The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Two Thoughts on 'The Hardware Revolution Is Upon Us And Why It Matters'

Jon Callaghan of True Ventures has written an excellent article where he argues that a new hardware revolution is upon us, and that it is destined to be a game-changer. It's a great piece, and well worth a read. 

Here is an excerpt:

Almost exactly six years ago, Apple launched the first iPhone. It was a small device that many dismissed as a toy. In reality Steve put a supercomputer in our pocket — we just didn’t know it. And like super computers before, it came with immense capabilities and brought about an opportunity to rethink, reimagine and reinvent how we live, work, create and consume. Today, smartphones (and tablet devices) sell by the hundreds of millions.

Cheap processors, cheaper memory, and even cheaper sensors means it’s a great time for people who like to tinker with hardware to tinker. Platforms like Kickstarter and Quirky de-risk production, identify features and customers, and do so before the first tool is made. Wireless broadband is ubiquitous, and military grade technology is available at RadioShack. The manufacture and design of products and devices has changed forever. Building factories is no longer a prerequisite for building products. Add to the mix emergent technologies such as 3D printing and inexpensive laser cutters that put prototyping capabilities onto a kitchen table, and we suddenly are facing an extraordinary revolution in hardware-based innovation.

I wholeheartedly agree with his assertions, but I do want to put a bow around one of Jon's most salient points; namely, that building hardware is hard. Make that HARD with capital letters.

Specifically, there are two key 'gotchas' about the hardware business that most aspiring entrepreneurs get blindsided by.

Before I get into them, let me establish my "hardware chops." In my career, I have:

• Hand-built my own hardware systems (CafeNet: Internet access terminals)
• Worked in the network hardware business (Tribe Communications: Internet infrastructure)
• Invested in hardware startups (Whistle Communications: Internet appliances)
• Advised hardware startups (Square Connect: Universal remote control gateways)
• Founded a hardware device management software company (Rapid Logic: unified device management tools)
• Built a cross-platform system for creating native mobile apps (Unicorn Labs) 

In other words, my take is based upon a 360-degree perspective on the hardware business, and it's lifecycle from a make, bake and take to market perspective. 

So why hardware is so...HARD?

One is the simple truth that hardware guys speak a different language and come from a different planet than software guys, and vice versa.

This generally translates into each party trying to abstract out the other, which often leads to lowest common denominator solutions, or worse, products where the target user credulously wonders, "Were these things designed to work TOGETHER, or just to irritate the user?"

The next wave implies developers having a sense of there being one composite whole (hardware, software, service, tools, manageability), and the team, culture and ecosystem being oriented accordingly. One can see this dynamic at work in Apple's iOS vs. Google's Android.

Two is that specifically because you are dealing with physical devices (as opposed to the wholly digital 1s and 0s of software), the question of channels for discovery, selling, distribution and support are inordinately more complex, with many more points of failure, than with software alone.

This underscores an indelible truth about indirect channels (like retail, amazon, etc.) that many fail to grok; namely, that the channel can NOT solve your selling and support challenges until YOU figure them out first. It's like trying to tell the blind how to see when you can't see yourself.

Food for thought.

Related:

1. Three Takeaways from the WWDC Keynote: How Apple Got its Groove Back
2. Six Takeaways from the Google IO Keynote
3. Ruminations on The Mobile Native Cloud: An Extensible Computing Model for Post - PC
4. Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard

 

NIKEiD and the Uber-ization of Global Logistics

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

"You mean, I simply push this button, and it just shows up?"

**It**, in this case, is the magical Uber Black Car; magical being relative to the pedestrian, unreliable yellow taxi.

What Uber did in re-thinking the gray space between taxis and private car services is instructive.

Logistically speaking, they rejiggered the following:

1. The Ordering Process (it's push-button simple via an app; no interminable waiting on hold for a dispatcher)
2. The Transparency of Availability (you can literally see how many cars are nearby, and how quickly your car will arrive)
3. The Nature of the Transaction (no money ever comes out of your pocket; you never have to think about the tip again)
4. The Reliability of Your Order (you are notified on your mobile when Uber arrives, the driver confirms that you are indeed the orderer; no more pickups that don't show up, or taxis 'stolen' by pedestrians on the street)
5. Your Relationship to the Driver (most drivers feel like entrepreneurs; Uber is a new revenue source for them; all drivers are identifiable, and subject to being rated and reviewed)

Part of the magic of Uber is that the company is able to create this transformative experience without owning any of the cars or hiring a fleet of drivers.

