Monthly Archives: January 2007

Analyzing the Keynotes: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

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This is fascinating. I was thinking of doing an analysis of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates keynotes. I watched them both and their styles are so different.

Steve Jobs is the modern day PT Barnum. His charm is high and his enthusiasm is contagious.

Bill’s Keynote was tired and a bit boring with skit like demonstrations. The Windows Server was cool, but the iPhone that Steve Jobs presented was light years beyond.

This analysis is great and includes Michael Dell.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Keynote text analysis

What really strikes me is the “Average Words per Sentence” number.

SJ is at 10.5
BG is 21.6
Michael Dell is 16.5

The bottom line for a communications guy like me is that shorter sentences that are not dense with fancy words works the best. It is nice to have this proved for the hard numbers people out there.

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Podcasting Essentials: Finding Your Voice

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This is a continuation of the series on Podcasting Essentials.

Much like blogging, people who begin podcasting are not likely to be “good” immediately. Usually it takes some practice and, like blogging, time to find your voice. Good podcasters, like good bloggers, continually improve.

One of the early challenges podcasters face is finding their voice. It’s common to have heard podcast, or radio personalities, and try to emulate them. Nothing wrong with that. People often end up with tendencines of those they look up to. More importantly, it’s crucial that a podcaster feel comfortable with themselves.

While recording, be yourself. As a listener, I can generally hear when folks are being fake and I resent that. I prefer someone who is real.

Tomorrow morning’s Suicide 60 podcast (available here after 9am on Monday) reflects a little of this is a little reflection on how I “keep it real”.

Most folks who are podcasters are not journalists. If they are trying to be journalistic, then it’s important to maintain vocal consistency. However, in most cases, joournalism isn’t necessary and raw emotion in a podcast keeps the attention of listeners.

There is no magic formula. It’s all about finding the right balance and the right voice. Find that balance, and listeners will pay attention.

Bubble, Bubble, Bubble. – In Private Equity not Web 2.0

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Being a serial entrepreneur I have been through many business cycles, but the Internet boom of the late 1990′s was an extremely heady time. People were so enamored with what the Internet could do, every one really believed that the old rules didn’t apply.

The reality was that those rules applied more than ever and with the crash in the early part of the century we have tried to learn our lesson.

With these new companies deemed Web 2.0, everyone is expecting another bubble. So many of the same types of companies have been funded so there are bound to be consolidation and just plain failure.

According to Michael Arrington, his entry “Bubble, Bubble, Bubble“, the despite the fact that some companies are failing, the sky is not falling.

In fact I would call this time around the ol’startup track “saner, saner, saner”.

Despite many of these companies basing their success on being an aftermarket for Google, the smart ones I think many people know that you have to be in this to create a real enterprise and one that makes money. It is not so much about the VC’s but about the ability to use the low cost and barrier of entry to innovate.

But the DEAD POOL is not cool .

I think that the blog A VC gets it right his counter points on “Building It Up and Then Knocking It Down” are right. He says “over hyping young companies where people are working their butts off and then throwing them overboard quickly into a “dead pool” when they fail is not healthy.

I believe it is dead wrong to put this up there. It just feeds the fire for the chicken little’s of the world. Mike Arrington has known successes when he co-founded helped flip Achex and sold it to First data. I don’t know if he has experienced building a company from scratch and having it fail, many times from circumstances out of your control.

BUT THERE IS A BUBBLE DEVELOPING and not where you think…..

The bubble is not with companies it is in the private equity market itself. The model of funding and the way people are evaluating companies is changing. The way investors look at companies is not based on a fast IPO but aligning it to be a sweet acquisition target.

This is helped in no small part since most VC’s invest like they are teenage girls. “Oooo, you invested in a video sharing site, I want one too! You put $5 million into social networking for eco-friendly baby boomers? Find me one so I can get one too!!

HERE IS HOW I GOT THERE:

  1. The amount of money chasing deals have lightening strike twice to find that repeat of unrepeatable past returns is growing rapidly
  2. The number of opportunities are declining and there are too many copycats plus the cheap money is pouring out to fund them.
    Not enough VC’s to serve on boards effectively and make the existing investments get to a proper exit
    IPO market is still not there and there is and there are only so many acquisition partners
    Higher prices of entry and lower returns

WHAT I DON’T KNOW:

  1. When the IPO market might be friendly to tech stocks
  2. If investors will broaden their portfolio choices to get their money working in unique ways
  3. If funds might start giving their money back

Only time will tell if this comes to pass. If you have a good idea, the money is out there but might not be for very much longer.

