John Sculley Keynote, History of Disruptive Innovation, The Noble Cause

John Sculley gave the opening keynote at 7x24 Exchange here at Boca Raton on June 2, 2014.

Conference Keynote:
The High Tech Tsunami that is Changing the World

Three explosive high technologies, Cloud, Internet-of-Things, and Unstructured Data Science are converging at an amazing pace. Their derivative effects will be that every major industry will be disrupted, reshaped or even reinvented. Sculley will explain how companies like Amazon are combining exceptional customer experience, disruptive price, and same day delivery by taking advantage of advanced high technology supply chain systems. New business models like Amazon don't require a large number of higher skilled middle mangers that more traditional companies depend on. Sculley will discuss the possibility of middle managers becoming an endangered group as heavy lifting robots are joined by smart robots and the Internet-of-Things. How can corporations adapt to this fast changing world? John Sculley has a unique position as a leader in disruptive high technologies, a global investor and successful entrepreneur who is mentoring CEOs in his own companies in the fields of: the consumer era of healthcare; next generation mobile technologies; IT supply chain; and big data analytics. John will draw on examples from his current experience in the US and South Asia.

John Sculley
Former CEO of Apple and Former President of Pepsi

 

Let’s start with the end.  John discusses the Disruptive Innovation in The Adaptive Organization with these points.

- The best innovators focus on a “noble cause"

- Focus on best possible customer experience

- Disruptive Innovation is non-linear

- Disruptive innovators … see something others don’t …are passionate and relentless that “there has to be a better way"

- Are willing to commoditize their earlier innovations in order to move to the next era of disruption

Let’s go back to some earlier slides.  John describes the Noble causes illustrating Bill Gates vision vs. Steve Jobs, and the passion of Steve Jobs focusing on the customer experience

Disruption of non-linear is Kodak going bankrupt hit by the growth of smartphones.

Being able to see things others don’t see are lessons learned.

John then went into companies he has a role in or is an investor.

John is chairman of Pivot Technologies. http://www.pivotac.com/home/default.aspx

An investor in Misfit Wearables. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10405648/John-Sculley-Apple-Misfit-Shine-and-the-future-of-technology.html and Artemis http://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/story/artemis-pcell-offers-personal-cell-every-device-promises-dramatic-lte-capac/2014-02-19

This post is a bit of cheat to get insight.  I had a chance to talk to John Sculley at Breakfast.  The last time I had talked to John was 20 years in NYC, and we caught up a bit.

Technical Guy who Listens to Customers, Is One of Those Behind Microsoft's Changes

Mark Russinovich joined Microsoft the year I left 2006.  I had a chance to see Mark in action at a Microsoft conference in 2008 and in 2014 Wired has written a story that highlights Mark's role at Microsoft.

The one thing that stands out about Mark is his focus on the customer.

‘Look at what you’re doing through the eyes of the customer, treat the customer with respect, and assume the customer is smart.’

The company’s decision to refashion Azure as a service where businesses could run practically any software, including Linux, says Russinovich, was a direct response to discussions with longtime Microsoft customers. They wanted a way to move their existing software into the cloud, rather than just building new applications to suit Azure’s very specific architecture. “We needed to give them an on-ramp,” he says, and that’s what he helped design. It’s this kind of simple customer interaction, Russinovich explains, that shows how Microsoft is now aligning with his personal values. “It’s really just following some basics that can get lost in the heat of the drive to grab revenue and maximize profits: look at what you’re doing through the eyes of the customer, treat the customer with respect, and assume the customer is smart,” he says.

...

“He has real vision,” says HP cloud chief Bill Hilf, who once worked alongside Russinovich at Microsoft. “And he knows how to listen to customers.”

...

 “Without trust, there is no cloud. You’re asking customers to give you their data to manage, and if they don’t trust you, there’s no way they’re going to give it to you. You can screw up trust really easily. You can screw it up just by showing incompetence. But if you show intentional undermining of trust, your business is done.”

