It’s quite a challenge to add to the plethora of CES 2011 blogs. This post puts together some of my key observations. I didn’t touch on everything I saw and might have even missed key insights, so it’s not “the definitive” guide to anything CES. The show is huge and there were over 140,000 people there, so it wasn’t easy to catch all the action. But I did see a lot, and gain some insight along the way:
A key part of my day job is looking at how Amdocs, as a company, continuously improves its innovation capabilities and becomes an innovation powerhouse. So, I’m going to start a series of “About Innovation” posts talking about this—welcome to the first installment! I have so many things to tell you about what we do at Amdocs to nurture a culture of innovation and to become an effective innovator. So in order to help me choose which topics to discuss, I’ll rely on your feedback to help guide me.
We wanted to make sure everybody in the company, and beyond, understands that “innovation works” at Amdocs. Not only that we are seeing the results of our innovation activities, but also that it is really worth it for all the various stakeholders, and in particular, one community was most of interest to me – the innovators themselves. As a large company, we have many processes to help weed out variability in our day-to-day operations, in order to consistently recreate our successes, consistently produce quality products, and consistently deliver massive transformation projects for the world’s largest service providers. You cannot do these things consistently without good established processes and best practices—so we have many of these. But that can make innovation, challenging, as it requires trying something that’s new and different, and not part of the established process. Some might think that innovators might not fit in this culture. Well, they are wrong. Innovators can fit in, and we need them. But it takes some adjusting and encouragement to make this happen.
Continue reading About Innovation: Why we hung movie posters on our office walls
Last week – what most predicted – has finally happened: Android passed Apple iPhone in global units sold. This was no surprise. Google’s Android has a much more effective distribution mechanism than Apple’s iPhone. Apple’s iPhone is made by one manufacturer, Apple, and in the US, is only distributed by one service provider – AT&T. On the other hand, Google’s mobile operating system, Android, runs on many hardware manufacturers’ devices (HTC, Motorola, Samsung and others) and is distributed by many service providers in almost every region. It was just a matter of time until this strategy paid off for Google.
This raises the question: Will Android do to the iPhone what Windows has done to the Macintosh? More specifically, will Android make iPhone a niche solution? Even though the Mac was the first successful computer to have a graphical user interface and a mouse, Microsoft came from behind with Windows and reduced the Apple Macintosh computer to about 4% market share. It did so by making Windows practically ubiquitous – distributed by practically all other PC manufacturers.
Is Google Android going to do the same to the iPhone? All early indications are that it will.
