Mythical Himalayan Snowman - in Turquoise

Microsoft logo history (copyright http://techenjoy.com)

So today Microsoft announced a huge reorganization and you can find this gem in the memo about the move:

Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.

So lets take this apart with the trusted “who, what, how” of business strategy 101:

• who: who is our target group? Microsoft says: “individuals and businesses” and “at home, at work and on the go”. If we translate that it’s: whoever, wherever and whatever they just try to do. Basically 7 billion people, nobody left behind. Is this making choices? Strategy is about saying no, about not trying to be everything to everybody. example: the one Windows 8 to rule PCs and tablets is failing exactly at that.
• what: what are we helping our target customers to do? Microsoft: “the activities they value most” – again: whatever, no limitation, no trade-off, no choice.
• how: how will we achieve this, what’s our added value? Microsoft: “creating a family of devices and services” – that means: building stuff. Whatever we are already doing and more. Just more of it and services – will it soon be Microservices and not Microsoft?

So this is the new “one Microsoft” – is it too big to be one? Was it really so bad, when every product or product line could define its own distinct strategy and target segment? What we have now is a fluffy sentence that isn’t defining a clear strategic positioning at all.

This is a beautiful and powerful statement what Apple is trying to do.

The new unified messaging app by Google: Hangouts (Copyright The Verge)

The Google I/O keynote has just ended and although the Verge’s verdict is “The moonshots, it seems, will have to wait“, I think they’ve presented some great new and updated products. Even though they left Gmail and Docs out, their product refresh feels pretty much like Apple redoing their entire hardware lineup (which they almost did last autumn):

• Google Maps gets a major update with a completely new user interface for desktop and mobile apps
• Google Search can be piloted with your voice in a conversational way and seems to become what Siri should be and it’s “don’t even ask me what you want to know because I already know your question”-sibling Google Now gets more functionality
• Google+ has been totally redesigned and continues on the route of becoming what Flickr could have been, if Yahoo had done it right: the best social photography network. Now Google+ automatically enhances your photos and choses the best ones based on algorithms that even know regionally specific tastes of what makes a good photo
• With Google Hangouts they launched a product unifying all their messaging apps into one seemingly very slick package including some very nice looking flat design
• They’ve go even a Music subscription service up their sleeves that rivals Spotify and the similar service Apple is rumored to work on but seems to have difficulties closing a deal on

Not too bad, I’d say. And it shows one thing: Google is not slowing down with what they know best – building great web services. At the same time they’re flexing their muscles in hardware design and seem to have built a great looking and great feeling machine with the Google Pixel.

In the meantime Apple’s web services haven’t really shined. Some streets and bridges seem to be made of molasses in the Maps app (if they are at the right spot at all), iCloud document syncing is really limited – no sharing across apps, across people and (obviously) beyond the Apple ecosystem – and seems to be buggy and a nightmare to develop for. Siri is still a hit or miss for me and anyway I don’t use it much – although I’m sure it has a lot of potential. Pando Daily commented the Google I/O announcements with “Google is keeping iCloud’s promises”

In John Gruber’s words: “Google is getting better at what Apple does best faster than Apple is getting better at what Google does best.”

Please Apple, can we reverse this trend at WWDC? I want to see some updates to Apple’s web services that knock me out, some real magical and “just works” iCloud syncing (and why not finally buy Dropbox…?) and Siri features that are so bloody useful that I wouldn’t mind any more that I’m chatting with a robot in my phone.

But that’s a tough call: Google has shown today that while they’re getting better at Apple’s design game they’re not slowing down in the web services game. And running faster than the leader after having stumbled a few times is going to be hard for Apple.

The more I hear the expression the less appropriate the term “post-PC” seems to me. Post-PC only makes sense in a historical view in which the Personal Computer (PC – and here including Macs) is defined as the computer as we know it: our desktop computer or laptop of choice.

“Personal” in this context mostly only makes sense as the revolutionary step that made computers available to normal people, made them personal. The revolution was to make these machines affordable enough to be bought and usable enough to be understood by a regular person. And obviously both of these aspects have improved tremendously since the first build-it-yourself PC-kits were sold by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

But all of this doesn’t make the PC truly personal. The only actual personal computer you own is your smartphone.

How personal is a traditional PC in the actual sense of the word? How much does a PC belong to you as a person or reflect who you are? The longer you use it, the more of your personal data it stores: your photos, your emails, your thoughts expressed in whatever written word you create and even your DNA through your hair that falls between the cracks into its keyboard. It knows about your contacts and your calendar and about the work you do.

However all of this doesn’t make the PC truly personal. The only actual personal computer you own is your smartphone: it knows where you are, what caught your interest just now when you’re taking a photo, what you’re thinking right know when you send out a spontaneous tweet and even when you take a dump, since many of us (myself included) take it with us to the bathroom. The smartphone again may be replaced by some even more personal computer in the form of a wearable computing devices in the near or not so near future.

