Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:57:00 GMT
I just submitted my final assignment "An analysis of WalMart’s leaked brand positioning" and i’m done.
Looking back over the last couple of years, I think doing the course was valuable, as it opened my eyes up to different things that I didn’t know I didn’t know. I wish I didn’t "waste" some of the electives. What made them a waste? shitty lecturers. One night one of these "brains" spent 2 hours teaching people how to use a calcualtor to do NPV calculations.
The other thing is I think the way they teach subjects should move a bit more with the times. Closed book exams? I mean.. who (besides ANZ bank) does not have full internet access nowadays? or not use IM?
I think the worst example of this came through with a economics exam question that was worth 20%.
Some thing along the lines of
‘describe the XYZ theorem’ or ‘explain the 2 major inputs into ABC law and where you would use it’
where XYZ was one of about 50 different theorems we learnt. what pissed me off is that I forget the name of the theorem, but could have explain it for 3-4 pages when I knew WTF they were on about.
anyway.. i’m happy that I did it.
now the bigger question:
Am I going to get a ROI on the $$$ I spent doing it and the time spent sitting in a classroom above what I would have got putting that in the stockmarket or as a deposit for a small apartment.
Posted in General | Tags mba | no comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:56:00 GMT
It’s careers week at MBS, and a handful of companies have come to present themselves to students.
I mainly chose to attend the financial related ones, and will give you a summary of the types of jobs on offer and how they got pitched.
High Value-Add consulting—Looking for the top 1% of graduates, work 80-90 hours a week and travel to exotic places you would have never have thought about going to yourself.
Investment Banking—Looking for the top 1% of graduates, work 80-90 hours a week but minimal travel.
Corporate Finance/Large Bank —Looking for the top 1% of graduates, work a normal week (and emphasized work/life balance). one bank mentioned how good their people policy and work / life balance was at least a dozen times in their presentation.
all of the firms had 1-2 positions available each. I think there is about 120 people graduating which means 12 people are in VERY high demand.. I pity the others like me ;-)
but the best recruitment interview by far was of a large well-known bank in town. Their HR person spent all the time saying how hopeless they were, and how they were going through hard times culturally and how bad it would be to work there… a very strange way to attract people.
What surprised me was that there was no mining companies presenting.. maybe the mining boom is over.
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 09 Aug 2006 06:53:00 GMT
Over at Techdirt, Mike wrote a interesting article about how doctors (and car park operators) are getting screwed over by their use of proprietary software.
I have no pity for them. It’s one of the first things (maybe the second.. how to do powerpoint is the first) they teach you in business school.. create a product with high switching costs and you will make it very difficult for your customers to leave.
But they also teach you what to do to circumvent these things as well. The easiest way is to know what these costs are before you sign (when you still have negotiating ability) and put terms in the contract to lessen them, or at least sign a long contract so the ability for them to screw you when it comes to renew is a long way away (and by that time you will have converted to something else).
Strategy / Negotiation is all about next best alternatives. You want to have several alternatives to your vendor, and make them have none except to deal with you.
what you learn @ business school is how to:
- identify the alternatives
- change the game so it works in your favour
- and to make powerpoints.
Posted in Business Related | Tags lockin, mba | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 24 Sep 2005 15:39:00 GMT
over at TextDrive they are upset that they can’t renew the urchin data center licence
since the do-no-evil Google bought them, and seemed to have started a Petition/Survey to convince Google that they should continue their current licensing model.
Why should google be forced to continue a product pricing model they don’t agree with. Google is all about running stuff on their infrastructure. Why do they want to maintain a expensive customer service centre and product development staff when they can host it themselves far more cheaply (and also get more of the pie at the same time).
They offer a Urchin subscription model which does just that, but I’m guessing that wouldn’t be cost effective for TextDrive as it charges per domain or something, which gives TextDrive no volume break.
In effect Google/Urchin has decided that it is more profitable for them to sell straight to the customer, instead of going via middlemen like TextDrive. That is what business is all about, and it happens all the time, and why being a middle man for a large corporation is so sucky (if your too profitable you lose your business, when megacorp decides they want a bigger portion of the value chain)
So what can Textdrive do about it?
