I compiled my thoughts on the primary challenges the United States faces in the coming decade, and ways to overcome them, here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/facingthefuture.pdf

The primary focus in this collection is on domestic challenges, although some geopolitical issues are addressed.

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It’s often quoted folk-wisdom that climbing stairs adds years to your life. That’s interesting, since the goal of human civilization, once past the creation of the civilization itself and aside from war, has largely been the elimination of all possible effort associated with life.

From elevators to Google search, anything that eliminates effort is rewarded; from rotary dial phones to manual crank car windows, anything that adds effort is penalized. Day by day, year by year, more and more effort is removed from life, leaving more and more effortless life, more and more elevator rides through existence.

Is there a price to pay for that?

Does having a few staircases to climb every day add the level of striving and exertion required for humans to be healthy, both mentally and physically?

What about on a societal scale?

When societies have no major challenges to overcome, no credible common goal they are collectively striving to achieve, no literal or figurative staircase to climb, they inevitably disintegrate.

How many staircases can we eliminate before we as individuals, and collectively as a society, lose what we need to be healthy and stay alive?

Have we already collectively moved out of our 4th floor walkup? And, if so, how much longer before the effects overwhelm us?

Asked another way, if we’re no longer climbing the stairs of individual and collective challenge, are we instead fat, happy and riding the elevator, merely waiting to get off at a higher floor, unprepared for what awaits us? Or, are we instead hurtling down the elevator shaft to the depths below, blissfully unaware we’ve traded what we need to survive and thrive as individuals and as a society for the ease of an effort- free, ignorance-is-bliss, abbreviated existence?

The entrepreneur who told me of his father is 83. He’s looking for another startup. He wants to be climbing stairs. He wants a 4th floor walkup.

Which are you looking for: the stairs or the elevator?

Which is your country looking for?

First, in a story in MSN Money: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/FindDealsOnline/big-discounts-on-little-pleasures.aspx

Second, in a story on FoxNews: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2010/04/16/rv-travel-beginners/

The Fox story included a link to our Travel web site, www.HackneysTravel.com, which was nice of them to include. I haven’t checked the traffic levels on the site yet to see if they spiked or not.

More than 70 percent of corporate change efforts fail.

Humans hate change.

It’s a simple fact of life. There isn’t any easy way around it. In general, humans hate change.

That rule extends beyond individuals into groups of humans: families, tribes, organizations, companies, communities and nations. Humans hate change.

As individuals and groups, we tend to get locked into a way of doing things, a set of perceptions and a set of expectations. Anything that forces us to change anything about what we consider normal is usually resisted.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence for the need for change, we will resist change. For example, the majority of people who suffer heart attacks do not make long term changes in their lifestyles to eliminate or limit factors that contribute to heart disease. In other words, even when it’s a matter of life and death, humans hate change so much they won’t change even to save their own lives.

There are university degree programs in change management; multiple national and global professional associations of practicing change management consultants; countless thousands of trained, certified and degreed change management practitioners and a cornucopia of books, videos, workshops and tutorials on implementing change. In spite of all this learning and all these resources, there has been relatively little improvement in change rates in humans or groups of humans.

Why is this so?

The reason humans and groups of humans are so poor at making changes is that there is actually a very small window of opportunity for change in humans and groups of humans.

Most people and organizations consider themselves open to change. You could not begin to count the number of leaders who promote a culture of openness to change and constant improvement. Although this makes for good public relations, in reality, humans and groups of humans are typically open to and accepting of change only during a very small portion of time relative to their overall existence.

(click for larger image)

The lifecycle of humans and groups of humans, such as companies and countries, consists of cycles, cyclic periods of relative growth and shrinkage. During these cycles, humans and groups of humans such as companies and countries spend most of their time blocked off from being open to and accepting of change.

During growth periods, humans, companies and countries are in the cocoon of the Curse of Success. Everything is going great, so there is no need to be open to any external inputs, regardless of source. It is useless to attempt to provide advice, guidance or predictions of future challenges to humans, companies or countries during this period. From their perspective, they are succeeding, so they have no need of improvement; they are obviously the single and sole source of their success, so others have nothing to offer that could possibly be of value to them.

