Ecosystems typically have a healthy tension between players that creates a win-win for all parties. Often the players of the system stay in line with the dominant player, but occassionally one player will try to innovate outside of the system — as HP is now doing with Microsoft Vista.
The Windows Vista ecosystem is "showing signs of strain". Story here. HP is now trying to engineer around Vista features to provide a better customer experience.
Interesting new company, CrowdSpring, profiled here in Forbes. They want to create a new business model for graphic design. This story offers several lessons about the contractual component of business models.
Most corporate legal work is based on a business model of the billable hour. This model creates huge incentive problems for clients and attorneys. The client wants to minimize hours and the attorney wants to maximize hours. The billable hour model also creates incentive problems inside law firms as attorneys may hoard work that they should…
I was talking to a friend at a holiday party over the weekend. He recently left his company because they wanted to change his compensation plan to pure commission. He had been brought into the company to develop the federal government market for a company which had zero sales to the government. Despite several early…
I’ve had a series of separate but similar conversations in the past few weeks with several clients on the subject of pricing. These clients are: Professional service providers in different industries Extremely good at what they do – among the best in their field and highly differentiated . . . Operating at full capacity –…
I frequently hear people say “This product/service/business isn’t making any money, but it’s ‘strategic’.” When used in that sense, ‘strategic’ is frequently a code word for something else, such as: This thing is losing money –and we don’t know how to make it make money. We know it isn’t making money and it never will…
Once you have defined all of the elements of the customer’s solution, now you can go to step two: defining all of the various options for how the customer might choose to buy the solution. Remember this is not what you are offering (yet) it is simply considering the various ways that customers buy. It…
