Network World

Yankee Ingenuity

By Howard Anderson

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Anderson is senior managing director of Yankeetek, a Cambridge, Mass., venture incubator. He is also founder of The Yankee Group and the William Porter Distinguished Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mail Anderson.

CIOs face additional pressures: 11/04/08; Last year we talked about CIOs - who are both the masters and the victims of doubletalk and who are under enormous pressure to provide more to their users and at the same time, trying to keep spending under control.
Test Tube Companies: 07/29/08; Quick question: who is the major funder of new technology in communications?
Cable karma and Comcast: 06/03/08; Twenty five years ago, when I was running The Yankee Group and had just co-founded Battery Ventures, I would take perverse joy in getting one industry into the pants of another. Mischief City!
10 reasons why Motorola failed: 04/09/08; Warren Buffet once said that when a manager with a great turnaround reputation encounters a company with a reputation for dysfunctionality, it is the company that will keep its reputation.
Tech Valentines from Hell: 02/08/08; An errant Valentine Mail Server inadvertently forwarded me a bunch of Valentines for other people. Given your quirky nature, I thought I would share.
Google vs the telcos: the new industry Food Fight: 12/11/07; There is nothing we industry pundits love more than a good food fight. Cisco vs. Lucent. Google vs. Microsoft! Intel vs. AMD! Cable vs. Satellite! SAP vs. Oracle! But the Fight of The Future is what is going to happen on your cellular phone and in your home.
3Com joins the list of one-generation companies: 10/30/07; It was with some degree of sadness that I saw 3Com sold to Bain Capital and Huawei. But it got me wondering why we see so many one-generation companies.
The life of a CIO: It’s not pretty: 08/28/07; Want one of the worst jobs in American industry? Try chief information officer, a job with a lofty title and plenty of landmines, almost all of them more related to Machiavelli than technology.
Wireless metro service providers: back from the dead: 06/26/07; About 13 years ago, we at Battery Ventures invested in a company called General Wireless, a company with no assets, no customers and one tough CEO, Roger Lindquist.
A cynic rips open source: 05/10/07; I chaired an interesting meeting the other day. It was me against senior executives of Cisco, Agilent Technologies and Novell.
Wal-Mart and the Three Great RFID Lies: 03/15/07; One of the Three Great Lies used to be: My wife doesn't understand me. What are the Three Great RFID Lies?
Siemens: Sun never sets on white-collar crime: 01/18/07; Perhaps cynicism was what you felt when you read that Siemens management had uncovered more than $500 million in "suspicious transactions" -- all related to seven years of winning contracts in the wireline world.
Qualcomm: Contrarians at the gate: 11/16/06; What is the dominant wireless company today? Nokia? Motorola? Ericsson? No - it's Qualcomm. Irwin Jacobs, Qualcomm's founder, once told me that when he started the company, he thought it would be a small consulting firm working on interesting problems for the communications industry. Today, Qualcomm has 9,300 employees and sales of more than $7 billion.
Medicine: The next big thing: 09/25/06; So I invited the honchos of Boston medicine over to my house to hear Kessler. These are the people who run the establishment, whose credentials are irrefutable, who have made their careers and their hospitals fortresses. At first, they humored Kessler, but you could see their patience was wearing thin. I was reminded of the telecom industry poobahs when they first encountered packet switching and VoIP - they were in denial. Then I saw their smoldering anger - they were seeing the threat. I recalled IBM meetings where the idea of minicomputers, desktop computers and personal software was once raised. ...
OLPC and unintended consequences: 07/31/06; Last week I held that low-cost computer in my hands. It was built by Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the One Laptop Per Child project in Cambridge, Mass. It hasn't hit the $100 price tag just yet - the cost is about $140 now, but is still coming down - and you won't be able to buy it in any store, but millions of kids around the world will be getting one for free.
Microsoft vs. Cisco: The new clash of the titans: 06/12/06; A few years ago I suggested to both Cisco CEO John Chambers and Bill Gates that the day was coming when their companies would be competing against each other. Each replied that I once again had my head up my rear, that they had nothing but respect for each other and their spheres of influence were completely different. Both were lying through their teeth. Kind of like Don Corleone saying that Barzini was his blood brother for all time.
The future of disruption: 04/24/06; Clay Christensen dropped by my class at MIT the other day to talk about disruptive technologies in communications. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s Solution, pointed out that the incumbent company rarely loses its best customers because it always immediately addresses any foray by an upstart.
China, Incorporated: 02/20/06; Napoleon said, 'Do not awaken China.' That was almost 200 ago. Today, China is awake and energetic, and has funding from the most deep-pocketed of sources - the U.S. venture community.
Game over, start new game: 12/05/05; The early success of AOL was based on its explicit chat rooms. Now, fast forward to 2009 - where virtual reality and physical activity coincide. Don't laugh - many of the major revolutions in consumer behavior were driven by sexually explicit programming. Video rental stores, before Blockbuster, had a back room where you could rent X-rated videos. Once that market jump-started purchases of home VCRs, then the rest of the movie industry provided programming.
Curmudgeons of the world, unite: 10/10/05; I am tired, tired, tired of products that are smarter than I am and delight in proving how inept I am. I want a whole new set of products. Products for those of us over 50 - with simple instructions, fat buttons and our own help line manned by people over 50 who will not talk in jargon.
Confluxion: The state of our lives: 08/15/05; The world used to be hierarchical - some people spoke, others listened. Feedback was the occasional letter to the editor. Now the world is peer to peer. Everyone speaks, all the time. What are the implications of this?
Brother Bill and the next Holy War: 06/27/05; When we look at Sun's Scott McNealy or Oracle's Larry Ellison, we see successful executives who every once in a while get tired of the game and take a physical or mental time out. Not Gates. He has just what he wants: a new Holy War.
Game over: Demand is dead: 05/02/05; We're screwed. There's no other way to put it. Who's "we?" The network/datacom/telecom industry. And why are we screwed? Because demand is dead. Kaput. Moribund. Innovation has never been better, and demand has never been worse.
India, China duke it out: 03/07/05; The Chinese are aggressive and determined that they will remain the world's factory. The Indians are entrepreneurial and are beginning, quietly, to consider outsourcing some of their software development to even lower-cost countries - such as China.
Venture capitalist offers look at '05 hot spots: 01/10/05; Let's get right to it. Let's see what this year portends.