| | 1.2 Demand
01. Strategic Direction | | |
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| 1.2.01 Strategic Direction: | | The UK is in the middle of a ten year world recession - half way and the worse may be history. The very best time to build a new business is in a recession because the big players who could wipe you out are all in colsolidation mode. All the top service providers are not investing in new ideas and are not funding research to steal your good idea. New small businesses are formed in the latter half of a recession - look at the sucessful company formation statistics for the last 100 years. | | When world economies are blooming, it is very hard for a small company to find a niche market where it can make a profit. Large competitors and monopolies will predate on small company markets with below cost campaigns and a simple copy of your core market mission. When markets change to growth, be certain that large companies will copy your small business ideas and you will find you are fighting a war where the competition has massive amounts of cash to make sure they win. |
| Top Issues | | Analytics to present Executives with real-time dashboard knowledge that will influence their next decision. | | Cyber Security to frighten corporations to spend more to make their infrastructure more secure. | | Post-PC Era to identify that the business benefits do not come from a new version of Windows and Office. | | Social Media with the boundary of private and business activities become blured and interact. | | Clouds where clouds take over from in-house servers but too many clouds lead to fragmentation. | | Technology where companies use good technology to differenciate and prove they are more effective to their customers. | | Solutions are rapidly provided for the business, rather than cloud parts sold to IT specialists. |
| Innovation | | Innovation is a numbers game for companies that have lost direction - 99.9% of all good ideas are not a commercial success. When a company has lost its core market and original good idea, it becomes an innovative company scramling to find any vlever idea that may make a profit. Such companies leap from one good idea to the next until they run out of capital and go bust. | | Never imagine that you can build an innovative company unless you have tens of millions to spend to prove that your cannot build an innovative company. Microsoft lost direction and dreamed up "Metro" as the new Windows interface rather than continual improvement of the old and trusted windows interface - Metro is doomed to fail because it is innovative. |
| Continual Improvement | | Relentless continual improvement of a core commercially viable idea is the only long term strategy that can win. Find a service that can earn more than it costs and then milk that service in every possible way. Relentless continual improvements can mean that the competition cannot catch up and cannot compete with such a refined and advanced service. | | By providing a very high quality service that is beyond the capability of others to compete with is a sure way to build success. Each time a competitor tries to enter your bespoke market, relentless continual improvement will always mean that they are providing a more expensive service with a lower quality and a longer time to delivery. Where a competitor may offer to deliver in a week, your business will find ways to deliver in a day. Where a competitor may offer the service for £1000 per month, your business will find ways to offer the service for £500 per month. |
| The very best Application Service Provider in the world. |
| How to win | | Customer service is a well worked cliche, but it is true that in a service dominated world, good customer service pays its way. The retail era has given way to the service era - pile them high and sell them cheap has given way to providing the very "best" service that is value for money. A cheap low quality service with no customer service is not sustainable and is not trusted. The "Pound" shop has it place, but it is suseptable to many competitors, car boot sales and auctions - the busienss is too easy to clone. | | While customer will state that price is an issue, in reality value-for-money is what the customer is looking for. While a business must always compete on price, it is actually competing on value-for-money in the eye of the beholder. | | The silent differenciator is time - the company that can deliver the fastest will win in the long term. Many critical decisions are delayed until rapid delivery is a critical business requirement - make time a foremost differenciator. While others promise what they may deliver at some date in the future with a slide show, you must demonstrate a fully working solution that exceeds all expectations. |
| The End | | Into every new idea, the seeds of its own death can be identified. "Apps" are the thing that will dominate and kill the mobile smart phone. Just like Windows-based installed programs created malware and Trojans to destroy the integrity of personal computers, apps will do the same to mobile phones. | | The smart app is just a front end to a cloud application, but rogue apps are collecting your personal data and sending it to vendors who can sell it to the highest bidder. 80% of angry birds processing power is just collecting your data and send it back to its vendor. Each time you play a "free" game you are paying the price with the collection of your private data. | | It was easy to keep your Windows computer clean - do not download or install any alien software. It is easy to keep your smart phone and tablet clean - do not download and install any alien software. Fortunatly most people will install apps and they will find some apps include malware, Trojans and silent data loggers. |
| Analytics | | Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data - management information and key performance indicators. Where data can be graphically presented, it may have more impact than tables of numbers. Sales force optimization may be the most frequently used form of analytic methods. | | This year will see the growth and growth of analytics are ways are discovered to graphically present data as information and knowledge. Current presentation styles include: | | * Diary is a great graphical presention of time-dependent data | | * Vertical-Bar chart is used for top-ten analysis of objects such as airports, customers, suppliers, airlines, insurers, etc.. | | * Horizontal-Bar chart is used for larger numbers of objects such as all the days in a month or weeks in a year. | | * Pie chart may have value, but its complexity and presentation to printed media can be problematic. |
