Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Cloud gives tech firms a skills shortage

It’s almost twenty years since AWS publicly launched its first infrastructure service. Those early days of Cloud were chock full of promise: no more hardware ownership to worry about; scale infrastructure up and scale down, paying only for what you use. In many ways that headline promise has been realised. Much of the last two…
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…
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…
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…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why business leaders must forget about normal and thrive in the unknown

I’ve been in business a long time, and big events have come and gone: the oil crisis and inflation of 1972; the crash of ’87; a couple of recessions and a few wars and 9/11, you get the picture. Sudden technology changes have done their bit as well. I’m not really sure when it was,…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

How to fix the business issues created by Public Cloud

Public Cloud – on-line computing resources from the big brands – was seen as the obvious choice for many and technologists love them, but several key problems have emerged for business users: Costs can become prohibitive when usage gets underway Lock-in strips away business flexibility and choice Privacy and security issues concern many Support is…