are blogs that are “professional concerns in their own right,” such as Om Malik.)

Interestingly, Twitter seems to be the 140-character least common denominator between many of these technologies. You can view and update your Twitter feed within Facebook, or you can convert your blog postings (via RSS feed) into Twitter postings. (Although Whitehead advertises his Twitter feed, the newsman’s feed seems to have less news content than OSS execs Matt Asay or David Wood).

Because of that, I’m a little more optimistic about Twitter than Rupert Murdoch. That may not be saying much, given how much Web 2.0 prowess he’s demonstrated by running MySpace into the ground.

Scruitable Japanese

Looking for something else, I found an interesting website: What Japan Thinks.

The blog, written under the pseudonym “Seron,” is devoted to translating Japanese-language opinion survey results into English. For example, Friday’s post summarizes the effectiveness of contextual online ads in news sites and blogs, based on a survey of 1,085 Japanese respondents in March.

It is written by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson, a mobile phone software engineer from Scotland who lives in Kansai (the region near Osaka). The author chose to write the blog after getting frustrated by how many people spouted off online based on stereotypes and assumptions, not facts.

The blog tags aren’t very useful, but there is a built-in (Google-based) search option. For example, on March 5 he summarized a panel survey of web surfers:

Q1: Is a computer or mobile phone the main way you view web sites? (Sample size=1,067)
Mobile phone 8.7%
Computer 84.0%
Both about the same 7.3%

An earlier 2005 survey produced very different results, but the sampling frame was people who already used their Internet-enabled mobile phones. As he notes, the March 2009 results may be skewed by the panel solicitation:

Note that one way that they recruit their mobile monitors is by getting them to enter their mobile phone email address when they apply to be a PC monitor, so bear that in mind while reading the results.

Other posts this year include on UMPC vs. Netbooks and portable music players/headphones.

As someone who likes free research data — for my research papers and for my blog — this is a great deal, even if the coverage (due to the availability of input product) is irregular.

Blogspot searching

One of the annoying things about blogspot (blogger, Google blogs) is the default blogspot ad at the top of the page. It has buttons like “next blog” that add no value to my blog.

However, by deleting this element (from the HTML template in blogger setup), I lost the default “search blog” functionality. I want to search for old postings that are not tagged (e.g. for “Web” and “business” and “model”) and some of my readers have asked for this too.

The HTML is easy enough. To search this blog for “monetize” it’s similar to a standard Google URL — the base URL plus the search terms:

http://openitstrategies.blogspot.com/search?q=Web+business+model

But how do we enter the search string, without any server changes? Presumably there’s some sort of HTML form required.

A quick Google search found a posting on BlogoSquare, which doesn’t quite solve the problem. However, the blog itself has exactly the sort of search HTML I was seeking.

Now you can see my new search HTML on the right. Here is the HTML

<form id="searchform"
   action="http://openitstrategies.blogspot.com/search"
   method="get">
<div>
  <input id="q" value="" name="q"
     type="text"/>
  <input id="searchsubmit" value="Search"
     type="submit"/>
</div>
</form>

This turns out to be easier than I thought. I plan to promulgate it to my other blogs in the future.

Blogging update

I'm weeks behind on blogging. I’ve had also sorts of things to comment on, including more on economic price sensitivity, Circuit City’s last gasp yesterday, Irwin Jacobs retiring for good, even being mentioned in the Symbian-Google feud over openness. There’s also 3 or 4 talks I’ve attended that I’d like to mention.

There’s a lot I’d like to say, but with teaching deadlines, research deadlines, four major committees, plus personal deadlines, I’ve had a hard time keeping up. Look for the blog postings to slow down. In the meantime, I’ll be posting more traditional blog type postings (mainly quoting other people) because they are quicker and take less cognitive processing power.

New ways to make old mistakes

There’s an old saying “it takes a computer to really mess things up!”

We had an example of this today in the computer press with a mis-reported story. This problem is best illustrated by CNET:

February 23, 2009 10:41 AM PST
Verizon iPhone around the corner?
by Matt Hickey

There have been rumors buzzing around the Internet for some time Apple is secretly preparing a CDMA version of the iPhone, probably headed to Verizon Wireless, and probably by the end of this year. It's no secret Apple has been advertising jobs that require experience in the CDMA wireless standard, which Verizon Wireless and Sprint both use, and is the competing standard to GSM, which AT&T and T-Mobile use, as well as the standard the current iPhone uses.

