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What Nikola Tesla vs. VCs video says about the state of Silicon Valley

Om Malik — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:16:42 +0000

Nikola Tesla. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Last night I tweeted a link to this video, about the legendary scientist Nikola Tesla pitching Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and commented that the truth is sometimes funnier that comedy. And I was surprised by the sheer number of people who agreed with that sentiment. I went to sleep thinking about that reaction, and also thinking about it in the context of the decline of long-term thinking in our society.

If Tesla (I assume you know who he is) did indeed walk into a VC meeting, he wouldn’t get the attention or the money for his idea because it wouldn’t fit the time-scale of what venture-capital investments have become. Having followed the business of technology for a long time, I have seen that time-scale get shorter and shorter. I guess it’s the price to be paid for the excesses of the internet bubble of the 1990s.

The Bubble After Effects

During that time the business changed from funding innovation to funding concepts and eventually to projects. The fallout of the internet bubble was that venture-capital firms shifted focus. This shifting time-frame is one of the main reasons we are seeing fewer and fewer investments in hardcore technologies and more of the dollars being shifted to the softer aspects of technology.

Yes, bloggers like me like to harp on the fact that many investors are infected by short-termism. But let’s not forget that some of these folks have taken big risks, and sometimes have failed big, too.

Cleantech has ruined many reputations and resulted in billion dollar loses. Yes, there are a couple rare big bet successes that will come out of cleantech, like Tesla Motors and Nest, but the overall trend has been losses.

Now many of the investors that aggressively backed cleantech are trying to find a more cautious approach to cleantech that more closely aligns with the traditional short VC time frame. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers, which lead the charge on cleantech investments only to be left wounded, has recently changed tack in many ways, and in particular to go after social so it can get back into the quick returns on its investments.

That’s the trend that all investors, in some respects are, moving toward. They’re all looking for the next Facebook or the next Twitter, but no one wants to look for the next Juniper or the next Intel or even the next ARM. I am not saying Facebook and Twitter are not great companies and have not scaled dramatically and impacted the world. What I am pointing to is the fact that Silicon Valley funds fewer and fewer silicon companies.

Why are we assuming that we are all done with developing new kinds of chips for uses that we are not even imagining yet? Are we done inventing the routing technologies of the future?

It’s hard to invest in the future

Think of it this way: Had Vinod Khosla not backed Pradeep Sindhu to work on Juniper, we would all be living in Cisco’s vision of the internet future and using its hardware, which it would have made and sold at its own pace and at its own prices. Today, if you need to build a big company like that, you need to have deep pockets. Luckily Andy Bechtolsteim has those and that is why Arista Networks exists and is proving to be a major disrupter.

The point is not to just rant, but to note that there is a lot more innovation to be done. All of today’s stars — from Dropbox to SnapChat to every little hot company that pops up — is built on those basic building blocks, and we have to continue to make better, cheaper and beefier building blocks.

Yes, I understand that there is a chill around chip stocks, and Wall Street investors are showing more interest in pokes than petabyte speeds. I don’t necessarily think that this kind of rational thinking is bad for the investors, but when it comes to fundamental innovation, it points to a a real challenge ahead. And forget what Wall Street thinks, isn’t venture capital really risk capital? Risk, unfortunately, is a four-letter word around these parts these days.

Failure is an option

Elon Musk in front of the frunk

Forget chip startups, does anyone think that the Sand Hill Road firmament could have funded Amazon Web Services, a disruptive economic force, if they had a chance? Probably not. How about the iPhone? The same story. If you look at those two examples, and add Google’s self-driving car, Google Glass and what companies like Tesla are doing, you understand that patience is a virtue. Unfortunately, patience is in short supply in the Valley these days.

I wrote this on the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, and I want to resurface it:

A dear friend put it best when he said that Jobs allowed himself the freedom to dream big and most of us need to learn from him and supersize our dreams. While that is true of everyone, the Silicon Valley of 2012 needs to pay heed. Silicon Valley of quick flips, petty jealousies and rampant short-termism needs to remind itself of a greater purpose than a public offering. Change is more than a headline. It takes patience. It is more profound. And it is thinking about more than just us.