| Cyber-Secrurity | | Cyber crime is out of control with Governments fighting cyber wars with companies around the world to copy data. Google made it OK for a search engine to legally steal copyright web published data and now governments have passed laws to give them rights to install Trojans to copy data from citizens computers, to copy everything flowing through the Internet and to demand keys to encrypted data vaults. A continual reduction to the right of privacy is well underway and it is just a matter of time before all private data will be owned by Governments in all parts of the world. Company data will be involved in this data-grab as Governments fight to get their hands on valuable corporate information. | | All top-1000 corporations in the world have already had Trojans installed to secretly and silently steal data. With defence industry companies and finance companies, it is just a matter of time before they are leaking data to Governments in all parts of the world. The Liberal Government in Nederlands has been very open about this cyber war when it granted itself the right to install data copy software on computers in every part of the world. | | This year will see the growth and growth of cyber-security where corporations that do not trust their own computer systems outsource critical financial and business planning information to "clean" cloud applications that take excessive security precautions. The big four accounting companies of the world will see upstarts taking valuable consulting revenue into clean data centers that cannot be cracked by Governments or criminals. |
| Post-PC Era | | The one thing about the post-PC era is that desktop computers will continue to be used for the next decade, but in declining numbers and in a different way. Last year HP lost 48% of its computer business and DELL lost 35% of its computer business. With many millions of tablets and smart phones being used and with Microsoft left without any direction, the fall of the desktop has already started. | | This year will see the growth and growth of tablets and smart phones used in a business context. Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) is just one manifestation and many other campaigns will follow. The US patent war is central to what will happen - less and less companies are able to compete in this market and innovation has been stopped. Its a lottery and anything may happen - the Apple-Samsung war could continue for another five years. |
| Social Media | | Like games, knowledge of what will happen in the social media market is full of dreamers who have no idea. Real-time, point-to-point communications will switch from phone to social media, but how corporations can control such technology is unknown. | | When a sales person applies for a new post, the size and quiality of their social media network will be analysed and key to the appointment. Those people who may have thousands of influencial followers will be worth a fortune, but those who only have a handful of friends and family have no reason to be employed. Those people who have a solid and proven Linkedin pipeling of key people do not need a CV because their social media pipeling is their CV. | | This year will see a major switch for recruitement agencies as they change from electronic CVs to online social media analysis. Who you know has always been important, but who you have in your social media account will become even more important in the future. | | This year will see social media diaries taking a business role as people colaborate across companies with a shared diary system that has a business purpose. This will blur the difference between business and private social media with business procedures starting to poach private facilities. When switching jobs, the role of your business contacts in your social media will become a critical source of conflict and litigation. |
| Clouds | | It will be 2014 before clouds exceed the scope of in-house IT services, but the rise and rise of clouds is accelerating. Corporations with IT people who tried to pretend that clouds were not secure or were not well advanced have had their day and will be replaced. Vendors who tried to perpetuate the status-quo have come to the end of their pretence and must face up to extinction. | | This year will see the end of thousands of windows-based software product vendors - their days are numbered. Some vendors will try to move their products to the cloud as Apps, but they may be too late and their lack of Internet skills will become apparent to their customer base. | | This year will see so many cloud based applications that the problem of no interpoerability will become paramount. When a corporate has 100 different cloud applications, how can it get control of costs, how can it integrate data and how can it survive when all its data is so fragmented. The bcost benefits of cloud based applications is just the first step towards consolidation by the big players. |
| Technology | | While it was once a joke to be involved with technology, the benefits of increasing the effectiveness and productivity of a business by using technology has the attention of decision makers. Technology can not be seen as a critical business advantage to shareholders, can be promoted by Executives as being the best in the world and will be understood by customers. Where a corporation can demonstrate that it is a good company to do business with because it has great technology, then the value of that technology will become valuable. | | This year will see massive increases in the amount being paid by companies to jump onto the best technology that can reduce their costs. Cost is less of an issue as the benefits of working from all locations, of massive data analaytics and using any hardware take hold. |
