Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Atif
If you’re an investor in Apple or just one of the many admirers of this iconic business, you may be closely following news about the health of Steve Jobs. The cliché that people are a company’s greatest asset was literally demonstrated as this news surfaced — AAPL lost 5.7% of its value after his medical leave was announced. Is this the beginning of the end for the company or just a period of transition during a time of continued leadership? An opinion on the matter is vital to investors - should you be buying on unnecessary weakness or be gradually reducing your exposure? To develop an informed opinion you’re going to have to do some diligence.
I’m going to offer an approach toward diligence that uses web connections to define key topics for your assessment. Web connections are links between a story you’re following and the endless number of topics that exist in the world. It may sound quite broad and unwieldy but there is a manageable structure we can put around the information possibilities.
Web connections allow us to explore these topics by the degree of their relatedness. Think of it as swinging from vine to vine in a jungle of information. You can build upon a topic of interest by knowing what else is connected to it rather than limit exploration by direct coverage of what you’re reading.”
What’s useful about these connections is they transcend the obvious information you will find collected in most articles or coverage about a story you’re following. As I’ll explain later on, that’s not a knock on reporters but instead a natural limitation of what’s possible for any writer to cover in a single story. Put another way, web connections extend our journey into and behind the story. Read more »
Filed under: Management, People, Search Technology, Web Apps, Web Connections | 1 Comment »
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Posted on September 24th, 2008 by Atif
They sent Yankee Stadium off with a great tribute to the team, it’s players and legacy. The greatest sports franchise of the 20th century - the Yankees - saying goodbye to the Cathedral they’ve called home for over 85 years. Why can’t a corporation evoke loyalty and following like a sports team? There are many great companies with a history of performance and amazing achievement. People drive this success. No doubt it’s hard to compare the glamour of sports achievements (e.g., clutch homeruns) with making big things happen in business. Knowledge work is not very visible and rarely public. But let’s not under-estimate the strong appeal and mystique of accomplishments in industry related to inventions, patents, product ideas, customer insights, sales, deals, etc. Read more »
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Filed under: Management | 2 Comments »
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Posted on April 9th, 2008 by Atif
The NY Times was in the news yesterday – this time, a docile development related to its web site leadership. The Times was nominated for several Webby awards. In fact, the company has the largest presence of any organization with nine nominations, including the following categories: Best Visual Design, News, Newspaper, Best Copy and Best Practices.
Good news is a welcome relief at The Times. The “nation’s paper” is no stranger to front-page storylines. It is the center of several dramatic circumstances that involve controversy over future business direction. In a quick recap, there’s been shareholder discord over share price performance, governance structure (dual-class stock) and future strategy in response to the quickly vanishing newspaper business model. These issues are inter-related because different groups (broadly management vs. shareholders) hold different views on how the address the current industry climate and whether the corporate structure needs to be amended to respond decisively and effectively. Recently, hedge funds were successful in securing two seats on the company’s Board through a settlement with management.
With traditional offline revenue declining at a steady pace (January print revenues were down 9.8%), the foreseeable future does not look promising for overall financial performance. But is there light? In other words, as the core declines, how quickly is the revenue loss replaced by the digital business? Clearly this is a question of rates of change. Currently, the company does about $750mm a quarter in total revenue and about 90% is print. If the digital base, which is about $85mm per quarter, continues to grow at 15% annually while the core continues to decline at 10% annually, online will overtake offline 9 years from now. Can you say web 4.0? Even at 20% online revenue growth, we’re talking about 7.5 years for equivalency. Certainly a long way off and sufficient cause for shareholder anxiety. Read more »
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Posted on December 15th, 2007 by Atif
Many large companies find themselves launching new businesses at unprecedented rates in an effort to maintain growth profiles, margins and leadership status. When a company pursues new markets, that can include a variety of corporate initiatives which are distinct from each other. At the highest level in terms of potential value creation is the process of vying for a new category. I call this category-creation or entry. Category-creation is different than finding a new market for an existing line of business.
In the latter case, an existing product or service is re-oriented from a positioning, capability and/or distribution standpoint beyond existing customer focus into distinct and additive customer groups. This can be a complex activity for an established business because success often leads to inertia. In other words, it’s hard but necessary to unlearn certain aspects of an existing success formula in order to make the business mix work for new sets of buyers. Expansion of existing products lines into new customer groups holds a lower risk profile than the pursuit of a new category because some aspects of these new markets leverage existing capability. But product line expansion to new segments also carries lower magnitude of order growth potential. Only truly new categories move the needle in breakout ways.
These two growth strategies are equally important — one should not exist without the other. But it’s far more likely that a company is proficient at market expansion than market creation and development. That’s why I’m going to share some thoughts on the category-creation process. Read more »
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Posted on June 8th, 2007 by Atif
As reported in The Week, an online magazine called Pasadena Now has “hired two reporters to cover local government who have never set foot in Pasadena, and may never.” The reporters, who work from Mumbai and Bangalore, cover the beat by participating in webcasts of City Council meetings (open to all) and sorting through publically available archives on the web. In an era of email and Skype, it’s not hard to imagine sprinkling a story with quotes here and there from local politicians and stakeholders. The publisher describes these resources as “efficient” which “means he can pay his new hires $10,000 a year to generate 15 local news stories a week.”
Here’s an example of labor arbitrage impacting the frontline of journalism albeit on a small scale. The natural question is whether this is a one-off or a broader trend. What exactly is the latent arbitrage opportunity amongst other media jobs, especially those in the upper-echelons of journalism? The Week seems to be fairly resigned about the matter: “if you think you’re job is safe, ask yourself if somebody in India, Pakistan or Indonesia could do it for less.” Read more »
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