Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • The smartphone market and Huawei

    It is hard for anyone reading the media to believe that Huawei’s rise in the smartphone market was anything short of miraculous. In reality the roots of this rise go back at least six years. Back in 2010, Huawei was already shipping 3,000,000 smartphones. However since that time, the year-on-year percentage growth in consumer devices shipped by the company reduced from 82 per cent year-on-year growth to about 8 per cent growth in 2014.  This growth was initially driven by less sexy products like feature phones for China Mobile, DSL routers and 3G/LTE dongles.
    Huawei numbers
    In fact if we go back further to 2007, feature phones drove a 757 per cent growth in consumer devices shipped.

    2010 is quite crucial, Huawei Consumer Devices suffered a 32 drop in year-on-year growth in revenue / device going from $56 per device in 2009 to $38 in 2010. The margins per device then began to climb again during period from 2010 – 2014.

    January’s numbers discussed at CES don’t give us the total numbers of devices shipped by Huawei, but only smartphone numbers, so I haven’t calculated revenues for 2015, but they would represent a significant upswing from the 20+% growth enjoyed in previous years.

    Reading the Huawei coverage one would believe that the growth is being driven by developed markets and premium devices, but the truth according to the numbers found seem to be less clear. In between the years 2014 and 2015, the percentage revenue derived from Western Europe dropped from 11.3% to 10%, even as overall revenues grew. Much of this is driven by Southern European markets that had been hit hardest during the 2008 recession. It will be interesting to see how Huawei looks to crack Germany, the UK, France and the US.

    So what does this all mean?
    Huawei smartphones and watches are firstly just the most visible aspect of the company and not likely even the most profitable. Huawei equipment likely runs at least part of the internet network that brought you this page. They power mobile networks around the world (outside the US). They provide storage (very large boxes of hard disks) to banks and businesses around the world.

    Huawei Consumer Device numbers are reflective of wider technological change. In the space of the nine years that I looked, you could see the peak of the feature phone business, where Huawei was predominantly a domestic supplier. The rise of the mobile dongle to fill the gaps in free wi-fi networks and the rise of the smartphone/phablet which negated some of the mobile working laptops did around email, but also acted as tethered modems reducing the need of dongles.

    Huawei’s numbers are indicative of a successful fast follower strategy. Huawei learned the smartphone trade by first of all making badge engineered Android phones for T-Mobile. It then went out on its own. Each generation of phone improved in terms of industrial design and they built a direct to consumer channel over time.

    Xiaomi’s direct-to-consumer e-commerce strategy was transformative in the Chinese market and something that Huawei replicated with the Honor brand. Huawei hasn’t tried to build services in the same way that Xiaomi has and hasn’t ventured as deeply into the smart home.

    In terms of device numbers the company has successfully managed to displace both Samsung and Xiaomi in markets, but despite the ‘premium positioning’ it has taken a while to build the average revenue per device (ARPD). If the 20 billion dollar annual revenue announced at CES, only represents smartphone devices, then the ARPD (of $188) is still less than a third of what Apple enjoys with the iPhone.

    The smartphone market like dongles and DSL modems before it is moving rapidly towards maturity and lower growth. It will be interesting to see where Huawei’s business strategy goes next.

    How I got the data?
    The data quoted is based on numbers given out in Huawei’s annual reports from 2006 – 2014 and the Huawei Consumer Device press room where Consumer Device started to break out some of their own numbers. The types of numbers talked about vary from year to year. You can see a copy of my collated and calculated numbers here. When converting CNY to US dollars, I assumed an exchange rate of 1 yuan is 15 cents.

    More information
    Huawei annual report page
    Huawei Ships 108 Million Smartphones in 2015, Contributing to Annual Revenue Exceeding $20 Billion USD
    Total order value of Huawei Consumer in Western Europe exceeds 2 billion dollars
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces 1H 2015 Financial Performance
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces 2014 Financial Performance
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces Q3 2014 Financial Results
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Announces 1H 2014 Business Performance
    Huawei Consumer Business Group Ranked Third in Global Smartphone Shipments in 2013

  • The internet of heavier things

    I started to think about the internet of heavier things after I spent a bit of time with my Dad. We talked about work, engineering stuff in general and technology in general.
    IMGP0606.JPG
    My Dad has a pragmatic approach to technology, it’s ok so long as it fills three distinct criteria:

    • It’s useful
    • It’s efficient in what it does and how you use it
    • It doesn’t get in the way of product serviceability

    The last point is probably something that we tend to think about least, but my Dad considers it as he is a time served mechanical fitter.  Just prior to Christmas one of the gears went in my parents Singer sowing machine. The machine has been in the family for about 50 years. I managed to buy the relevant cog from a website for just under a tenner.