We are not moving beyond the Personal Computer as the term post-PC evokes. We are actually evolving towards ever more personal computers until one day they may literally be part of who and what we are.

Recently the FT took a critical look at what apparently is being derided as “innovation tourism”: these organized tours of company executives spending a week in Silicon Valley and hoping to bring something useful back home.

I plead guilty: Working for a media company mostly stuck in the analog world? Check. Staying for just a short week and expecting some sort of enlightenment? Check. Hitting the hard wall of reality when I got back? Check…

Still my trip to the Silicon Valley this March was enlightening, like taking a glimpse at a not so distant future. Last time I have been in the area was in 2008: Apple had not released a way to develop apps for the iPhone yet, the iPad was two years away, Android smartphones were being tested in some secret Google lab and Twitter hadn’t really gone mainstream yet.

A lot has changed since! The evening I arrived, I took three cabs and two of them took my credit card with a Square-dongle attached to their smartphone. I communicated with the group I was about to meet through Twitter. Anything I wanted to find, was a tap away on my smartphone: the way to my Airbnb accomodation, great restaurants in the area with many and actually helpful reviews and finding a cab where none was around with uber.

In Switzerland I’m an avid foursquare-user, just for the fun of it. But have I ever had an actual benefit from giving my location in Switzerland to some random startup company? Not really. In the Bay Area foursquare actually works as it’s supposed to: there are specials in many cafés and a department store even asks you how you enjoyed it a day after you shopped there (a little bit creepy, I agree – but then again: I decided to check in…).

you need to think about the short term because the long term implications of the digital and mobile disruption are at most a gut feeling

How is all of this relevant to my employer? Will we launch our own social-mobile-local network? No way. The most relevant and also the hardest part to bring back home is the mindset:

• You don’t have to figure out everything at the start. It’s more important to just start and figure out the next step as you go – hard to implement within an organization that requires business plans that have to hold true all the way to Judgement Day.
• In Europe and especially in Switzerland everything is built to last forever. But maybe it’s ok to build a product or even a business for the short term. Definitely that’s the way digital businesses work: you need to think about the short term because the long term implications are at most a feeling. Nobody knows for example how the digital disruption is going to play out for media businesses, but if we don’t try, we’ll never find out.
• Personal freedom seems to be much more important and respected in Silicon Valley. Maybe this is why some companies go way out of the usual ways to create fancy offices with sofas, bean bags, great cafeterias, and so on: everybody should be able to work the way they like, use the tools they are most efficient with and divide their workday in the way that suits them – as long as they deliver.
• Technology and design are at the core of the most successful businesses coming from Silicon Valley. Only after applying some design thinking did Airbnb turn into the success it is today and only with technology being the other driving force in product design, can you create a truly great online business.

This Silicon Valley reality is to a large extent theory in most corporate environments. So how can we bring about change? Those might be some steps to create more of a startup or Valley-feeling even in the most rusty corporate environment:

• You think you have a better way of doing a certain task or an idea about developing a new business within your corporation? Start doing it at a small scale, don’t ask for permission. If it works, great. Show it to others and ask for help and funding to develop it further. If it doesn’t work, you’ll figure it out soon enough and you won’t have done any harm. Not trying would probably be worse.
• Don’t build everything for eternity. Start with a hack and refine it at the next iteration.
• Evangelize about how important design and user experience is for any business. Make your management understand that many of the successful businesses are successful because they think about the user first. Don’t be intimidated by legacy IT systems that apparently ask for some user interfaces that are impossible to understand by mere mortals (think: checkout processes, forms that need to be filled out, etc.).
• Let people use the tools they feel most comfortable with. This probably means opening up IT: allow for “bring your own device” and for using cloud apps like Dropbox, Evernote (they even have a business product) and other online collaboration tools. Employees will be more efficient and creative and the IT department can focus on core infrastructure, managing the risks of 3rd party applications like the above and training people to make the best and most secure use of them.

But most of all: start taking risks and reward success as well as failure, if failure means trying something new and learning from it. Be more daring, get out of your comfort zone and build something new instead of finding all the reasons why your idea won’t work anyway. Don’t listen to the naysayers, go out and do. This is what we can learn from startups all over the world and especially from the Valley: go out and build something new – not trying is the worst failure of all.

About the term “curation”:

when I talk to journalists I always have to be like, ‘Actually, curation – it’s really what you guys have always done.’ It’s taking a lot of information, pulling out the relevant parts of it, giving context, and telling a story.

About how traditional media companies first (sometimes still) reacted to the Internet:

it was clearly disrupting newspapers who didn’t seem to know how to deal with it, or grasping onto the old world and hoping all this Internet stuff would go away.

Great guy, go read the interview!