Given the above, is it any wonder then that "uber-ization" has become my go-to term for industry re-invention through new combinations of design, user experience, workflow and logistics -- as enabled by broadband, mobile and the cloud. 

NIKEiD: Re-Thinking What a Shoe Can Be

The power of great technological waves and re-invention in general is not merely that they change how things are made, or what they cost. 

Rather, it's that they change our concept of what is possible, and what a given medium can be.

In the realm of motion pictures, adding sound (and talking) to films, completely transormed the industry.

In the case of ecommerce, the boundarly-less and friction-free nature of Amazon, has completely disrupted retail.

In the realm of mobile, building a unifed platform around iPhones, iPads, iTunes and iOS, has catalyzed the post-PC era. 

I thought about this truth yesterday, as the pair of fully customized NIKEiD shoes showed up at my door.

Not only were they beautiful (okay, beauty is in the eye of the beholder), but what left me feeling awed was the fact that what had begun as a series of push-button simple clicks in San Francisco, had traveled across the globe, navigating an unimaginably intricate manufucturing and logistics process to find its way back to my front door.

The UPS route home alone (see above) shows stops in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines, back to China, Alaska, Kentucky, Oakland, and finally, San Francisco. 

Simply magic, and I wonder how many other products, services and industries are ripe for such reinvention. 

If you are sitting in an industry where commoditization and/or disruption is your future (through de-localization, re-invention and digitization, you need to heed the words of Google CEO Larry Page.

His guidance? "I encourage more companies to do things that are outside their comfort zone. It gives you more scalability."

Food for thought.

Related:

1. Uber-ization: The art and science of reinventing an industry (GigaOM)
2. Retail needs a reboot to survive (GigaOM)
3. You say you want a revolution? It's called post-PC computing (O'Reilly)

Google Glass will soon be invisible – and the new normal (New Post @GigaOM)

“There are three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” 
– Robert Evans (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”)

I recently met up with my friend and one-time business partner, Steve Lee, who is product director on the Google Glass project, and before that, ran product management on Google Maps for Mobile.

Other than a quick tour of the device, Steve basically let me dive in, so as to experience Glass with a beginner’s mind. I won’t bother reviewing the basic capabilities and specs, which have been covered exhaustively already.

Instead I want to focus on some of the points that are in debate, and whether I believe that Glass is destined to succeed.

Glass is translucent; designed to be invisible

In “Waves of Power,” David Moschella shows how new disruptive industries begin as verticals, since the complete product solution requires one provider to deliver the whole enchilada.

The new industry continues on this path until the solutions finally reach the “good enough” stage, when the larger trend becomes horizontal orientation, so as to achieve ubiquity, commoditization and the broadest possible ecosystem. (In passing, one can see the battle between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in this light.) The endgame, so to speak, is that the technology becomes persistent, embedded and ever-present to the point of being “invisible.”

It’s a paradoxical concept to be sure. On the one hand, the technology is everywhere; how can it be invisible? On the other, it’s because it’s everywhere that we no longer think about it as exceptional – and, equally, grand solutions can anticipate and incorporate its ever-presence.

Read the full post HERE.

UPDATE: This piece has obviously struck a chord with the rank and file at GigaOM, based upon the storm of comments. Check it out.

UPDATE 2: Google just announced a bunch of third-party apps coming to the platform, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, CNN, Elle and Evernote. 

Related:

1. You say you want a revolution? It's called post-PC computing
2. Apple's segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom
3. Horizontal, Vertical and the Google Path to Riches

 

Mobile 'native' publishing: Why our concept of content must evolve in the post-PC era (O'Reilly @TOC)

One reason that industry disruptions prove so vexing to market leaders is that disruptive waves simultaneously barrel through assumptions about customer needs, industry economics and operational best practices.

Consider the case of the motion picture business, an industry that was disrupted when the “talkie” — once derided as a costly gimmick — subsumed the silent picture in the 1920s.

The takeaway from the film industry’s transition is instructive. The talkie not only changed how movies were made and the economics of the business itself, but critically, it changed our concept of what a movie could be.

In doing so, it transformed the medium forever (The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman is an excellent book on this topic).

Disrupted by digital

As we move toward a post-PC universe of 10 billion mobile devices, a similar disruption is playing out in the publishing business.

Print media is patient zero in the ongoing saga of “disrupted by digital,” an unstoppable force that has decimated one time toll road businesses like newspapers, and is threatening to squeeze out the last breaths of magazine and book publishers.