| Business Solutions | | IT vendors have traditionally sold to IT people who could evaluate CPU cycle cost, disk space cost, network traffic cost and backup costs. This entire way of working will give way to packaging complete and correct usiness solutiuons and selling them to business people. At the current time, it is impossible for a business person to buy a cloud business solution; Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace only sell cloud components. | | This year will see the begining of packaged business solutions - application service provision. The rapid provision of application services will become the critical business factor that will identify those few companies that will win in theis new market. |
| Key Factors: | | 1. Climate + weather + environment + energy + water. | | 2. Migration caused by climate and economics. | | 3. Cyber war. |
| Climate: | | 1. The best the firm can do is become self-sufficient in energy and water. Egypt could be devistated by a water shortage - an upper-Nile war. Israel could be devistated by a water shortage - river Jordan will dry up. Parts of Africa could be devistated by a water shortage. | | 2. Enough energy includes the ability to recyle and desalinate water. Water management must include the growth of food and fish. Microbes, insects and birds may be added. Environment management should mean 100% recyling, but this may not be practical - things will be traded with other people. |
| Migration: | | 1. Migration has happened for thousands of years and will not stop because a country gets tough border controls. Migration must be made desirable where it is needed and economic where is is needed - people follow the money. | | 2. Every person MUST have a digital identity (DID) that is their physical video apprearance - something that cannot be faked yet. Passwords are replaced by the appearance of a live person who is recognised. Real-time geo-location tracking of every person is mandated by law - so authentication knows where a person physically is at any time. Passports and driving licenses are superceeded by DID with real-time location tracking to verify who is who. People cannot buy a car or buy fuel if they do not have a DID - they MUST be recognised. | | 3. Many people already have a Facebook digital identity and this will evolve to become mandated by law. People without a DID cannot have a bank account and cannot buy anything - everything you earn and spend is automatically accounted for. Government taxation becomes 100% easier because its fully automated at the earn-buy-sell level. | | 4. Every person MUST have a registered address and that is continually checked with location tracking. A person without a registered address and without a DID will be deported or sold to any other country. | | 5. If Facebook does not provide this digital identity, then Linkedin or some similar vendor will. This is a world-wide service that every government will eventually support. |
| Cyber War: | | 1. Most people did not realise that the cold war morphed into a cyber war. While the UK spend billions on aircraft carriers to fight the last war, more agile countries spent billions on an army of cyber attack engineers to steal secrets. | | 2. Data is the new currency and the country that can gather intelligence from all other countries can make better decisions than a country with an aircraft carrier and no intelligence. The vulnerabilities in Microsoft software has enabled some countries to have a real-time access to most major corporations intellectual property and trading details. When a company buys new materials, it has won a contract and the revenue stream can be identified by some agency in a competitor country. The competitor is armed with the intelligence to win the next contract and win the long term economic war. | | 3. Virus Business Model: A business can create a threat like a virus, promote the treat and then sell anti-virus products to defend against the threat. Ransomware and malware threats are artificial and promoted by a self fulfilling business model. Yes its a legal protection racket. | | 4. Next Business Model: A business can create a threat like "personal and business data will be stolen and published". The business will create an anti-theft product to guard against data being stolen and published. People with a lot of assets have a lot of private data that they do not want to be published. Businesses have a lot of strategic intellectual property that they do not want to be published. A company has detailed sales by territory that they do not want to be published for the benefit of competitors. Yes its a legal protection racket to protect people from cyber agencies. | | 5. Taking Sides: For 20 years the firm has been a "defender" that earns self-satisfaction from keeping everything safe and secure. It may be time to become an "attacker" that earns data that has a value and sells protection services to defend customers from such attacks. The business model could include a defence service that pays "ten million pounds" to any company that has any protected data stolen. Protected data is excessively encrypted and defended with a block-chain to approved people who have the right to access the data. | | 6. Authentication: Protected data is distributed by block-chain to a large number of approved people - it does not exist on a central server that will be hacked by a government agency. The digital wallet is protected by a digital identity that is managed by Facebook as a short video that identifies how the person walks, talks, fidgets and salutes. When the approved person needs to authenticate themselves (sign in), they show themselves on a video link until Eliza has clearly identified enough factors to be certain the person is who they say they are. |
| How To Defend: | | 1. How to give 495 a copy of all their data in a way that it cannot be lost or stolen or hacked. Blockchain provides part of the solution. Facebook identity with real-time geo-location tracking is part of the solution. | | 2. The folder of images is zipped as a shared copy downloaded to each approved person. The zipped folder of images looks like an old photograph on the persons computing device. Even if an agency spend considerable resources to decompose each image, the numeric contents are meaningless - no text exists. | | 3. When the diary application is fully operational as a defence service, then attack and publicise services need to be promoted. People will buy into the protection defence service, after enough publicity exists to increase the threat to be greater than the cost of defence. |
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