Two stories in the news at the same time about Sony that draws a picture of the company’s plans.
The first is that Sony is forming Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) from all the units contributing to Playstation, hardware, software, and network, effective April 1. Sony has set the new company up with a US headquarters — San Mateo, CA — with a single CEO, Andrew House. Notably, console sales are way down in Japan, to the lowest level in 24 years, and the future looks to be mobile and handheld gaming there. But Playstation is still huge in the US, so the move makes sense.
The second is that Sony is buying Altair, a chip manufacturer for IoT smart appliances. This is a $212 million investment, taking the company way out of its niche in smartphone camera chips. Last year, Sony bought Toshiba’s image sensor operations, which is part of the same strategic plan: to grow into a major IoT manufacturer of chips and sensors.
So, Sony continues to operate SIE, but has positioned it as a separate operating unit, so it can be spun all the way out or sold off, as the presumed decline in console games ripples through the rest of the world. In parallel, Sony is increasing its bets on IoT, and a world crammed full of smart devices, sensors, and networks to link them together.
The benefits of using the cloud are undeniable—from reduced infrastructure costs and license fees to increased scalability and agility. But, while every company has some variation of a cloud strategy on their roadmap, the move to the cloud is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Most often, it’s a gradual implementation because some processes must still run on-premises or in a private cloud, while others can more easily and compliantly be supported in the public cloud.
Organizations are becoming more and more comfortable with a hybrid model because it makes good business sense—combining the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud with the option to keep more complex applications on-premises. There are many reasons why businesses may want to combine on-premises and cloud instances, from specific policies relating to where data can be stored, to having previously purchased on-premises solutions, to a future-focused strategy that integrates more and more cloud opportunities. In fact, a 2014 report by Infonetics Research confirms that hybrid cloud is becoming the “new normal” as adoption among enterprises was expected to more than double by 2015.
Hybrid Is the New Normal
This new normal is your new challenge: managing a hybrid environment that consists of private and public clouds and on-premises IT infrastructures. No longer are you responsible for just managing on-premises solutions within your own borders. Now you have to manage applications across the cloud as well. To effectively meet this challenge, you’ll need visibility into all of the pieces of this increasingly diverse environment.
Visibility Into the Hybrid Environment
Visibility across on-premises and cloud deployments is the key to navigating the shifting tide of IT management in the hybrid world because you cannot manage what you cannot see. You’ll need visibility across the environment to gain an understanding of cloud workloads and to ensure service levels, security and compliance.
In addition, you’ll need this visibility into what’s happening and why so that you can determine whether your hybrid environment is functioning as you had intended. If any of the applications that have moved to cloud aren’t performing as expected, you need to know so that you can modify your strategy. When you have refined your strategy and the workloads you’re running in the cloud are as reliable and secure as they were on-premises, you’ll want visibility into that as well, so you’ll feel ready to begin transitioning more and more workloads to the cloud.
Hybrid In the Real World: Gatwick Airport
One organization that maintains visibility and compliance through a hybrid model is Gatwick Airport. Among its other cloud solutions, Gatwick integrated Splunk Cloud into its operations to supplement its existing on-premises solution. In doing so, the team realized that combining ops data in this cloud solution gave them the agility and scalability they needed, while providing insight into airport performance. The world’s busiest single-runway airport now benefits from a seamless hybrid environment that allows them to better monitor on-time performance, optimize gates and terminals, improve predictability, manage security wait lines, reduce rail and road incidents, and more.
Like other major changes in business and technology, embracing the new normal of hybrid will require a shift in mindset and corporate culture. The good news is that on-premises and cloud solutions can operate at full capacity and very much in hybrid harmony—as long as there is the right level of visibility, monitoring and insight.
Find out more about how Splunk solutions can give you visibility across your hybrid environment.
This post is sponsored by Samsung. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
While the 1992 film Toys, starring the late, great Robin Williams, did not meet with universal acclaim (it registered a paltry 26% at the review site Rotten Tomatoes, despite receiving two Oscar nominations for its artistic merit), it contained at least one notable scene. This involved Williams, as toy designer Leslie Zevo, sitting on a sofa with his sister Alsatia (played by Joan Cusack) and wearing what looked like eye masks. As the pair rocked, screamed and waved their hands in the air it became clear that they were watching a roller coaster simulation.
