#eavoices
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is like TNT
Remember the mid 90s (or not) with the so called PoC Products where you would create a minimum viable product? Well many of those PoC are still around in production (about a third of all barcode Point of sales as an example)and others are responsible for some of huge IT disasters (usually as they were … Continue reading Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is like TNT →
The Wonder of Poohsticks
Walking one of my habitual routes this morning, I stopped by a bridge to play Poohsticks (with myself). One of my three sticks never made it under the bridge. The other two headed straight towards an obstacle but at the last moment were steered round it by the current. Slightly further up they failed to avoid […]
Could we switch the algorithms off?
Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Soapbox/~3/VgZxPW9WsRI/could-we-switch-algorithms-off.html From Architecture, Data and Intelligence 00
Could we switch the algorithms off?
In his review of Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, Tim Adams suggests that Bostrom has been reading too much of the science fiction he professes to dislike. When people nowadays want to discuss the social and ethical implications of machine intell…
On digital maturity, research from Sloan MIT and Deloitte
The “findings from the 2017 digital business global executive study and research project”, a Deloitte collaboration with MIT Sloan Management Review, “based on a global survey of more than 3,500 managers and executives and 15 interviews with …
The Idea of Showrooming
According to Wikipedia, the word “showrooming” was coined in the 2010s. The earliest reference I can find is in a Wall Street Journal article dated April 2012, which opens as follows:
“Shoppers who scope out merchandise in stores but buy on rivals’ websites, usually at a lower price, have become the bête noire of many big-box retailers.”
By September 2012, showrooming is being described as a “commonly held belief”, and being dismissed as a falsehood by the CEO of Best Buy.
But the idea of showrooming was mooted many years previously, in discussions between Jeff Bezos and HP. Nick Earle, then an executive with HP, mentioned this in a keynote speech in June 2000.
During his speech, Earle recalled a conversation he had with Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., an HP client. When Earle asked Bezos to describe a “killer application” from Amazon.com’s perspective, he described a handheld device with a wireless link and a bar-code reader that would enable customers to scan in a book from another retailer, find out how much cheaper it is sold at Amazon.com, and then order it online for next-day delivery. “We will make one,” Earle promised.
I cited this conversation in 2004, as evidence that Bezos got ecosystem thinking. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that he had basically invented the iPhone. And he had had the idea of showrooming, over a decade before the word was coined.
So I asked Nick (via Twitter) whether HP had ever made such a device.
No they didn’t!— Nick Earle (@nearle) August 2, 2017
David Jastrow, HP Keynote embraces ecosystem thinking (CRN, 15 June 2000). I have corrected the misspelling of Earle’s surname.
Thomas Lee, Best Buy’s new chief is selling from Day 1 (Star Tribune, 8 September 2012)
Ann Zimmerman, Can Retailers Halt ‘Showrooming’? (Wall Street Journal, 11 April 2012) (paywall)
Wikipedia: IPhone (1st generation), Showrooming (retrieved 15 July 2017)
Related Posts: Jeff Bezos and Ecosystem Thinking (Feb 2004) Showrooming (Label)
Updated 2 August 2017
Proposed Enterprise Architecture Solutions for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing
Proposed Enterprise Architecture Solutions for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing By Cole…
Management, Simple and Wrong – Semantics, Systems, and Self-Correction
Simple responses to complex situations are both seductive and dangerous. The difficulty in juggling lots of variables tempts us to employ abstraction so as to avoid being overwhelmed. Abraham Maslow’s observation, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”, applies. […]
IBM Jumps Into RPA Market With Automation Anywhere – Perhaps A Turn To More Practical Challenges
IBM and Automation Anywhere (AA’s) today announced a collaboration (note-not a formal partnership yet) to integrate (AA’s) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, used to create software bots to handle repetitive, task-based work, with IBM’s portfolio of digital process automation software, that includes IBM Business Process Manager and Operational Decision Manager. For AA, the partnership is a validation of its strong position in the RPA market, as shown in the Forrester Q1 RPA wave. For IBM, the partnership will enable clients to use AA’s RPA platform to create software bots that execute tasks within larger business processes managed by IBM’s software. Here’s our take.
IBM Can Add Smarts to AA’s RPA Platform
RPA works in a very dumb fashion today – mimicking human keystrokes and mouse movements – where all decisions must be explicitly programmed into the script. The result is that there are very few real decisions made beyond simple logic loops. Watson will be relevant down the road, but as a first step, RPA will benefit from IBM’s mature business rules engine (Decision Manager) or the embedded rules in the BPM platform. But as interesting, IBM’s content analytics, if part of teh collaboration, can allow AA to keep pace with unstructured RPA intelligence from Workfusion and other RPA competitors moving quickly in that direction. RPA use cases that comb through unstructured content will be ahead of chatbot and AI-based digital workers.
Further Market Validation For RPA
Amazon Product Content: A New Space Race?
The Whole Foods acquisition by Amazon weeks ago was only the latest milepost in the latter’s inexorable march to the top of retail. The company sold $136 billion worth of products in 2016 – more than any other online retailer (and just over a third of what Wal-Mart did). And we find that Amazon is big and gaining […]