When growth slows, complacency sets in. Humans, companies and countries consider this a brief lull before inevitable growth returns. They use this period to relax and recover from the exertions of the high growth period. Again, it is useless to attempt to provide any suggestions for improvements or warnings of coming challenges during this period. From their point of view, they just had a huge run of success. If anyone should be offering advice, it is they who should be instructing others; their success had nothing to do with external factors or the overall environment; success was due to their unique combination of talents and abilities.

When things turn downward, humans, companies and countries engage in a long period of denial. During this period they attempt to apply solutions to past problems to the new challenges they face. They will continue to cycle through previous solutions to past problems until they pass through the baseline. Only then will they consider the possibility that they are facing new challenges that their old solutions won’t overcome.

Once they are well and truly lower than the baseline where they started, they will panic and desperately apply any possible solution in an effort to return to the sweet days of growth and the lazy afternoons of complacency. This period is when individuals, companies and countries attempt “silver bullet” solutions, magic cures and radical reorganizations, often leading to outright failure. This period is a fertile market for purveyors of quackery, flim-flam artists, con men and get-rich-quick schemes on the individual and small group level and seemingly simple solutions to complex problems at the large group to country scale.

If they survive the panic phase, they will finally, albeit briefly, be open to and accepting of real change.

Real change requires real work. It requires real changes in processes, perceptions, activities, structures and organization. As such, humans and groups of humans attempt to limit the amount of real change as much as possible. During this period, they are enthusiastic about the concepts of change, but very resistant to fully adopting and implementing the nuts-and-bolts reality of complete change. If they succeed in not fully changing, they guarantee that they will revisit the downward slope and panic phase shortly.

As soon as humans and groups of humans sense a shift in direction from plunging ever downward to leveling out, change stops. Lip service, platitudes and posters regarding change may still linger, but real change, complete change, ceases immediately.

The next step in the cycle is incorrect attribution of causality. For individuals or groups that survive the terrifying dive to near oblivion only to pull up just as they were staring directly at disaster, the only possible cause of their success is themselves. They immediately begin the process of self-congratulation and self-reinforcement of all the things they did right to save themselves. As they begin to experience growth, this loop becomes self-enabling, self-certifying and self-accelerating. The more they experience success, the more entrenched the legends of how they survived and triumphed over adversity become. The long drop off the cliff, the panic, the terror all fade into dim memories as they pass upward through the baseline and wall themselves off in the cocoon of the Curse of Success.

And the cycle begins anew.

As you can see, the window of opportunity, the period of time, when people are open to and accepting of change is actually extremely limited. That is the reason why humans and groups of humans are so miserable at effecting change in their lives, their tribes, their communities, their companies and their countries.

Where are you in this cycle?

Where is your tribe, your community and your company in this cycle?

And, of critical importance right now, where is your country in this cycle?

*******

Sources:

• Texas A&M University
• Harvard Business Review
• Canadian Medical Association
• Enterprise Group, Ltd. www.egltd.com

The equity split was Wozniak 45%, Jobs 45% and Wayne 10%.

Wozniak recalls, “Steve had 45 percent of this partnership, I had 45 percent, and Ron had 10 percent, because both of us agreed that we could trust him to resolve any dispute, and we would trust his judgment.”

So what ever happened to Ron Wayne, a guy who had 10% founding equity in Apple?

Wozniak relates, “I had no money and Steve had no money. We didn’t own cars, we didn’t have savings accounts, we didn’t have houses. So Ron Wayne figured they’d come after him for his golden nuggets that he kept under his mattress. (He actually tells me it was in a safe-but he was afraid they’d come and get his gold.) So he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10 percent of Apple to [us] for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300-but   a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch him.”

Apple’s market capitalization this morning is $181.7 billion, with a B. If Ron Wayne had stayed around (and assuming no dilution), his 10 percent of Apple would be worth $18 billion. With a B.

Fear, thy name is Ron Wayne.

Sources:

• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• Yahoo! Finance

Even though we all know this story and can intellectually recognize that it is a required component to make a capitalistic economic system work, when push comes to shove, or more realistically, padlocks come to factory gates, things get a lot tougher. When long-standing, treasured companies die, such as Maytag, it is traumatic, especially for the local communities.

If they are big enough or politically well connected, governments sometimes step in and prop up dying businesses. In the last year we’ve seen multiple examples of this in vehicle manufacturing, insurance, financial services and banking. But even while entire economies are distorted by artificial means, the market keeps changing and creative destruction keeps happening.

As an example, consider these two ranked lists of the world’s highest market value companies in the technology, media and telecom segments from 1994 and 2009.

