Apple's Retail Strategy - Its About the Customer

"Only by getting people to "Shop different" will Apple get people to "Think different" . . . and ultimately, to Buy different", that was the comment shared by David Lang a number of years ago and he was some what correct. Despite possible channel conflicts and other challenges, Apple's is becoming a retail powerhouse, unveiling another 50 stores this year in 8 countries around the world including the new Manhattan location on the left - watch the video on abc news here and from the WSJ below. Impressive to say the least.

According to an article at MacCentral, Apple concluded that "'destination' locations such as Best Buy and Office Depot won't work for the 95 percent of non-Mac computer users." In doing so they realized the need to create "experiences" via retail space that engages consumers to understand unique attributes of their products and brand to grow market share. In this case bricks and mortar distribution is a synergistic strategy that serves to educate consumers in a unique way. This strategy integrates physical retail into a largely digital distribution model. When considering how other concept retailers like the  "Discovery Store" or Sharper Image were unable to make this work, we'll see how sustainable Apple's strategy for retail will be in the long-term. Regardless, when visiting these new locations - they certainly are all about the customer.

Augmented Reality

Not to get ahead of myself, which I do at times, but you must watch some of the videos below, they'll blow your mind - and its only the beginning.

In all industries there will be an increasing move by insightful participants to benefit from the merger of the physical and digital. This strategy enables the creation of new value paradigms; thus continuing the relevance of business models - like magazines, among others. For example, Esquire Magazine's  2009 Best and Brightest issue includes "Augmented Reality", which layers data like audio, graphics, and animation over live video. Wow !

The Augmented reality term was coined in 1992 by Tom Caudell while working for Boeing, where factory workers used AR to sort parts. Now, with video cameras available in so many electronic devices, AR applications range from advertising to architecture and gaming to pizza boxes. The technology had not been applied in an editorial scale, until Esquire did it. The Barbarian Group is a leader in the application of this and other technologies.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/augmented-reality-technology-110909#ixzz0WYDl9Ccb

See the video demo below and get your experience software for the experience here.

Cloud Computing & Political Correctness

I woke this morning to read David Linthicum's article "How to kill the cloud: Claim it's about job loss," originally published at InfoWorld.com.

Here is my initial thought: are you kidding me ? David's theory is that the adoption of Cloud Computing would be far more "acceptable" (aka politically correct) if we didn't have executives like Unisys's Richard Marcello saying: "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization."

To be fair, I think David is a really brite guy and he correctly observes that technology innovation often sets forth unrealistic expectations when it comes to realizing cost reductions and other benefits. But to read this: "The message here is that the cloud computing industry needs to think a bit about what it's saying in the promotion of cloud computing. Some of the "cloud computing experts" are sending wrong and inaccurate messages. In other words, they're not helping." What are they not helping ? Don't you believe that enhancing the quality of systems and reducing the expense of deploying them for the benefit of customers isn't at the core of innovation ? Isn't that what its all about ? For those who don't think so I suggest a view of Danny Devito's Larry the liquidator speech from the movie Other People's Money below. Amen, you just heard a prayer - the prayer for the "dead".

Bottom line is significant segments of IT, along with players in a variety of industries, are in peril because their value paradigms are erroding, no longer as relevant to the market. Its only a matter of time until a combination of forces including globalism, technology advancements and mega cultural shifts turn over their proverbial apple carts. David do you honestly believe that the "press" people get around the "truth" (being that reengineering significant aspects of business models via cloud computing will eliminate vast segments of the job market and redeploy them abroad) will stop this revolution ? That's analogous to what GM thought ten years ago about its industry. You get the idea. Perhaps it would help advance our industry to be more transparent about obsolesence, change, and continuing to get an increasing share of a shrinking market. Think about the buggy whip example Larry cites in his speech.

Social Media - We're Just Getting Started

Gentry Underwood focuses on social media and collaborative software at IDEO. He works both internally and with the firm's clients to design and build software people will actually use.  Check out his recent post: Social Software, The Other Design for Social Impact. Gentry's post includes the following exerpt:

It isn't difficult to see where most social software falls short: many tools have pleasant, user-friendly interfaces and take advantage of well-designed physical devices (i.e., they're easy to use from a human-computer-interaction perspective). But it's in the sociological and anthropological arenas where they run into trouble: most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction.

The bottom line, which Underwood intelligently shares, is that we are in the infancy of social software and new methods of designing these tools will lead to more powerful applications of their capabilities. Join Gentry and continue the discussion at http://socialsoftware.org. In the meantime watch this hillarious satirized look at Facebook by the British improv troupe Idiots of Ants  that pushes the social behaviors of Facebook to the extreme.

Google's Chief on the Web's Future

Gartner's recent 2009 Symposium provided another opportunity for IT leaders to share views regarding the future. Google's chief Eric Schmidt explored his thinking on key internet trends; among them real time search, the dominance of Chinese language content, the ten fold increase in computing power and the continued shift to video content - all forecasted to dominate the next five years of the Internet's evolution.

Gartner is a respected research firm and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed at business leaders. An excerpted 6 minutes highlights points of interest to anyone impacted by the web.

For an interesting review of Schmidt's contemplation of these points read Kirkpatrick's article and watch the brief video. It will be an exciting next five years indeed.