Spot the date: over a quarter of a century has now passed since virtual reality (VR) headsets first entered the popular consciousness. A number of challenges have had to be overcome — not least insufficient screen resolution and movement tracking, which have been considered as causes of queasiness when headsets are worn.
But also, cost. I can remember, back then, considering the scenario of a young rebel on a city metro train, sporting cool-looking glasses that beamed images onto his retinas. Even if this were yet possible, it would be cost-prohibitive. But it is coming.
A mere three years have passed since Palmer Luckey first set himself the task of producing a low-cost VR headset. Following a luck(e)y break when he met John Carmack, creator of the seminal first-person shooter Doom, Palmer followed the footsteps of so many entrepreneurs when he left college to follow his dreams.
The Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift heads-up display raised nearly $2.5m and while the device is yet to be released, its technology is already built into Samsung Gear devices. As it arrives however, the Rift is already offering more potential than just viewing images and videos.
To understand why VR in general, and the Rift in particular, are set to be such a game changer, we need to consider not just the headset but how it fits with a range of other technologies. Augmented reality for example, which links visuals with context-based data. Motion tracking from the likes of Leap or Kinect.
It’s not how any one technology delivers that matters; rather, it is how they can be used in combination. You can think of all the pieces as components of a new range of solutions, which have applicability in retail, in healthcare, in navigation, in geology and (as per Mr Williams) in film, media and all forms of entertainment.
Audi’s “world’s first fully digital car showroom,” based in London, is one example of how VR can benefit the retail experience. Audi integrated a Samsung Gear VR headset, immersing customers in a tour of the car’s features – you can even take a test drive. While this set-up claims to be the first of its kind, it is unlikely to be the last. As such solutions become prevalent, and as an inevitable consequence of the laws of supply and demand, the components will also become cheaper even as they diversify in form and function.
What other applications might we see? We might see a resurgence in virtual worlds such as Second Life; more likely however is that VR will become part of our daily lives. As such it is important for any organisation to consider the implications, which can come from a number of directions. It may be that VR has applicability within the business — in R&D for example, or in data visualization. Equally, it has potential to change behaviors, for example in how people work and relate to their colleagues.
The bottom line is: today, for many, VR still looks like a fun gadget, and indeed it is outside of certain domains. So have some of that fun — for a few hundred dollars, invest in some headsets and try them out. That way, when VR becomes more than fun, you will have a more solid perspective into how to integrate VR into your business strategies.
IBM has added Ustream to a long list of video technology company acquisitions in the recent past — like Clearleap at it bought last month — buying the streaming video vendor for around $130 million (according to Fortune). The company had raised $50 million in venture funding, and was the sole video partner involved in the launch of IBM’s cloud marketplace in 2014.
The typical analysis is that this rounds out a spectrum of technologies that now make IBM a player in corporate streaming video, particularly targeting customer contact and marketing activities.
But I’m betting that IBM’s primary focus will be — although not be limited to — workforce communications.
Ustream Align is an inside-the-company video ‘collaboration’ — or ‘workforce communication’ — product built on the Ustream platform.
Even though there’s a broad market of offerings from companies like Google, Microsoft, Unify, Cisco, and so on, no one has become the dominant player in video-based workforce communication, which may be the most natural solution for an increasingly mobile world.
The Ustream acquisition is another indication of the rapid transition to video in workforce communications, where it is destined to be the major medium for work communications.
As AWS increasingly becomes the preferred deployment model for enterprise applications and services, it’s never been more important for a software or AWS SaaS provider to work effectively with AWS. Many leading technology providers are therefore optimizing their software to run on AWS as well as building globally available cloud services delivered through AWS’ worldwide regions.
Splunk has been very pleased with the success of our SaaS business on AWS, so we thought we’d share what we’ve learned in the form of best practices for you to keep in mind when developing your software or SaaS business on AWS.
1. Embrace the change
If you’ve attended the keynote at any recent AWS Summit, you’ve heard the message “cloud is the new normal.” Our advice is to take this to heart, and invest in your business knowing the momentum behind cloud will only continue to accelerate.
This is a boon to businesses of every size and in every location around the world—cloud makes it easier than ever before to innovate, rapidly bring an offering to market and serve your customer.
2. Relentlessly focus on the customer experience
Focusing your business on customer success is a must when building a business on AWS.