(Click on image to view full size)

Note that only 12 companies made both lists. Fully 60 percent of the world’s leading companies in 1994 disappeared from the top 30 list by 2009, and in some cases, disappeared altogether.

In addition, entire market segments shifted, with media sliding from 15 to 5 percent of the total market value in 15 years.

More significant to those outside that industry, the Asia/Pacific region rose from a trivial 1.63 to a second place 17.02 percent of total market value. Along the way, the Asia/Pacific region eclipsed Europe and is well on its way to overtaking North America.

What drives these massive changes? Along with global shifts associated with the rise of China, fundamental chapters of the evolution of technology and its implementation have repeatedly fed into and accelerated the creative destruction cycle.

We are currently in our fifth primary cycle of computing technology:

1. Mainframe computers
2. Minicomputers
3. Personal computers
4. Desktop Internet
5. Mobile Internet

In the first four cycles, there were clear winners, companies that dominated the cycle and realized huge market valuations. For instance, Unisys did very well in the mainframe cycle, DEC in the minicomputer cycle, Compaq in the personal computer cycle and Netscape in the Desktop Internet cycle. As you will notice, none of those companies is currently dominant. In fact, with the exception of Unisys, none even exists today.

Over the last 50 years there is only one company that has done well through all cycles, ranging from near monopoly to significant player: IBM.

How did they do it? For one, they reinvented the company on a regular basis, breaking apart entrenched and crusted cultures and business divisions. And secondly, they never stopped investing in research and development.

As an example of that commitment to research, IBM ranks number one in U.S. patents awarded in 2009.

As you’ll notice, six of ten of the top U.S. patent producers were in the 2009 top 30 valued companies ranking.

While there is no way to guarantee that any company can and will survive the changes from internal market cycles, such as the rise of the mobile internet, and external influences, such as the rise of China, constant innovation and invention has a proven track record over the last 50 years with IBM.

However, history has taught us that innovation and invention, in and of itself, is not enough. Kodak invented digital photography but the inertia of Kodak’s business model based on analog photography prevented them from capitalizing on it. Xerox invented the personal computer, graphical user interfaces, the mouse and the Ethernet, among other things, but Xerox’s business and sales model inertia rooted in leasing high profit margin copiers to large corporations prevented them from capitalizing on any of those world-shaping innovations.

Invention is one thing. Changing corporate culture to leverage those inventions is quite another. Companies that demonstrate the courage of vision and the ability to execute constant alteration of their business model to leverage new invention and innovation significantly increase their chances for ongoing success.

There are only two things for certain:

1. Creative destruction of companies and market segments will continue as long as capitalism exists.
2. The top 30 market valuation list of technology, media and telecom companies will look different in 2024 than it does today.  

It will be very interesting to see if IBM, or any of the other survivors from 1994, appear on that list.

*****

Sources:

• IFI Patent Intelligence
• Morgan Stanley
• FactSet

“If they didn’t pay me, I’d do this for free.” – Harry Cabluck

Have you ever had a job in your life where you felt like that? Have you ever invested your time and energy into a career where you literally couldn’t wait to get up in the morning?

Few people have that opportunity. I feel very fortunate that I’ve had more than one.

Many people get exposed to a job early in life and do some variation of that same job the rest of their lives, especially in the trades. Others pick a college major at age 18 or 19 for reasons that often have little to do with their interests, skills or abilities and more to do with factors related to friends or romantic pursuits. They end up with a degree unrelated to their interests or stuck in that career track for the rest of their lives. Others, especially in times like these, take any job that’s available, and as long as the paychecks clear the bank, they stick to it. Others get on a job or career track they don’t intend to pursue for a lifetime but are subsequently locked in by responsibilities such as loans, marriage, mortgages, and children.

In all these cases, it is not unusual for people to wake up one day and realize they are unhappy in their jobs and careers, but feel trapped there due to age, education or skills, unable to seek any alternatives because the barriers to change are too high.

Harry Cabluck was fortunate to discover photography as a young boy, introduced via his uncle’s darkroom, just as I was. Harry will be 72 in March, 2010 and is still going strong, still enjoying every day that he gets to do what he enjoys most: making pictures. Very few people discover what they were put on this earth to do in sixth grade like Harry did. Many people wake up most mornings dreading what they have to spend that day doing; they spend their days, weeks and years just grinding it out.

