Wharton Tech Blog

Evan Williams, CEO of Odeo and co-founder of Google-owned Blogger, writes 10 rules for web startups. If this is the extent of your readings as a tech entrepreneur, you’re screwed. But internalizing a few of these rules couldn’t hurt.

I’m not so sure how to resolve rule #6: "Be Self-Centered" with rule #5: "Be User-Centric" though. He writes, "Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch." So do almost all terrible products. Watch inventors shill their poorly-researched knick-knacks on late-night infomercials and it’s clear that some itch-scratching entrepreneurs needed to pay more attention to market assessment and less attention to their own wacky perception of needs. He’s actually advocating focus rather than blind self-centeredness.

On the 10th anniversary of its inception, Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategy+Business magazine picked the 10 most enduring "conceptual breakthroughs" that appeared in the publication over the last 10 years. Of the 10, two are technical at heart: Customer Relationship Management and Disruptive Technology.

Would a survey across all business media of the last 10 years yield a significantly different list of enduring business ideas? Though nobody likes to dwell on the negatives, I can’t help but think that "executive accountability" has to be up there in the top 10 after the scandals that rocked corporate boardrooms and Wall Street and sent denizens of both to jail. Oh, and to bring it back to technology for a second, "The Internet" should probably be on there too. Sure, it had its roots long before 1995, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that companies really began to use its potential in a major way.

Microsoft faced huge challenges with the launch of the Xbox 360. John Porcaro, Group Manager of PR Communications for Microsoft’s Home & Entertainment Division, responds to customer frustration surrounding the launch of Microsoft’s big bet in consumer electronics and gaming.

"Here’s the challenge," he writes, "Design a Go-To-Market campaign" given a list of 16 issues, including:

• "The product has a multi-year sales cycle with forecasts into the tens (hopefully hundreds) of millions of units"
• "The product doesn’t hold market majority, and competes against a product with significant market share advantage"
• "The product relies on follow-on sales (games) and licensing fees to be profitable
• "Coming out too early allows competitors to build their plans/product reacting to ours"
• "Coming out too late means our competitors have first-mover advantage, and can build games portfolio and customer base"
• "The customer you need to reach in the future has almost no awareness of your brand"

The central dilemma here is that the "hardcore gamer" demographic is pretty much in the bag. In order to grow marketshare, however, Microsoft must build awareness in the broader population, but to do so requires marketing that exacerbates short-term product shortages that enrage the early adopters. Tough job.