His words were ringing in my ears when I turned on the computer this morning and read about Kodak’s bankruptcy. Shocking (and sad) as it might be, it is not all that surprising. People have been watching the company’s slow free fall for years. The Economist has a great rundown of what went wrongat the company — I recommend you read that and skip all the news-y nonsense – and my key takeaway from that wonderful piece: you cannot fight the future.

Companies that once were large and massive and failed to adjust to the new reality have been left behind.  Xerox that owned the photocopying industry is now a small player in what was essentially its core competency —  document management. AT&T used to be a giant wireline phone company that controlled how we communicated with each other. Now it is a cellphone provider and only a component of the way we communicate. Why? Because communication itself has since moved on to a new kind of network and isn’t limited by per-minute billing.

No coming back

Kodak Logo: through the ages

As my friend Pip Coburn says, turnarounds never turn. Kodak has been in restructuring mode for 15 years – cutting headcount, closing factories, tightening belts and squeezing rocks for blood. In other words — the company isn’t fat in a traditional sense.  But why none of its strategies worked was  because the company took too long and sat on its duff watching digital photography come and eat it for a mid-day snack even though Kodak R&D helped with the digital photo revolution when it launched the first digital camera in 1975.

And yet they failed to do what one of their major competitors – FujiFilm did — embrace digital with both arms and is now thriving. And when Kodak finally did embrace digital in 1993 it did with hesitance that comes when companies are afraid to cannibalize their existing businesses for the sake of the future. 

Today Kodak is experimenting with printers, commercial printing and other services as new ways to grow, but one wonders if that will be the path forward. I am pretty sure HP, Cannon and Lexmark have something to say about Kodak’s printing ambitions. And even if it succeeds and survives, it won’t be the Kodak of George Eastman. We might as well call it, a Corporation-Once-Known-As-Kodak!

Kodak, like many other businesses that have failed before it, made one fatal mistake – it forgot the true purpose of its business and instead focused on features, SKUs and products. (I have written about this before.) Kodak continued to define itself by “film” when all it should have done is define itself with “photos” or moments.

Who cared if the photos were on a slide, were printed and placed in albums, in digital cameras or on online sharing services. “The Kodak Moment” is what made that company powerful. Had it looked at the world from that lens it would be been an easy decision to adapt to new technologies and adopt them for benefit of their customers – us! In Mad Men, Don Draper tells the guys from Eastman Kodak when giving a pitch for their slide carousel:

This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again… to a place where we know we are loved.

Nokia’s Kodak Moment?

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop

There are many lessons for today’s companies in Kodak’s failure to adapt and eventual bankruptcy. Is Nokia the next Kodak? I hope not – for I like those guys – but Nokia is a likely candidate. Just as Kodak’s internal team was arguing for a digital shift that the top guys ignored, Nokia too, ignored all protestations from its resident experts who argued for an Internet-centric, touch-based and app-driven mobile device. Anyone remember the Nokia 770?

That phone could have been Nokia’s future, instead it is forgotten.  Nokia defined itself by a certain kind of a product – the 12-key phone. People at Nokia talked about a multimedia mobile computer, but it couldn’t look beyond those 12 keys. It took Apple and Google to show Nokia how to re-imagine the phone. In doing so they have defined how hundreds of millions view and what they expect from a smartphone. As I have said before – it is too late for the Finnish company.

Sure, Nokia has a brand, global presence and a sizeable marketshare. So did Kodak. It took 132 years, the last 15 of those spent in constant belt tightening, for the photo film company to sink. Having missed the big wave, Nokia doesn’t have the luxury of time.