That daily grind takes a toll. It grinds down your spirit, your intellect, your dreams, your personality, your energy and your relationships. Often too late you realize that the ablative material of that transaction is your soul. Often too late you look into the mirror and don’t recognize who is looking back.

Those who do often ask the mirror, “What happened to those dreams? What happened to those ideals? What happened to that energy? What happened to that lust for life?”

That’s where I sometimes enter the picture. The primary professional things I’ve continued to actively do during my sabbatical have been life and entrepreneurial coaching. During my sabbatical years, I’ve spent a lot of time with people who are adrift in their lives or are searching for which entrepreneurial dream to pursue and how to pursue it.

For both groups one of my initial questions is usually, “What would you be doing with your life if you didn’t need money?” For many, that is a question they have never seriously considered. It is a tougher question than most people think. It’s tougher because I relate to them the lessons from my friends who have achieved financial independence and still woken up with the same questions my clients have: “What am I doing? What is the purpose in this?”. The people doing the searching then often realize that money, in and of itself, is not the answer. For people who choose to be productive, there is usually a finite limit to the number of days they can spend lounging on a beach or twiddling their thumbs admiring an alpine view.

The question, “What would you be doing with your life if you didn’t need money?” is an open door to finding your equivalent to Harry Cabluck’s photography, something you’d do for free, even if they didn’t pay you.

The challenge is that the answer to that question is, unless you are a rare specimen such as Harry, not a lifetime answer. Life is comprised of chapters, and people usually have a different answer to that question during different chapters. People who lack the ability to give themselves permission to change and attempt to lock themselves into that answer for a lifetime often end up in the same place as before: unhappy. Your life and your interests, desires and needs will change with every chapter, so it’s important to realize that the answer you give to that question today may not be the same answer you’d give in the next chapter of your life.

As an illustration, think about what your answer would have been or might be at ages 18, 24, 28, 35, 42, 50, 60 and 70. Each of those life chapters would probably yield a different answer. At a minimum, you’ll probably have three or four different answers.

For many people, their life circumstances in any of their life chapters precludes them doing what they’d do if they didn’t need money. In that case, it is critically important to include elements of what you’d like to do in the life you have. For instance, you may answer that if you didn’t need money, you’d be a painter of abstract art. However, you’ve got student loans, a mortgage, two car payments, taxes, homeowner’s association dues, a cable bill, an even bigger mobile phone bill, two kids and another on the way. And, you’re an accountant.

The delta between your life reality and what you’d like to do if you didn’t need money can be a constant irritant, and if left unaddressed is likely to degrade your professional and personal life. In this example, it would be good to get a membership at your local art museum, or if you don’t have one, plan an annual pilgrimage to one. Take an evening course in art or art history at your local community college. Participate in online communities related to abstract art. It is critical to feed the need of your true interests and passions.

The rule is: Allocate and invest energy into your true passion or you will suffer two tragic fates—your passion will wither and your spirit will wither with it.

For people choosing new directions for their career, either voluntarily or due to layoffs (RIFs, redundancies), it is important to revisit the answer to the question as you plot your next job or career. If you consciously put yourself into a job or career that does not align with your answer to the question, you will build resentments that will either consume you, your career or those around you (often those you love most) or all three. The reason this happens is that you are spending most of your life investing time and energy into something that is not aligned with or advancing your life priorities.

To avoid that fate, start with a list of your life priorities. This list is not about work, work skills or work activities. It is a list of what you consider most important in your life, such as honesty, integrity, marriage, family, friends, health, freedom, control of destiny, challenge, growth, fulfillment, meaningfulness, creative outlet, financial reward, intrinsic reward, travel, etc. 

Once you’ve got the list, apply a weighting of importance to each priority on the list. For instance, if you feel that being challenged is the most important thing, give that a ten. If travel is half as important as challenge, then give that a five, if health is also half as important as challenge, give that a 5 as well, and so on.

Next, rate each of your job or career opportunities in each of your priority categories. For instance, if you are considering a high tech startup, then rate each one of your priorities in that scenario. For a high tech startup, travel will often be high, so that may rate a seven; growth and challenge would also be high, so they may rate a seven or eight; and the required commitment and long hours of a high tech startup means that marriage, family and friends typically suffer, so they would likely rate a two or three.