Why? Because the number one driving factor behind everything AWS does is to help its customers be successful and innovative. Tactically, this can mean many things for a SaaS Partner, but the one that stands out is building technology integrations that can provide additional value to AWS customers.
A good example of this involves AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config, services that deliver log data on AWS API calls around user activity and resource changes. When properly harnessed, these services help enable enterprises ensure security and compliance of their AWS deployments. A handful of SaaS Partners deliver integrations for these AWS services. The importance of these integrations is clear when you think of the importance of security and compliance for any successful AWS deployment.
3. Leverage your customers in your go-to-market strategy
When it comes to building your software or SaaS business on AWS, nothing beats customer validation. One of the most compelling stories is when a customer fully integrates your technology into their AWS strategy.
A great example of this is the Federal Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA is an independent regulator that examines all securities firms and their registered persons and monitors trading on U.S. markets. To respond to rapidly changing market dynamics, FINRA is moving its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to analyze and store approximately 30 billion market events every day. FINRA uses Splunk Cloud to ensure security and compliance in their AWS deployment.
4. Choose AWS and go “all-in”
When building out your cloud strategy, you have to make choices. Our advice: When two roads diverge in the cloud, choose AWS.
This is a best practice because AWS has the richest and broadest set of services in the market. If your offering is storage intensive, there are specific solutions for that; if it’s compute intensive, there are specific solutions for that; if it’s I/O intensive, there are specific solutions for that as well. Regardless of what you need on the infrastructure stack—whether it’s automated provisioning, configuration or management, AWS has a mature solution that fits the bill.
In addition, business today is global. To successfully grow your business you need the ability to rapidly expand around the world. AWS offers that through their 11 worldwide regions.
5. Leverage the ecosystem
If you’re building on AWS, chances are that other folks building on AWS will find it useful. This is what makes the AWS announcement of its SaaS Partner Program so exciting. If you’re building a SaaS storage solution, odds are we could use it for our SaaS operational and security monitoring solution. Since we’re building a SaaS operational and security monitoring solution, odds are you could use it for your SaaS storage solution.
We have the opportunity to be better together on AWS for the benefit of all of our customers.
To learn more about our cloud solutions, visit us here.
I am just going to focus on the slash commands and email integration.
Slash commands — Fleep’s chat (or ‘conversations’ as they call them), support a number of commands that are preceded by a slash (‘/’):
/pin <message> — create a new pinned message
/task <message> — create a new task message
/taskto @someone — create and assign a new task
/bug <message> — create a new bug report task with ((bug))
/add <email> — add new members to the conversation
/kick <email> — remove members from the conversation
/leave — leave conversation
When these are used in the context of a chat, when a chat message with a leading command is posted, the action is taken. In the screenshot below, I have just invited Doppelganger Jones to the AdjectiveNoun conversation, assigned him a task ‘please write up a plan’, and I have formed a new chat message at the bottom to create a second task also assigned to him.
Here’s the task pane opened after those tasks were created.
One of the weaknesses of Fleep’s task model is that the tasks have very little metadata. I can understand why they might not need comments or notes — it’s a chat app, after all — but due dates are fairly essential.
Tasks are completed by checking the task box. I found it odd that pinning a task — which moves a message to the top of the chat window and stops it from scrolling away — leads to the task losing its ‘taskness’: it becomes just another message. Odd.
Documents can be added to the conversation — including Google and Dropbox docs — but these aren’t attached to messages or tasks: they’re just dropped into the chat.
Once added, they show up in the ‘Files’ pane, the one with the paperclip icon.
Personally, I might have designed them to do both. That limitation seems particularly irksome with tasks.
Also note in this case I was trying to attach a Google doc, but somehow Fleep instead creates and attaches a PDF of the doc. So my colleagues on Fleep can’t use this as a way to open and coedit the Google doc, but just to look at an immediately out-of-date pdf of the doc. This is dumb. If I were actually using Fleep in production I would copy and paste URLs to docs, instead. And that works really well, in fact:
Clicking on the preview or the URL opens the Google doc, and since I copied a share URL that allows for editing, my colleagues would be able to view, comment, and or edit the Google doc, in place.
Returning to tasks, the task pane can include ‘sections’ that can be used to arrange tasks into subsets.
I like the capability to layout the sections in this way, and when coupled with the ability to ‘clone’ conversations, teams could create and reuse project templates to help regularize the work in project conversations.