That this occurs at a time when physical bookstores are also under assault is hardly a coincidence given the tight links between publishers and bookstores on book distribution, discovery and monetization. The brutal reality is that when an industry is disrupted, the entire ecosystem feels the pain.

The rise of dynamic content services

So if publishing must evolve, what does this mean for publishers?

Most basically, it suggests that whereas static text and pictures define our current concept of publishing, in the mobile era, we need to think about what is being “published” as a native app that re-configures itself based upon the content being served. Logically, this type of system autonomously generates data.

This has significant ramifications for how such content is made, what it can do, and the underlying systems required for delivering and receiving the same.

Read the full piece at O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing by clicking HERE.

Related:

1. You say you want a revolution? It’s called post-PC computing (O'Reilly Radar)
2. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time (O'Reilly Radar)
3. Anatomy of an eBook App: Lessons learned building a Top 20 eBook App (O'Reilly Radar)

 

Introducing Play and Learn with Wallace

This short video is a superb encapsulation of what I have been working on for the past year with the good folks at Macmillan Children's Publishing, and their much beloved imprint, Priddy Books.

If you don't know them by name, Priddy is the maker of over 500 books, including First Words, ranked by Scholastic as one of the 100 Greatest Books for Kids. They have sold over 100M titles over the past decade so they really understand the early learning segment.

Working around a model known as co-creation, we called upon our own learnings from building dozens of ebooks, apps and games at Unicorn Labs, combined those learnings with the ethos and IP of Priddy, and a built that into a series of early learning apps.

These apps are delightfully fun for kids, to be sure, but in the process of play, kids develop cognitive, creative, spelling, math and drawing skills.

What's unique about the approach is that while each app can be used separately, the apps can also be "super-shuffled," or mixed together dynamically, to provide what is known as blended learning, a proven methodology that helps children learn more rapidly and more deeply.

I will write more about the system that underlies 'Play and Learn,' but in the interim, I would encourage you to watch the video, and download the app, which is free.

New titles in the series will be rolling out monthly. In fact, here's a teaser about our next title, Picture Puzzles, which launches at the end of the month.

Related:

1. Rebooting the Book (One iPad at a Time)
2. Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit

Tim Cook on the relationship between collaboration and integration to Apple's success

This Businessweek interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook is an excellent read, but I really nodded when Cook talked about Apple's unparalleled level of integration and the role that collaboration plays in their culture and organizational structure, inasmuch as it points a bow around the core thesis behind my recent GigaOM article on the age of indivisibility and integrated systems design. Here's Cook:

"You look at what we are great at. There are many things. But the one thing we do, which I think no one else does, is integrate hardware, software and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore. They just care that the experience is fantastic. So how do we keep doing that and keep taking it to an even higher level? You have to be an A-plus at collaboration."

Sounds sooo simple, yet just a tiny handful of companies on the planet have found a way to do this across products segments, product lifecycles, and do so at scale -- over a multi-year period. That's the magic of Apple.

Read the full Cook interview HERE.

Read my GigaOM piece HERE.

The Jobs Engine: On Indivisibility and Integrated Systems (GigaOM)

There is a looming sense, a dark narrative that America’s best days are behind it. Why? A clash of civilizations. A sense in many pockets of the country that we are living in a time of anomie, inequity and worry.

Everywhere you look, there is disaster. At ground zero are the remnants of a 100-year flood known as the 2008 financial crisis; it’s a flood that never completely receded.

Put another way, whether you are politically right or left, believe in trickle down or trickle up,  the hard truth is that there are few catalysts for significant job growth in America right now.

Take a look at that one great wonder and power of our age, broadband internet. In many ways it has been an engine of growth and created whole new industries. Yet it has also set off a wave of painful disruption, through the triumvirate forces of:

• Digitization: Anything that can be turned into bits, will be.
• Globalization: Where location can be rendered moot, it will be.
• Commoditization: When bits and logistics can commoditize, they will.

In its wake it has permanently broken or even destroyed multiple industries. In fact, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows quite clearly how such industries that were rocking and rolling prior to broadband are now sucking wind, including electronics stores, book stores, electronic components, employment services and information services, to name a few.

Less obvious, but equally troubling, is the fact that when these industries break it also disrupts the ecosystems that surround them as well, cascading in a domino effect. 

Here’s how it works: When an industry like print media goes sideways, not only do publishers and the employees housed within them go away, but so too do printers, production houses, delivery trucks, book stores, newsstands, book reviewers, sales reps and publicists. Worse, this hits regional hubs especially hard. And we now know those jobs are not coming back. Ever.

