Former Microsoft mobile chief Juha Christensen quits in November to do
his own thing. In January, he surfaces at Macromedia, where he will be
heading up that vendor's mobile program.
Grok Headline matches for Juha Christensen Goes to Macromedia
juha christensen joins macromedia
juha christensen joins macromedia01/07/2004 05:35 PM it may be a reflection of their relative mobile platforms that
christensen left microsoft and chose to follow Flash
Hayden Christensen At Celebration III04/13/2005 12:15 PM Hayden Christensen will be at Celebration III, just not physically.
The actor wanted to attend but due to current filming in Italy will
not be able to. The next best thing is to have Jay Laga'aia interview
him via satelite, live in the Sagamoore Ballroom on Friday at 10:30
AM. Hear Hayden discuss his journey to the darkside as Darth Vader,
and so much more!
Seeing What's Next: Porter, Drucker and Christensen
The Idea: An overview of Michael Porter's, Peter Drucker's, and
Chris Christensen's approaches to innovation research.
Research is probably the most undervalued, and
poorly done,
process in Western business. It's not rocket science, but doing
it well takes practice, a
disciplined process, and strong creative, analytical and communication
skills.
Clay Christensen's new book Seeing What's Next is essentially a book
about doing good research, directed at accurately predicting the
future
of your business, or of an entire industry, and the market forces that
affect it.
Whereas most predictions of the future done by analysts and
accountants
are essentially projections,
and assume little or nothing will change except perhaps the
volume and margin of sales, any really useful, strategic prediction
must be a forecast,
which identifies what will, or might, significantly change, disrupt
the
market and the status quo, and how your company can react to these
anticipated changes. The forecast is the net result of these
anticipated external market and non-market changes and your company's
planned response to them.
The key to being able to competently anticipate such changes is knowing
where to look and knowing
what to look for. Michael
Porter, in his book Competitive
Strategy, identifies
'five forces' that provide one approach to doing so:
Suppliers:
How many there are, how their offerings differ, how their pricing
structures differ, where/how they get their supplies, how expensive it
is to switch suppliers, what substitute supplies might be available,
whether suppliers could become competitors, and how much an impact
their price has on your price
Customers:
How much power they have to affect your price, how much they buy, what
different customer segments exist, how your and others' brands are
perceived, how price-sensitive they are, whether they could become
competitors, how your products are differentiated in customers' eyes,
what motivates them to buy, what substitutes for your product could
become available, and how many there are and how they are
distributed
Competitors:
The fierceness of competitive actions and price-cutting, the costs of
abandoning an overly-competitive product and doing something else, the
number and diversity of competitors, fixed costs and margins, the
growth rate and stage of maturity of the industry, production
capacity,
the cost to customers of switching suppliers, customer loyalty to your
and to competitors' brands, differences between your and competitors'
products, and the size and profitability of the market
Potential New
Entrants:
Cost, capital requirements and learning curve to new competitors
entering your market, availability of supplies and distribution
channels to new entrants, impact of government regulation on ease of
entrance, economies of scale, value of brand and cost-of-switching
advantage to incumbents, ability of incumbents to retaliate quickly
against new entrants, intellectual property (patents
etc.)
Potential New Products:
New substitute products and technologies and their attributes, cost of
switching to customers, customers' buying criteria and propensity to
change to a novel product versus just changing brands,
price/performance ratio of new vs. current products
The last
two of these five forces are the source of what
Christensen in his earlier books called disruptive innovations -- the
ones that are often not foreseen when your focus is intently on
customers, suppliers and competitors.
So one way to predict the future for your company would be to do
thorough research in each of these five areas, see what changes are
occurring or what changes your company could precipitate, and how
those
changes and your company's responses to them would 'play out' in the
marketplace. It is not uncommon for research of this nature to use scenario planning
techniques -- to write several different 'stories' of how these
changes
might play out, and allow management and experts in the industry to
assign probabilities to each before deciding what actions to take.