Fleep now supports ‘@mentions’, so that I can alert others to messages, like ‘Can someone take a look at the timeline in this doc to check it’s up to date? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bwF55zWtnJOtUsDheIoRgwmC7Geq7ZVcT9Ho-UYnd3w/edit?usp=sharing @doppelganger.jones’.
Note that the user identity in Fleep for Fleep users is an email address:
This is by design. Fleep is tightly integrated with email, so that non-Fleep users can be invited to conversations simply by adding their email. If they aren’t a Fleep user, they can participate through email. This leads to all messages — including tasks — being sent to them, and their responses showing up in the conversation. Emailed tasks just look like messages at present, so email only participants can’t check them off, for example.
I have not touched on all features of the tool, but probably enough to get a sense for what using it feels like. Fleep is at core, a classic work chat tool, based on contextual conversation (see Contextual conversation: Work chat will dominate collaboration). Unlike leading competitors, however, Fleep has integrated task management.
At the same time, the limits on Fleep’s task model would chafe anyone who believes that richer capabilities are essential — like multiple assignment, subtasks, due dates, start dates, notes, comments, attachments, and so on. However, the fact that tasks and other messages can be brought back into context when looking at a task by selecting ‘show in conversation’ does counter some of the issues with notes, comments, and attachments, so long as they are in fact truly contextualized.
If the team at Fleep continue their development at the breakneck pace of 2015, they may in fact be countering some of these issues, and their focus on integration with a wide spectrum of developer tools seems to represent the same arc of adoption that we saw first with Hipchat, and later with Slack. We should anticipate the same disperal pattern, where the developers in a company infect non-developers with the ease of use and depth of the developers’ work chat platform, and they in turn begin to infect other non-developers across the company and the company’s ecosystem.
More departures at Zappos leads commentators to question if Holacracy is the culprit. Recalll that Tony Hsieh offered employees a big payout if they decided to quit during the transition to Holacracy. But that’s not the only transition going on there. Zappos has been involved in a major web transition, moving onto parent Amazon’s back-end technology platform:
The latest departures came from a group of employees who were helping Zappos migrate to Super Cloud, a back-end infrastructure run by Amazon. The arduous, years-long effort to move Zappos to Amazon’s servers has effectively frozen the company’s website, and employees working on the project were offered more time before taking the buyout.
Mr. [Arun] Rajan [Zappo’s Chief Operating Officer] said that the migration to Super Cloud, which he had hoped to complete last year, was still ongoing. Meanwhile, 38 percent of those working on the Super Cloud transition took the buyout offer.
My bet is that a lot of these departures are folks that have burned out on the apparently difficult transition to Super Cloud, and the bail-out money simply makes leaving more attractive.
New numbers tell a dark story for PC manufacturers, except perhaps Apple. New Gartner stats are unequivocal: worldwide sales are down 8.3%.
Source: Gartner
Apple is the only brand bucking the tide, with growth of 2.8% and market share of 6.7% at this point.
The economic downdraft is likely having a large impact, and even Microsoft’s Windows 10 might not be able to counter that trend.
The elephant in the room is tablets: are they now at the point where they can replace PCs, even for the most hardbitten PC users? I know that I am not ready to make the shift, although I do travel with an iPad, and use it frequently. I’ll have to take another look at the new iPad Pro and the Surface Pro 4, because that’s where we are all heading.
I wonder if that’s a response to users concerns, like mine:
Jack Dorsey seems to be saying that Twitter will soon be letting people write Tweets with more than 140 characters without resorting to images of text.
I’ll turn it around: Twitter should be based on modern mobile communications (chat, IM, etc.), not old school mobile communications (SMS).
Email is often characterized as hellish: at best a necessary evil and at worst a monstrous time sink.
Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face. — Paul Ford
In this post I am not going down that rat hole (as worthy a digression as it may be), and I will simply accept the fact that email exists, we use it, and it is an integral part of many working folk’s workflow. I won’t be talking about email zero, or other approaches that take a Fordian slant.
There’s been a great deal of innovation in email clients for mobile devices — a topic I’ve written about a great deal — but this is about the breadth of what is in email clients, rather than in the gestural and mobile innovations we’ve seen in tools like Mailbox (now defunct).