After you build out a grid of each opportunity against each of your weighted priorities, you can easily rank those opportunities based on your life priorities. What you find may surprise you as jobs or careers that you wouldn’t think would be right for you rise to the top. For instance, you may consider yourself best suited for a jet-set, high technology startup, but you find that opportunity is diametrically opposed to your life priorities of marriage, family, friends, community involvement and health. Instead, your ranked opportunity list may show that running a local ice cream truck or working in a hardware store fits your priorities best. These results can be surprising and troubling, but they are very rarely wrong when it comes to identifying the opportunity that best aligns with what your priorities are during this chapter of your life.

The point of either scenario, maintaining an element in your life of what you’d do if you didn’t need money or pursuing a job or career that matches your priorities during this chapter of your life, is to move you closer to being like Harry, being someone who can truthfully say “If they didn’t pay me, I’d do this for free.”

For many people, the secret to happiness is closing the gap between where you are now and where you’d be if you were doing it for free.

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Not seeing any need to rush into this, I took my time before committing. I especially felt there was no need to rush into this since when you’ve been away for a while and you come back here, everyone looks very, ummm, tethered to their smartphones.

Nonetheless, I could see that given we were going to be here for a while, I might as well jump in, especially considering it would help me to evaluate opportunities for a few business models I was considering.

The first trigger point was when Steph was unpacking her office stuff out of storage and found her old Palm. She was giddy, since she was looking for a way to have her calendar with her while she was out of the house. Instead of either a) installing and supporting the LG application for her laptop that would synch her ancient cell phone to Outlook, or b) installing and supporting the ancient Palm application that would synch her equally ancient Palm, I chose c) and bought her an iPhone, which, since it’s from Apple, doesn’t require any support and never fails. Ever. At least that’s what I told her.

It was all enlightened self interest. It would allow me to play around with the iPhone OS and apps, as well as have one less thing to support in her information and productivity environment. Admittedly, that would be along the lines of one less grain of sand on the beach, but every little bit helps when it comes to supporting Steph and her digital domain.

But for me, after getting her iPhone set up and working with it a bit, I was still undecided. I also played around with a few Blackberries of friends, relatives and at the Verizon store.

While doing research on the mobile market in general, it became clear that the iPhone market was stuffed with existing applications and business models. If not mature, it was certainly crowded.

The same can be said for the Blackberry market: very robust, very mature, very stable.

So both of these options looked more than viable from the smartphone standpoint, but not very exciting in the market segment upside department.

Both were great devices, enthusiastically, even fervently supported by their patrons. OK, yes, some iPhone owners do cross the line into full-on, post-Kool-Aid, cult levels of rabid to violent defensiveness. Strand Consult, in a recent analyst report, even compares fervent Apple defenders, including some of the press, to Stockholm Syndrome hostages. But that didn’t put me completely off of the iPhone because I personally know several iPhone users who do not foam at the mouth. Most of the time.

In the end, my bottom line evaluation was:

• iPhone – great UI, good to very good ease of use, more apps that you could ever wade through, ubiquitous accessories, and it includes the fruit logo guaranteed to gain you acceptance in certain quarters.
• Blackberry – rock solid OS, secure platform, badge of honor in any corporate meeting room, fledgling app store and the best physical I/O device in the business (depending on the model).

Touch decision. But I had to choose one or the other.

So, my decision was: neither.

Instead, I waited until early November and bought an Android OS based Motorola Droid when they launched. I spent a few weeks with it, exploring the device, the apps, the OS and the user experience. Three days short of my 30 day cut off to return it, I mailed in the rebate form and locked on the typical American mobile carrier service agreement handcuffs.

Like the iPhone and the Blackberry, the droid is not perfect. However, unlike the iPhone and Blackberry, it’s a high growth market segment with a lot of opportunity. And it’s got some “the new new thing” buzz around it.

Biggest upsides:

• Verizon network; no comparison between the real-world network experience between AT&T & Verizon, and that’s not even including the 3G aspect. AT&T itself admits its calls in the NY City metro area are dropped at higher rates than its internal standards. And that’s in New York City for goodness sake. Imagine what it’s like out in the hinterlands that lie between the Hudson and east LA.
• Open platform, and it has been rooted for those so inclined.
• Open development environment and market; no mysterious and arcane application screening process by Apple app store gatekeepers (although I understand the business reasons why they do this, and I would too if I was in their position).
• Great screen.
• Multitasking (multiple open applications)
• HyperGeek developer community and nascent tribe (read: If I need to recruit some Ruby On Rails developers I might gain a little street cred by flashing my droid).