    Contrast this with most electronic goods where you tend not to be able to replace products at a component level. Even if you did, trying to find 50 year old standard catalogue processors, let alone a custom ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) would be a thankless task.

    We got to talking about a concept I read in EE Times earlier that month; the internet of heavier things (IoHT). IoHT basically means wiring  up or making smart fixed infrastructure and machinery. Venture capital firm KPCB think that the IoHT will generate $14.2 trillion of global output by 2030.

    The boosters for it like KCPB think that this opportunity revolves around a number of use cases:

    • Being able to flag up when preventative servicing is required. (For a lot of manufacturing machinery, companies like Foxboro Instruments – (Now Foxboro by Schneider Electric and Invensys Foxboro respectively) – had been doing this prior to the widespread implementation of TCP-IP network protocols). It is the bread and butter of SCADA systems. But it could be bridges and viaducts indicating that they need work done
    • MRI machines and other medical equipment that are financed on a per scan unit rather than as a capital cost. Basically extending the enterprise photocopier model into capital equipment expenditure
    • Machinery that is continuously re-designed based on user feedback

    Kicking it around with my Dad got some interesting answers:

    Flagging up items for servicing was seen to be a positive thing, however, how would this work with the reality of life in a manufacturing plant. Take a continuous process, say something like an oil refinery or food production line where the whole line needs to be shut down to enact changes, which is the reason why maintenance is scheduled in well in advance, on an annual or semi-annual basis. The process needs to take into account the whole supply chain beyond the factory and both shutdown and start-up are likely to be a complex undertaking. When I worked in the petrochemical industry before going to college; the planning process for a shutdown took six to nine months. Secondly, there was redundancy built into some of the plant so certain things that might need to be taken off line on a regular basis could be. A second consideration is that plants are often not off-the-peg but require a good deal of tailoring to the site. Plants generally aren’t new, there is a thriving market in pre-owned equipment. In the places I worked this included equipment such as such as pressure vessels, electric motors and valves – all of this would have implications for interoperability.

    Lastly, what would be the implications when when the ethereal nature of technology underpinning the internet of heavier things met infrastructure that has a realistic life of a hundred plus years in the case of bridges or buildings?

    Looking at the defence industry, we can see how maintenance costs and upgrading technology drives much of the spending on weapons systems – a bridge will generally last longer than a B52 bomber or a Hercules transport plane (both are 60 years old systems).

    Financing on a per-use unit cost. This was discussed less, the general consensus was that this could dampen innovation as the likes of GE Medical would become finance houses rather than health technology companies, in the similar direction to what happened with Xerox or an early 21st century Sony.

    Machinery that is continually redesigned on user feedback sparked a mix of concern and derision from my Dad. It seemed to be based on a premise that products aren’t evolved already – they are changed. The pace of change is a compromise between user feedback, component supply issues and backward serviceability. Moving to an ‘always beta’ model like consumer software development could have a negative impact on product quality, safety and product life due to issues with serviceability of equipment.

    More info
    Introducing the IoHT (Internet of Heavier Things) | EE Times
    The Industrial Awakening: The Internet of Heavier Things | KCPB
    What does technology adoption really mean?
    Old 2.0: interfaces and use cases
    Old 2.0: adventures in retail
    Old 2.0: On the virtual road
    On the road 2
    On the road
    Web 2.old

  • Trustworthy x86 laptops + more things

    Trustworthy x86 laptops? There is a way, says system-level security ace | The Register – ARM isn’t solution either. Trustworthy x86 laptops is a relative concept. With physical access to the hardware trustworthy could soon become untrustworthy

    Zuk sells in Vietnam | Shanghai Daily – part of the brand strategy might be masking the Chinese involvement given the fractious relationship with Vietnam

    Qualcomm bags license deals with China’s Tianyu and Haier – HKEJ Insight – interesting moves
    Ex-Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig: go private – Business Insider – DanR is right

    AT&T to ditch most two-year phone contracts on January 8th – Engadget – I don’t see it affecting Apple that much but will it be an opportunity for Huawei to steal a march on Samsung and HTC in US?

