in Innovation
I’ve been a loyal Firefox user since version 0.4, back when an open source browser was a novelty. Thanks for Mozilla, today there are a handful of open source browsers in the market. Since then, many things have changed; including Firefox. Yesterday, Firefox 57 or Quantum was released. In a world where incremental improvements is the norm, this is actually a big release for Mozilla.
A good mantra for teaching an old industry new tricks is: make the common uncommon.…
WhatsApp has succeeded because it is focused on creating a great product, not another social network. What will make your business unique is what you deliberately choose not to do.
After almost two years of chit-chat, WhatsApp sold to Facebook for $19 billion yesterday. For a moment, let’s ignore whatever we think about the valuation, and whether in the larger economic picture this is something to be concerned about.
Here I won’t get into the whole strategic thinking behind why this deal makes or doesn’t make sense. What I will do is talk about the picture below:…
Via Quora: What can you change in a business that is strong enough to differentiate the business from all competitors, but without touching the product itself?
For example,
These are significant differences that not only differentiate the companies from all the others, but disrupted the market in some way.
What other variables can you change in a business in this way?
How are these variables called?
Where can I learn more about this?…
“It’s not enough that we win; all others must lose.” – Larry Ellison
Heard this one yesterday. I’m all in for competition, but business isn’t about war (at some point I used to think like Genghis Khan too). It isn’t about beating competitors just for the heck of it. I find this focus on competing to beat competitors ridiculous.
The focus SHOULD be on the customer winning. …
in Innovation
Yes, that’s my browser. It had 100 tabs open at that point in time last night. Those 100+ tabs were accumulated over a week of browsing and not reading what was previously open. Not very productive, and a clear sign of procrastination on my part. The accumulation of un-read tabs is a clear sign, to me, that I need to focus.
I’m pretty sure my laptop can handle another 100 tabs, but what’s the point of having 200 tabs open? I’ll never read them. And that’s the point. At some point in time, when complexity overwhelms us, we just want to reset and start over.…
in Innovation, Strategy
While the statistics are debated, apparently Google’s Chrome browser has overtaken Firefox for the number two spot in two short years and now sits behind Internet Explorer. Why has this happened?
Two years ago Firefox was cruising. Their value proposition was that of reliability and security. They created a browser that never crashed and protected users. Two attributes people didn’t associate with Internet Explorer because of it’s propensity for getting exploited by hackers and malware.
They also pioneered the ability to personalize the browser by letting developers create extensions that added more functionality to the browsers. Mozilla took advantage of this and became the browser of choice for techies and internet enthusiasts.
But this focus on reliability, security and personalization, while great, made them blind to an emerging dimension: speed.
Google focused it’s efforts on making a browser that was not just reliable and secure, but also very very fast. It even touted that it was faster than lighting, and it is.
Well guess what?…
