Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple they’ve just gone from strength to strength with a few missteps along the way.
iMac
iPod
iPhone
iPad
iTunes
MacBook
MacBook Pro
MacBook Air
Apple Stores
the upcoming iCloud that we hope launches better than MobileMe
the App Store
That’s a lot of winners.
Now Apple is making inroads into the corporate market, the potential to become a massively dominant player is within their grasp.
Will they ‘screw the pooch’? Sad to say that a very possible scenario.
If you look at the recent launch of Final Cut Pro X you’d have to say that was pretty comprehensively screwed up. Apple managed to piss off a vast majority of editors with that one. I know they’re saying just wait for the updates and all will be good, but people don’t want to wait for the updates. They want it to be good when they get it.
That’s kind of like buying a Porsche and discovering that the wheels are on a boat from Outer Mongolia so you’ll just have to wait until they arrive and THEN everything will be really good. Promise.
The truth of the matter is that Apple do not, and appear to never have, understood the corporate market. Sure they understand it better than the Gnomes of Mountain View, but they don’t get it like Microsoft do.
I talked about this some time back in this old blog entry at Anthill. Apple just don’t seem to get corporate customers, but, there is a chance that this may change with the Commonwealth Bank deploying 4000 MacBook Air laptops to replace their fleet of Dell laptops.
If they don’t screw things up at the Commonwealth and they can learn about what corporates want, they might, just might, figure out how to crack this market sector.
That being said if anyone can screw up a deal like this its Apple.
Showing posts with label Australian Anthill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australian Anthill. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
If we hadn't lost money we would have made a profit!
A while back I wrote a piece for Australian Anthill entitled “What an MBA should teach you”.
Since I wrote the piece I’ve had the benefit (?) of encountering more MBA’s, full to bursting with theory of management, finance, Mergers and Acquisitions and the new buzzword in these troubled economic time, Corporate Governance.
It still seems to me like the basics of the Mallard and Doillarmite Theories are still roundly ignored by these newly minted ‘Captains of Industry’ in favour of management triple speak in year end accounts that translate to “if we hadn’t lost money we would have made a profit”.
A degree and an MBA and the best they can do is “we would have made a profit if we didn’t lose money”?
If you were a shareholder of a company and found a comment like that in your annual report you’d be, rightly, looking to mount the heads of the Board of Directors on the wall of your trophy room.
Instead of trying to spin a bad result into a not so bad result by using mealy terms like “we would have made a profit if we didn’t lose money” they should man up and tell it like it is and then tell us how they plan on fixing it.
Business has become so intolerant of mistakes that an entire vocabulary has been created to make bad news seem like better news.
I recently heard that a comment that said one of the reasons Apple is so successful is that they make so many mistakes.
This is not a bad thing.
The Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Area during the Second World War was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Early in his career he commanded the USS Decatur and was court martialled for grounding his ship.
In the modern business world (or the modern US Navy) something like that would have been the end of his career.
In an age where the “Zero Defect Mentality” didn’t exist to the extent it does today he was able to come back from this incident and was the US signatory to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS MIssouri followed by two years as the Chief of Naval Operations.
In modern management speak Chester Nimitz started in the mail room became a middle manager, screwed the pooch on a deal, but was able to get over that and become CEO.
Usually a middle manager that screws the pooch on something basic will never make it to the CEO chair. Nimitz learned from his mistake and turned it into a brilliant career.
How many great leaders are we consigning to the trash bin?
Since I wrote the piece I’ve had the benefit (?) of encountering more MBA’s, full to bursting with theory of management, finance, Mergers and Acquisitions and the new buzzword in these troubled economic time, Corporate Governance.
It still seems to me like the basics of the Mallard and Doillarmite Theories are still roundly ignored by these newly minted ‘Captains of Industry’ in favour of management triple speak in year end accounts that translate to “if we hadn’t lost money we would have made a profit”.
A degree and an MBA and the best they can do is “we would have made a profit if we didn’t lose money”?
If you were a shareholder of a company and found a comment like that in your annual report you’d be, rightly, looking to mount the heads of the Board of Directors on the wall of your trophy room.
Instead of trying to spin a bad result into a not so bad result by using mealy terms like “we would have made a profit if we didn’t lose money” they should man up and tell it like it is and then tell us how they plan on fixing it.
Business has become so intolerant of mistakes that an entire vocabulary has been created to make bad news seem like better news.
I recently heard that a comment that said one of the reasons Apple is so successful is that they make so many mistakes.
This is not a bad thing.
The Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Area during the Second World War was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Early in his career he commanded the USS Decatur and was court martialled for grounding his ship.
In the modern business world (or the modern US Navy) something like that would have been the end of his career.
