Daily Archives: October 26, 2007

San Jose Mercury News – A Cautionary Tale from Business Week

Posted on by
9

There is a great summary at Business Week of the  remarkable rise and pending fall of Silicon Valley’s newspaper – the San Jose Mercury News.     They note that in many ways the Mercury News saw it all coming, but still failed to position itself to profit from the migration of offline info to online info.  

Although the article does not make this point, to me the failure supports the idea that paradigm shifts do not come from old systems evolving into new ones even when the old systems “get it”, rather they come from new folks thinking out of the old boxes and building the next generation of innovative solutions basically from scratch.  

Obviously new technology rests on the shoulders of old technology, but it seems reasonable to assume that the next big things are not going to come from the previous big things, they are going to spring up from the harsh, quirky, and shifting sands of technology and innovation.     I would suggest that IBM might be an exception to this notion but clearly Microsoft, then Yahoo and Google, now YouTube, Myspace and Facebook all fit this model of major changes coming more from scratch than from a slow simmering of existing ideas.     This also helps explain the challenges of Venture Capitalism in finding “the next big thing”, which may right now only be known by the glimmer in a college kid’s eye.

If so, who is next?

Search metrics

Posted on by
Reply

Daya over at Webguild  has a nice post detailing the search shares across various engines.  

I’m supposed to be posting over there more often but the rest of the contributors are doing such a good job, and I hate to post right after somebody else and push them off the front page, I’ll keep it light for now.

Bye Bye Sprint, Cell ya later!

Posted on by
3

Thinking about moving away from Sprint now that I can hopefully unlock my Treo 650 from the evil clutches of the marginal Sprint signal here in Southern Oregon.   With a theoretically robust national network and a top of the line phone you’d think I’d get a signal on, say, all the key cities on the main drag here which is Highway 101.  But it is not so – I’ve had connetivity problems even in Medford which is the largest city on I5 for hundreds of miles.

I’m also underwhelmed by the Treo 650, though I’d have to say the Google maps integration is nothing short of brilliant.    When I tested some iPhones in Atlantic City I was blown away by the mapping feature from Google.   Treo 650 mapping is inferior due to the small touchscreen but still very, very nice – one of those applications that Ben Franklin would have flipped his wig for (and then probably improved on – that dude ROCKED as a technologist!)

So, when Google gets busy with the new phone or software I’m gone, Sprint.  Unless you sign up with them and get me a better phone with better features and cheaper cost.   I’m not holding my breath on that.