Strategy:

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Strategy is differentiated from tactics, or immediate actions, with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed.

In the last post we saw how Bill Gates used a Portfolio of Strategies(henceforth called PoS) to remove some unnecessary uncertainties from the market. Today, we will extend and innovate on the PoS strategy in relation to internet marketing.

There are clear identifiable steps to deploy PoS strategy. And they can be roughly classified in the following manner:

1. Identify a global aim. First you have to identify the common meeting point where you want to go with your PoS.For example, the global aim of Microsoft was to be the leading PC software company. Each strategy in the PoS was achieving this common goal.
2. Contextualize your PoS. Just identifying a goal is not enough. Next comes putting your PoS in a context. Contextualizing mandates setting limitations.Let’s say your global aim is to make money through blogging, then contextualizing the PoS would amount to (more…)

   Tags: Bill Gates, Marketing, Microsoft, Strategy, Uncertainty

Image via CrunchBase

I had some major misunderstandings about Microsoft’s Windows strategy. After some research I realized even more what a genius Bill Gates is. (Even though I might disapprove of some of MS’s policies, but that is besides the point.)

In one sentence Bill Gate’s strategy for Operating Systems can be called Portfolio of Strategies.

It was 1987, and MS-DOS was challenged by more graphical and intuitive Operating Systems. And Microsoft was still a $346 million minnow. The then giants were already eying the OS market in various ways:

1. IBM was building a multitasking OS/2 system.
2. AT&T in collaboration with Sun Microsystem and Xerox was making its own user friendly OS.
3. HP in collaboration Digital Equipment was building its own version of UNIX Operating system.
4. Apple already had a highly graphical OS, and it kept out-innovating Microsoft.

To say that odds were stacked against Microsoft would be an understatement.

Apparently Bill Gates had two options: (more…)

Tags: Apple, Bill Gate, IBM, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Operating system, Sun Microsystem, Windows

You have journeyed all the way with me, and we are here. Let me remind you of our wonderful journey together. And let me re-introduce myself. I am the Entrepreneur. I was tiny and unicellular, I moved around in the prebiotic soup. I am sure , you mighty observer, must have dismissed my micro and insignificant activity. I was helpless and vulnerable, and many the likes of me just vanished without a whimper.I somehow managed to survive, barely. I just hanged on enough till the next major evolutionary step. Despite the harsh conditions (more…)

Tags: Evolution, Physical law, Psychology, Reality, Social Sciences

Courtsey : http://www.cindoc.csic.es

Imagine millions of neurons made up of simple chemical substances. And when they are meshed together they give rise to an amazing phenomena what we call as human brain.The magic of human brain does not occur because of the individual neurons but because of the way they are connected. Any system has two parts: component and connections. Almost always it is the type of connections which govern the system’s behavior.And those connections give rise to behavior which (more…)

Tags: Applications, Combinatorics, Complex systems, Connectivity, Emergence, Graph theory, Human brain, Math, World Wide Web

Coutsey : www.scu.edu

There are a few books which impact you on so many levels and from so many angles. ‘ Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty‘ by Prof. Muhammad Yunus is one of them for me. The book is about the story of Grameen-Bank and how it came about, how it expanded and how it changed the life of millions of people. The book is just unputdownable.(Grameen-Bank and Prof.Yunus got the Noble Peace Prize in 2006.) I read around 200 pages in just first sitting.(it has 277 pages.)Through this book I witnessed the very soul of entrepreneurship and have gleaned some lessons for you:

(1) Believe in the creative spirit of yourself and others around you. When Prof.Yunus started the Grameen Bank his basic premise was the power of creativity of the borrowers of micro-loans. Without believing in the creative spirit of the poor borrowers, there is no way micro lending would have succeeded. Even if you are just self employed, if you believe in the creativity of your model and the people who use it, quickly your model will be adopted far and wide. That is also what happened with open source technology.

(2)An entrepreneur has to see through social conditioning. Entrepreneurship has one major thing in common with philosophy of science. That thing is (more…)

Tags: Bank, Banker to the Poor, Business, Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, Poverty

SocialRank seemed like a brilliant idea. You get to the far flung niches and aggregate and rank the blogs in each niche.And you get a huge market of eyeballs. And not only our intuition but also a mathematical idea supported this assumption.That mathematical idea is called ‘The Long Tail‘, much popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name.I remember that this book was touted as the prime inspiration for the creation of SocialRank. When I first heard about it I was excited too. I was supposed to architect and program the algorithm which would do the job.And so I did.

As the work progressed, I took a peek into the book, which was the basis of the SocialRank marketing strategy. The more I thought about the idea the more it seemed dubious. And one of the major factors pointing towards the unsoundness of the idea was the mathematical giant named Benoit B.Mandelbrot(He invented Fractal Mathematics and he is called the father of Chaos Theory).He wrote in one of his papers (more…)

Tags: Anita Elberse, Chris Anderson, Education, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School, Long Tail, Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

I attended the recent barcamp in Joho Bahru, Malaysia(6-7th December). Barcamp is an open source , international network of user generated conference(or unconference as many like to call it).The first barcamp focused mainly on web applications and other related open source technologies. Later the concept spilled over to health care, political organization and so on.

It was amazing to find people coming together to unconference about things that they like, things that they think they like and things they don’t like but pretend to like it anyway.

I could sense a combined consciousness emerging from (more…)

Tags: BarCamp, Malaysia, Open source, opensource, Programming, Technology, Theory of Relativity, Unconference, Video game, Web application, World Wide Web

How much value you place on the next five years of your life?

I read a piece of news a few days ago about a person  falsely accused of sexual abuse. After spending five years in jail, it was found out  that actually he was innocent and the detective who investigated him was having an  affair with his wife.

The point which jumped out from the news article was that he got $16 millions over  the wrongful conviction. Note that the judge equalized the value of his lost five  years and harassment to $16 millions. The question I ask is  : How much value do  you place in the next five years of your life? Allow me to put an entrepreneurial twist  to the question: How much value do you think you can create in the next five years?  Is it more or less than the value placed on the life of a man who spent five years in  jail doing nothing? Can you at least aim for producing value worth $20 million  dollars in five years? Or $50 millions?

The problem with us is that (more…)

Tags: Gene, Human, Law, Mathematics, Nonlinear system, Physics

I lost my keys and I have been locked out(it has happened more than once), so I am sitting in the so called ‘old town coffee house’ sipping chocolate and doing what I love to do. Life has never been this good. Really!

I take breaks from my intense product development to do some other stuff, which is not so important as products but still holds a lot of significance for the company. One of the things is to pen down my thoughts(As I mentioned before, the reason I take action is primarily to aid my thinking, so it is only natural that I should pen down my thoughts as I am in action).

Today I will dwell on one deficiency of human psyche,so pay close attention. (more…)

I have been giving talks here and there, in public, in private and sometimes talking to myself on the unrealized power of mathematics and the impact it can have on the WWW. Now is the time to walk the talk.

For that purpose I have started my own enterprise– EvolviMatix[1]. I will come to the ultra-geeky name in a short while.So, first things first. (more…)