Seeing over the horizon

Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why we can’t ask ChatGPT if it’s the future of technology

I’ve often wondered whether insight is simply a particular kind of logic. Did Steve Jobs visualise the visionary Walkman by joining the dots and seeing an area where plenty of human activity took place yet recorded sound was missing? Was the iPhone an obvious step to take five years after Blackberry had proven the appetite…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Operational people dominate the new Cloud era

Cloud technology has captured the headlines for years, and development teams have delighted in all the new services and capabilities that have been added. Rightly so. The race has been on to build new applications and get them running in the Cloud. Yet the emphasis has been shifting steadily, largely overlooked, and this shift has…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why using a new Cloud provider is getting even harder

Public Cloud services are widely available, and more and more firms are using these as a platform for their own technology services and systems. Tech teams, though, tend to have a favourite brand of Cloud, often out of familiarity or practicality. This can be a problem because there are several good, business reasons why firms…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Are you ready for the Post Everything world?

How the world has changed in such a short space of time. Just three years ago, Trump was in the White House, Jeremy Corbin was almost in Downing Street, and Get Brexit Done was everywhere in the UK media.  It’s hard to think of a major business assumption that hasn’t been turned upside down since…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

Why tech firms must now be agile in business, too

The future isn’t going to be like the past. In fact it isn’t even going to be like the present, but that’s not new for tech firms. What is new is that there are so many moving parts and large, disparate and sudden uncertainties out there that make forecasting deeply suspect. The range of significant…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management

Why change reveals the entrepreneurs

Paco and his family have run the cafe just off the beach here in Southern Spain for 35yrs, and it’s well known and frequented by locals, ex-pats and knowledgeable tourists alike. The Mollette Catalan are as popular as beans, bacon and eggs. Yet Paco is cutting his opening hours and telling us that he’s thinking…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Business leaders need to know where Cloud is heading

I read somewhere that business is all about solving problems before someone else solves them for you. Certainly “Hope and Cope” is not a management strategy that has much going for it. Anticipation is everything, especially for business leaders in fast moving sectors like technology where it’s like driving at high speed. To correct a…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Netflix shows us that Cloud is a jungle

Good entrepreneurs and great salespeople share a key characteristic: at heart they are control freaks. In some it may all be fairly benign, carefully moderated and directed to get good things to happen, but control is what drives them. Michael Porter’s Five Forces is a well established device that’s used by market strategists to analyse…
Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why the Cloud carve-up makes life hard for SMEs

Revealing figures published recently in the FT show Cloud supply is highly concentrated in AWS and Azure, and they now command more than half the worldwide revenues in the sector. The rest of the vendors are fragmented and too dispersed for them to be able to exert any significant influence. They pick up what’s left….
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management

Three ways to solve the growing problems of Cloud scale-up

Once online technology services have been built and tested, attention shifts to delivering to customer, and Operations becomes the name of the game. Lots of new workloads must kick in to ensure that performance is up to scratch, services are resilient and robust, and all service problems and issues are identified and fixed quickly to…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Cloud vendors are taking us back to the 1960s

Trousers were flared, and flowers and funny smelling smoke were everywhere when Gene Amdahl worked as a computer architect at IBM in the 1960s. Back then, designing and building hardware was a big deal and very expensive. Only a few companies produced such equipment, and each was different from the rest. Software was big, complex,…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

What Tim did after Steve

There were a lot of naysayers about the future of Apple when Steve Jobs died in October 2011. Few were confident about the Company he’d created and its future under Tim Cook, who’d just been promoted up from Chief Operating Officer to CEO. Even fewer had any idea about the rocket ship that the business…