Crystal Ball? 2-3 years or mid-2008 this is gonna come to a head. Only time will prove me right or wrong.

iPhone Lawsuit – Kettle? Please meet the pot.

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I find it ironic that during the Macworld Keynote yesterday where Steve Jobs boasted about the 200 patents for the iPhone and how they would enforce them that they get a lawsuit for the one thing they couldn’t protect.

So Kettle, please meet the pot. It will be a fun topic of discussion and give Apple free press for the next 6 months.

My guess? I am betting it becomes the ApplePhone. Cisco will keep the name and their product will continue to suck and not make money. Apple will change the name and everyone will go “that’s great”!

It all depends on branding strategy. It seemed like the “i” was for consumer electronics and the Mac was for computers. With the iTV now AppleTV, I just don’t know.

Could it be…..

THEN: iTV
NOW: AppleTV

NOW: iPhone
FUTURE:”?

This will have to be worked out by June, no matter what.

5 Reasons I will NOT buy an iPhone

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As I watched the keynote live and looked at the flash demos on the Apple site, it occurred to me….

This phone is not for me. Why? Because I am a business person and a techie.

SO WHO WILL BUY IT? : Consumers that have money to spend that will look at the price of buying a fancy phone for $200 and a Nano for $249 and seeing the rest as “coolness price premium”.

CONUNDRUM: THE PEOPLE WHO WOULD TRADITIONALLY BE THE EARLY ADOPTERS WILL NOT EARLY ADOPT.

I came up with 5 reasons this phone is not for business people or the techie crowd, of which I am both.

  1. NO 3G – This one I just don’t understand. Business users and techies need it because they surf the web and use it for e-mail and attachments all day. Just having EDGE is going to keep ALOT of people away. Especially consumers that that want to buy iTunes songs over the air. People will want to use this phone with their computer as modem and EDGE will not cut it.
  2. NO Corporate e-mail access - Just IMAP and POP is NOT OK STEVE. People who use the kinds of devices use Blackberry Servers and Versamail to access exchange. If you guys would fix iCal so it would connect and sync with Exchange I might be willing to deal with it for the time being.
  3. NO 3rd Party apps - The whole point of having wi-fi is to install Skype and the need for office applications. Widgets are great dude, but we need apps that make us productive. Developers are your life blood and if you want any chance of killing competitors you need to have apps available like Palm and Windows Mobile does. For goodness sake this phone is crying to open PDF’s Period.
  4. NO GPS – I can already pull up Google maps on my Treo. I hate my Treo, but what would make this a killer device is GPS for location based services (LBS). This is first phone that would actually make that market take hold.
  5. NO Removable Battery - Most business users who have phones, especially smart phones carry an extra battery to swap out on the go. This thing is supposed to have 5 hours of talk time but if you are using this all day as a business person, it will die on you before you get home.

All of this will come, but not tomorrow. However…

Apple thinks 10 million people will buy this phone by the end of 2008.

NO WAY, DUDE.

BUT WHY?

Here is my VERY UNSCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE:

  1. Apple fanboys and fangirls – 500,000 units
  2. Consumers thinking about buying an ipod and hate their phones: ~ 500,000
  3. People that need a really good reason to leave Sprint or Verizon: ~ 1,000,000 (probably alot more but can’t afford the iPhone AND the cancellation fees).
  4. Phone freaks that love to be first – 250,000

So puts us at the number of units for the U.S. at 2,250,000 X GLOBAL UNIT FACTOR of 2 and you get a total of….

4.5 million units sold by the end of 2008 by my best and VERY UNSCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE.

So where will the missing 3.5 million units come from? iPhone 2 launched at Macworld 2008 that will have all the stuff I complained about earlier in this post. This will get the mass market to adopt, the business users to switch and everyone the sidelines thinking about it to make the plunge.

Look how long the iPod took. Everyone thinks it was overnight but to really become a success took about 3 years (2004). I suspect that the iPhone will take that long as well.
Apple is the one company that is the prime example of a “fast follower”. They watch everyone else, release something, learn from their mistakes and innovate even more.

NOTE:
In all fairness, there are two great write ups of this contrarian view that I share but they beat me to press so I must give credit for their speed and sharp analysis. They are Ars Technica and Paul Kedrosky.

At least I know I am not alone in seeing through the “Reality Distortion Field” of Steve Jobs.