zhangtwin

Wait until Haswell generation of ultrabooks come out

PG - I recently read a great article on measuring innovation from CIO. I've linked below to share:

http://www.cio.com/article/628054/How_Do_You_Measure_Innovat...

I want to call out how they discuss innovation: Ultimately, innovation is a means to an end — a competence for generating profitable growth opportunities and improving the organization's competitiveness. A holistic measurement system needs to have three perspectives: performance, strength of the competence, and strategic application of the competence. The performance perspectives report out the "returns" or "results" of an organization's innovation program(s) while the competence perspectives report out the ability to envision and implement innovative opportunities. The strategy perspective outlines the criticality and impact of innovation in the organization's strategic direction.

Hopefully we can get some good discussion going on this topic as in my day-to-day work, we frequently discuss with large enterprise customers how they handle change management. Frequently we discuss it in the context of IPM (innovation process management) and how to create organizations that benefit from managing innovation; and more broadly speaking, what types of software or tools they need to successfully handle this change.

I'm looking at this more from a candidate perspective both I think having a view from both sides is important. IE - what is the interviewer looking for in an ideal candidate and as a candidate what is the best way to prepare.

Part of the problem with OEMs, especially when you look at the Windows ecosystem is that they are cutting costs by using the same design with swappable part (different memory, different HDs, etc.). Reaching the $400-500 price range requires low end specs, but also requires a single SKU that can be mass produced cheaply.

Since alot of the major OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) have already made major investments in products (Thinkpad, Inspiron, etc.) for design that is focused on the head end and highly configurable, they don't spend resources producing the low end. Instead they all of the R&D cost have been spent creating one design that is very configurable, which results in design tradeoffs (swapable parts causes laptop to be bigger, etc.) in order for them.

Apple is successful partially because they have VERY few SKUs, a small number of models, which enables to them to easily reach scale and spend all their money on design. There is no equivalent because the margins at the $400-500 are very low and if OEMs have to spend large amount on design for something with low margin that can't be scaled up to high end, the ROI is not there.