Being Steve Jobs' boss

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

from Steve Jobs' Stanford University Commencement Speech 2005

This is the occasion to repost this excellent article "Being Steve Jobs' boss" published in Business Week a year ago.

Viral marketing unleashed

The flu business will probably be ranked amongst the most popular business cases reviewed in Business schools in a few years. Indeed, it has all the characteristics that makes it a businessman dream : it is recurrent (every year), it is viral (self-explanatory really;), it addresses a mass market, it has strong global branding (sras, chicken flu, mexican flue, HxNy, etc...), excellent media coverage, deep impact on public opinions and full support from state governments. This is really much better than the iPhone... but not as good as the subprime crisis -as yet!

Whether the virus is organic or human-engineered, whether it was released or not on purpose, whether a few good businessmen and other policy-makers are riping off the benefits of their investments, whether the mass media are simply dumb or under control, etc... finally have very little importance.

Indeed, in a mass consumption society, what people want, what they really really want is to shop safely! -isn't it ?

Our body

"Our boby" also known as "bodies" and "bodyworld" is a fascinating exhibition that show in details how is made and how works the human body. The bodies presented are all real human bodies provided by the Anatomical & Technologies foundation of Hong-Kong.

The exhibition has been seen so far by more than 30 million people and is currently being held in Lyon, France. This is a very unique opportunity to discover & learn in a way that is normally reserved to surgeons only.

Visit the web site for more information (only in French).

Below is an excellent commented tour of the exhibition that took place in the USA.

Big blue wants to be big green

The costly mainframe technology was ditched out in the 90's in favor of x86 based server platforms but global warming considerations give a significant TCO advantage to large systems according to IBM. The company has performed several surveys regarding the energy efficiency of IT systems and is coming up with results that fully support their green computing approach.


Nearly 60% of the total energy consumption of a computing system is dedicated to cooling.

The remaining 40% are mainly used for powering peripherals (70%) and the CPU (30%).

When taking a closer look at the CPU, it turns out to be idle 80% of the time. Indeed, the processor activity rate is only 10% for a x86 Microsoft Windows system, 25% for a x86 Unix system but can reach up to 75% for a mainframe system.

Beyond these technical facts, IBM research have come up with calculations that have a much greater marketing impact :

• A single search request on the internet affords for the electrical comsumption of a 70W bulb in a year



• An avatar on Second Life requires as much energy as a middle-class brazilian

A Gartner study says information technology was responsable for 2% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions last year - equivalent to all the planet's airlines combined.

Big blue strategy to address the market is three-fold : better cooling, enhanced hardware design and last but not least virtualisation.

Find out more about the greening of corporate data centers on the Raised Floor blog and on the IBM website.

HMI 3.0 : sensitive objects ?

HMI 1.0 (Human Machine Interface) was keyboard/screen. HMI 2.0 came with the mouse and the graphical user interface. What will be the HMI 3.0 ? Voice recognition technology is so complex that I doubt it will ever reach maturity. The successful come back of touch screen technology in the mobile computing segment seems to have given a new momentum to haptic technology -to such an extent that Microsoft is about to releasing its own MS Surface product.

Remember the cutting-edge HMI in "Minority report" ? This is precisely what haptic technology is all about. Sensitive object, a spin off from the French National Research Center (CNRS), has developed a technology based on the recognition of sound waves propagated in an object when the user touches it. A tap on an object produces a pattern of sound waves through the material. This pattern creates an acoustic signature that is unique to the location of the impact.

With this technology, it is possible to turn most objects into usable HMI. Beyond the "demo flat" marketing hype presented in the video below, the technology can have many innovative & useful applications across many domains of activity.

Is Alcatel-Lucent a 2.0(€) enterprise ?

The keynote address was quite bewildering: the entire Enterprise Business Group market vision seems to fit in a single buzz word : the Dynamic Enterprise or Enterprise 2.0 for insiders, an avatar of the Web 2.0. Indeed, I wonder if the words "R&D", "innovation", "new products", were ever pronounced when all the speech was about "facebook", "social networking" and "knowledge management".

All this is very well, and there is no doubt that the Web 2.0 is transforming (another overused buzz word;) the way information is produced, accessed and shared, that it is reshaping the ICT landscape but is it really Alcatel-Lucent's core business ? No. Will it be Alcatel-Lucent's business in 5 years ? I do not think so. So it looks like the whole point was to avoid talking about real issues like the lack of strategy in the Enterprise Business Group and the challenges facing the company.

Alcatel transformed itself over the last 7 years into a fabless company (shrinking its workforce by two in the process) merged with transatlantic archrival Lucent 2 years ago, developped its business (sales as well as R&D) in Asia (where it is facing fierce competition from low-cost vendors), all this with no return to profitability so... "what else ?" ;)

A vision of students today

"A vision of students today" is a video clip that is only a piece of a very interesting initiative led by Prof. Wesch from Kansas University around digital ethnography. There is indeed a lot to say about the dramatic impact of the media into the classroom. The clip sadly highlights that the classroom is no longer a sanctuary for learning, and that students tend to turn away from academic knowledge.




According to Prof. Wesch "the most significant problem in education today is the problem of significance itself. Our students, our most important critics, are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education".

I fully agree with him. However, significance is a human concept that does not like the vacuity of our mass globalized society : significance in education is the result of a combination of secular academic culture, years of learning effort, endless days of self-questionning and unforgetable hours spent in the classroom with charismatic teachers. Our world has destroyed most of this in less than two decades! Useless to say that it will take much longer to restore a hint of significance in education -if ever!

Knowledge is not information. Knowledge can be wrong, not fake. Knowledge cannot easily be found in a search engine or in a YouTube video. Knowledge is not a product. Knowledge can grow, can be lost, can be useful or useless. Knowledge loves to be chased. Knowledge loves to be shared. Knowledge's home is the brain, knowledge's house is the classroom!

Desperately hilarious Web2.0 bubble video

Brought to you by blonde2.0 whose blog is worth a visit if you are interested in social networking issues.

Alcatel catches up with Slimphony

With the 5.0 release of the OmniTouch Unified Communications suite, Alcatel seems to have finally understood the principles of unified communications. It only took Alcatel 3 years to figure it out, following the purchase of eDial in 2004. eDial was then a 30 employees start-up boasting 100 customers and was acquired for 27 millions USD. Maybe they would have figured it out much faster if they had acquired Cycos rather than eDial at the time... but this is another story.

Well Slimphony head-count is just one, and its user base is greater than 100! Damned! Don't tell me I missed out a 1 million USD deal ?! ;)

Alcatel's OTUC R5.0 gets rid of the Web UI on the Windows Desktop and provides a very nice unified communications client with an integrated video softphone. A slim idea, isn't it ? ;)


On the server side, a single server is necessary to accomodate for up to 2000 users (plus one dedicated server for conferencing & IM services).

The pricing has also been revamped : less than 150€ WPL, no server-fee which makes the solution affordable.

Now that Alcatel have caught up Slimphony, they are ready for the Microsoft challenge ;)