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Not wanting to be left behind by the AIO hordes, Acer has unveiled a trio of new options for your spick and span desktop. The higher-end AZ5 provides a 23-inch expanse of full HD, multi-touch glory, a minimum Core i3-2120 processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 1TB HDD, all for the sum of 0. Next up is the AZ3, which saves you 0 by cutting the screen size to 21 inches, switching to an AMD dual-core A4 APU (along with a discreet Radeon HD6410) and slimming the HDD down to 500GB. Both models come with an adjustable stand, two side-mounted USB 3.0 ports (plus four USB 2.0 ports on the rear) and a built-in webcam and mic. Meanwhile, Acer’s new Veriton all-in-ones target enterprise users who are prepared to sacrifice those high-def media credentials in favor of better performance and a smaller, more office-friendly footprint — the 20-inch Z2620G, for instance, packs a Core i5-2400s quad-core processor and NVIDIA GeFore GT 520M GPU for 0. All the new models are available in densely populated areas as of right now, and you’ll find more details in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Acer outs AZ3, AZ5, Veriton Z Series all-in-ones, starting at 0

Acer outs AZ3, AZ5, Veriton Z Series all-in-ones, starting at 0 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The news has sparked some excitement around Nokia’s stock, which is up on the hopes that the company is managing its transition well and may be turning a corner. But the real challenge awaits as Nokia prepares to unveil its first Windows Phone devices next week at Nokia World, beginning to show how its big bet on Microsoft’s mobile operating system will play out. That’s where Nokia will need to make its stand because it can’t rely on feature phones, which will only become more like smartphones over time.

Smartphone penetration continues to grow and feature phones are increasingly going to be left behind. The average selling price of low-end phones plummeted 20 percent year over year, dropping Nokia’s operating margins to 2.4 percent compared to 11.3 percent a year earlier. The future for Nokia is in smartphones, a market it used to lead with its Symbian devices, which have fallen behind Android and iPhone devices in popularity with many consumers. Nokia’s smartphone sales fell to 16.8 million units in the third quarter, down 38 percent year over year and up just 1 percent sequentially from the second quarter. A lot will rest on what Nokia can conjure up and how interesting it can make its phones, which will be competing against devices from other Windows Phone makers.

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop said Nokia will bring its first WP7 devices to specific countries later this year before a systematic increase in markets and launch partners in 2012. That means that this coming quarter is also not likely to reflect a big showing in WP7 devices, or smartphones overall, unless Nokia creates an absolute home run that can move units in a big way despite a limited roll-out in select countries.

The big test will be next year as it ramps up distribution of Windows Phones. But the pressure is on for Nokia to demonstrate that it made the right bet on Windows Phone and that it has some pretty stunning hardware to show for it. The handsets will need to be markedly better than anything its got in its stable including the N9, a very compelling device that launched with Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo OS. Positive reviews of the N9 have prompted many to wonder why Nokia essentially discarded MeeGo in favor of Windows Phone 7, something Elop will have to answer by showing just how much Nokia can do with Microsoft’s platform.

I still have some reservations about Nokia and Windows Phone. There’s no guarantee that Nokia feature phone and existing smartphone users will automatically move up to a Nokia WP device, just because of the brand name. The two companies will need to bring their A-game and show that any device they collaborate on can stand up to the iPhone 4S, with its new operating system and new Android 4.0-based devices. As we’ve noted, Mango is a big software update that puts Windows Phone in a great position to compete, but some of those improvements are starting to get lost in the frenzy around iOS 5 and Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

The stakes are extremely high for Nokia, which has bet the farm on Windows Phone. All eyes will be on the company next week and it’s got a great shot at showing how far its come in this rocky transition. But it’s going to have to rise to the challenge because the market is only accelerating toward smartphones and Nokia knows it can’t bank on feature phones to bail it out in upcoming quarters.

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Windows XP users will finally need to upgrade to enter the iCloud originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Years ago when the electronic software was developed, people use it mostly for two purposes. One, as a storage of their data (for database usage) and the other, as a calculator. In fact, up to now, people are still using these spreadsheets as glorified calculators. The problem is that office employees are not all trained properly to harness the full potential of these spreadsheets. So what happens is they are using such software on less then important tasks, at least if that’s what they do with it.

However, as weird as that may sound, it is one of the ways that a spreadsheet can help speed things up in the office. Especially if the employee has been working on spreadsheets for a long time that making fast calculations using the cells has become second nature to him. But there are other good uses for this application.