These are the two options I currently see them doing. I don’t belive either of these will work, or provide the end result they want. (Cheap web stats for their customers which isn’t dependant on the number of domains they host)
Here is what I propose they do.
go find a server-side open source project which does/could do what they need. (go look at Weed for a example).
Take the license fees they would have spent on buying mint/licencing Urchin for say 3 years, and use that to sponsor/fund R&D work on Weed so that it has the desired functionality they need. The accountants will love it, as your are converting an ‘expense’ to a ‘capital expenditure’ which means they can depreciate it over multiple years, instead of just one (meaning higher profits).
If you want this to work even better, you could approach other urchin datacenter licencees and persude them to use 1-2 years worth of expenses to fund R&D on a product which will meet their needs and be opensource/free of licencing fees from then on. The Weed developers would like it, as they could quit their day jobs/get paid to do something they love. And possibly start a support/consulting company around the product they develop which they could offer to other people. (even turning it into a ASP-type service later on and charging people that way)
Now thats the power of opensource development model.
Posted in Business Related | Tags coopetition, mba, opensource | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:43:00 GMT
source: The Friction Free Economy
There are four basic strategies to fight a dominant market leader.
Brute force
Attack the market leader through an aggressive attack on several fronts
- beat price-learning curve
- branding
- tailoring (to the market of one)
- volume manufacturing
- execute Davidow’s law (beat them to the market on the next round, and gain the lead when you obselete their product)
Momentum
Find a weak spot, gain a foothold and build takeover momentum
- joint ventures
- mergers and acquisitions
Anti-Monopoly
Get third parties to help destroy the leadership position through monopoly
- target the weak
- lobby government
- litigate
Pure Play
Consistent execution of a strategy over a period of time
- hit shooting range targets
- introduce chaos into marketplace
From what I can see recently on the net, Google appears to be playing more ‘pure play’ than ‘brute force’ with it’s gmail, gtalk, froogle, and news sites, while murdoch and microsoft are more into ‘momentum’ plays buying established companies with existing market shares.
the other interesting saw in my class yesterday (not from the lecturer, but googling while being bored) was about The New Lanchester Strategy.
Which theorizes about how different market share sizes in the overall market affect the market itself.
So according to the new Lanchaster strategy I would think Technorati (which I would estimate would hold 30-40% market share) should merge with a smaller player of slightly smaller size to control 73% of the overall market, in effect controlling it. Making it much harder/expensive for other players to enter.
you can also look at this in the web-mail (and messenger) area, where hotmail & yahoo have an order of magnitude more subscribers than gmail. I would love to see how the new guy on the block plans on breaking that. Right now all of gmail’s new innovations are being implemented in hotmail and in yahoo.. I don’t think that google is going to have a slam dunk in these areas, unless it can provide another compelling reason to switch over.
(oh.. please don’t take me as anti google or anything, it’s just that they have shaken up several markets and I can apply some of the stuff I learn in the books/classes to them)
Tags marketing, mba, strategy | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT
So Google’s Summer of code has drawn to a close, the 4 students I have beeen mentoring have produced their code, and it is starting to appear in The HTTPD Repo. I believe each got a true experience of what developing open source code is about, and hopefully 2-3 of them will continue on with HTTPD!
I’ve been off work as Michelle and I have had some variant of flu, and has made mish bedridden, making me the ‘child care unit’… The girls also had a bout of pink eye (naturally one got it just as the other stopped) so it’s been a slow week. Oh.. and I’ve caught whatever they have got now.. just in time for the weekend ;(.
my MBA semester has also started, I’m enrolled in managerial economics and managing process (operations management). I’ve got an advantage in both of these.. For some reason all the stuff on the internet lately has been about long tails, lemon markets, prisoners dilemmas and red queens, and my work as in performance at cnet has given me some insight into queuing theory, which hopefully I can apply to ops mgmt. I also think that seeing how I can apply these things to help improve CNET’s internal operations.