The immutability of this dynamic hearkens to a signature line in Oliver Stone’s ever timely, ‘Wall Street,‘ when broken trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) asks corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), “Why do you need to wreck this company?” Gekko retorts, “Because it’s wreckable, all right?”

Read the full post HERE.

UPDATE 1: Kevin Kelly, author of 'What Technology Wants' (one of the more thought-provoking books of recent years), and long time Wired writer, has written an excellent article on what he calls 'The Post-Productive Economy.' Most fundamentally, he argues that sustaining growth waves take decades to reach full bloom, yet our measures are tailored to both the wrong kinds of metrics and the wrong sense of periodicity. I think that it further underscores the truth that the strongest counters to Commoditization, Digitization and De-Localization is Integration.

Related:

1. Retail Needs a Reboot to Survive (GigaOM)
2. HP, Dell and the Paradox of the Disrupted (GigaOM)
3. Assessing the Internet: Great Creator or Better Destroyer (GigaOM)
4. The Great Reset: Why Tomorrow May Not be Better than Today

Pattern Recognition: User Interface Design; OEM Roadkill; Cheesecake Logic; Quotable

My goal is to write one 'Pattern Recognition' a week. Just the top 3-4 stories that stayed under my skin. Here's what stuck this week:

1. The Principles of User Interface Design: Many, if not most, products deliver a poor user experience (see the excellent book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum' for more fodder on this topic). While it's easy to throw out terms like 'keep it simple' or 'minimalism,' that still doesn't answer the larger question about what the guiding principles are for sound user interface and interaction design. Having built a ton of products across: A) Type (hardware, software, service, tools); B) Segment (consumer, enterprise, developers, carriers); and C) User Environment (PC, mobile, Web, network device), I thought that this article provides an excellent compass for newbies and leathered veterans alike. EXCERPT: "To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse."
   
2. OEM Roadkill Ahead: In 'The end of the road for OEMs,' Sebastian Anthony puts forth a compelling argument that the days of the hardware OEM are numbered. But, in doing so, he misses a key reason why. The simple fact is that in the post-pc era, software is a greater differentiation point than hardware. Software, as Marc Andreessen correctly notes, is eating the world, and today's hardware OEM doesn't understand software as anything other than a layer to be abstracted away. As such, this isn't the end of OEM's per se; just the end of OEM's that lack true software competency (see Acer's feckless attack on Microsoft for their hardware end-run). Bubbling under the surface, however, are hardware OEMs that natively grok software. Look to Kickstarter and other Maker-friendly spots to see the seeds of such innovation germinating.
3. Cheesecake, Chains and the Health Care Industry: In this excellent New Yorker piece, Atul Gawande looks at the processes  and management culture by which a restaurant chain like Cheesecake Factory can serve its 80M customers a year a diverse menu of fresh, high quality food at a reasonable price, and do so consistently, year-after year, and location after location. It makes Gawande wonder what the health care industry can learn from Cheesecake Factory, a great entry point to some illuminating writing. EXCERPT: "In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven’t figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital."
4. Can I get a Quote? If you have ten minutes or an hour, Fred Wilson's Fun Friday post is a group thread on favorite quotes. There are many gems, but this dandy by Teddy Roosevelt stood out for me: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

On co-creation, contests and crowdsourcing (O'Reilly Radar)

I had decided to update the branding at one of my companies, and that meant re-thinking my logo.

The creative exercise started with a logo design contest posting at 99designs, an online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design.

When it was all done, I had been enveloped by an epic wave of 200 designs from 38 different designers.

It was a flash mob, a virtual meetup constructed for the express purpose of creating a new logo. The system itself was relatively lean, providing just enough “framing” to facilitate rapid iteration, where lots of derivative ideas could be presented, shaped and then re-shaped again.

The bottom line is that based on the primary goal of designing a new logo, I can say without hesitation that the model works.

Read the full post HERE.