I have already
written about Drucker's approach, in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
to knowing where to look and what to look for. For completeness, my
synopsis charts of his innovation process are reproduced in the charts
below. His 'where to look' is the seven innovation sources illustrated
in Fig.2 below. His approach to analyzing these potential 'change
producers' is described in Fig.3 below. His approach to identifying
what changes may be coming is similar to Porter's -- look for the
sources, do your research, and then analyze the implications
critically
-- but he slices the 'universe of change possibilities'
differently:
In Seeing What's Next,
Christensen offers yet another way of parsing this 'universe of change
possibilities'. What is most different about his book is that he
devotes the bulk of it to applying his approach in detail to predict
'what's next' in five industries: education, air transport,
semiconductors, health care and telecom, and in global markets. Here's
a summary of his theory of
where to look and what to look for:
Customers:
Undershot Customers (those dissatisfied with current
product limitations): Look for signs whether existing or new providers
are addressing these dissatisfactions through 'sustaining' innovations
(incremental or radical).
Overshot Customers (those for which
current products are
too complex or expensive): Look for signs whether new or existing
providers are introducing low-end 'disruptive' innovations, whether
providers from niche or other markets are entering this space because
their offering is simpler or cheaper and meets requirements, and
whether new standards are emerging that allow commoditization of the
product at a radically lower price.
Non-Customers (those that
are not currently using the
industry's products): Look for signs whether new or existing providers
are introducing new products that are simpler, cheaper or more
convenient and bringing new customers into the
market.
Non-Market Forces: Look for signs whether new
regulations
or government policies are making it easier for new competitors to
enter the market space.
Competitors:
SWOT: Compare the strengths and weaknesses of current
and
potential competitors (tangible and intangible resources they have
access to, processes and skills they have at their disposal, response
to past challenges, their strategies, structure, historical priorities
and business model -- the way they make money.
Asymmetries:
Assess what each competitor is doing that
others can't or won't do (e.g. go after niche markets, compete in the
low end of the market, dramatically shift processes or business model
in response to new market opportunities)
Strategies:
New Entrants: Assess whether potential new entrants are
flexible, experimenters and fast learners; whether they have the
internal skills and experience to enter the market effectively; and
whether their investors are patient for growth yet demanding of high
margins -- all of these signal success in entering the
market.
Creation of New Value Network (suppliers, customers,
alliance partners): Assess whether new entrants' initial target
customers, selected suppliers and strategic allies are sufficiently
'freestanding' (different from incumbents') to prevent incumbents from
co-opting them before they can effectively enter the
market.
Incumbents: Assess whether incumbents have established
their own separate innovative organizations or internal innovative
capability to launch its own disruptive innovations.
Just as a reminder, here from my earlier
article are Christensen's definitions of sustaining innovations
and disruptive innovations:
Sustaining
Innovations
are new, higher-margin, significantly more valuable products and
services brought to an existing market, a known group of customers.
Large corporations, who 'have' most of those customers, have a huge
advantage in introducing such innovations.
Disruptive Innovations
are new products and services that extend the market to a whole new
class of customers (usually down-market, by introducing a cheaper
version or alternative). As these innovations improve they gradually
start to eat away at the up-market version, sometimes destroying
it.
(His books have many examples of both types, the most famous
disruptive
innovations being the Mini-computer and then the PC which largely
destroyed
the mainframe computer market).
I like all three models -- Porter's, Drucker's, and Christensen's --
and if I were to be assigned to do some innovation research today, I
would use a combination of all three approaches, looking at the
markets, and potential markets, and the forces that drive them, from
all three perspectives. That way you can actually get a '3-D' forecast
of the future of your, or your client's, business or industry, or the
entire economy.
I would also integrate into the research process Imperato and Harari's
Thinking
the Customer Ahead approach, a type of primary research (i.e. face-to-face, as contrasted
with secondary research,
which is looking at written documents in the public domain) that
entails helping the customer to imagine where their business is headed, and then working backwards
to assess the implications of that on where your client's business is headed. I would use the Pyramid
Principle
methodology to document the research and perform the analysis. And I
would probably structure the results as scenarios or future-state
stories, embedding the results of the identified strategic innovation
and differentiation responses I would recommend the client
undertake.