So.. apologies in advance for boring the socks off you guys when I give my insights to these 2 subjects apply to the internet, open source, and Corporate IT.
Posted in Business Related, monitoring | Tags economics, family, mba, operations, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 16 Aug 2005 14:13:00 GMT
Ok.. this really should be a series of things, as there is a lot of marketing theory out there, and most of it could be applied to how IT builds systems.. but these are the things I think are pressing.
Different people want different things out of your system.
most people know about regular users, power users etc.. but that isn’t the only way to slice your users up.
before you go and design your UI, go and do some research and see if you can ‘segment’ your user base into diffent chunks and then think what they will use your system for.
eg. a monitoring system.
The network manager cares about the health of the network, and doesn’t really give a toss if some application is dead on the machines.. not his problem.
the operations manager needs to make sure the latest deployment worked.. and the general health of the applications.
The operation engineer needs to be able to zoom down to the minute detail and figure out why this stupid system is paging him.
Design 3 different views/UI’s for them. not a single one which doesn’t do what any of them need.
How do you promote it?
The person who designed the better mousetrap died a peniless death.
no one (besides other geeks) cares about all the latest tech wizbang wizard or if you used ruby or spring or SOAP.
They want business value. Talk to them about time saved or efficiences created, or new opportunities available to them thanks to your latest program.
Do your boss a favor, prepare a single slide or two summarizing your project at that level so that he can show it in his status meeting with his peers. prepare another slide of ‘action items’ that his peers would need to do to make your project a reality, or let them gain the benefit of it.
Making your boss look good will never hurt your career.
Make it look pretty
Pretty systems get demoed. So do easy to use systems.
I should know.. I create the ugliest hardest to use systems and they sit there gathering dust.
But seriously, while it might be quite understandable to you, or to people who use your system for hours every day, the person who needs to use once a month will have no idea what to do.
Forget the spec
well, not exactly, but don’t follow it blindly. go and talk to the people who were initally questions (the users) when you have questions, or ideas on how what they really want could be done in a different way and make it much easier for them to do their job. (not because you heard of this latest cool geek thing you want to implement)
Common Infrastructure
The company does not need another user-management system inhouse.
If some other group has done it already then go interface to theirs.. your is special/different. BS. they are the same users, figure out why you think your app is special, and go to the original group and see if you can persude them.
Then go and work on something that will actually add value.
ok..enough ranting.. flame away
Posted in Business Related | Tags customer, marketing, mba, service | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 13:46:00 GMT
I've been thinking about all the posts about the long tail, and how amazon is going to own this market via the purchase of two startups which print books and DVD's on demand.
But then it struck me.
why do you need amazon at all in this equation.
Once the publishers 'open up' and allow distributors (not end users) to recieve a copy of their manuscript electronically it then becomes an issue of print quality, and distribution channels.
Imagine walking into your kinko's store.. they have the top 2,000 best seller books (which is a fraction of what a small bookstore would have) stocked and on the shelves so people can purchase them straight away with no hassle.
combine this with a couple of computers to look at reviews, which could even be personalized if they want and you have the long-tail filter in place.
now you've chosen a book.. you wait 20-30 minutes for it to print (you could submit your order online if you wanted to avoid the wait) and badda bing.. you have a book of medium-high quality in your hands, amazon can't do this.
There is a kinko's in nearly every neighbourhood, they have the printing infrastructure in place. They can build a recommendation / personalization engine in the short-medium term (6-12 months MAX if that long), all they are missing is the relationships with the book publishers.
I think the publishers would love it, why do they want only one electronic provider in the game to control what price they can charge for doing this, and it alllows it's traditional book sellers (i'm guessing who still make up the lion's share of the publisher's sales) a chance to compete.
The question then becomes is it cheaper to build a printing infrastructure for a book store chain, or build the relationship with the book publishers for a printing chain?
I wonder if we will see a merger between kinko's and a large book retailer/distributor soon..
you heard it here first ;-)
Posted in Business Related | Tags longtail, mba | no comments | no trackbacks