An hour later, CNET added this to the story:

Correction 11:56 a.m. PST: We messed up. The 9 to 5 Mac blog we cited below is in fact from September 2008, so it turns out this is an old rumor. Because it showed up in our RSS feed Saturday, we, like a number of other publications, took it as a recent post and went from there. Apologies for the confusion.

So we had snafus before — Dewey defeats Truman, bits dropped on teletype transmissions, missing words (the AP stylebook using an imprecise synonym for “not guilty.”)

Stale RSS feeds are merely just a new way to get misleading data. (It also points out an ongoing problem of bloggers and websites not marking their content with a date.

Another bum prediction

OK, it wasn’t made this year, and thus doesn’t count as a faulty 2009 prediction. However, 4 weeks ago I said Meryl Streep deserved the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical. Instead, on Sunday night it went to someone named Sally Hawkins, who’s more than 25 years younger.

I believe I wrote my last movie review in 1981. Obviously I should stay retired, as (at best) I’m rusty and out of touch with today’s culture or (at worst) I have no aptitude for the post.

Prediction QA department

In archiving all my posts from last year, I was reminded of the accurate (and not so accurate) predictions from last year.

For 2009, one of my resolutions has to be to stop making iPhone predictions. In 2008, I repeated rumors that Flash was coming Real Soon Now; it‘s not here. In May 2007, I doubted Apple would sell 10 million iPhones in 2009 because of the AT&T exclusive, but of course that was wrong. (At least I was more accurate in my iPhone assessment than the CTO of Motorola, who is now CTO of Cisco).

A few other postings hit closer to the mark. In April, I noted the moral hazard of the government bailing out troubled banks. Throughout the year, I noted how Web 2.0 business models are fundamentally flawed and Yahoo was foolish and/or arrogant to turn down Microsoft’s money

Still other things don’t seem to change:

• Google is battling Microsoft and Nokia for Total World Domination
• Sun, Sprint and Motorola are in trouble,
• free municipal Wi-Fi is dead,
• paid Wi-Fi hotspots are dying even quicker than newspapers.

A few old patterns remain relevant: commoditization drives consumer decisions (or at least those of Americans) and most major acquisitions subtract value for shareholders.

Some issues from last year that remain unresolved:

• The love-hate relationship of content owners with YouTube: it offers unmatched reach, but negligible revenue.
• What impact will Google’s gPhone/Android/OHA initiative on the industry.
• How will industry deal with patent trolls?

On a more serious note, is Steve Jobs really dying?

One prediction I will stand by: digital TV is coming, and analog TV will be gone by mid-February.

Blogging high water mark

A friend (who didn’t know I have a blog) found this today on Seeking Alpha:

Of course, that and $4 will get you a vente latte at Starbuck’s.†

I didn’t think that “Four Dying Silicon Valley Companies” was a particularly inspired posting — merely commentary on a solid (if somewhat conventional) column by Chris O’Brien of the Merc on the plight of 3 ½ local companies.

My reading on what wins popularity at Seeking Alpha (a stock investment site) is that writing something opionated about more than one publicly traded company will attract attention. And, alas, offering biting criticism is more interesting that attempting to come up with solutions for companies in a difficult situation.

Still, my primary audience is readers of this blog. At the end of the year, I’m going to be soliciting feedback from readers about what they find most interesting and, by implication, what I should emphasize in 2010.

† I don’t drink coffee, so I’m guessing that’s still a reasonable market price nowadays.

Not quite a Krugman hater

The question of Jeffrey Frankel’s quote being borrowed by Paul Krugman has been resolved. Prof. Krugman acknowledges the borrowing on his blog and Prof. Frankel accepts (as I would) the explanation that one doesn’t attribute a quote when live on Bill Maher.

The latter explanation is the simplest one, and much simpler than the one that I posited. Motives are difficult to measure directly and even more difficult to infer directly, so it would have been better to have offered the quote without comment and wait and see what developed. When I was a professional newspaper reporter (25 years ago) I would have known better. If I didn’t end up with egg on my face, I certainly leaped pretty far in hopes of reaching a conclusion.

However, I was a bit surprised at Prof. Frankel calling me a Krugman-hater, since I don’t hate anyone. I suppose if one were to call Krugman a Bush-hater then I could see how I could be considered a Krugman-hater. However term “hater” is overused if not abused as a rhetorical device in modern politics.

Since “hater” is inaccurate in this case, this is evidence that others don’t know my motivations anymore than I know theirs. Instead, the best policy is to be temperate in one’s words and let the facts speak for themselves.