If you want to practice applying these theories and doing your own
research, analysis and "what's next" forecasting, here are three
intriguing exercises:
Tivo won many awards for its invention of the personal
video recorder, which had all sorts of interesting attributes: the
ability to record automatically by interfacing with online program
guides, the replacement of the much-loathed VCR, the ability to strip
out commercials, the ability to do 'instant replays' on the fly on any
program. But it has not been terribly successful or profitable. Could
it reinvent itself or is the advent of competitive PVR technologies
built into TVs, satellite systems, and PC video software its death
knell?
The decision by Mercedes not to introduce its Smart Car
into the US market has the industry abuzz, as has its failure to make
a
profit in Europe. Now, GM is considering introducing a lower-end
similar vehicle for $3,000 into the Chinese market, but is concerned
about whether this could cannibalize its own markets. What will the
future hold for these vehicles?
The Apple iPod has been
enormously successful, even being
able to command a premium price over comparable products made by
reputable manufacturers. If you were Sony, what would be your
competitive response to the iPod?
"The Epicure's Lament" by Kate Christensen
"The Epicure's Lament" by Kate Christensen03/08/2004 11:07 PM Hugo Whittier has no interest in humanity -- except to insult it and
deprive it of his company. But the embittered and eloquent antihero
of this delightful farce isn't quite ready to let go.
Macromedia Prepares ColdFusion Upgrade August 11 - 9:04 PM ET News in Brief | Macromedia is currently alpha te
Gartner Group has a wonderful
new o
nline interview with Clay Christensen, one of the few consultants
out there wisely focused on innovation. Here are some of the
highlights:
For those who haven't read The
Innovator's Dilemma or The
Innovator's Solution, he recaps the definitions of the two main
categories of innovation:
Sustaining
Innovations
are new, higher-margin, significantly more valuable products and
services brought to an existing market, a known group of customers.
Large corporations, who 'have' most of those customers, have a huge
advantage in introducing such innovations.
Disruptive Innovations
are new products and services that extend the market to a whole new
class of customers (usually down-market, by introducing a cheaper
version or alternative). As these innovations improve they gradually
start to eat away at the up-market version, sometimes destroying
it.
(His books have many examples of both types, the most famous
disruptive
innovations being the Mini-computer and the PC which largely destroyed
the mainframe computer market.
He then goes on to say, in response to a question about whether
public
companies, being bottom-line (profit) rather than top-line (revenue)
focused, are inherently incapable of innovation and hence doomed to
fail, "The evidence is just
overwhelming that is true."
That's a remarkable statement, and vindication of my claim that the
current price/earnings ratios of most public companies, which
anticipate continuing double-digit annual profit growth for decades to
come, are absolutely preposterous.
Not only will disruptive innovations eventually kill market leaders,
he
says, but those that want to survive will have to create new,
autonomous organizations or business units to compete in the new
'disrupted' marketplace -- the inertia of the 'old', disrupted
organization is deadly, and cannot hope to transition to the new
market
reality fast enough to survive. IBM was the only survivor of the
mainframe PC companies, he says, because they did exactly that when
they entered the Mini-computer and PC markets -- they established
completely separate, autonomous divisions headquartered in different
cities.
[An interesting aside for regular readers of this weblog: Christensen,
in the process of discussing how disruptive innovations take over a
market, suggests something that may be disheartening to entrepreneurs
who want to take a low-risk, low-sweat Natural
Enterprise
approach: The race is to the quick, meaning the entrant who can bring
in a lot of new investment quickly to commercialize the innovation
will
likely dominate the market. Big risk, big return. Entrepreneurs need
to
recognize their limitations -- trying to bit off more than you can
chew
is more likely to lead to bankruptcy than the brass ring. There are
still lots of opportunities for natural entrepreneurs to make a very
comfortable living, without significant risk, by innovating on a scale
they can manage and which they can finance organically. There is much
to be said for modesty in business.]
Christensen goes on to suggest, as a corollary, that going, or
staying,
private can be a better route to sustainable innovation than being a
public company. While an IPO can be a great way to raise cheap money,
it then exposes your company to the insatiable and unreasonable
expectations of passive shareholders, forcing you to take your eye off
both innovation and strategic vision, in pursuit of short-term
profitability targets that, in the long run, are often dysfunctional.
That creates a great quandary -- because private companies have much
less access to cheap capital, they are also less equipped to
capitalize
on innovation, even though they are better equipped to produce it.
