Posted by
stephen – February 10, 2010
Today’s post asks whether an organization’s long term financial health is best served when the organization’s main focus is to increase share price each and every quarter, or if more value is generated by putting the customer their needs first.
Recent literature on the subject implies that the popular trend of the last three decades may not be the best choice – prioritizing share price above all else may actually rob longterm shareholders of wealth that could have been generated with a customer first policy. In the January-February 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin (dean of the Rotman School of Management) took a close look at a few companies that put the customer first. Interestingly, many of these companies generated strong shareholder returns compared to the S&P 500 while creating customer loyalty (or because of it).
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Posted by
stephen – February 9, 2010
SpringSource recently announced a change in their open source strategy. SpringSource’s dm Server project (a Java/Spring application server) was previously monetized using the open core model in which a product’s core functionality is available as open source and a commercial version of the product is sold with a different license agreement and/or an enhanced feature set. SpringSource has decided to move to a complimentary service model in which the product is offered entirely free of charge and subscriptions for support can be purchased.
As organizations better understand their own offerings, the markets they operate in and open source itself, changes in strategy and business model can be beneficial to their ability to create value. As an acquisition of VMWare, there may be ulterior motives to this strategy switch which is counter to what has been happening in the open source word as of late. Savio Rodrigues of InfoWorld weighed in on the switch here stating that:
“It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that VMware is attempting to drive dm Server adoption through the Eclipse Foundation and monetize the adoption when operations team want to deploy dm Server applications on Cloud infrastructure. The dm Server support subscriptions are a stop gap until VMware can build out its cloud offerings and dm Server adoption increases.”
Read Savio’s whole post here.
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Posted by
stephen – February 8, 2010
Posted by
stephen – December 8, 2009
T
he University of Ottawa took bold steps towards opening up its wealth of academic knowledge to the world today, announcing a new open access policy that is the first of its kind among Canadian universities. Ottawa U will now join the ranks of highly-respected schools such as Berkeley, Cornell, MIT and Harvard.
From the Ottawa U Website, an explanation of what open access will mean:
• a commitment to make the University’s scholarly publications available online at no charge through the University’s repository, uO Research;
• an author fund to help researchers defray open access fees charged by publishers;
• a fund to support the creation of digital educational materials organized as courses and available to everyone online at no charge ;
• support for the University of Ottawa Press’s commitment to publishing a collection of open access books; and
• a research grant to support further research on the open access movement.
I have talked about the merits of open access before and I hope other Canadian schools soon follow suit. For the full press release from the University of Ottawa, go here.
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Posted by
stephen – November 20, 2009
Legendary rapper and businessman Snoop Dogg sat down with CNBC to talk a bit about how he created his personal brand and how he differentiates himself from the competition. Although he is not what you would traditionally consider a business icon or mentor, Snoop is very successful in both the music and media industry and as a serial business owner and entrepreneur.