Maybe this video is a reminder to all of us that while we might be living in great times, the future is still to be invented.

More about the video: The video is in support of a Kickstarter campaign that hopes to collect enough money to build a statue of Nikola Tesla. While to many Tesla might be a car, in reality Tesla was a scientist who worked on difficult things. As an aside, we at GigaOM are fortunate that our New York offices are in the Radio Wave Building, the very building where Nikola Tesla lived.

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Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:46:59 +0000

Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room.

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Judge rules Apple CEO Tim Cook must testify in ebook antitrust case

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:54:10 +0000

Apple CEO Tim Cook will have to testify in the the Department of Justice’s ebook antitrust case, federal judge Denise Cote ruled Wednesday, according to a report in Reuters.

Apple hadn’t wanted Cook to testify, writing in a letter to the court on Monday (PDF) that the government’s original complaint didn’t mention him (it only refers to former CEO Steve Jobs) and that Cook — who was previously the company’s chief operating officer — doesn’t possess any “unique knowledge about Apple’s decision to enter the ebooks market and recalls no relevant ‘private conversations’ with Mr. Jobs.”

However, according to Reuters, Judge Cote said in a teleconference Wednesday that because of Jobs’ death, “I think the government is entitled to take testimony from high-level executives within Apple about topics relevant to the government case.” Court documents supporting her decision have not yet been posted to PACER.

The DOJ sued Apple and five book publishers last April for allegedly conspiring to set ebook prices. All five publishers in the case have settled.

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Steve Jobs biographer dropped from Apple ebook case, James Murdoch named in email

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:47:13 +0000

Walter Isaacson, the author of a bestselling book about the late Apple founder, will not have to share his notes or testify in a case about alleged price-fixing between Apple and book publishers.

Class action lawyers had earlier demanded that Isaacson provide evidence, based on his interviews with Steve Jobs, about why Jobs asked publishers to sell books on Apple’s iPad device. Isaacson refused to hand over his notes and invoked a New York law that allows journalists to shield their sources in many situations.

The lawyers, who want Apple to pay for allegedly fixing book prices, had subpoenaed Isaacson and said the reporters’ shield did not apply. Last week, however, court documents show the parties agreed to drop Isaacson from the case.

The Isaacson dispute comes at a time when Apple’s antitrust showdown with the Department of Justice and class action lawyers is coming to a head. While the five publishers who were also named as defendants decided to settle, Apple is rejecting the accusations that it acted as the hub for an illegal conspiracy to raise book prices and thwart Amazon. Meanwhile, Amazon executives are poised to testify against Apple.

Even though the Isaacson biography is no longer part of the case, a court transcript shows Steve Jobs will remain a central figure. In response to a question about who decided to sign contracts with book publishers, Apple executive Keith Moerer said, “Ultimately, I would say it was — Steve. But working closely with — with Eddy, Mr. Cue.”

Meanwhile, other recently filed court documents identify one recipient of a highly publicized Jobs email about Amazon and pricing — the recipient was James Murdoch, a senior executive at News Corp, parent company of HarperCollins. The other recipient(s) are still redacted. You can see the email below:

Steve Jobs Emails by

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A brief guide to tech lobbyists in Europe

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:00:54 +0000

In the last few years, lobbying by web giants like Google and Facebook has increased dramatically on both sides of the Atlantic. As noted by the Financial Times, Facebook’s spending in Washington trebled in 2012 — and similar expansion has also been seen in Europe. That’s no surprise, perhaps: with COO Sheryl Sandberg intimately familiar with the way power works, both from her time with the Department of the Treasury and then at Google.

There’s an obvious reason they’re concentrating their energies, too. Technology companies are incredibly powerful, which draws a lot of attention, and a lot of anger in many cases. Unfriendly administrations can be powerful enemies: from Microsoft’s drawn-out conflict with European officials — effectively running for 20 years — to the vast fines levied on companies like Intel who break competition rules, conflict with governments can be costly and distracting. So what better way to try and smooth the path than try to head off that conflict earlier in the process?

