On The Importance of Design at IBM: Love and Margins.
At the end of last year my founding partner dropped a quite outstanding post - The Importance of Software at IBM. In it Stephen analysed IBM’s 2011 financial results through the lens he has been using for most of the year (the end of the age of Software-only business models). It should surprise nobody that Software is [...]
SAP Goes All in for User Experience and Design
I flew down to Madrid yesterday to check out what’s happening in the SAP ecosystem at the company’s TechEd and Sapphire event. There are a ton of angles to consider in looking at the company’s comeback, but one of the most obvious is the growing influence of SAP’s Research Labs in Palo Alto. SAP’s future is [...]
Don’t Focus Solely on Design
The passing of Steve Jobs, his subseqent biography and the recent HBR article on his management Photo credit: courtesy of Catapult Global principles has stoked tremendous interest in the importance of design in building great products and companies. Designing great products is a brilliant notion… hard to do but easy to see how effective it [...]
The Intersection of Marketing and User Experience
The pace of change in the online world is causing organizations to struggle to keep up with their online interactions with their customers. More and more of these interactions happen nowadays via the Interweb. While these digital interfaces serve consumers everywhere, the user experience these consumers have shapes how they view the brands in their lives. [...]
IBM Systems and Technology Group: Redesigning for Developers
I just spent a couple of days with IBM in Rye Brook, NY, and I have to admit, I came away impressed. I should also mention that I landed quite a nice contract while I was there, so take that into account when reading this piece. Why does IBM STG want to work with RedMonk, [...]
Is Gap’s New Logo a Crowdsourcing Black Ops?
Here’s an interesting argument… that Gap hoodwinked everyone into signing on to crowdsource a new logo by using their decidedly crappy “new” logo as bait: That’s right. One of the most prominent popular fashion brands is crowdsourcing its new brand logo. So the favorite last-ditch tactic of brands and causes lacking money or new ideas [...]
The iPad and the Enterprise
(photo cc attrib. pntphoto thanks!) I have seen several keynotes from software executives lately. I recollect that all of them had iPads in them. Seasoned software executives have been getting positively giddy about the iPad. It has given Steve Jobs a sales force that he didn’t know he had. It seems without really planning for [...]
Crowdsourcing Our New Logo Design. Time to Vote.
We’re putting our money where our (digital) mouth is: having talked so much about crowdsourcing, we took 99designs for a test drive, hoping to see a new CloudAve logo emerge. I was not too impressed with the initial submissions, but just as I suspected, 99design works pretty much like eBay does: the better contestants ignore [...]
On innovation
(image of Scott Berkun presenting via Chasingfun cc attribution. Thanks!) In this interview on the O’Reilly blog Scott Berkun nails it. How do you define “innovation”? Scott Berkun: I strongly recommend people use this word as little as possible. It’s mostly a distraction. Many great ideas and breakthroughs were achieved without people worrying if they [...]
