When we look back, 2012 will be seen as a pivotal year for Microsoft. They have launched Windows 8, possibly their most ambitious product ever, as well as the Surface tablet, their biggest ever foray into hardware.
So how’s it all going? Reviews have been lukewarm, sales for Windows 8 are lagging compared to the Windows 7 launch and even Steve Ballmer has described Surface tablet sales as modest. Over the past year, I’ve been sanguine about Microsoft’s future. How do I feel now? Well, I’m doubling down.
Henry Blodget at Business Insider calls people like me delusional, but I don’t think so. What I think is really going on is that while the pundits are chiding Microsoft missing out on the last trend toward social, local and mobile computing (SoLoMo), they are probably the company best position to take the lead in the next phase of technology. read more…
If you had to put a date on it, the digital age began in 1948, when two discoveries came out of Bell Labs: the transistor and information theory. The world would be forever changed, but at the time, few noticed.
Having just come out of the most devastating war in history, the planet was a very uncertain place. The Iron Curtain was descending upon Europe, war would come to Asia in just a few short years and few cared what the eggheads were doing.
It took decades for the impact to become clear, but eventually people noticed that something important was going on. Computers were not only getting better, they were getting cheaper and in the ’90’s, the term “new economy” entered the lexicon. Now, that similar trends are taking hold in energy and medicine the impact will be even greater.
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Are you data driven? Do you live by the numbers? If you are, then you’re probably wasting an enormous amount of time and energy. Even worse, you’re probably getting a lot wrong.
In the neverending quest for substantiation and certainty in corporate life, we have used numbers as a panacea. All too often, more numbers are considered better and fewer are considered worse. This is, for lack of a better term, really stupid.
In truth, what we really need is fewer numbers and a whole lot more math. Math is what the ancients invented when they ran out of fingers and toes, because they realized that they needed to start thinking about abstract relationships in order to advance. The good news is that math is much simpler than numbers, more elegant and more likely to be right.
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Abraham Lincoln. Winston Churchill. Nelson Mandela. We honor our leaders and always have. In both public and business life they are treated with almost godlike reverence.
I guess that’s why we compensate our corporate chiefs hundreds of times more than we do the average worker and then give them tens of millions more in bonuses, even when they are fired for cause. Mediocrity in leadership seems to pay as well as excellence.
All of this begs the question: Do we really need leaders? Is the small chance of getting an excellent one worth the high cost of the mediocre breed? Top management thinkers have begun to ask that question and, surprisingly, there are some prime examples of high performing organizations who are able to succeed without any leaders at all.
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A lot can happen in a century. In 1900 Argentina was an economic powerhouse and New Zealand had the world’s highest GDP per capita at $4300. Most people didn’t have indoor plumbing or electric lighting, much less an automobile or a radio.
Perhaps not surprisingly, people didn’t live very long, life expectancy was in the mid-forties. Penicillin wouldn’t be discovered until 1928. The concept of the atom still wasn’t widely accepted and a “computer” was a person who did arithmetic.
It’s tough to imagine what someone in 1900 would think of us, chatting on mobile phones, zipping around and tweeting away, but clearly they would have a hard time believing it all. Yet today, technology advances exponentially faster, so the change during the next century will be infinitely greater. Here are the industries that will dominate.
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Senator Marco Rubio, a man who is reportedly a top contender for the Republican nomination for President in 2016, caused quite a stir last week when he expressed confusion about the age of the earth in an interview.
Liberals like Paul Krugman pounced. Conservatives like Erick Erickson defended Rubio and heaped scorn on the “atheists and secularists.” The blogosphere erupted and the pundits licked their chops at the elevated ratings during a normally quiet holiday week.
Why should we care? After all, as Rubio quite rightly pointed out that “the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow.” So why all the hubbub? Why waste time and energy over something that happened long ago and none of us were around to see? The answer, of course, is that there’s a lot more at stake than cosmology.
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Revolutions are funny things. They succeed in large part because nobody is paying attention. The world appears stable, even comfortable and then out of nowhere someone sees a need, attracts a following and change comes, seemingly out of nowhere.
The seeds of major events are usually sown in small places. From the American Revolution to World War I, personal computers to the Web, the spark tends to come from the edge, rather than from the center.
There’s something like that brewing now. Over 2 billion people are connected to the Web and there are nearly 6 billion mobile subscriptions. As information technology reaches increasingly remote areas of the world, new markets are being created and multinational companies are finding that the lessons learned far away can lead to profits at home.
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Franz Kafka once wrote, “Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” I’ve used that line before in a post about the audacity of youth, because I feel that fresh perspective is enormously important.
Our young people bring enormous value because they apply new contexts to old problems. It’s no accident that Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and James Watson made their major discoveries before the age of thirty.
However, this new generation has a problem. They are coming of age at a time in history when great technological forces are converging to democratize the use of complex and powerful machines, which is giving a false sense of validation to their youthful exuberance and making it easy for them to ignore hard truths. Here are some of them, unvarnished.
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Marketing, at it’s best, is about the future. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time stuck in the past. We research what already happened and extrapolate forward to produce a plan. It’s not that we’re lazy, we simply know a whole lot more about the past than the present or the future.
We already know that marketing is becoming more social, local and mobile, just as we know that big data and new interfaces such as touch, voice and gesture are becoming increasingly more important. What comes next?
One key to answering that question is to define the problem. We live in a digital age, but continue to manage in analog terms. There is a strong need to integrate those two realities and so we can expect that the next wave of innovation will close the distance between the virtual and the physical world. Here are 3 things that are coming in a few years.
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In the last few days leading up to the recent presidential election, long time political observers such as Peggy Noonan, Steve Forbes and Dick Morris were predicting that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.
They were wrong, of course. Horribly, drastically, overwhelmingly wrong about everything from the shape of the electorate, voter turnout and, of course, the direction of the result in the face of massive, publicly available evidence that showed Barack Obama as the clear favorite.
InTrade markets gave 7 to 3 odds that the President would prevail. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog (which analyzes polling data) calculated a 91% chance of an Obama win. How could they get it so wrong? It turns out that the answer lies not so much in partisan politics, but in the inherent flaws of our basic human decision making machinery.
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