@lin, maybe that's getting to be a drawback. Customers don't like to hear about patents, because it may mean the startup is apt to sue or get sued in the future, leading to its disappearance. Who wants that when you're looking to buy IT products? You want endless support.
@Mary - About a month ago, Gil Elbaz of Factual was on IE Radio. It was interesting to me that Factual didn't have any patent applications, even though Gil Elbaz was an inventor on a lot of patents while with Google. I think very fast and nimble software companies may be eschewing the whole patent process.
@Lin: Again, I can't speak for Boris, obviously. But he seemed to like a comparison I made. In the 1980s, a small Canadian company called Madge Networks developed a local area network technology called token ring. It was based on some other theories etc. But one guy sued the startup, claiming to own the technologh. Founder Robert Madge stood his ground. As a result, token ring became widespread and was adopted by all the big IT firms.
I don't know whether RIM willfully ignored its customer base. Perhaps it did. Someone may have believed in "build it and they will come" instead of "build what they want."
@Lin: I think RIM didn't do its market homework. If you don't understand your customer requirement, you can't develop products that address the market.
I don't see anything unusual in RIM's failure. Classic case of a company failing to realize the market they once monopolized has since moved on. The two-CEO solution was uniquely bad, though.
@aum007. I don't know that you could attribute RIM's stock crash to two CEOs. But I think it's worth probing what the dual CEO situation said about RIM management.
IOW, someone who signed up for a GroupOn for a restuarant today isn';t likely to return to that restaurant tomorrow (which is why the restaurant invested in the Groupon). The consumer will isntead go to anotehr restaurant offering another groupon another day.
Also, Groupon's business customers eventually realized they weren't winning loyal customers of their own by offering Groupons. Groupon was acquiring a massive base of consumers who went from one Groupon to another.
Well, Mason made those glaring errors in speaking to the media during the IPO quiet period. Then there was the awful Tibet commercial during the Super Bowl.
Kim, Amazon and Netflix are both examples of businesses that did something anyone could do, but succeeded by doing it better than anyone else. And GroupOn was doing what they did better than anyone else. The problem is they didn't make money off it.
Kim, I don't know if GroupOn's problem was copyright. They couldn't monetize. That's an old problem on the Internet -- to the point where someone who adopts the centuries-old business model of selling something people want for less than it costs to produce suddenly starts looking like a breathtaking innovator.
@Boris: You said traction trumps IP. Traction is a real challenge, though, isn't it? I'm thinking of GroupOn, which seemed to have good traction in the deals market, but because it couldn't copyright what it was doing, soon faced plenty of competition.
@Boris, I have a few questions I didn't get to ask. One was this: RIM and Nortel. Two big Canadian tech successes, now biting the dust. What went wrong?
What about Microsoft and Google? Microsoft set off with the vision of putting a computer on every desktop, and Google wanted to index all the world's information. Those are pretty broad missions.
Google CIO yesterday said his strategy was to give employees enterprise devices they really wanted to use. When an employee likes his work device more than his leisure device, more work gets done, of course. But Google's rich.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