Now Christensen gets to the most important point in the interview,
though he does so strangely. He starts by saying it is dangerous to
listen too much to your customers, because they are, by definition,
satisfied with what you do now, and hence won't force you to be
innovative. But his real point is that it is by talking to prospective
customers (who he calls non-customers) thatyou
discover why they are not buying from you today, that can lead you on
the path of innovation (by finding out why). I think that's a bit
black-and-white: It suggests you have either 100% 'market share' of a
customer or none. In my experience there are lots of opportunities to
sell more to existing
customers, and since you have strong relationships with those
customers
they may be able to help you identify opportunities to sell more to
them through innovation, than 'non-customers' who don't know your
capabilities and with whom you don't have a relationship that can buy
you time, trust and candour from them. But there are still three
important points here:
While the best innovative ideas come from talking to
customers and determining their unmet needs, 'customers' should include prospective customers, not just current ones,
and
There is some danger that a customer who knows you for
product or service X will not want you, or not imagine you being able,
to produce Y as well: Your excellence
in one area can actually detract customers who are aware of that
excellence from helping you innovate in another
area.
If you're going to try to innovate in a new area, set up a separate, autonomous business unit
to do so, so interference from, and to, the existing business
is minimized.
He goes on to talk about the folly of the traditional product
line/demographic market segmentation, trying to find patterns in
product category needs by customer age, income level, profession or
sex
-- leading even sophisticated market-driven companies like P&G to
fail with 85% of their new product launches. He re-affirms what I've
always believed: Every individual is a market segment of one. The
answer, he says, is to segment the
market by types of need instead of by demographics.
To do this, he says, you need to understand yourself as a customer and
consumer, and appreciate that your needs are diverse, dynamic, and
ever-changing. The best innovations fill an unmet need, and starting
with demographic segments actually obfuscates the identification of
needs that transcend demographic boundaries.
He recommends two techniques for honing in on such needs:
At brainstorming sessions, get people to identify and
then individually rank why people buy each type of product or service
(KJ
diagramming), and then aggregate the top-ranked reasons to create
a profile of the need.
Conduct a series of interviews of
customers who recently
used the product or service, asking each to tell a story about (a) the
specific situation that caused them to decide to use the product or
service, and (b) the last time they were in a similar situation but
used a different product or service, and why; and then aggregate these
into a profile of the motivations.
The combination of these two profiles gives you an appreciation for
the
needs that exist, and the customers' buying behaviours when faced with
that need -- excellent grist for the innovation mill.
The interview includes a wonderful quote from Ted Leavitt in a 1960
HBR article called Marketing
Myopia: "People don't buy a quarter-inch drill. They buy a
quarter-inch hole.
You've got to study the hole, not the drill. The drill is just a
solution for it." Rob Paterson
recently made this point with similar eloquence, coining the word
"coolth" for what people were really buying when they bought an air
conditioner.
Christensen didn't seem to be prepared for the final question -- where
to look for unfilled needs. I guess I need to tell him about my post of
last week.
Thanks to the always-excellent Innovation Weekly for the link to
the Gartner article, and to John Wark at New Dog Old Trick
for the link to KJ diagramming. John also has an interesting recent
post suggesting one of the main values of a blog is as a place to
organize and store our memories. For the explanation of my
Innovation
Process chart, above, please see this article.
[securityzone@macromedia.com: New Macromedia Security Zone Bulletin Posted]
Into Macromedia?03/06/2004 02:08 AM Or into something else? If you haven't seen Macromedia's excellent
INTO - What are you into?, then you really should take some minutes
to...
New CMD for Macromedia
New CMD for Macromedia12/24/2004 12:44 PM The Hindu Business Line Dec 23 2004 7:57PM GMT
It seems that my former company is up to their typical hijinks.
What's amusing about this - is that it comes from O'Reilly Net - and
Tim O'Reilly is on Macromedia's board.
Do they think they're just being coy, tricky or just enjoy coming
off looking foolish? Hard to say.....
Either way - it sticks to their horrible reputation - which seems
to be carefully coddled and replenished with each stupid announcement,
deal and product acquisition.
