The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

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Great read from The New York Times for this weekend about Gérard de Villiers, a pulp-fiction spy novelist in France who has an uncanny knack of writing about world events before they happen.

Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. “It was prophetic,” I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. “It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.”

Great read for the weekend. The article, I mean. Something tells me Mr. de Villiers collection would take longer. Oh, and I’d have to learn French.

Really Hard Work

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I really like this very short post by David Smith, esteemed writer of iOS apps. David doesn’t like the idea that to win you have to work really hard. Instead, he thinks the key to success is persistent work.

The difference isn’t just semantics. There is a big difference in how you view your goal if you are trying to work hard versus working persistently. It isn’t about the amount of energy you expend or the stress you survive.

In my experience the people who succeed are typically the ones that outlasted their peers for long enough to become confronted with opportunities well prepared.

I hope he’s right. What is this for me? 16 years and counting? (Although I must admit there has been plenty of stress along the way!)

RIM and the Case for a Third Smartphone Winner

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Blackberry bushes love the Northwest. They grow like crazy here and are generally considered a weed. In the spring blackberry bushes flower and then the fruit grows through the summer, with full bloom in August. The fruit is delicious but often very hard to get to as the plant has some nasty thorns. There’s a fast food chain here called Burgerville that specializes in fresh fruit milkshakes. Their blackberry shakes are to die for. None of this has to do with BlackBerry, the product (and now company as RIM changed its name) but I couldn’t resist the fruit/plant discussion.

I saved a whole mess of articles on BlackBerry announcements last week. I’m looking for signs of life and, frankly, a clue. I may be one of the few people on the face of the planet that believes strongly that there is room for a third mobile platform. I think iPhone and Android are basically attacking the same market segment — entertainment-centric people — and there is room for a product well positioned as an information-centric platform. At one time RIM was well positioned to capitalize on that market with its messaging-centric devices.

So the question I’ve been asking myself for the past month since the company name change, BlackBerry 10 and new devices were announced is this: can BlackBerry be that company.

There are some potential signs of life from the things CEO Thorsten Heins at the announcement. He said his devices are aimed at “people who need to get things done, people who need simplicity, and balance” and “people who consider true multitasking a must have.” Okay, maybe some signs of life. But then Heins also said, “hyper-connected social multi-taskers” and “We will soon give you more ways to connect your mobile experience to not just other people, but the whole world around you,” neither of which, frankly mean much of anything.

What does it mean to be an information-centric user? It means that the devices are designed and meant to make us more productive, caring less about entertaining us. Let me give you some examples, some of which could be accomplished today and some of which are dreams of a better future:

  • Calendar, contacts and tasks are all interconnected seamlessly across all devices
  • Devices are smart enough to change directions for you when it sees you have steered off course
  • Devices talk to parking meters and tell us which spot, closest to my meeting, is available
  • It monitors my calendar and traffic patterns and tells me that I need to leave
  • It sees a meeting request and automatically schedules it tentatively, waiting for approval
  • It knows all the information I’ve created and all the connections I have and tells me all about a person as I walk into the meeting

This is the tip of the iceberg, obviously, and the one company who is doing any of this is Google.

Jean Louis-Gassée backs this up with an article on why iPad just isn’t up-to-snuff as a professional tool. ”But when we take a closer look at the iPad ‘Pro’, we see that Apple’s tablet is far from realizing its ‘professional’ potential. … The more complex the task, the more our beloved 30-year-old personal computer is up to it. But there is now room above the enforced simplicity that made the iPad’s success for UI changes allowing a modicum of real-world ‘Pro’ workflow on iPads.”

Back to BlackBerry. There was nothing in the BB10 announcements and reviews that left me believing that RIM has this perspective. Here’s a few additional quotes:

  • Walt Mossberg review: “If you use a corporate network controlled by an IT department, and want to keep your work and personal apps separate, BB10 has a simple way to do it. You just swipe down and press a button called “Personal” or “Work” and the apps, and even the background, change. However, email and calendar entries are still intermingled.” A sign of hope. At least they get the dual use for devices.
  • Interview with CEO Thorsten Heinz, answering the question, “What does BlackBerry mean to you?” Heinz said, “Innovating in the field of mobile computing by being bold.” I have no idea what that means. What? Android isn’t bold? Apple’s sitting on their laurels?
  • Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations from a developer event in Amsterdam: The themes BlackBerry wants to encourage for BB10 apps are “integrated, social and beautiful”, he said. ”Don’t just port the apps you’ve built over — build us applications that are specifically for BlackBerry 10.” You don’t want popular apps just new stuff? And how is “integrated, social and beautiful” different then the apps on iOS and Android?
  • Joshua Topolsky in his Z10 review talks extensively about apps. He highlights a few of the bundled ones: Messages, Camera, Maps, Browser, Remember and Story Maker. Camera and Story Maker (a video editing app) are primarily consumer-oriented. Browser is a requirement for all. Remember, Maps and Messages are all prosumer apps. Unfortunately Topolsky’s biggest problems are with the prosumer apps. He particularly finds the Messages app, Blackberry’s original claim to fame, slow and painful for anyone who gets lots of messages. Maps, he said, is horrible at directions. He does mention that Dropbox, Evernote and other third-party services can be added at the operating system level.