But lobbying is furtive, and tends to happen behind closed doors: only dragged into the open when big issues emerge, such as the recent furore over American tech companies paying little or no tax in the U.K.. The European Commission does run a transparency register that companies are meant to report for, but the truth is that many — including, for example, Apple — have not signed up. Shouldn’t the extent of lobbying be more visible?

What follows is a short overview to some of the power players working to influence Brussels, or other governments in Europe, on behalf of the world’s big internet and hi-tech companies. It’s not meant to be comprehensive — there are lots of companies missing, and lots of individuals not named. But consider it more of a starting place: If you know more lobbyists, and their roles, then please leave them in the comments. Eventually, maybe, we can produce a map of their activities.

Google

Google has one of the most complex European lobbying operations among Internet companies. It operates a significant team in Brussels, but also has staff in most other major European capitals — including Berlin, where it opened a new office housing seven lobbyists. Their job? To try and influence the German government over issues like privacy and copyright, where it is far stricter than most other nations.

Key players:

Antoine Aubert, head of Google’s Brussels policy team, is listed in the transparency register as the liaison between EU and Mountain View. He is a policy wonk who previously spent three years working for the Commission itself.

Simon Hampton, the company’s director of public policy in Europe, is a former AOL and Time Warner policy chief. He took up the role with Google four years ago, which he describes on his LinkedIn profile like this: “His team of 45 evangelise the economic and social potential of the Internet, and work on the regulatory agenda to help Europe tap the full opportunities of the Internet.” The transparency register claims seven people working at European level.

Annette Kroeber-Riel, European policy counsel, heads up the German lobbying effort, which has built a network of operations, including think tanks and a research institute. Her background includes VeriSign and Jamba! (the company behind Crazy Frog, which was notorious Samwer brothers).

Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel based in Paris, is a long-time hand at the company who works on international policy efforts around data and privacy. Largely operating behind the scenes, Fleischer’s profile was raised when he was one of those named, tried and convicted in an Italian court over a YouTube video of a boy being bullied. (The ruling was overturned just before Christmas.)

Sarah Hunter, head of UK public policy, was a senior policy adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Facebook

Facebook’s rocket-like trajectory in the last few years has rapidly increased its interaction with governments — rarely positive — and it is staffing up its lobbying efforts to reflect that. It seems keen to pick those with inside knowledge of the system gained from active political positions, rather than from the academic or bureaucratic side like most of its peers.

Key players:
Erika Mann, managing director of public policy (pictured) has helped build Facebook’s Belgian lobbying engine since joining in 2011, but knows Europe very well: the German was a Member of the European Parliament for 15 years.

Richard Allan, the director of policy in Europe, also has political ties. He spent eight years as a Member of Parliament in Britain (and then acted as campaign manager for Nick Clegg, the current Deputy Prime Minister) and sits in the House of Lords after being made a Baron in 2010. Before moving to Facebook in 2009, he worked as a lobbyist for Cisco.

Apple

Apple is one of those companies which has no presence in the transparency register, but clearly has a lobbying operation in Brussels. Steve Jobs himself was known to join meetings with European officials, and EC documents show he took part to get regulatory approval of Europe-wide pricing for iTunes. Still, its lobby effort does seem underpowered compared to rivals like Google.

Key players:

Claire Thwaites, director of Apple’s EMEIA government affairs previously helped lead Vodafone lobbying in Brussels and Washington.

Jaymeen Patel, senior government affairs manager (pictured), is another telecoms veteran, with five years at Telefonica.

Amazon

Amazon is one of a number of American technology companies that is lobbying Brussels in order to weaken restrictions on data collection. It is not listed in the joint transparency register. And yet it does have a Brussels presence to help try and secure itself a good deal across the single market.

Key players:

Andrew Cecil (pictured) has been Amazon’s director of public policy in Brussels since 2009, after he jumped from the same role at Yahoo!. Became temporarily notorious for refusing to answer a range of questions when when giving evidence to British MPs over Amazon’s tax avoidance strategies.

