It's a tough call. When a company is private but no longer small, that can be a great time to get research underway, since as you note, Lin, there isn't anyone waiting to see an immediate payback and profit.
At the same time, the lure of profit can be tough for founders and other inital stakeholders to resist.
I suppose whether a company can continue to innovate depends on how well it does overall. Look at Google; it continues to innovate --and throw away a lot of what doesn't work -- and while shareholders squawk, they haven't done anything to stop it.
I totally agree that providing a return on innovation in a quarterly cycle is almost impossible.
Is it the fault of the companies that go public, or should we look at shareholder expectations as the culprit? Years ago, people would buy a stock and hold on to it through the bad times. Today's shareholder focuses on short term profits/gains. It's really hard to innovate when the results of innovation need to provide value to the corporation and their shareholders in 90 days.
Hi Mary, I enjoyed this video blog very much. Especially with Facebook's IPO going as badly as it did, the company is going to really have to focus on business over innovation to avoid further disaster. This of course leaves the door open for some more appealing service to come along and snatch consumers' attention.
Perhaps the message for companies is an obvious one -- that an IPO should not happen until the company has a sound business model in place and is more than secure financially. If you're still fiddling with the revenue stream (as all of the tech companies are that went public in the past year) going public could be a huge mistake.
Multi-tenant clouds assure security for clients, but not necessarily for their ideas. Here's one thing you should discuss with your cloud provider before you sign on.
Project management and marketing don't generally work well together, but now the cloud delivers PM software that is more compatible with marketing's creative and spontaneous nature.
Now apparently the mobile platform of choice, the Apple iPhone has benefited from its sound understanding of human factors and ergonomics – but is this reputation threatened by a looming avalanche of advertising?
The bring-your-own-device approach isn’t suited to monitoring of enterprise equipment and processes. In these cases, it is up to IT to come forward with gear suited to the task.
Enterprises are discovering that using social networking within the secure setting of a SaaS provider's network gives them an unusual opportunity to freely collaborate with partners, suppliers, and even competitors.
Recently, Amazon was recognized for its customer satisfaction excellence. It has made no secret that being customer-centric is a primary goal. This should be the goal of every e-tailer that wants to build market share.
Tongji University in China has teamed with local businesses in the development of a "real world" banking system that now enables students to master technical skills that are immediately transferrable to enterprises.
Good news! The US gross domestic product grew by 5.5% last quarter. But does that number accurately reflect the value created by the information economy?
Some of the "cool" people are testing a new Web service: Blippy. It could be a great data source for corporations to glean info about customers’ credit card purchases. But it has all sorts of possible privacy and security problems. Buyer beware!
If you listen to the hype, clouds are everywhere. But if you look at the data, it turns out most customers say they still wouldn't use cloud computing for mission-critical apps or data. What's holding them back? Fritz investigates.
The sooner purveyors of cloud computing services can pass muster, security-wise, with financial services companies, the sooner cloud computing will really go mainstream.
Financial management planning does not need to include Voodoo economics, but it does help to tap into the knowledge base of your team through some sort of real-time system. We explore your options.
How do you recognize an Internet bubble when you see one? Saunders explains how all bubbles have four symptoms in common – and takes a swipe at Google and Twitter into the bargain.
The sky is falling! And in other news, Saunders explains why he’s predicting a second Internet bubble – this one based around the current craze for social media.
Global communities are changing the nature of innovation on the Internet from a fiscal model based on greed, to an organic model based on greed, posits Saunders.
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
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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