    Hem.com Is On The Block, Swiss Furniture Maker Vitra Likely Buyer | TechCrunch – its in a tough space

    Is The Clock Ticking For The Traditional Watch? | Advertising Age – undecided looking at the opinions

    This is why you’re inadvertently watching more Facebook ads – Quartz – autoplay video units, I have to wonder about the real viewability stats

    Predictability is going through some unpredictable changes. – Slate – interesting essay on innovation

    Samsung says its new Tizen TVs will be harder to hack – wow security features on a smart TV, its a first

    LG’s smart home hub looks like an Amazon Echo with a screen | The Verge – interesting that they are blowing all of this stuff out before CES rather than using the show as a launchpad

    How a Nation of Tech Copycats Transformed Into a Hub for Innovation | WIRED – or why Silicon Valley needs to be very afraid

    How the Internet of Things Limits Consumer Choice – The Atlantic – good for business, bad for consumers

    Search Results – Springer – text books over 10 years old can be downloaded legally for free

    State-owned enterprises to be split into 2 classifications – commercial and strategic for government interests

    Why messaging apps saw the biggest mobile wins in 2015 – Luxury Daily – its all about WeChat in these examples

    5 Predictions for China’s Luxury Industry in 2016 | Jing Daily – Only a handful of luxury brands—including Chanel and Tag Heuer—opted to lower their China prices over the past year even as currency fluctuations widened the price difference. As long as it remains profitable to sell and a bargain to buy daigou items, the market will remain strong in the coming year.

    How Typecasting Millennials Is Hurting Ad Buyers | DigitalNext – Advertising Age – another play for programmable and deeper data sets

    Star Wars in augmented reality lets you fight the First Order in real life | Mashable – could bring back single player gaming as a thing

    Despite big hack, Ashley Madison is back – with four million new members | siliconbeat – what’s the definition of insanity, doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result?

    Behind Frank Quattrone’s Comeback in New Tech Era – WSJ – but dotcom taint still drags on him (paywall) – more on Frank Quattrone here

  • My 10 most popular (trafficked) blog posts of 2015

    These are the ten most trafficked posts of 2015, in reverse order:

    Throwback gadget: Nokia N900 – I tried Nokia’s first Maemo-based phone. It was amazing how useless it was as one forgets how linked the modern smartphone is to web services. Despite these problems one could see the now lost potential of the phone. More on the Nokia N900 at GSMarena.

    Generational user experience effects – a meditation on user experience from the analogue era to the present

    2015: just where is it all going? – I had a think about where digital and technology would go over the next 12 months or so. You can see how I did here.

    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation – by June this year, the product rationalisation that Yahoo! underwent provided ample opportunity to show that it’s core offering was collapsing in many international markets. Rather than it being a market wide condition, the data pointed to Yahoo! specific issues.

    Traackr – beyond the buzzword event – a post about how a diverse range of organisations from Coca-Cola to a luxury jeweller were thinking about influencer marketing.

    Throwback gadget: Made 2 Fade (by KAM) GM-25 Mk II phono pre-amp and mixer – a review of a mixer that has been lost in dance music culture history, yet was responsible for much of its popularity outside the super clubs.

    That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis) – or why everyone from the mainstream media to PR Week got the story so wrong about Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

    An experiment on fake Twitter followers – I spent some of my hard-earned cash to see what difference if any buying fake followers had. I chose Twitter as a channel mainly because it would be easier to measure any impact, otherwise it could have just as easily been Facebook followers, Pinterest subscribers or Instagram followers. My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system.

    O2O (online to offline) or what we can learn from the Chinese – East Asia is way ahead of marketers in the west in terms of multi-channel marketing particularly the integration of of online with offline aspects.

    48 hours with the Apple Watch – hands down the most popular post of this year on my blog was my short experience living with the Apple Watch. I felt that it was a nicely designed, but un-Apple experience. It also convinced me that the use case for wearables wasn’t here yet.

    That’s the end of my posts of 2015.

  • 2016 just where is it all going?

    I started to think about 2016 just where is it all going?And Uber immediately sprang to mind. It is obvious that Uber’s CEO had never watched The Princess Bride, a cultural touch stone for both generation x and generation y, otherwise they would have known the maxim:

    Never get involved in a land war in Asia

    There is a lot of reason why this is true, the phrase captures the essence of a remark Douglas McArthur had said. If you play the board game Risk, Asia poses a problem due to the amount of territories involved.

    I expect Uber will continue to funnel money into China and still get sand in its face. Quite what this means for Lyft I am not so sure.

    Twitter gets a change of management, but that doesn’t do any good. The reasons for this are already apparent:

    Twitter has stopped growing at all in the US in 2015. This is a big deal because the US is the bellwether market for advertising innovation and advertisers like growing audience numbers.

    It has growing content volumes on broadly static growth, which has infrastructure costs. It also has costs from trying to innovate itself out of trouble with advertisers.

    Although there aren’t hard numbers to support it, there is a body of evidence to suggest that the number of times a day a consumer accesses the platform has declined and the number of impressions per post would flatten or decline.