Are you still using paper-bound ledgers? Aside from you being left behind by the times, you should know by now that if you are the owner of a small business that you should look into ways that you can automate certain processes in your workflow. And that is what electronic spreadsheets can do for you. Perhaps you are doing your own accounting. To help you with that, saving and calculating your financial data would be a lot easier and faster when done through a spreadsheet program.

Have you ever thought of undergoing a Microsoft Excel training Melbourne to enhance your and your employees’ skills on using spreadsheets? Often it would take just lest than a day to finish the lessons, especially since you already know a little on how to use electronic spreadsheets. Although a live training would be the ideal set up, you can still learn about it through books and video tutorials. Although using the latter choices would mean you are mostly on your own to analyze the processes being taught to you.

And also, aside from the speed that you would be introducing to your office productivity, there is one indirect benefit of using this kind of software. And that is you will be giving nature a good turn. That is because you will be using less paper from now on.

And with ledgers you will be severely limited by the size of the book or of the paper. If you need more lines and there no more left, you will have to get another ledger. Just imagine how hard it is to keep track of your information using this old method. With electronic spreadsheets you there is virtually limitless entries that you can make. Plus you can format it in whatever way that you prefer.

These are just some of the reasons why you should start contacting a registered training organisation Melbourne to help you with a spreadsheet training program for your employees. Now is the best time that you make the digital conversion.

Former Time Warner CEO, Gerald Levin, may best be remembered for the disastrous merger he architected with AOL in 2000. The marriage was a failure and Levin went on to retire a short time later. But the former executive has made a quiet return to the online world as an investor and board member of health information start-up OrganizedWisdom and now sees the power of channeling social media to help better the lives of people. New York-based OrganizedWisdom gathers and curates the knowledge of medical professionals who share online. Levin believes his original bet on digital will be even more powerful and meaningful when applied to health and wellness.

I talked with Levin, in a conversation earlier this week, shared his changing views on the power of the web. Back when he pulled the trigger on the AOL deal, he believed that old media had to move and embrace the digital world or be left behind. While he’s apologized to the employees and shareholders who lost money on what he called the worst deal of the century, he doesn’t regret the move. If anything, he said he should have acted more quickly because online media is so transformative and disruptive.

“The underlying concept was right, but the timing was off,” Levin said. “The culture and human side of putting together old media and new media didn’t work out. But I probably would have moved faster. The only way to do something effective is move quickly.”

Back then, Levin saw the power of online media to disrupt old patterns. But he thought it would lead to more consumer-controlled interactive media. For Levin, he understood the power of online as a business opportunity.

Upon retiring in 2002, Levin opened up the Moonview Sanctuary, a health and wellness treatment center in Santa Monica with his wife. Serving there touched on his interests in health and helped him recover from the rigors of his former work, which he described as “a 24-hour isolation booth,” that tried his soul. Health issues became even more personal when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease three years ago. His passion prompted entrepreneur and investor Esther Dyson to suggest that he invest in OrganizedWisdom, a company I recently profiled. The start-up believes social media can bridge the gap in knowledge between medical professionals and consumers, who are often left to fend for themselves online. Impressed with OrganizedWisdom’s mission, Levin invested an undisclosed sum a year ago and now sits on the board.

He said health care in the U.S. is in desperate need of disruption and he sees social media as a tool for that. With heavy government regulations stifling the flow of information, Levin said social media has the ability to surface new data and understanding on health topics and build communities around health care. In essence, Levin believes there’s still more interactivity that needs to happen with online media.

“There’s a lot of wisdom and experience around the world that never sees the light of day, but this is an opportunity to open those avenues of sharing information,” he said. “The Internet is a disruptive technology, but we view it as disruptive to business models. But it’s also disruptive to our own health patterns and structures. I think the highest application of digital media is to live happier, more fulfilled lives.”

Levin has seen some of the power first hand. Last year, he came upon a link through Twitter about high incidences of Parkinson’s disease among farm workers. He said the discovery helped push him to go vegan and avoid pesticides, which he believes has helped with his treatment. In the same way, he believes social media can help plug the gaps in health care understanding and ultimately lead to better awareness about health issues of all kinds.

“We’ve seen (what) community and crowd-sourcing can do, now let’s apply it to this field,” he said.

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