Infrastructure of IoT, Beyond availability and scalability

I wrote this post for Gigaom on what the Infrastructure of IoT is.  My thoughts are it is beyond the typical abilities - scalability, availability, etc.  I included part of what I wrote below.  For the full text go to the Gigaom post.

I am moderating panel discussion on the Infrastructure of IoT at Gigaom Structure on June 19.  Please join me there or watch the live stream.  This event should be one the of best here are the headline speakers.

Here is my post on IoT.

Infrastructure of IoT, beyond availability and scalability

by Dave Ohara

 MAY. 24, 2014 - 12:00 PM PDT

 Comment

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photo: asharkyu

SUMMARY:

To handle the addition of billions more devices — including sensors that talk to each other, not necessarily to us — how must our infrastructure evolve? That’s a big topic on tap for Structure 2014.

Infrastructure is something that people are used to not thinking about. It is normally associated with roads, water, electricity, and telecommunications. Things it takes for a society to function. People just want infrastructure to work when they need it. When roads are being repaired, when the waterline breaks, when the power is out, and the Internet is down — that’s when people pay attention to infrastructure. Most would assume that the Infrastructure for IoT should be the same just like the rest of information technology (IT).

In IT, search, email, finance, social networks are the infrastructure for being connected. When people talk about infrastructure for IT they think of security, availability, scalability, and reliability, as the key capabilities to focus on. Whenever there is a security breach or services go down, teams scramble to remedy the situation. The internet of things is being driven by many of the same technology companies that users are familiar with. Running a Google Search for “IoT” the top three paid advertisers are Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel.

Building IoT Infrastructure the same as other IT Infrastructure

If you take a traditional approach, the IoT is the same infrastructure approach for IT but scaled to work with billions and billions of IoT devices. Servers, network, storage are now at a scale to allow billions of devices to be connected to cloud services. Along with this scale comes millions of failure events, which could be a degradation of device performance or outright failure. One view is users will get another device run setup based on the new device, connect a replacement IoT device, and the old one disappears. Another view is we have the history of your IoT device, we can help you repair it, replace it, or upgrade it. The damaged IoT device is part of a bigger experience and a device failure is an opportunity to build a new and better experience.

Tamar Budec, VP of portfolio operations at Digital Realty

Some of you may still think I just want to build highly available, secure, and scalable Infrastructure for IoT, that users will expect it to be no different than their existing IT services. But, I would argue, that we need ore than that. we need IoT infrastructure that does more than compete on availability, security, and scalability. We need infrastructure that provides a sort of institutional memory of what you’ve done with your devices. Where do you think the money is in the infrastructure of IoT? A low-cost infrastructure that quickly gets commoditized or a value added service for the Infrastructure of IoT users will stick with?

Peak Inside Code Conference, a place not interesting to data center executives

Here is a post on what it is like to attend the Code Conference.  It’s interesting, but I have no interest in attending.

Secrets of the Code Conference

Rebecca Buckman

Entrepreneur’s dream: Animoto’s Brad Jefferson with Walt Mossberg

One of the perennial marketing conundrums facing start-up CEOs is picking the best industry conferences to attend to boost their companies’ brands and expand their networks. This week, some lucky entrepreneurs dropped in on what may be the gold standard for tech-industry confabs: The Code Conference.

This is a schmooz event for C level executives.

It was refreshing to hear the big-time CEOs and company founders discuss their companies’ problems and learn that many of them relate to the same issues vexing smaller companies, Shank said—recruiting, dealing with product snafus, etc. Uber Co-Founder and CEO Travis Kalanick talked about not taking a salary for four years and living at home with his mother, which he said didn’t do wonders for his dating life.

See you at 7x24 Exchange Boca Raton

By this time tomorrow I will be at 7x24 Exchange Boca Raton.  Many of my friends have made going to 7x24 Exchange a regular part of our conference plans.  Some going once a year.  I go twice a year and after 6 continuous trips over the past 3 years, I always learn something, make new friends, and enjoy discussing data centers with good friends and smart people.

The 7x24 Exchange hears the same from their attendees.