Sortd
Sortd is a ‘skin’ for Gmail, implemented as a Chrome extension, and attempting to integrate task management directly into the email inbox experience along with conventional email. The company has also developed an iOS app, which I haven’t had a chance to fool with, yet.
Here you see a screenshot (courtesy of OSM), showing four columns. The leftmost is the email inbox, which flattens out all emails into a single stream, even if you’ve set up Gmail folders.
The right three columns are like Kanban boards, and are user definable. Here the user has defined ‘To Do’, ‘Follow Up’, and ‘Deals’ boards. The items in the boards are nominally Sortd tasks, which are created by either dragging an email from the inbox, or creating a task in one of the boards by clicking the plus sign (‘+’) at the foot of one of the boards.
[My goal in this post is to discuss the concepts motivating Sortd’s design, and so I will leave my quibbles in square brackets, so they can be filtered. In this case, I think the plus sign should be at the top of the list, so it doesn’t drop out of sight when the task list grows long.]
Tasks that start out as an email inherit their name from the email subject, but can be renamed. Tasks can have email(s) added, so a task — in both cases — can include a variety or emails from various people. This is an interesting alternative to email labels or folders, when you think about it: a collection of emails united by some intention, goal, or activity.
Tasks can have notes, deadlines, and reminders, but there is no real concept of subnotes. Boards can act as projects, but there is no other level of task lists.
The UX allows for dragging and dropping of emails onto tasks, and dragging tasks around to reorder them. And dropping tasks onto other tasks consolidates any attached emails and notes, but does not create subtasks, alas. [This is something that should be remedied.]
In my personal case, I have defined ‘Today’, ‘Soon’, and ‘Later’ boards. I refresh what’s on Today, every day, using my 1, 2, 3 technique (one big thing, 2 medium things, 3 little things). Tasks are added, moved, checked off, and consolidated across the three boards all the time, and in particular, new tasks are created as new emails arrive.
When a specific task is opened, there are three flavors of UI:
No email –– notes, due date, and reminder fields are shown.
Single email — as above, but minimized, with most space given over to framing the email:
Note along the top right various icons to deal with the task/email, like label, and trask, and including a check mark for completing the task. The email can be responded to in this presentation: replied to, forwarded, archived, and so on.
Multiple emails — a selector that allows the user to pick which of the emails should be viewed appears under the task title, and once a specific email is chosen, the presentation is like the single email case.
Sortd provides a toggle on the right hand side of the Gmail window so that the user can toggle between the Sortd and Gmail skin. There is also a setting to select which skin to open in.
Lastly, when looking at an received email that has not yet been associated with a Sortd task the tool allows the user to ‘sort it’ using a button at the top:
Note this also allows selecting which board the new task will be placed on.
A second approach for turning a reply into a task is provided by hover icons:
And this allows either pinning the email to a new task in a specific board, or to set a reminder for the email. [There should be away to select an existing task, too.]
Discussion
I like the Sortd approach to melding task management and email right into Gmail. Partly that’s so that other services offered by Google and others that are integrated into Gmail continue to work, and so that I don’t have to move to some other client. That also makes trying it out much easier, and likewise for gradually transitioning.
The problems I have are only a few:
Sortd’s task management is relatively immature — lacking features like subtasks, recurring tasks, multiple notes, bookmarklet, etc. — is a powerful disencentive. Sortd has not to deepen the offering’s task model dramatically if it wants to attract people using tools like Asana, Todoist, Wrike, Clarizen, and so on. Creating a bookmarklet, so users can create a task linking to the URL of any web page, is a really easy feature to create, especially since the tool runs as a Chrome plugin already, and this counters to some extent the lack of integration with other tools, presently.
Sortd’s communication model is minimal — At present, there is nothing like chats, messaging, or comment threads. I’ve been told that @mention style communication is in the works, presuambly from the existing task notes.
There is no capability for assigning tasks to people, so that effectively limits tasks to personal use. Note that other offerings — Like Streak — have extended the notion of Gmail labels for that enables personal emails to be shared among invited users. I bet that Sortd will have to implement something like this for task assignment — or at least sharing the attached emails as something other than text — to work.
