Are You The Point Of Inflection?

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s former chief financial officer, said in an interview with the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008, “I remembered getting on a plane, I think sometime in 2000, with Reed [Hastings] and [Netflix co-founder] Marc Randolph and flying down to Dallas, Texas and meeting with John Antioco. Reed had the chutzpah to propose to them that we run their brand online and that they run [our] brand in the stores and they just about laughed us out of their office. At least initially, they thought we were a very small niche business. Gradually over time, as we grew our market, his thinking evolved but initially they ignored us and that was much to our advantage.” …

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In the age of disruption, complacency is an investor’s biggest enemy

The difference today is that it no longer takes 30 years for an innovation to become disruptive. Take for example the roll out of Airbnb and its impact on the hotel industry; Uber’s low-cost ride sharing, which will soon make city controlled high-cost taxis obsolete; Amazon’s online business, which is threatening higher cost big-box retailers such as Best Buy; and streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix, which are making CDs and DVDs a thing of the past.

Source: In the age of disruption, complacency is an investor’s biggest enemy

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How Natural Language Processing is transforming the financial industry – IBM Watson

The exponential growth in data from the Internet, social media and personal devices is providing enterprises with unprecedented opportunities to use digital information to improve their businesses. To an extent, sophisticated analytics programs can help businesses utilize their data by searching for and revealing patterns hidden in structured data, such as spreadsheets and relational databases.

Source: How Natural Language Processing is transforming the financial industry – IBM Watson

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Disrupting Industries With Cognitive Computing

With cognitive computing, we are now able to unlock the value in ALL the data — from internal, external and even publicly available sources — available to a business. Much of this data was previously inaccessible as it existed in was unstructured (documents, emails, social media posts and images etc.), or was dispersed among any many systems and silos. Hear how two companies are already using cognitive computing to disrupt their industries:

Source: Disrupting Industries With Cognitive Computing

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Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

It’s difficult to navigate through all the myriad factors to identify what might really be behind this picture, but perhaps the real story is less about the impending death of large businesses and more about their need to adapt – to move through business and product life cycles more quickly than before, to be more focused on systematic experimentation and organising swiftly around opportunity.

Source: Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

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A Look Back At Why Blockbuster Really Failed And Why It Didn’t Have To

The irony is that Blockbuster failed because its leadership had built a well-oiled operational machine.  It was a very tight network that could execute with extreme efficiency, but poorly suited to let in new information.  Antioco’s fatal flaw wasn’t one of intelligence or capability, but a failure to understand the networks that would determine his fate.

Source: A Look Back At Why Blockbuster Really Failed And Why It Didn’t Have To

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Low-End Disruption in Consumer Markets | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh

In the 1960s, General Motors held a ~50% share of the US automobile market and 80% of the industry’s profits. General Motors’ integrated value chain allowed it to dominate the industry in an era where products were still not “good enough” (with respect to performance and reliability). But as automobile performance improved, modular, “low-end” disruptors like Toyota attacked it from below and profits evaporated. Toyota did not succeed by immediately attacking the premium segment of the market. It started with the low-end Corona and “then moved up-market by introducing sequentially its Tercel, Corolla, Camry, Avalon and 4-Runner models, and ultimately its Lexus”. Honda and Nissan followed similar approaches to disrupt integrated incumbents like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Now, these disruptors are in turn facing low-end disruption from the likes of Kia and Hyundai.

Source: Low-End Disruption in Consumer Markets | Tech-Thoughts by Sameer Singh

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Epic Fail: How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix | Variety

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s former chief financial officer, said in an interview with the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008, “I remembered getting on a plane, I think sometime in 2000, with Reed [Hastings] and [Netflix co-founder] Marc Randolph and flying down to Dallas, Texas and meeting with John Antioco. Reed had the chutzpah to propose to them that we run their brand online and that they run [our] brand in the stores and they just about laughed us out of their office. At least initially, they thought we were a very small niche business. Gradually over time, as we grew our market, his thinking evolved but initially they ignored us and that was much to our advantage.”

Source: Epic Fail: How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix | Variety

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