IN THIS ISSUE

- To succeed, have a vision

- Events

- Press

To succeed, have a vision

Three tech titans' struggles to stay relevant
By Jason Wisdom

Three major changes have happened during the past month, in the world of big technology:

Apple's CEO resigned, Google made two more high profile acquisitions, and Yahoo fired its CEO.

There are take-aways that can be learned from each of these events. But they all revolve around the same concept: to be successful, it is necessary to have and stick to a vision.

Each of these three companies has at times found great success, through implementing their vision.

And, a case could be argued that each company has struggled with holding a vision at one time or another, to their own risk and peril.

Apple

Steve Jobs has been the soul of this company since its founding. When he left the first time, Apple nearly lost its soul for good. But he came back, and the company became incredibly successful. The question is, will Apple still have a soul after Steve Jobs is no longer with the company?

He is not completely gone; he has retained the title of chairman of the board. And while this is not a day-to-day operational position, he will still be able to exert his influence, and hold the company true to his vision, through retaining the position of grandfatherly patriarch: only showing up at the holidays, but the rest of the family is concerned enough about staying in his good graces that they'll be motivated to have their act together when those holidays do appear.

Except for perhaps Steve Jobs' design intuition, Apple should be able to maintain continuity. But what about after Mr. Jobs is no longer chairman? What about for the next 20-50 years. The last time Mr. Jobs left, the company lost its vision and was only saved by the tech industry's equivalent of the second coming of its spiritual leader. This time around, will Apple be able to retain its common vision, and stand the test of time? Or will they go the way of John Sculley-Gil Amelio, the dodo, and the South Sea Company?

Bottom line: Apple has its vision, and needs to keep it.

Google

Google has made two high profile acquisitions this month: Motorola Mobility, and Zagat. Speaking in terms of a long shareholder, one of these acquisitions I like, the other I don't.

Zagat, I support, because they are not expanding into a completely new direction. Although their clientele is more on the high-end than Google has traditionally served, the Zagat concept fits into Google's core purpose of organizing the world's information. (This was also a very smart move by Zagat, who realized their lifeline was ticking, unlike other companies say Groupon, but I digress....)

The other big deal, Motorola Mobility, I don't. The best that can be said about this is it's a defensive move, similar to Microsoft buying a share in Facebook, Google buying a share in MySpace, and ebaY acquiring Skype. Sometimes these acquisitions work out well, and sometimes not so well. But the purpose of defensive moves is not to make a killing, but to eliminate a threat. Any patents, or talk about Google dominating the mobile vertical, are secondary.

However, there are two concerns. One is that companies that used to view Google as a mobile partner (say Samsung with their Android-powered smartphone lineup), now realize Google is a competitor (Samsung vs. Motorola). Not good for business.

The other concern, perhaps larger, is that Google's direction setters are diluting their focus. They are compromising their vision.

What is Google's vision, might you ask? "We do search." You can google the phrase.

What's more, the title preceding this slogan, on Google's own "our philosophy" page, is even more important:

"It's best to do one thing really, really well."

Google cannot do search really, really well when they are taking major steps into the hardware industry! There are only so many minutes in the day, and the more Google's top leadership needs to discuss mobile hardware, the less that same top leadership will be able to discuss and improve search.

Companies that dilute their focus are just inviting smaller and younger companies to come in and build a better mousetrap (which ironically is exactly what Google did when every other search provider started focusing on becoming a portal).

If Google says they do search, they should stick to search. Otherwise, they are nothing more than a decade younger version of Microsoft, in terms of expanding into product lines (XBox, Zune) that dilute their focus and render the whole company obsolete in terms of technology thought leadership. I thought Google would have learned from Microsoft's lesson and not repeated the mistake. We shall see.

Bottom line: Google is in danger of losing its vision.

Yahoo

Yahoo has been nicknamed a company searching for its soul for more than half its life. Recently fired CEO Carol Bartz did not cause this, but she also did not end it--something more than a few people hoped she would do.

Yahoo went from the largest web portal, a top-traffic site and one of the very few profitable companies in the 1990's, to a sort of jack-of-all-trades (and master of none) entity that has somehow survived when most other jack-of-all-trades websites did not. They still have good news and finance sections, but they also have mail, dating, horoscopes, games, jobs, autos, real estate listings and a section called OMG! At least they stopped highlighting Yahoo Answers, which took an absolutely brilliant concept and burned it out in a six month frenzy of "What is the weather going to be like tomorrow?" nonsense.

360 social networking was a bust. Yahoo Messenger, mail, and dating are obsolete. The finance discussion boards are ravaged by trolls. Yahoo as a company appears to be in limbo, too entrenched and established to close up shop, but too bogged down by internal red tape and too thinned out in all directions to really create anything new.

Today's Yahoo is not what Jerry Yang and David Filo had in mind when they originally ramped up, but it IS a picture-perfect example of what can happen when a company loses sight of its vision, and behaves like a bureaucracy instead of a leader.

Bottom line: Yahoo has lost is vision, perhaps beyond the point of no return.

Summary

Apple, Yahoo and Google were tech titans in the 80s, 90s and 00's respectively. They were certainly not the only tech titans of these decades, but they have certainly been A-list, household names. And, like any visionary company described in books such as Built to Last, they've begun to fall whenever they tampered with their central, guiding vision.

Disclosure: the author is long AAPL and GOOG.

Jason

Events

Come see Jason speak live!

18-22 October 2011
Global communication, outsourcing and technology
Montreal, Quebec
Click here to register

Press Room

Check out Jason's recent publications and mentions in the press!

PC Today: SaaS Brings Change to IT

Info World: 7 IT superheroes and their fatal flaws