Saskia Horsch, the company’s senior public policy manager, previously worked for the European Casino Association.

Microsoft

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has put a vast amount of effort into Europe over the years. according to the transparency register, it currently has 17 lobbyists working in Brussels, spending at least €4.5 million ($6 million) last year — though experts suggest that few companies accurately report their true lobbying spend.

At a national level, it operates governmental lobbying of various kinds — such as warning the British government over the adoption of open standards. And it has also funneled some of its lobbying effort through Burston Marsteller, the PR consultancy: opposing the purchase of DoubleClick by Google in 2007, for example.

John Vassallo, a former Maltese ambassador to Europe, has been vice president of EU Affairs for more than four years. He also worked in a similar position for General Electric.

Stephen Collins, the head of EU policy, recently gave evidence to British parliament over plans for a new communications bill.

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Emails show Steve Jobs took hard ball approach to prevent employees from leaving

Erica Ogg — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:14:04 +0000

Emails made public as a result of a of a recent court ruling show how the late Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley CEOs used brazen tactics to ensure their employees didn’t jump ship to competitors. The emails are part of an ongoing class action case in San Jose, Calif., in which employees are suing Apple, Palm (now part of HP), Intel, Google and other firms for allegedly entering into illegal pacts not to hire each others’ workers.

The Verge has posted all the emails, and it is worth reading them for yourself. A sampling of some of the quotes from the heads of Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar, Intuit, Adobe and Lucasfilm:

Jobs didn’t mince words when it came to defending his employees from poachers. When he found out Google was heavily recruiting from his iPod team, he asked then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, “Can you put a stop to it? Thanks, Steve.”
Jobs wasn’t above threats. As he told then-CEO of Palm Ed Colligan when complaining of Palm recruiting Apple engineers: “I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective companies when you say: ‘We will both just end up paying a lot of lawyers a lot of money.’”
It’s clear they knew this was wrong and did it anyway. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said of his arrangement with Schmidt and Google, “We have nothing signed. We have a handshake ‘no-recruit’ between Eric and myself. I would not like this broadly known.”
Jobs was signing off personally on some employees’ recruitment. He was asked by current Pixar VP Rob Cook about a particular Apple employee he was recruiting to the animation studio, to which Jobs replied, “Yea, it’s fine.”

The Department of Justice investigation into this same matter was settled in 2010, but the civil suit is continuing. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who was COO when these emails were being sent back and forth between Jobs and others, has been ordered to sit for a deposition. Otellini will be deposed later this month, while Google Chairman Schmidt will give one in late February.

Image courtesy of Flickr user acaben

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The GigaOM Quiz: test your tech knowledge

Tom Krazit — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:00:21 +0000

Think you know your stuff when it comes to the fast-changing worlds of technology and media? Try your hand at our GigaOM Quiz below. In the age of Google, finding the answers to these questions is child’s play, but avoid the temptation of the search field and see if you can come up with the right choices below. Answers (and explanations) are on the following page, and the questions (submitted by GigaOM and paidContent staff members) follow below.

1. What major U.S. mobile carrier is still operating under its original name?

A: AT&T
B: Verizon Wireless
C: Sprint
D: T-Mobile

2. In April, the Department of Justice and 31 states sued book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices. Which of the following did NOT APPEAR in the DOJ and states’ original complaints?

A: A “decisionmaker” was quoted as saying “F*** Amazon.”
B: A publishing executive was quoted as instructing someone to “double-delete this email.”
C: Publishing CEOs were described as meeting in “‘The Chef’s Wine Cellar,’ a private room at Picholene,” where “business matters were discussed.”
D: Publishing executives referred to themselves in an email as “the Club!”

3. Just as Twitter launched its own photo editing and filters service, Instagram released updates to its popular app, including the addition of a new photo filter. What was this filter called?

A. Wander
B. Willow
C. Wrestle
D. Tousle

4. We’re producing and consuming data at the same rate your kids attack the bowls of holiday M&Ms left around the house this time of year. But as we move past petabytes and exabytes to the even more esoteric zettabytes and yottabytes what comes next?