In an age where the “Zero Defect Mentality” didn’t exist to the extent it does today he was able to come back from this incident and was the US signatory to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS MIssouri followed by two years as the Chief of Naval Operations.
In modern management speak Chester Nimitz started in the mail room became a middle manager, screwed the pooch on a deal, but was able to get over that and become CEO.
Usually a middle manager that screws the pooch on something basic will never make it to the CEO chair. Nimitz learned from his mistake and turned it into a brilliant career.
How many great leaders are we consigning to the trash bin?
Thursday, July 28, 2011
If you don't own it you can't be responsible for it...
I want to revisit a post that originally showed up in Australian Anthill a while back about technology ownership, responsibility and reporting.
The original post was entitled “Grab it all. Own it all. Keep it all.”
Since then I’ve done a lot of consulting to a lot of companies and I keep seeing the same mistake being made.
For all those Managing Directors, CEOs and Boards out there you need to read this and really digest it because your finance departments are leading you down the garden path.
Your ICT team must be treated as a business unit, just like any other operational unit otherwise you lose visibility and spend money like there’s no tomorrow. This is going to happen because your business units won’t be responsible for technology consumption. If you query them on it they’ll say its ITs fault, but, IT doesn’t actually have the visibility and clarity needed to be proactive because this has been buried in management fee this and administration fee that and shared services something else.
If you’re on a board and one of your accountants comes to you with a suggestion to bury clearly identifiable expenditure into administration fees or some sort of nebulous shared services model take him/her/it out the back and shoot them. These ideas are just bad news for a business.
When it comes to technology there is no such thing as shared to the point where you can’t identify the consumption by business unit/user/site and anyone who says otherwise is either deliberately burying the facts or is breathtakingly ignorant of the capability of technology today.
This has come up because of the time I’ve been spending in Brisbane dealing with a client who is moving to a Windows monculture on the recommendation of their Group Financial Controller. As part of her ‘transformative technology strategy’ she’s also moved away from a user pays cost allocation methodology to a shared services/administration fee cost allocation methodology. Her rationale is that there is little difference if cost is allocated by percentage of revenue rather than by actual consumption.
Accounting doublespeak, smoke and mirrors. Its really all about reducing reporting on something that isn't seen by the Financial Controller as really important to the business. The company used a Voice over IP phone system so the data lines that were moved into corporate charges were actually the phone lines for the various business units.
With one magical flourish of a quill, whole divisions had direct costs eliminated from above the EBIT line.
Suddenly financial results looked better than they really were. Bonuses would be paid on patently false results and for the IT team, they would watch as the company slowly sank into the mire of self-congratulatory oblivion.
I’ll have more on this one soon because the turn of events at this company makes this a really compelling story.
The original post was entitled “Grab it all. Own it all. Keep it all.”
Since then I’ve done a lot of consulting to a lot of companies and I keep seeing the same mistake being made.
For all those Managing Directors, CEOs and Boards out there you need to read this and really digest it because your finance departments are leading you down the garden path.
Your ICT team must be treated as a business unit, just like any other operational unit otherwise you lose visibility and spend money like there’s no tomorrow. This is going to happen because your business units won’t be responsible for technology consumption. If you query them on it they’ll say its ITs fault, but, IT doesn’t actually have the visibility and clarity needed to be proactive because this has been buried in management fee this and administration fee that and shared services something else.
If you’re on a board and one of your accountants comes to you with a suggestion to bury clearly identifiable expenditure into administration fees or some sort of nebulous shared services model take him/her/it out the back and shoot them. These ideas are just bad news for a business.
When it comes to technology there is no such thing as shared to the point where you can’t identify the consumption by business unit/user/site and anyone who says otherwise is either deliberately burying the facts or is breathtakingly ignorant of the capability of technology today.
This has come up because of the time I’ve been spending in Brisbane dealing with a client who is moving to a Windows monculture on the recommendation of their Group Financial Controller. As part of her ‘transformative technology strategy’ she’s also moved away from a user pays cost allocation methodology to a shared services/administration fee cost allocation methodology. Her rationale is that there is little difference if cost is allocated by percentage of revenue rather than by actual consumption.
Accounting doublespeak, smoke and mirrors. Its really all about reducing reporting on something that isn't seen by the Financial Controller as really important to the business. The company used a Voice over IP phone system so the data lines that were moved into corporate charges were actually the phone lines for the various business units.
With one magical flourish of a quill, whole divisions had direct costs eliminated from above the EBIT line.
Suddenly financial results looked better than they really were. Bonuses would be paid on patently false results and for the IT team, they would watch as the company slowly sank into the mire of self-congratulatory oblivion.
I’ll have more on this one soon because the turn of events at this company makes this a really compelling story.
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