Biggest downsides:

• Verizon network; uses CDMA, so unless I’m going to one of 40 or so countries that have some CDMA network coverage, it’s worthless overseas as a phone.
• Lacks the trackball/trackpad of the BB, which is, IMO, by far the best user I/O device in any smartphone. Ever.

Biggest surprises:

• I thought I had to have a physical keyboard but use it very little.
• The small screen size of a smartphone vs. a laptop is less limiting than I anticipated for most things I do.
• I’ve been using it for reading more than my Kindle. Especially useful for couch surfing, research, newsfeeds, etc.

Realities:

• The droid is not an iPhone and never will be. The iPhone wins the ease of use and optimized customer experience hands down. The result of this is the anti-iPhone (as in everything it is not) marketing campaign. I think the droid team did a pretty good job picking a marketing strategy. There was very little potential in anything other than an “uncola” approach.
• The droid is basically a tribeless device. You are not going to automatically gain entrance into the cool hipster or locked-in corporate type tribes with this smartphone. While researching smartphones I found a story about a guy who went to D.C. for a new job and was told that he’d have to swap his iPhone for a Blackberry or it would destroy his career chances. The same would probably work in reverse if he was going to certain careers in LA or NY City. The only place the droid is cool right now is at meetups of Android OS / app developers. And that will last precisely until the next coolest Android OS phone hits the market.  

Observations:

• Smartphones are a little about telephony and a lot about a pretty powerful handheld, networked, mobile computing and media device with significant levels of internal telemetry.
• The potential of this intersection point of capabilities (telemetry, geolocation, computing, media, network & communication) have not yet been even partially explored. Yes, even with the iPhone’s 100k apps. Not even close.

The numbers:

            Global GSM users: ~4,000,000,000 (4 billion)

            Global CDMA users:  ~423,000,000 (423 million)

Apple iPhone apps:  >100,000

Android apps:            ~20,000

Android apps market: 37.7% paid, 62.3% free.

Projected sales for Motorola droid between launch 9 November and year end: 1,000,000.

Smartphone OS sales in North America, Q2 2009 (prior to droid launch):

1. Blackberry, 5,500,000
2. Apple 2,600,000
3. Windows 984,700
4. Symbian (Nokia) 383,600
5. Android 380,000
6. Other 480,300

Global mobile sales, Q3 2009:       308.9 million, 0.1% increase year over year

Global smartphone sales, Q3 2009: 41.0 million, 12.8% increase year over year

Global mobile manufacturers’ market share, Q3 2009:

• Nokia: 36.7% (down 1.5%)
• Samsung: 19.6% (up 2.5%)
• LG: 10.3% (up 2.5%)
• Motorola: 4.5% (down ~4%)
• Sony Ericsson: 4.3% (down ~4%)

Global smartphone manufacturers’ market share, Q3 2009:

• Nokia: 39.3% (down 3%)
• Research In Motion (RIM)(Blackberry): 20.8% (up 4.9%)
• Apple: 17.1% (delta not reported) (7.04 million units in Q3)
• HTC: 6.5% (delta not reported)
• Samsung: 3.2% (delta not reported)

Futures:

• An Intel backed 4G standard named WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is currently rolling out in limited markets in the U.S., including here in Austin, Texas (see photo). A competing standard known as LTE (Long Term Evolution) will begin rollout in 2010 to 2011. U.S. WiMax provider Clear states their speed is 6 Mb/sec (mega bits per second) downstream and 1 Mb/sec upstream on its 2.5 Ghz (gigahertz) network. European LTE 4G system provider TeliaSonera promises speeds of 20 to 80 Mb/sec on its 2.6 Ghz network. Actual LTE data rate will depend upon the frequency at which your local system operates. For instance, Verizon has committed to cover the entire U.S. market with LTE at 700 Mhz (megahertz), which will probably deliver lower data speeds than higher frequency band systems. LTE is the clear winner in this global standards battle, even though it will be later to market, as it has majority support among infrastructure and device manufacturers, and carrier networks.
• It wasn’t that long ago that we all got very excited about moving from a 10 Mb/sec hard wired network to the then-new, blazing 100 Mb/sec copper network. A global standard 20 to 80 Mb/sec. mobile network added to a two to five years increase in computing power at the handheld smartphone level adds up to some very interesting possibilities.
• The mobile development market will remain fragmented. As if the world needed it, Samsung recently announced it would build its future smartphones on its own, proprietary OS named bada. Consequently, the cross-platform development frameworks space (Rhomobile, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, etc.), which implies, if not promises, “build once, run everywhere,” will continue to exhibit rapid growth. Acquisition of the leading players may happen prior to IPO, with appropriate suitors being the hot question of the moment.
• In addition, mobile fragmentation is not just limited to the OS, it also includes the delivery of media, specifically video. In the long term, HTML 5 may handle video adequately all on its own. Prior to that, the pending release of an updated Adobe Flash player browser plugin will help it be fairly mobile ubiquitous. However, Flash will never reach the 96.71% market penetration it enjoys on the web on smartphones, if for no other reason simply because Apple won’t allow it on the current iPhone platform as a browser component, although they will allow standalone iPhone apps to display Flash based content. Consequently, video Content Delivery Networks (CDN) that handle all necessary scaling, formatting, presentation and delivery to all mobile platforms from a single segment of video media will remain viable for the near- to mid-term.
• The majority of the world’s mobile users are using 2G phones on 2G networks. The highest growth rates in mobile are at the high end with smartphones and at the low end with very low cost plans, such as $2 or less per month, especially in India. While most people concentrate on opportunities at the high end, the numbers on the low end (3.5 billion users) are staggering. It’s important to remember that even 2G phones can do text.

The Clear WiMax marketing balloon drifts over our neighborhood on local market launch day morning, 10 December, 2009.

Sources: The Register, Strand Consult, Gartner, Cnet, Wall Street Journal, Wired, AndroLib.com, 3G Americas, StatOwl.com. Gartner press release is here: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1224645

In advertising, marketing’s shock troops, the goal is to create the propensity to buy.

I just received this advertisement from CompUSA.com via email.

Read that ad copy carefully.

Does that ad create the propensity to buy something–anything–from CompUSA.com?

In marketing, perfection is the baseline. First you deliver perfection, on time. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.

But first, you deliver perfection.

If you don’t, instead of creating the propensity to buy, you create the propensity to consider the brand incapable, if not incompetent.

Which pretty much sums up my thoughts about CompUSA.com right about now.

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Read this short web page about a new technology: http://www.agilenano.com/technology.htm

What would you build with that technology? What are your product ideas?

My friend Scot Mortier, an assistant District Attorney suggested, “Interesting…so, applications from making cars safer to bomb-proofing buildings? Then, if one can find a way to allow the slow release of the energy absorbed, a battery-like energy source? Better running shoes if you can coordinate both absorption and release (to match your stride, let’s say)? And what about the applications for roadways? Both longer lasting (because the particles could eliminate freeze thaw expense) and the possibility that it could wind up being an energy source once the trigger to release it is found? Wow! Great possibilities! Medical applications for aging joints?”

And therein lies the challenge for the budding entrepreneur. There is no shortage of ideas out there, especially for game-changing technologies.

But even if your invention or idea is more pedestrian than something that could be as fundamentally revolutionary as AgileNano’s, you still face the same type of challenge: picking one market and pursuing it.

Almost every first time entrepreneur, and even many experienced entrepreneurs, attempts to develop multiple markets and multiple product and service offerings with their new business. Being entrepreneurs, they see nothing but possibilities, and with every possibility a “natural” market for their new idea, their new product or service.

Along the way they will chase dollars, meaning wherever a potential customer indicates they might be interested if only this or that change was made, then the entrepreneur will invest precious resources making this or that change in their product or service for the faint prospect of a sale. The end result of chasing dollars is inevitably failure. A young business has very few resources, and if you expend those resources chasing every possible sales opportunity, regardless of how tangential they are to your business plan and core strategy, you will never generate enough revenue to replenish your resources, much less make a profit.

The analogy is riding horses. If you’ve got a dozen horses that you need to move from your ranch across the prairie to town, you do not jump from one horse to another along the way. Trying to be all things to all people, all things to all potential markets, all things to all potential customers, is the same as trying to jump from one horse to another to another all the way to your goal. That will never work. You’ll inevitably fall off, and that will not be a good day.

Just as in moving horses, when you are starting a business you need to pick a horse and ride it. Pick a single opportunity space, a single market, a single set of characteristics that comprise an ideal customer. Pick that one, single, individual goal and pursue it relentlessly.

Pick a horse and ride it.

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