The facts are that Krugman

• is a Nobel Laureate (actually, winner of theSveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences);
• has spent the last eight years as an angry (if not bitter) critic of the Bush administration;
• wrote a 1996 book to attack former colleagues in international economics; and
• as even critics of his recent punditry concede, had a profound impact on 20th century economics.

A few undesirable personal traits won’t take away from Krugman’s permanent place in history. Perhaps he will have a happier disposition once Bush is gone and the most progressive president of two generations takes office.

New EE/RE blog

Every year or so, I teach a strategy elective to SJSU MBA students, which is entirely about the issues facing high-tech companies. Although I’ve occasionally brought in biotech, those who know me and my resume would not be shocked to hear that it’s pretty much all IT, all the time.

The last few times I taught the class, students have been interested in pursuing alternative energy or other cleantech topics (such as plug-in hybrids) as their term project. However, given the structure of the class, it’s hard to tie the project to the class concepts (and thus get a good grade) without course readings that bear on the topic.

So this year I vowed to push outside my comfort zone and do something to meet this student demand. For Fall 2008, I have added a week on alternative energy, starting from a very comprehensive Stanford case (actually, industry note) on the energy industry. I also hope to write my own case on photovoltaic energy, with help from a local tech entrepreneur.

As part of this journey of teaching, research and personal discovery, I decided to do what any good blogger would do: create a new blog. My hope is to stay focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy, since many of these will allow me to stay in the EE (rather than chemistry) technical domain.

However, what I think is new is that I intend to focus on the economics (i.e. business viability) of these topics. I believe that this is relatively under-covered, although I’ve found a few sites that talk about these issues (sometimes). That also means no more cleantech topics on this blog, because I think they are separate (if overlapping) audiences.

I expect that blog to be relatively low traffic, perhaps once every week or two, rather than 3x-5x/week for this blog. I have a constant amount of time available to blog, so I will need to allocate my time carefully to those topics where I can make the most original observations (in a reasonable amount of research time).

Symbian's second 10 years

My friend, client and soon to be co-author David Wood has started a blog. (I warned David about blogging as a productivity destroyer, but he’s gone ahead anyway).

The blog is not one in his official capacity as executive VP for research at Symbian, but obviously it’s influenced by his work as the only remaining Symbian executive founder (and many years with Psion before that). One of his first articles (posted Monday) is entitled “Anticipating the next ten years of smartphone innovation.”

David reminisces a little about the first 10 years (Symbian was founded in June 1998) but it’s not primarily about that. The company has a slick official 10th birthday site. I half expected Andrew Orlowski of the The Register to a Symbian retrospective, but I guess he burned out with last year’s long feature on Psion’s last great product, the Series 5 PDA.

Instead — as the lead researcher of an IT company should do — David looks forward. Here are some key smartphone trends he predicts:

• Component prices will continue to fall.
• Quality, performance, and robustness will continue to improve.
• Users will discover that phones can do more than just phone calls and SMS.
• The smartphone ecosystem will to innovate in new services
• Even cooler smartphones will come out

I’m not going to try to summarize the entire posting, because it’s easy enough to read here.

David’s blog is added to the blogroll on the right: a list of people I know personally whose occasional postings I find insightful. So far, I have decided as a matter of policy to omit those who seem to be full-time bloggers — if for no other reason that competing with them would cause me to spend even more time blogging.

Finding a voice people can understand

One of the most time-consuming parts of my day job is wading through piles of student essays on midterms and finals. Our students don’t write as well as we would like — most of them can’t write well when they graduated from high school, and with our larger class sizes we have even less contact with them than their high school teacher did.

I am passionate about good writing in every form, whether a 2-sentence e-mail, 1-page memo, or 20-page report. It’s not from my brief foray into journalism (which certainly helped my writing) but from 20+ years in business, initially as an underling and later as a boss.

With lots of college student as employees, I had to emphasize time and time again that they needed to be able to communicate clearly if the money their employer paid them was going to bring it any benefits. Anyone who’s opened a U.S. airline magazine knows the phrase “You get what you negotiate” (Chester Karrass) but I would say “your value is what you communicate.” (The two ideas are consistent, just not identical).

Today a friend forwarded an Oct. 2006 speech on good writing given by John Leo, former US News columnist. It’s really long, but just about everything resonated with my experience.

