Archive for April, 2006

Strategy: Competitive Standards Strategy

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

While competitors and customers believe in standards that are fair, impartial and open, a company’s competitive interests are often met by seeking unfair, proprietary and closely controlled advantage. Yet the open standards process is valuable to a company in broadening the potential market, building a positive market reputation and building a community of potential customers. The challenge is to participate in and drive standards in a fair, impartial and open manner while internally pursuing an aggressive competitive product, market and standards strategy. This article will discuss:

  • Value of the Standards Process;
  • Ethics and the Standards Process;
  • Challenges of the Standards Process;
  • Competitive Strategy and the Standards Process.

(more…)

Posted in Business Planning, Product Management, Standards, Strategy | Comments Off

Strategy: Lessons from Texas Hold’em

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

I don’t play cards, but I enjoy watching Texas Hold’em poker on TV. One might think that watching other people play cards would be boring. On the contrary. Poker games present a microcosm of strategy, tactics, personality traits and clues. I’ve learned a few important lessons about corporate strategy while watching these games.

  1. If you’re going to play a hand, bet based on the effect you want to have around the table (market) rather than betting based on the actual strength of your hand.
  2. Use your position at the table to lure your competition into an uncompetitive position.
  3. When you believe you have the best hand, play it for the long haul rather than just using it to grab a quick win.
  4. All you need is a chip and a chair to play. Many players have rebounded from near zero to win the tournament.
  5. Two or three solid wins will turn an also ran back into a chip leader.
  6. Play a tight game early in a tournament while evaluating the competition.
  7. Play an aggressive game once you understand the other players.
  8. When playing head-to-head with a competitor, take no prisoners.

(more…)

Posted in Business Planning, Product Management, Strategy | Comments Off

Business Planning: Software Patents

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Up until the last few years I have not been a fan of software patents. My rationale for my disdain of software patents was purely pragmatic.

  1. Developing approvable patent applications takes significant time from senior engineers which distracts them from their critical responsibility – getting products out the door with which to compete in the market.
  2. Securing market-share is what drives revenues, value to the customer drives sales to gain market-share. Patents do not contribute to success in the market.
  3. Patents do not significantly positively contribute to the valuation of a company with private or public investors.
  4. Software technology changes so quickly and the patent process takes so long, that often the patent is irrelevant by the time it is awarded.
  5. Because software was largely distributed as binary executables, monitoring for and identifying patent violations was impractical.
  6. Many, if not most, “new” ideas in software are not new, just rediscovered by younger engineers with a poor understanding of computing history. Significant prior art should be a barrier to receiving a patent on an idea.
  7. Many of the ideas that could be patented are ideas that your company needs to make ubiquitous in the market so that you can sell value-added solutions across the entire market, not just to a niche proprietary market.

I have had a change of heart. Each of the points above is still true. But reality in the software world is that if you don’t patent your idea, someone else will. Then where will you be?

(more…)

Posted in Business Planning, Engineering, Product Management | Comments Off

Strategy: The Palladium Print System

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

In 1986, within a few weeks of joining Digital Equipment Corporation as an Enterprise Management Architect, I was tossed a “simple” assignment of resolving a distributed queuing problem between VMS, Ultrix and the new line of LPS networked laser print servers. Customers were complaining that print jobs were not being printed in exact time-stamp order, with suspicion that one operating system was being given precedence over the other operating system. Since there was a bit of contention between the VMS proponents and the Ultrix proponents, the problem needed to be corrected to avoid internecine fighting within the customer-base. The real problem was with the lack of a coherent distributed queuing strategy between multiple print servers (each of which pre-queued a small number of jobs at a time) and multiple client OS printer queues. As anyone with experience standing in line at the bank knows, it can be a crap shoot who gets to a teller first when there are multiple lines to multiple tellers.

Solving the problem required more than a simple fix to the LPS and OS queuing systems. The solution was a new model for distributed printing across the networked printer and software product lines. So, I joined Tom Hastings from the Printer Division and colleagues from across engineering, program management and marketing to define a common Print Systems Model for the corporation.

(more…)

Posted in Standards, Strategy, War Story | Comments Off