Comments on: Hauling bits around

By: Funky Monkeys Spain

Funky Monkeys Spain — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:15:38 +0000

Great idea to tweet your needs. I might start thinking about that for a Tom Robinson CD or MP3 I want to get hold of…
I suppose the results would vary according to your reach on Twitter. This might be the only reason i have heard for getting a huge Twitter contact list

By: Paramendra Bhagat

Paramendra Bhagat — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:53:08 +0000

I met Dan Bricklin at at NY Tech MeetUp months back. He has an amazing presence.

By: JP

JP — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:00:33 +0000

Hi Prutha, it was my pleasure. I loved Sai’s idea, so I had to tell people about it. Small-world experiments brought to life.

By: Prutha Raithatha

Prutha Raithatha — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:39:39 +0000

hey,
Lug-it is my friend Sai’s idea and I designed that orange logo!! This is soo cool…Thanks for putting it out there.

By: JP

JP — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:26:31 +0000

Sean, here’s an offbeat example. Google to limit free news access. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8389896.stm
Smart thing to do? Symbiosis with the twitter class of disruptor.
Head in sand approach? A Whitacre-meets-Murdoch approach that seeks to crush the tick.
There’s infrastructure and there’s infrastructure.

By: JP

JP — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:18:53 +0000

You’re absolutely right; the “irrelevant, threatening, incomprehensible” objections are the classic ones. Infrastructure players are finding it hard to come to terms with the ease with which “over-the-top” plays are made possible, with more agile competition entering the fray.

The enlightened response is to take the symbiosis approach, but it is rare to see an incumbent accept symbiosis with a disruptor. You should know!

There is also one other response. Head in sand. Fiddle while Rome burns. See if you can avoid the cataclysm happening on your watch.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:16:00 +0000

One more example of the generalized move towards distributed, complex adaptive systems – massively multi-parallel (human) processing supported by the technological substrate of the web. While in a completely different industry, here is another great example of how disruptive innovation can really only bubble up at the edges… I would hope that Royal Mail (and Fedex, UPS, USPS, DHL, etc. etc.) executives are paying attention. The problem is (at the risk of being presumptuous) that even if they are, I suspect they would see these kind of initiatives as one or all of the following:

irrelevant: tick on an elephant type stuff
threatening: crush the tick (mimic your favorite record company executive)
incomprehensible: the world just doesn’t work that way, no way this could ever compete with the multi-billion dollar logistics systems we have built.

When the correct approach would be to embrace it as symbiotic, analogous to say PayPal (and other payment operators) riding on the banking clearing platforms. At the risk of being a broken record, like banks, like telecoms, like most any large network infrastructure provider, I think the (brightest) future of these big incumbent logistics/delivery companies lies in embracing a ‘horizontal’ platform strategy (and not, or only selectively a ‘vertically integrated stack.) See my eComm presentation for a 20min elucidation on this thesis.

By: jobsworth at 12/02/09 06:52:38 | Exectweets

jobsworth at 12/02/09 06:52:38 | Exectweets — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:52:07 +0000

[...] Pro Tweets after a month’s self-enforced layoff, really enjoyed writing this http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/12/02/hauling-bits-around/ jobsworth – Wed 02 Dec 6:52 0 [...]