bookmark_borderHas Apple Lost its Mojo?

Wow, what a disappointing presentation: Apple’s Media Event on Sept 10th was the biggest disappointment I had with regards to Apple.

I don’t mean to say that I expect Apple to innovate ahead of everybody else every year and introduce ground-breaking technologies year after year. That was not what I was expecting.

What disappointed me were two items:

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bookmark_borderEnd of the Operating System License as a Business Model?

Today, I was reading an article about the history of Unix. When I came across this paragraph, I had an intense instinctive and natural reaction:

Sun was already a success (with imitators!) when, in 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice won its second antitrust case against AT&T and broke up the Bell System. This relieved AT&T from the 1958 consent decree that had prevented them from turning Unix into a product. AT&T promptly rushed to commercialize Unix System V—a move that nearly killed Unix.

My reaction was: “Whoa! How can they think anyone would want want to pay for an operating system (OS)?

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bookmark_borderPlea for a New Nokia (April 2nd, 2010)

(This was an article I wrote in April 2nd, 2010 and sent to the Nokia Executive Board – Times have changed and, as the saying goes, “The Rest is History”)

Today, we face what might be seen one day as the biggest and sharpest crisis in Nokia’s history: we’re being attacked on all fronts – being a big market leader, as a friend put it, sucks: you are usually attacked at high-end, middle-range and low-end at the same time – you have to fight battles on many fronts and nobody in human history ever won many battles at the same time. If Nokia cannot find a niche, however big it might be, it is condemned to either shrink significantly, become a supplier for other mobile phone companies or … something even worse.

But how could this have happened? What are the reasons and what might be the remedy?

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bookmark_borderBallmer Never Was a Product Guy

Thank God he is gone… well, he is going. 

The problem with Steve Ballmer was or is that he never was a product guy. Steve Jobs said so, as mentioned in in his authorized biography. The reason, I am pretty sure, why Microsoft declined lies directly with the fact that Ballmer was not a product guy. He put revenues and profits before good or excellent products. He sacrificed long-term growth and long-term revenues for short-term profits. And the stock market, showing for the first time some intelligence, reacted with stable or declining share prices.

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