Robin Berjon writes "Macromedia
recently announced that its latest version of Flash Lite (a
limited Flash for mobile devices) was to support SVG Tiny 1.1, and
support it fully (though no one has yet been able to verify that
assertion). For a moment, the Web community wondered if they might be
playing nice at last, after yielding to massive pressure from the
mobile market to support W3C and 3GPP standards, or if they simply
meant to use SVG as a trojan to get Flash into mobile devices. A
n article freshly published on Macromedia's web site clearly makes
the case that they're after the latter, speading as much FUD as
possible along the way. Thankfully, Antoine Quint decided to
respond in a brief O'Reilly Net article in which he debunks
Macromedia's marketing lies one by one, and expands on the wondrous
features of SVG Tiny 1.1 and the shortly upcoming SVG Tiny 1.2 that
make people drool before their mobile phones."
Have I apoloigized to the collective whole for coming up
with that lock-in strategy in the first place? Little did I
realize how horrible it would become and how these caretakers would
usurp the world I dreamed of creating.
Oh well - they're all going to hell. Me - I'll spend the rest of
my life trying to make up for that mistake.
Seems straightforward to me. Adobe is in at the center of print
production (PhotoShop & friends, InDesign, PDF), while
Macromedia’s DreamWeaver is the single most important Web-design
product. Dave
Shea says this might be about Flash, but let me suggest exactly
the opposite: if you’re hitching your career to Flash, it might be a
good time to look at alternatives. Why’s that? Because, near as I
can tell, Macromedia has never made any serious money with Flash.
They’ve accomplished one of the great, heroic, marketing coups of
all time, getting the plug-in onto substantially every desktop on the
planet; and this bought them, uh, what exactly? They sell authoring
tools, but seriously, how many Flash designers does the world need?
Anyhow, most of the good things you can do with Flash, you can do
about as well with DHTML (oops that’s called AJAX now) and your
“back” button still works. I guess there’s no reason to
actually shut Flash down, the tool revenue must about cover the
engineering costs. But Adobe, historically, has been good at focusing
on what works and dropping the distractions. (Can you remember
PageMill?) Flash is a distraction.
Macromedia Breeze
Macromedia Breeze07/30/2004 08:31 AM PC Magazine UK Jul 30 2004 12:11PM GMT
Adobe to buy $3.4bn Macromedia
Adobe to buy $3.4bn Macromedia04/18/2005 10:09 AM Adobe is to buy Macromedia, a specialist in software for animated
graphics and web design.
Macromedia.com invisible?03/11/2003 11:53 AM Congratulations Macromedia, with a new site. I like the design, but
that is about all the good things I can say about the site. I...
Adobe to buy Macromedia!04/18/2005 04:25 AM A blockbuster sized story just broke--Macromedia will be bought out by graphics giant Adobe. Between the two
companies, nearly 100% of people in the design industry use at least
one of their products. The $3.4 billion deal has been approved by
execs from both companies. Here are the specs:
Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved
by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at
a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every
share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on
Adobe's and Macromedia's closing prices on Friday, April 15, 2005,
this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common
stock. Upon the close of the transaction, Macromedia stockholders will
own approximately 18 percent of the combined company on a pro forma
basis.
Shares of Macromedia [MACR] closed at
$33.45 Friday, making Adobe's bid a large premium.
The real story here is the massive market share Adobe will control in
the creative industry. Besides video and out of date print publishing,
they have it wrapped up. What are your thoughts? Sound off!
(Personally I thought I read the headline wrong...)
Adobe to buy Macromedia04/18/2005 04:13 AM Adobe to buy Macromedia I almost choked when I saw this
press release, Adobe is going to buy out Macromedia for $3.4 billion
in stock. Adobe is paying about $9 over the current share price, which
means the investors will make out nicely. With the two largest design
software companies becoming one, the new Adobe will be a monopoly (if
it isn't already with Photoshop). I just hope they remove the ability
to make really annoying Flash movies...
Macromedia Breeze 307/13/2004 12:18 PM PC Plus UK Jul 13 2004 3:32PM GMT Grok Description matches for Juha Christensen Goes to Macromedia GrokA matches for Juha Christensen Goes to Macromedia
Juha Christensen Goes to Macromedia
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