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Microsoft goes All-In with Xbox Series X?

Microsoft and Sony have turned around their first cards in the next-gen console race, revealing the main technical specs for their next-generation consoles.

While Sony is the market leader in the current-gen with the PS4 and enters the race from a strong position, the question is, how far is Microsoft willing to go to reclaim ground.

It is worth looking back to better understand how we ended up here. Sony dominated the first two generations with the PS1 and the PS2. The first Xbox wasn’t a serious competitor but helped Microsoft to learn. With the PS3 Sony made an expensive mistake by going too far while Microsoft gained a lot of ground with the Xbox 360. With the launch of the 4th generation, it was Microsoft who made a big mistake in the beginning by launching the console together with Kinect. Microsoft wasn’t competitive in terms of pricing and Sony nailed it with the $399 launch price! In combination with the strong lineup of exclusive games, Microsoft had no chance to catch up with Sony in the current generation.

Coming now to the 5th generation. Microsoft made a lot of changes. The man in charge of the Xbox division, Phil Spencer has the gaming DNA. Under his reign MS has acquired several game studios to secure more exclusives, he is pushing new services like Game Pass, xCloud or Xbox All Access. Tech spec-wise the new Xbox Series X is more powerful than the PS5 and that nearly across all aspects incl. CPU speed, GPU teraflops, memory bandwidth or storage size. To be clear, raw hardware power itself doesn’t result in better games.

The question that is left, is the launch price for the Xbox Series X and the PS5. And here is where it gets interesting. My impression is that Microsoft is willing to use its balance sheet (cash!) to fight and take an aggressive stance on pricing. They spend money on M&A, I guess they subsidize services like Game Pass Ultimate, and they did not go cheap on the new Xbox. I wouldn’t be surprised if the price gap between the PS5 and Xbox Series X is much smaller than many expect or that there is no difference at all (maybe cross-subsidizing through bundling with a subscription service).

The launch price will be key to bring Microsoft in a position from which it has a fair chance to effectively compete.

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Market Crash 2020

The stock market is in free fall. In addition to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) we now also have a price war in the oil market. Feels like the perfect storm.

How quick will we go back to “normal”? How much have global supply chains been disrupted? How much are people afraid to travel? What we know, there is a lot of uncertainty.

This is the fourth crash that I experience. The first one was the burst of the dot com bubble in 2000, then came September 11 in 2001, followed by the financial crisis in 2008 and today. I don’t count Black Monday in 1987 as I was just 9 years old.

I was about to liquidate my entire portfolio around 4 weeks ago. I not followed my instinct and was happy to see that the market rally continued.

I’m long in equities. The markets will recover and the next virus will come.

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Google Photos

Google Photos is an amazing product. After Search, Gmail,(Google Drive; there is legitimate competition from Dropbox & MS) and Youtube, Google Photos is the next billion-user product for Google.

The USP and differentiator is the object & facial recognition technology. It’s scary how good it is already. Facial recognition is amazing and it not only works with photos but also with videos. It’s super convenient to search for “Jasper” “Snow” and within milliseconds I see the photos of my son from the winter holiday. Or jump back in time to a specific location, super easy with Google Photos. No manual tagging needed, no elaborated folder structure required.

Collecting vast amounts of data and organizing it is Google’s mission. I believe I read somewhere that per day 1.2 billion photos are uploaded. The computing and storage requirements must be gigantic. For $10 you get 2TB of storage now with the upgrade Google One Plans. That is a hell lot of space to store all your photos for the foreseeable future photos, and all of them will and need to be processed.

So far all my smartphone photos from the last 4-5 years are in Google Photos. It’s enticing to upload all digital photos that I have. There is a good amount of photos from my DSLR and the photos from the early years with a digital compact camera. They lack the geolocation data, unfortunately.

Another nice feature of Google Photos is the feature to share the entire library or parts of it automatically with a partner. That comes in pretty handy for families. The integration feature with Google Drive in both direction is another useful feature of Google Photos.

A question for sure is the price that we as users pay. Don’t be evil isn’t easy when the currency is user data and Google is getting a vast amount of private data from each users who uploads his photo library.

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The 11 Bad Habits Killing Innovation in Your Company

Taken from a guest post of Alexander Osterwalder on the blog of Steve Blank

  1. The current business model dominates the agenda
    “…managing the present often takes oxygen away from inventing the future” 
  2. One-size-fits-all decision making hurts speed & inventiveness
  3. Insisting on untested and detailed business plans 
    “Business plans actually maximize the risk of failure because of the focus on executing an unproven idea rather than testing it.”
  4. Opinions matter more than evidence 
  5. Outsourcing customer discovery and testing
    “You can’t hire outside professionals to test and learn from customer interactions and make decisions for you“
  6. Senior leadership too busy for hands-on innovation
    “…leaders have to be more than just sponsors of new business ideas. Decision makers are the ones who can make things happen.“
  7. Obsessing about competitors rather than customers
    “You can’t drive forward by looking in the rear view mirror.”
  8. Focus on technology risk at the expense of other risks
  9. Innovation is career limiting
    “…in most organizations any type of failure is seen as a negative for your career. …  prestige in companies is measured by who commands the largest budget and staff.”
  10. Innovation is siloed from Execution
    “…the execution engine deprives the innovators from access to valuable resources like customers, brand, or skills.”
  11. Integrating new ideas into the execution engine too quickly

    “New ideas are fragile and they need to be carefully nurtured and scaled before they are integrated into the execution engine with its rigid processes, key performance indicators rules, and procedures.”

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E-Commerce MENA

Alabbar isn’t short of confidence, charisma and cash — but the numbers also add up very much in his favour. Right now, e-commerce accounts for just 2 percent of total retail sales in the region, or around $3bn. By 2025, the e-commerce market is expected to be worth a staggering $70bn a year. Noon is building the world’s largest warehouse to store its products, adjacent to Dubai’s second airport, Al Maktoum International. It will be the size of 60 football pitches. Similar centres are planned in Saudi Arabia and later across the region, as Noon launches first in the UAE and Saudi Arabia before moving across the Middle East.

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How to Miss the Boat – Five Times
Despite Microsoft’s remarkable financial performance, as Microsoft CEO Ballmer failed to understand and execute on the five most important technology trends of the 21st century: in search – losing to Google; in smartphones – losing to Apple; in mobile operating systems – losing to Google/Apple; in media – losing to Apple/Netflix; and in the cloud – losing to Amazon. Microsoft left the 20th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%. These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading. Yet a very smart CEO missed all of these. Why?

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Ovum: Handling of Gaming traffic a bigger challenge than video?!

Gaming represents the new frontier of real-time cloud services. It will be more challenging than video because its interactive nature means predictive estimation strategies cannot be used: a standard-definition stream in gaming requires three times the bandwidth of a comparable resolution stream in video.

Source: Ovum StraightTalk “Optical industry needs business transformations: OSA Executive Forum”

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Great article from Gary Hamel – Who’s Really innovative?

If you are interested in Innovation and how companies can be classified in terms of their innovation management approach, then this article from Gary Hamel is definitely worth reading.

My favorite quote is:

Fourth are the cyborgs, companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple that have been purpose-built to achieve super-human feats of innovation. You won’t find much industrial age DNA in these organizations. These companies have been built around principles like freedom, meritocracy, transparency, and experimentation. They are so endlessly inventive and strategically flexible they seem to have come from another solar system–one where accountants are treated as servants rather than gods.

Great article from Gary Hamel – Who’s Really innovative? Read More »

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