    All of this would be bad news for potential advertisers and their intermediaries in the advertising and PR world.

    Fintech bubble that will take good ideas and bad ones down together. Banks are currently considered to be ripe for disruption. One of the key problems with this is that technologists think it will be easy to sweep aside regulations that banks operate under.

    The reality is rather different, these aren’t taxi services or hotels but people with real political and financial clout. These are the same organisations who managed to persuade governments to bankrupt themselves in order to bail them out in 2008.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000 there was a similar bubble around Linux and open source software. A number of companies at the front of it including VA Linux didn’t last the bubble, but the effect was to make Linux ubiquitous from consumer electronics to banking systems. I suspect a similar impact for technologies such as Blockchain. It may prove to be a handier way than historic transactional databases for say low transaction rate businesses; but that doesn’t mean that corporate enterprises will buy the technology or services from start-ups. Instead, the bits that prove themselves through the Linux Foundation are likely to be co-opted by the likes of HP, Oracle or Huawei in the future.

    Ultimately these providers aren’t selling a shiny technology but trust. Think of it in terms of two axis of risk:

    • CTOs will take a chance on a technology where a major vendor is involved if it makes sense (IBM and the internet for instance)
    • They will take a chance on a new vendor to do something that is well understood (think the Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro)
    • But they would be hard pressed to take a risk on both vendor and technology at the same time, think systems integrator marchFIRST which championed then new web technologies to enterprises around about the time of the dot com bust

    We will have reached peak ad-blocking. Ad blocking still requires a modicum of savvy from a consumer audience, just as an in the same way encryption isn’t completely mainstream – the same will be true with ad-blocking. However there will be an increased interest in native advertising.  There won’t be the complete meltdown of retargeting or programmatic for instance that ad blocking would tend to imply.

    The internet in the EU will become increasingly regulated. At the moment the European Union is succumbing to The Fear. In the past, whether it was the Red Brigade, The Baader Meinhof gang or Northern Ireland there was a lot of emphasis put on keeping normality. The only real notable change in the UK was sealing up bins on the London Underground and other public transport services. Because there was a collective memory going back to the second world war, there was a recognition that keeping society normal was a key element in dealing with terrorism – whether the rise of the right or the left.

    After the cold war the parameters of risk versus impact on societies reaction acted to it changed. This was the coming of The Fear – the roots of it can be found in the US reaction to 9/11. America had not experienced terrorism or foreign attack on its soil since the war of Independence. The fear felt by Americans was palpable and infectious. Each risk faced by a society was coupled to an asymmetric response. This was something that terrorist theorists planned. The risks become more abstract including paedophiles or the catch-all of ‘organised crime’ to give governments greater insight into consumers lives. It has only taken 20 years for Germany to forget the lessons of life under the Stasi.

    This won’t change any time soon as governments have a lack of incentive to give up on powers they have already legislate for themselves. If one looks at the UK mainstream political spectrum, both Labour and Conservative regimes have been remarkably similar in terms of legislating consumer privacy out of existence.

    We will have reached peak smartphone and tablet. China has now reached replacement rate for devices, there is a corresponding lack of paradigm shifts in the pipelines for smartphone design and software. Tablets have shown themselves to be nice devices for data consumption but not requiring regular upgrades like the smartphone or replacement for the PC.

    VR in 2016 will be all about finding the right content. VR won’t work in gaming unless it provides e-gaming athletes with some sort of competitive advantage, if it does then gaming will blow things up massively. Gaming will not be the only content vehicle for VR, it needs an Avatar-like moment to drive adoption into the early mainstream. From a technology point-of-view the smartphone drive towards OLED displays should benefit virtual reality goggles.

    GoPro is going to get eaten alive. Manufacturers like drone-maker DJI have been integrating GoPro-esque cameras into their products and UPQ (think a cross between gadget company and a fast fashion outfit like Forever 21) are providing much cheaper (but not cheap and nasty) alternatives.

    More information
    What stands between Uber and success in China? | CNBC
    Uber CEO accuses Chinese messaging app WeChat of censorship | The Telegraph
    Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) – Umair Haque
    MarchFirst enters the terrible twos | CNet
    Why ISIS has the potential to be a world-altering revolution — Aeon
    LG Secures Super Bowl Slot And Ridley Scott For OLED TV ad | Forbes

    Older predictions
    2015: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara
    2014: crystal ball gazing, how did I do?
    2014: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara 
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2013 how did I do?
    2013: just where is it all going?
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2012 how did I do?
    2012: just where is digital going?
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2011 how did I do?
    2010: How did I do?
    2010: just where is digital going?