A: Googolbytes
B: Brontobytes
C: Gegobyte
D: Mondobytes

5. What was one of the big secrets about Apple revealed during executive testimony at the Apple-Samsung trial?

A: Jony Ive had been lobbying for years for an iPhone with a 5-inch screen
B: Scott Forstall was not Steve Jobs’ first choice to run the iPhone team
C: Steve Jobs was not against the idea of 7-inch tablets after all
D: Google’s Eric Schmidt had helped convince Jobs to build the iPad

6. Long before the iPhone, Androids and Windows Phone, Microsoft did have a sizable percent of the personal digital assistant (PDA) market. These devices eventually turned into Windows Mobile smartphones and at one point, the platform was forecast to surpass that of Symbian. Which of these companies did NOT make a Microsoft-powered PDA:

A: Casio
B: Handspring
C: Toshiba
D: Compaq

7. What event set the new world record for the most simultaneous tweets per minute in 2012?

A: The closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympics
B: A live Twitter interview with Justin Bieber
C: Pope Benedict’s first Twitter conversation
D: The night of the federal election

Click through to see the answers.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Shawn Hempel; Tim Cook/Dave Grohl photo courtesy of @tim (Tim Bradshaw)

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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What every designer working in a startup needs to know

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 18:30:22 +0000

At the core of any startup is a passion to satisfy unmet needs. At the core of a designer there’s a passion to craft a bold vision for the future. But being a designer and being a designer in a startup are two very different things. After working at IDEO for about five years, I took the leap into a startup. Here are the three most surprising things I’ve learned from the past year about design and the role a designer plays in a startup.

User research doesn’t produce user-centered design.

At IDEO, a team conducts “unfocus groups” where consumers were given a buffet of prototyping materials to build their perfect running shoe

Traditional quantitative user research does not help you envision the future. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Using focus groups and surveys to measure and predict what consumers need and want are incremental at best because they’re focused on present realities.

User-centered design is something entirely different. It’s a way to run your company — with users at the center — where you uncover, understand and are inspired by people’s needs, wants, hopes, and aspirations; what they say, feel, do (and don’t do). So asking a focus group to imagine the future is akin to asking them to do the designer’s job themselves. It’s nonsensical.

Steve Jobs introduces the iMac, or “what [computers] will look like from today on.”

Steve Jobs was notorious for his belief that good design could create products that anticipate consumer needs. As he said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” But Apple is a deeply user-centered company. Instead of relying on focus groups, they designed products they’d want to use. Which is why, in 1998, they opted to put a lot of memory into the new iMac, to give it an optimal screen size, and to simplify the overall user experience. As Jobs explained at the time,”This has to be the computer that we want on our desks too.”

One way is to get your design team into the homes of people who would use your product, and let them experience these people’s lives first-hand. Your offering will look quite different when you begin to see the context that will exist around it in people’s lives. Another way is to randomly conduct “man on the street” style interviews where you show someone a low-fidelity prototype and get their feedback. These are fast and dirty — and really fun to do. A final way to better understand your customer is to host what IDEO calls a “Whine and Dine,” where a focused conversation happens over food and drinks.

These methods aren’t about measuring, and they’re not about predicting. Rather, user-centered design is about starting with people — to uncover their unmet needs, aspirations and behaviors. And once you identify whom you’re serving and what they need, hold onto those insights as the sacred, core opportunities of your company.

Design and engineering don’t make great bedmates.

Hundreds of logo studies were done before converging on the final Mailbox identity.

The traits that make for a good engineering culture are rarely the same as those that make for a good design culture. Design teams thrive in the experimental, the quick and dirty, in taking leaps and being daring, and they aren’t afraid of failing as a means to learning. Engineering teams, on the other hand, thrive in understanding, in the elegant solutions that account for edge cases, in heads down and focussed spaces, and the engineers I know aren’t too keen on failures of any kind.

IDEO’s San Francisco offices have an open layout for cross-pollination of ideas through conversation.