Leo starts with various examples of bad writing, due to bureaucratic obfuscation, social activism or just plain laziness. Here is but one excerpt:

In plain English, what does it mean when students “achieve a deficiency” or reach a “suboptimal outcome?” It means they failed. A suboptimal outcome is even worse in at a hospital. It means the patient died. The airline industry sometimes speaks of a hull loss. What they mean is that one of their planes just crashed. Here’s more twisted language. Your doorman is now known as an “access controller”, and a receptionist is a “director of first impressions.” Hospital bills can be filled with such language, How about a “thermal therapy unit” (an ice bag) or a “disposable mucus recovery unit”, also known as a box of Kleenex.

Leo presents exemplary communications lessons from Hemingway, M.L. King, Wolfe and Lasch, but draws his greatest personal inspiration from John Madden, the everyman (American) football commentator. He refers to Vonnegut’s concept of “background music” — a personalized, human point of view — which for this blog ties back to the comment my earliest reader made about “finding your voice.”

Ironically, conversational writing is seen as a negative in academic research — too informal, atheoretic, imprecise. I’ve been told that my journal papers are “too journalistic” in their writing style: that might mean that the writing is too approachable, but that also might mean that the “what” is not wrapped in the “why” of social science theorizing. (IMHO as long as the theorizing is somewhere in the paper, the language shouldn’t matter, and obviously clearer language makes the research more useful to people in the real world).

My current endeavor is writing an academic book that is both theoretical enough for academics but also appeals to ordinary industry professionals such as communications engineers, telecom entrepreneurs, MIT engineering alumni. In a couple of months we’ll be negotiating with publishers as to how the book should be crafted to serve these conflicting goals, which could just become a matter of hiding the gobbledygook in footnotes.

The only example I’ve seen of such a book — one that is both readable and legitimate in the eyes of academics — is The Man Behind the Microchip, Leslie Berlin’s terrific biography of Robert Noyce. Noyce was the co-inventor of the integrated circuit (with Kilby) and cofounder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, who Berlin argues is most responsible for modern-day Silicon Valley. Like a good historian, Dr. Berlin got her dissertation published by Oxford University Press (my previous publisher). But she got funding from the IEEE and delivered something that can be understood by anyone interested in Silicon Valley. I’ve yet to meet her, but at some point I hope to sit down with her and ask for lessons on how she pulled it off.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Blogger envy

This week I’ve been mulling about my blog — it’s a hobby, a way to get out ideas, and a way to communicate with an audience of friends, business associates, students and former students. It’s not a business. I’ve held off on running ads (like some blogs do) on the assumption that the ugliness is not worth the token revenues. (The site is partly supported by the book/movie/CD links to Amazon).

Then today I read an Business Week article about schlocky little blogs that make money. ICanHasCheezburger, (boy that’s a stupid name due to cybersquatters) launched within a few days of my blog, is pulling an estimated $67K/year after only six months.

“Thou shalt not covet” is #10 on the all-time top ten list of rules to live by, and while this is one the most frequent temptations of modern life, blogger envy is pretty easy to overcome.

Instead, I find it interesting that there’s opportunity for late entry into a crowded field to make money. Kinda reminds me of when my friend Duane Maxwell started a software company ca. 1992 — several years after my tiny company been shut out of any significant distribution — I assumed that new entrants faced impossible odds. But he made a small chunk of change from the 1993 hit Morph — although probably less than he would have made if the Levco Prodigy business had been sold for cash rather than SuperMac stock which later proved to be worthless.

Of course there are entrepreneurial returns to first/early movers like Steve Wozniak who imagine a product category or industry that doesn’t exist. This is yet another reminder that a little hustle, moxy or just dumb luck makes it possible for the most optimistic, entrepreneurial businessperson to succeed even in relatively mature markets. As my mentor Charlie Jackson used to say, “I’d rather be lucky than good.”

Technorati Tags: blogging, entrepreneurship

Blogging as a career enhancer

Here on my blog I quote the WSJ blog, talking about someone else’s blog:

July 17, 2007, 12:41 pm
Economics Blogger Gets Senior Fed Job
Economics blogging can be good for your career. David Altig, author of the Macroblog has just been named research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Mr. Altig is currently associate research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and also teaches at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. His blog postings reflect a mainstream Fed view on key macroeconomic questions of the day.

So let’s see: he’s associate director of research of one Fed bank and gets promoted to director at another bank. While I think bloggers tend to be somewhat more interesting people :-), something tells me blogging has little to do with it.

Technorati Tags: blogging