RIM – Heins Uncertainty Principle
Blackberry maker RIM has a new man at the helm. Physicist Thorsten Heins is the new CEO. Despite RIM’s share price dropping over 70% in 12 months, he is advocating a turnaround rather than sticking the organisation in the Large Hadron Collider and selling off the resultant pieces. In particular he believes that RIM’s private data network is a key differentiator and so will remain in place.
Apple – MVP
Apple revisited the top of the leader board when after announcing its record quarterly results it briefly become the most valuable company in the world again. It would appear that the CEO transition from the iconic Steve Jobs to Tim Cook has been a complete success.
Twitter – Censorship strategy
Twitter plans to grow its membership from 100 million to a billion and that means entering markets where the governmental leaders can get a little tetchy about less than respectful tweets. Anticipating this Twitter has loosened its censorship policy so that it will if requested make ‘offensive’ tweets invisible to citizens of the offended nation. It would be great if the censorship could extend to ‘social marketing’ experts who seem to make up a significant percentage of Twitter’s existing community.
Kodak – Unfortunate development
Kodak became another example of an industrial economy giant failing to adjust to the digital economy when it recently filed for bankruptcy. The innovation-loaded slogan ‘you press the button, we do the rest’ suggests that Kodak played at the leading edge. However that slogan was coined in 1888 and whilst Kodak continued to keep one eye on the digital landscape it wasn’t enough (eyes) to gauge the speed at which the market was moving.
IBM – 12 atom bit
IBM researchers decided rather than follow the traditional path of making the next version of memory storage a little smaller than the current version they would rush to the end game. Having discovered that it is not possible to represent either one or a zero on just one atom (quantum effects) they just kept adding atoms until they were able to predictably store literally one bit of information. This is still very much in the lab and a very cold one at that (1 degree above absolute zero).
Sap – Bullish
German enterprise applications vendor SAP is confident that it is on target to hit 20 billion euro in revenues by 2015. 2011 saw its best year ever with fourth quarter revenues up 11 per cent year on year. Its $3.4bn acquisition of SuccessFactors gives it a boost in the Cloud space as well as in the HR software market. Oracle and Microsoft will likely be unnerved by the enterprise giant regaining its mojo.
Cisco – Leaves the living room
Cisco’s relatively recent review of its strategic direction led to its commitment to focus on the enterprise space. It subsequently dumped its half a billion dollar Flip investment, which on reflection looked sadly on course to obsolete itself anyway. The most recent withdrawal from the consumer space is the demise of the Umi Telepresence home videoconference offering. Cisco does teleconferencing like no other, but its consumer offering was expensive. Like the Flip it was another device delivered into a world where device consolidation is the name of the game.
WalMart – Scan and scram
Be afraid. Retail giant Walmart is now in the mobile shopping applications business through its acquisition of Small Society for an undisclosed sum. It is looking to boost its web offering with a view to taking on Amazon, which has in recent years been eating its lunch. Another problem Walmart is looking to address is where shoppers visit their store and use their smartphones to capture the barcode information of products they are interested in and then source a better deal online.
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