Related

1. Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons
2. Ruminations on MacWorld and the Future of Trade Shows
3. Creating New Synapses in the Global Brain: Notes from Foo Camp

 

Pattern Recognition: Mobile Web v. Mobile Native; TV's Blind Spot; 'Invisible' Designs

My goal is to write one 'Pattern Recognition' a week. Just the top 3-4 stories that stayed under my skin. Here's what stuck this week:

1. Mobile Web > Mobile Native > Bifurcated Native: In the continuing 'banjo duel' between Mobile Native and Mobile Web, three threads got into my bones. One, is the idea that whereas Apple has the best combined story in terms of providing BOTH a superior mobile web environment and the best mobile native platform, the reality is that their unfair, defensible advantage lies in iOS. Hence, it makes sense that Apple would boot Google from Maps, a native app, but keep them in Search, a mobile web environment, a decision that Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land called 'Containment' (in lieu of Thermonuclear). After all, Apple is not at war with mobile web, but definitely wants to WIN mobile native. Two is the fact that whereas all of the banter is that HTML5 is the great disrupter to be of all things Native, the hard truth is that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. In abandoning their HTML5 gaming ambitions, featured Facebook Platform developer Wooga cited insurmountable challenges with discovery, performance and connectivity. I guess the contender is still a pretender, but then again, I have been waiting since 1994 for Web apps to offer a caveat free application model, as opposed to merely a (quasi) universal one. Finally, the meme of what it means to be mobile NATIVE, has been buzzing in my brain since reading Fred Wilson's excellent post on the topic. I think that I have a thesis around the evolution of native apps. If the first generation of native apps were knocked as being little more than native wrapers on web functionality, and the second gen were mostly parallel to the web, what we are going to increasingly see are what I call 'Bifurcated' Native Apps. These are apps, like Instagram and Path, where the optimal creation, consumption and service-ready environment (e.g., social share + discovery) is within the native app itself, BUT one of the output methods is in a web-friendly format suitable for blogs, tweets, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn pages and the like. In other words Native first, with a 'best-practical' gateway to the web. I can see a great many application scenarios for such apps.
2. TV's Blind Spot: Peter Kakfka of AllThingsD argues that the TV business is vulnerable, but it's not with highly pirated premium shows like 'Game of Thrones,' but rather, cheap to produce, cookie-cutter reality shows. I have two takes on this one. One, "must-see" programming and live sports are the straws that stir the drink, and everything else is bundles and fillers. That's why ESPN drives Disney profits, and HBO cares not one whit that GOT is most pirated. It's the same reason that Bravo, the den of reality programming, has cultivated the hell out of their few franchises, including continuous advertising, which cost serious coin.In other words, cost reduction is not the silver bullet in itself, even if it has real prospects as a low-end disrupter. What will be a silver bullet is when the next wave of web "tv" programmers start creating media units that are native to the web/app medium, and deeply integrated from the first storyboard. Whether that means integrating community into the programming, designing in locality handles, reinvigoration of live to create a new shared experience, game-ification, or something else, that's the bucket, and it's a different animal, in the same way that TV was not simply radio with pictures. So far, what we've seen are loosely-coupled approaches that I view similarly to the dog that walks on its hind legs. Interesting, but nothing that anyone would conclude was designed from the ground up to be that way. As an analog, think of the distinction between our concept of the smart phone pre-iPhone (see Blackberry) and post (see iPhone, iPad and beyond). TV has a long way to go in that regards.
3. Integrated to the Point of Invisibility: One of the books that has deeply influenced my thinking about industry, economy and technology models is the book 'Waves of Power' by David Moschella. In WOP, the author shows how technology evolves in waves, such that in the initial wave, the technology is so new, complex and brittle that the only way to deliver a real solution is to be verticalized. As the technology matures and becomes understood, the trend is towards commoditization. Here, the best model is to be horizontal, so as the leverage the broadest swath of innovation, and to be able to focus on the narrowest slice of differentiation, where your margins will come from. One can see how the mainframe and mini was the first wave of computing, and the PC era was the second wave. What's interesting is that Moschella, who wrote the book way back in 1997, goes on to show how the wave after horizontal is the embedded wave where the technology becomes so pervasive and the best practices are so well-formed that computing becomes both ubiquitous and invisible. Apple's dominance is best understood in this light. In an industry organized around 'speeds and feeds' and loose-coupling, they correctly realized that once everyone understood what technology could do, they would want it to work well. To do so, it would need to be an extension of their aspirations, their vanity and their daily outcomes, not the other way around. I thought about this in comparing my iPad 1 to my new iPad; namely, marveling at the many elements where the 'magic' lies not in some cool new feature, but rather in the tiny bits of integration 'finesse' that turned functionality that I formally noted, 'Wow, I can do that,' to instead, 'Wow, I no longer even think about the steps to doing it.' The source of delight is in the fact that it's simply invisible, an extension to what I am doing in the moment. I thought this an interesting contrast to Microsoft's announcement of Surface earlier in the week (which I like, even though it's vapor at this point), where they were touting the hinges on the kickstand of the device's case as being 'designed to feel and sound like a high end car door.' It's the opposite of designing invisbility, IMHO.