During this past year I worked in an office that was modeled after IDEO — big communal tables, no walls, and lots of team space. You’d think this open format would foster discussion, keep the designers and engineers in lock-step and promote visibility across the company. But that just wasn’t the case. The designers were noisy, they liked their music at full volume, and they hashed through design reviews passionately. The engineers were cranking and found the noise and activity distracting.

So instead of trying to convince the engineers to be more like the designers, or for the designers to be more like the engineers, we went to Home Depot, bought some giant sheets of foamcore and built a wall. Suddenly, the engineers had a coding cave that was quiet and took over two-thirds of the office, while the designers had the other third of the space to pump their music and debate over button styles as loudly as they wanted.

The result? On the day-to-day level, people were suddenly excited for weekly meetings instead of being at one another’s throats. And at a deeper, cultural level, a respect began to emerge between the teams.

Embrace the fact that design and engineering cultures are different. Design is really well-suited to answer the “How might we?” questions, while engineering is really well-suited to consider all of the details that go into making a concept real. And if you want to build a world-class product, you have to surround these two unique cultures with the tools, space and support that will get them there. They’re complementary – you need both. It’s where 2 + 2 adds up to 5.

You can’t add back in design at the end.

Design thinking touches all aspects of your company.

A startup expresses the values of the founding team. Period.

If the founding team isn’t made up of designers or design-thinkers, design will have a hard time offering much more than window dressing. The founders represent the heart and soul of the company: What the founders burn for will be what the company burns for, and when a company is run by a team that loves product, the results are magical. Because a design-led startup is going to design not only their product, but also their culture. (It’s this mission that started The Designer Fund — a group solely dedicated to investing in designer founders.)

Dropbox’s product helps you upload and share your photos, documents and videos simply and easily.

Take Dropbox, for example. It has only three official designers and the founder, Drew Houston, is a self-professed software engineer. But the Dropbox team has obsessed over the design of their product: It is a wonderfully simple, easy-to-use, intuitive product that serves a clearly defined, core need. It is magical. And this is because — even though he doesn’t call himself a designer — Houston is a design-thinker, which is expressed through the entire product. Dropbox is clearly the result of design thinking operating at the core of the company. So for design to be effective in a startup, it has to be at the center of the organization.

But design isn’t just about product; design is a way of thinking about everything. It’s how you handle the unknowns when talking to investors; it’s how you approach ambiguity within your earliest ideas and explorations; it’s how you critique — not criticize; it’s how you talk through those ideas that could potentially alter your engineering schedule by months; it’s how you know when to keep pushing past “good enough” and on to great; and it’s how you get from why you’re solving a problem to what you’re building and putting out into the world.

Let’s call a spade a spade here and reframe the role of the designer — design isn’t simply making things look pretty, design is about creating a vision for tomorrow. And it’s difficult — if not impossible — to dream, create and ship amazing new products when the foundation of the company isn’t set up to solve really complex problems, deal with uncertainty, and align on a definition of what “good” looks like.

Since the designer’s role is to envision tomorrow, and the startup exists to bring tomorrow into existence, that fundamental partnership is what’s really needed for a designer to effectively do their job in a startup. So if you’re interested in building a design-led startup, do it fully. Be bold in designing the future. And make that vision a reality.

Elle Luna is the Design Lead at Mailbox — a mobile email app. You can find her on Twitter at @elleluna.

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It’s great that AT&T opened FaceTime up but when will Apple?

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:55:23 +0000

Consumers scored a bit of a small win in the U.S. this week as AT&T decided to reverse course and allow FaceTime video calls over LTE for customers on tiered data plans. To be honest, the carrier should have done so from the beginning; here’s an excellent post from Chris Ziegler at the The Verge on why.

After the news hit, I actually considered buying an iPad mini with cellular connectivity since many of my contacts use iOS. I bought a Wi-Fi model of the mini — it’s replacing a Retina display iPad 3 for me — and I can still return it for a different model. That idea went out the window once I realized that FaceTime is still a silo, even though at launch, Steve Jobs said Apple would work to make it a standard notes a 2010 Computerworld article:

“Apple will ship tens of millions of FaceTime devices this calendar year, so there’s going to be a lot of people to talk to. FaceTime is based on H.264 video … and a bunch of alphabet-soup acronyms. We’re going to the standards bodies tomorrow and making FaceTime an open standard.”

