Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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Thoughts on a New Business

By Phil October 15, 2007 3:41 pm

As I said, part of the Frost and Sullivan award ceremony was a panel where the 5 recipients were asked about innovation. I thought a couple of comments made by Michael Treacy of Gen3 Partners were very interesting. Michael was another of the award winners this year, I will leave it up to you to Google his CV (hint, he was an MIT professor and focuses on entrepreneurial innovation).

Micheal said there are two key things he looks for in a new business area:

That it should be in an area where any idiot can make money.

and

There should be obvious ways to improve on what the idiots are doing.

He is currently helping get a company funded that will focus on car loans for illegal aliens (no judgments here, just a real business need he is helping fulfill – even idiots make money in car loans and they do not see the opportunity that even illegal immigrants need cars in America).

It got me to thinking about how tough our business is. There are very few idiots, and many times even the most brilliant people blow it in realizing the complicated path through research, product, marketing, sales, etc. And our improvements are often so incremental that it requires 35-100 PowerPoint slides to clearly communicate the value of the changes.

I talked to Michael and his comment to all this was; "I definitely have no plans to enter the networks marketplace"........

So while I love our business, I came away asking the question; do we do it for money or for the vision of the world we are creating or for the sheer challenge and fun? If you want to make money fast, are you better off in technology or something more mundane like Pizzas?

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  1. Ah, Pizza

    Oven, Dough mixture, Ingredents, and a worker.
    Procedure to prepare pizza ingredents from sales order and the time it takes to cook.(Traning to producing pizza maker is one to two days)

    Nortel Product.

    Sales & Marketing, R&D, Engineering, Manufaturing, Installation and Commissiong, Integration, Project management, QA, and Traning to Customer. To be qualified personnel to operate most of the Telco product is you know the time required to operate Telco equipment.

    Customer Buying Pizza and Customer buying Network Switch.

    Ask anyone on the street how Pizza is made, they know the overview procedure.

    Ask anyone in Telco Equipment buyers. How network switch is setup. Well you know the answere.

    The Term “Keep it Simple Stupid” in Engineering keeps coming up. Maybe it is time to change the word Stupid to Idiot.

    October 17th, 2007 at 11:28 am by TK Wey

  2. Phil,

    I have been saying for a long time that nortel (and other vendors too) need a Powerpoint to C++ converter.

    I currently help companies make technical choices on equipment and technologies to deploy in their networks. My customers are large and there have been significant consolidations making multi-vendor networks a fact. What strikes me the most about our business and areas where we could improve is that for all the duplication of effort and powerpoint, we still find so many reasons why things will not interoperate.

    I just finished presentations from four major vendors (nortel included) on a new technology to be deployed in a large network. It struck me how similar the presentations and implementations were and yet how poorly they interoperate in the lab especially when it comes to the application layer. It seems as if the IETF (or any other standards body, but the IETF is the worst) purposely comes up with seven different ways to implement the same thing and puts them in a hat. Then each vendor picks a way to implement it from the hat ensuring no one implements it in the same way.

    I know some of this is product differentiation, but it seems to have reached absurd levels recently (trackback to the MSFT - CSCO meeting to “reassure” customers that they would work together to interoperate)

    It seems as if any equipment vendor could make money improving interoperability. Apparently the MBAs don’t think so though.

    Personally I do it for the sheer challenge and fun. I do think that a lot of very bright people are finding reasons NOT to work in telecom and that should be a concern.

    October 17th, 2007 at 5:42 pm by many

  3. Yes, this is a complex industry….it is interesting how different groups tend to define standards that give “value” in their area (witness the 19 standards for digital/HD television).
    I agree, we need to make the networks simplier and use the value from the applications environment as the driver into the network. Often we add complexity as it is the next interessting thing to do, when the best thing is to make it simple.
    Finally, it appears that we all agree, if you want to make money, this is a challenging place to do it.

    October 18th, 2007 at 1:41 pm by Phil

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