Skinning has limits, or maybe doesn’t go far enough — I like the idea of skins on top of Gmail, but it only goes so far. Why doesn’t Sortd implement opening one of multiple emails collected in a task as an additional hover panel above the topmost one? Each email could be its own task, with nested tasks and emails. Likewise, as in the task management tool Trello, why don’t we have ‘subboards’ within boards? For example, in my ‘Soon’ board, I create tasks that serve just as labels to break up the list of tasks into weeks, like ‘— wo 4 Jan —‘, meaning ‘week of 4 Jan’. But if boards could be dragged onto boards, this would work better.
I will be tracking the progress at Sortd, which has been around for over a year, but we’ll have to see if they are pointing their efforts in the same direction as I would like to see.
A few news stories make it clear that the venerable automobile industry is going to wind up sliced, diced, and consumed by the new economics and technologies of the web, and in short order.
Ford has announced that it’s working with Amazon to integrate the Alexa virtual assistant service that runs on the Echo smart speaker and Fire TV devices, so that we can turn the on the lights in our homes with a voice command from the car, or start the car as we walk out the back door in the kitchen.
Ford is also integrating with Wink, the smart home hub company formerly an arm of Quirky purchased by Flextronics when Quirky filed for bankruptcy in 2015.
I get an odd pleasure thinking of an automobile as an extension of the smart home, like a thermostat or washing machine. But that’s one of the trends we are witnessing. And the relationship between Amazon and Ford — or any other permutation of the formula <Internet Giant> + <Automobile Manufacturer> — is deeply imbalanced because of the relative velocity of the two players. So we can imagine that the destabilizing impact of this relationship will shake the Automobile Manufacturer into its constituents, and anywhere that the Internet Giant is strong will be taken over by them.
In this case, imagine a few years down the line when a car is even more of a hardware commodity than it is now, and where you will select the ‘carware’ based on how well it integrates with your ‘homeware’. Say I am a big fan — and buyer of — Amazon’s smart home products, and not invested in Apple, Google and Microsoft alternatives. Amazon provides my critical UX, stores all my data, and the various devices integrate ‘seamlessly’ and complement each other well. So I may choose a Ford the way that people choose a Mac, Dell, or Microsoft tablet today, first choosing the OS and then the device.
Here’s a scenario that Ford provided to Geekwire as an example of the interaction through Alexa:
Owner: “Alexa, ask my Ford for my scheduled car start time.”
Alexa: “Here is the list of your current go times. You have a start time set for Monday at 7 a.m., with a cabin temperature set to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Tuesday at 5:45 a.m., with a cabin temperature set to 75 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Owner: “Alexa, ask my Ford for my car’s driving range.”
Alexa: “You have an available range of 56 miles.”
In that scenario, Ford’s investment in proprietary on-board communications technology will turn out to be something like the Palm OS: a dead end in smart device operating systems. I will think of the Ford as another Alexa device, like my Fire TV Stick or Echo. I won’t care who manufactured the device. In fact, it could be branded Amazon, and built in Shenzhen by jobbers following an Amazon (or Apple, Microsoft, or Google) design.
However, the smart home-centric model isn’t the only model we are seeing at work. Consider the news from General Motors which is investing $500 million in Lyft, the Uber competitor. GM announced last year that it plans to deploy a ‘fleet’ of autonomous Chevy Volts by the end of this year, so it has seen the decline in car ownership accelerating in the future, and want’s to get ahead of it.
Millennials are much less car oriented than earlier generations, and the cost savings of car ‘sharing’ — or fractional availability, are huge: connect the dots, and you see imminent revolution in carland.
Cars spend 95% of their lives parked. Leaving aside the ecological and city planning aspects of that waste, the cost equation of fractional car availability — or sharing — will trend toward very low car ownership when all falls out. If GM wants to have a dominant role in the future economics of cars, they need to broaden their economic participation because there will be much fewer car purchases, and more miles on the meter per car.
They are hoping to become Lyft, or Uber, or the like, while operating as a car manufacturer in the meantime. Good luck. That’s the kind of self-renewing straddle that incumbents find so hard to accomplish. Will they be willing to accept Amazon-sized minuscule profits and plow profits back into disrupting their markets faster than others — like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft — will be doing?
It’s an easier bet to say that Uber — and maybe Lyft, although they are facing strong headwinds — might start building their own cars, and get out ahead of the auto companies, just like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft will. The brand value will come from those defining the most unique aspects of the product, and that won’t be automotive: it will be the user experience. You might choose a future Uber over a Lyft because it integrates better with your smart phone, not because of the seats or steering.