As one who follows some standards boards, particular those in the wireless industry, I realize that such things take time. But remember: FaceTime was introduced in June 2010 and since that time, not a single piece of information suggests that Apple is working with any standards body to open up FaceTime for use on anything but iOS or OS X. Contrast that to my other heavily used video services, which are Google video chats now done through Google+ hangouts, and Skype.

Both of these services run on every device I own, regardless of platform. That means I’m accessible at any point in time, no matter where I am, what network I’m using and what device I have. Isn’t that the point of instant communications? It’s for these reasons that I use such services. In this day and age, we all want to be connected to our friends and peers without having to worry what device those people are using.

Listen, I love FaceTime. I find it to be one of the better performing video services out there and until my son moved in with me, it’s what I used to communicate with him daily. Two-and-a-half years after FaceTime was introduced, however, I don’t want to ping him on FaceTime, hoping he has his iPod touch with him only to see no response because he’s instead using his Android phone.

I know I’m oversimplifying here, but this is akin to limiting voice calls only to work on phones made by the same company. It’s a huge step backwards in an age where we’ve seen so much forward progress and the removal of communications silos.

If I could make one request it would be this, in my best Ronald Reagan impersonation: “Mr. Cook; Tear down this wall!” Let’s get FaceTime support through open standards and let the video calls flow on all platforms and devices already.

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Tech startups need/don’t need MBAs? Discuss …

Barb Darrow — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 23:08:57 +0000

Does a Masters in Business Administration make its recipient more or less attractive to tech startups? Or does it have any impact at all?

It’s a serious question. A day after Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium 18, I remain struck by the concern attendees seemed to feel about what their advanced degree will mean in a tough economy and in a tech business that elevates technical prowess above everything else. After all, college dropouts Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg all built hugely successful tech companies — Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Facebook — without a degree among them.

One Cyberposium panelist basically told MBA candidates interested in big data opportunities that they need not apply unless they also had technical chops. I’m simplifying here, but that was the gist.

Dropbox founder Drew Houston — who does hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT – was gentler but still not all that encouraging. Asked what he wanted in an MBA he said … um pretty much the same thing he seeks in any hire. “What we look for in any candidate is that they’re smart and passionate and not just chasing money. We look for a cultural fit,” Houston said in a Q&A session. ”The guy who runs most of the business side [at Dropbox] has a Harvard MBA but what we look for isn’t that different from what we look for in other areas,” Houston said.

The underlying theme was that business skills and teamwork are valuable and much desired. Attitude and a sense of entitlement are not.

Hunter Walk, director of product management at Google (and a Stanford MBA) must be hearing the same concerns. Yesterday, he shared a great post on the topic: “It’s fine to get an MBA, but don’t be an MBA.”

One of his points:

Getting an MBA means you shoot out of school wanting to prove yourself and see what you can contribute to others. Being an MBA means thinking the world owes you something and that your value 10x’ed just from spending two years on a campus.

Given the economic climate, it’s natural for students to worry about the worth of their degrees. And this topic crops up periodically in the sort of “builder versus spreadsheet guy” debates that get heated. Last year, auto executive Bob Lutz’ book “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business” stoked the debate anew. Lutz’ argument, according to the Time Magazine review was: ”To get the U.S. economy growing again, we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show.” Harsh, But I would bet lots of people who watched the decline of US industry in the 70s and 80s under the tutelage of MBA CEOs would agree with that sentiment.

Still, promising business students should take heart. Every tech company needs people with business and financial management expertise. As one commenter to an earlier Cyberposium story put it:

Harvard Business School was where the concept of the spreadsheet developed. Don’t be dismayed … fellow MBAs. Your day will come… Take the Disruptive Innovation courses, and pick up some Advertising while you’re at it.

And, let’s face it, there are many times when the best technology in the world won’t win unless it’s accompanied by real business savvy.

I would love the discussion to continue, so please post your thoughts in comments below.

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