Maybe the reality of these devices in professional hands will prove differently. Or maybe BlackBerry felt they needed to match iOS and Android strengths before moving in its own direction, something I don’t believe but could be enticing for an also-ran uncomfortable in its own shoes. But I highly doubt either of these are the case. My gut tells me BlackBerry is in an awkward position and will never again regain its former glory.

Map The Future

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My friend Michael Mace wrote a book on a topic that, I think, he is one of the world’s foremost experts in: mapping the future. I met Mike when he was the chief competitive officer for Palm. Since then we have had long conversations about where the market has been and where it was heading. I am constantly amazed at the foresight he has had.

Mike just released a book on the topic called Map the Future and I was privileged to read a pre-release copy.

Most companies think about the future the wrong way. Visionary companies try to impose their will on the future, like a military drill sergeant; analytical companies try to predict the future in detail, like a weather report. Both approaches fail when there are changes we didn’t anticipate. The reality is that the future’s not determined yet, so you can’t predict it exactly, and you can’t always control it. What you need instead is a map of the possibilities, like a highway map for the future, so you can see where you can and can’t go, and then nudge events toward the future you want to see. Map the Future teaches you how to build that future roadmap, and how to use it to drive strategy.

Mike describes it as a cookbook for business strategy. I highly recommend it: Mike’s site, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Artery Calcification

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There were two very large pieces of news in the tech world last week: Google cancelled Reader, its RSS feed reading service, and Mailbox, an innovative mobile email client, sold to Dropbox.

These are both interesting news items to me for primarily the same reason. Let me explain through the Google Reader example. There’s a lot of angst in the tech community about this decision. Those of us who use Reader use it avidly and its disappearance leaves a huge hole. The problem, though, is that Google has stopped any innovation in RSS feed readers years ago.

Big companies, in my opinion, are like plaque in an artery. They enter a market, clog it, and then stop letting anything get through. The shear size of these big companies clogs all innovation and we, as consumers of these products, are left wanting more. Google with Reader isn’t the only example. Microsoft has done this for years with Outlook and Office. Intuit has done this for years with Quickbooks. PeopleSoft did this for years with CRM software. In each case, these solutions calcify until some major change happens to blow things up. Generally this change occurs around a shift in technology. In the past 15 years that has been a rise in the web and a rise in touch, mobile systems like smartphones and tablets. In Google Reader’s case it is Google blowing it up. When these changes occur we see amazing innovation with new winners. Eventually, of course, those winners calcify, too. We get Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com, for instance.

And that leads me to Mailbox. In the old days a company like this could never compete with Microsoft’s Outlook. They could have built an email client that sucked in Outlook data, even streamlined and improved it, but to compete? Wasn’t going to happen. But because of the web and mobile over the past 15 years, Mailbox has a chance. In just a few short weeks 1.3 million people joined its waiting list and the company received multiple acquisition offers, with Dropbox dropping as much as $100 million to own it.

The combination of web as plumbing and mobile as front end is doing that to a lot of software areas now. We’ve mostly seen this in social and pure consumer apps, Instagram for example, but that’s temporary. It will happen to productivity apps, too. The key is looking at the old problems and old solutions in a brand new light, re-orienting around the customer and the problem he is trying to solve but utilizing usage paradigms perfected in the technology generations before. Mailbox didn’t look at email and see it as solely a communication tool or CRM tool as Google and Microsoft had done before. Mailbox looked at email as a way to organize the things you need to do instead, realizing that a lot of people use their inbox as a task list.

This pattern is very straight forward and has occurred every time the technology changes. First we get solutions which are the same as the old platform but now available on the new platform. Think the email client on every mobile device today. Then you see innovation around those ideas, Mailbox as an example but there are others, too. Then one of these solutions becomes dominant and, over time, solidifies its control of the market, overserving it, and slowing innovation. Finally, technology changes and the cycle starts all over again.

When markets change and technology change, that’s when real innovation occurs. Google canceling Reader is a huge pain in the short term. But in the long-term this creative destruction is the only way things get better.