Pattern Recognition: The Integrator's Dilemma; iTV Disconnects; Buy a House

I read a ton, and while much of what I read captivates me in the moment, very little gets under my skin, and into my bone's by week's end. These three narratives are the ones that kept percolating to the top:

1. The Integrator's Dilemma: There was an interesting article written by Horace Dediu on the topic of 'What retail is hired to do: Apple vs. IKEA.' It basically looks at IKEA's global success, its dearth of competitors, durability, and relativity to the Apple Store model. As a devotee of Strategyn's 'Jobs, Outcomes and Constraints' model, which is one of the primary inspirations for Clayton Christensen's excellent book, 'The Innovator's Solution,' I am a firm believer in the precept of hiring products and services for specific jobs. In parallel, I have have been ruminating alot on how the Internet is changing the job that retail can viably perform from an economic perspective (see 'Retail Needs a Reboot to Survive' at GigaOM), so the topic is near and dear to me. When I net it all out, I am left with a narrative that goes like this. Once upon a time, the premise was that businesses should be horizontal and focused on solving just one piece of the product or service equation, and outsource the rest. The rise of the PC and the growth of Big Box category killers (Comp USA, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble) all seemed to affirm this approach. As the Internet took hold, the idea that this model was universal became conventional wisdom, as Google was all about being open and loosely coupled; and Amazon become the biggest online retailer by (seemingly) building very little, but selling everything. But now, this wisdom is getting turned on its head, as undifferentiated retail is dying, commodity PC makers are dying, commodity mobile and tablet device makers are dying, and the winners are folks like Apple and Amazon and Nike that are the antithesis of loosely coupled. In other words, conventional wisdom is dead. Not only are these companies integrated across their value chains, but they have built into their DNA truly differentiated positions. To me, this is The Integrator's Dilemma. It's not enough to assemble a bag of components. You have to do it in a way that is truly differentiated, which often means, a hybrid of hardware, software and service, which is hard to execute. In retail, I look at someone like Gap as an example of a company that confused brand and hit-making with clear vision, agility and differentiation, and once they stumbled, they never came back. The irony here is that most individuals would get fired for not taking a holistic (integrated) approach to getting their jobs done, yet paradoxically, few companies embrace this ethos, preferring the path of comfort, entropy and obsolescence to the path of discomfort and reinvention. And we wonder why there are so few catalysts for job creation in our economy.
2. iTV Disconnects: Ever since Apple analyst Gene Munster starting asserting that Apple was going to build a full-fledged TV set, I have struggled to get my head around the concept (see my analysis HERE). TVs, after all, are low margin, bulky to deal with from an inventory perspective, and infrequent buys. Plus, the actual TV viewing experience is essentially "good enough." By contrast, Apple's last three game changing devices -- iPod, iPhone and iPad -- are the kind of devices that several members of the family might buy, and those same members would likely replace and upgrade every 2-3 years. Moreover, those devices created entirely new experiences to fix fundamentally broken models or to define new ones. In the big picture, the TV set is closest to, but doesn't even look as good as, the Mac model, where you buy 1-2 Macs for the household every 4-5 years. It just doesn't fit that Apple would build a device that looks more like the relatively low unit Mac model when their universe is all about high unit sales and high device refresh frequency. And the only scenario where content is a compelling, high margin business for them as rationale for such a device, is where Apple is partnering with the cable and satellite providers for a slice of the monthly subscribers' bill. But, that's a set-top box play, more so than a TV play, in my opinion. The only other scenario I can theoretically see is where the so-called iTV is really an iWall; a widget device that is flat like an iPad, but made to perform the task of the smartest, most interactive wall frame ever. Yet, the rumors persist. (See also: 'Your iPad Could be Your TV' in MIT Technology Review.) 
3. Let's Go Buy a House: Felix Salmon did some interesting analysis looking at the correlation between rental rates and mortgages in America, on the premise that when you can get a mortgage (if you can qualify) for equal or less to what it would cost you to rent in the same market, housing values are, or should be, compelling. This truth is even more so when you weigh the fact that the historical market data shows that rents go up pretty predictability over time. In other words, the value of your house today, if nothing changes, should only get relatively less expensive than renting over time. You can even rent it out. So, let's go buy a house!