Creating New Markets Archives
Here you’ll find a collection of blog entries published under the Creating New Markets category.
Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type: BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy Gets SaaS
By Marsha Keeffer on July 18, 2008
In today’s Rough Type, Nicholas Carr comments about Sarah Lacy’s latest Businessweek article on SaaS. Turns out, as we see from Microsoft’s inability to turn a profit in this area, the frenzy of SaaS activity may be lemmings to the…
In a bar fight, what are you prepared to do?
By Nilofer Merchant on August 3, 2007
Competition in the tech industry is a fundamental. Without it, we would never have seen the innovations and incredibly cool stuff that have informed, transformed, and improved our daily lives. Think about search and how much we use it to…
Google SMB Push…
By Nilofer Merchant on August 2, 2007
Having launched what now seems like a bazzillion products, I think I can draw a conclusion about the simplicity of enterprise product adoption. Here goes. There are only 3 things enterprise companies need to adopt technology: security, scalability and support….
Amazon’s Category Creation Going Again
By Nilofer Merchant on May 30, 2007
Grid Platforms: The big idea? 5 steps to Category Creation: 1. See a critical gap. 2. Figure out how to fill and dominate it. 3. Establish innovation as a Differentiation. Must have a point of differentiation or others take advantage…
The guides
By Nilofer Merchant on March 22, 2007
I met last week with this incredibly zany guy named Nick Hayes of Influencer 50. His firm understands influencer marketing at a very deep level and he’s now in the Bay Area establishing a presence here. In doing so, he’s…
3,000 marketing messages per day
By Nilofer Merchant on March 2, 2007
Today’s consumer receives over 3,000 marketing messages per day. That’s what Maritz Dialogue Marketing group says. Start counting and see how many you come up with in 1 hour. I think it holds true. Now the question I want to…
When in Doubt, Pilot
By Nilofer Merchant on January 29, 2007
Ever heard this? Let’s go 180 degrees in a different direction, at full speed, with everyone on board, and expect our current business to do great while we turn everything in a new direction. Yippee. Sound like a good idea…
Blurred at Web 2.0 Summit
By Nilofer Merchant on November 11, 2006
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley is the only speaker I know that can get away with delivering slide content in such a fast pace that not only can you barely follow, but you can barely connect notes. But she is…
Distribution Model = New Markets
By Nilofer Merchant on November 10, 2006
Hats off to OReilly for the name of this web 2.0 session: Pirate and the Suit. Eric Nicoi, Chairman of EMI, and Eric Kleptone on stage together. Given what has happened with the music industry through the IPOD business model,…
Product Management are really Super Heros in Disguise!
By Nilofer Merchant on September 26, 2006
In my opinion, there are two really hard jobs inside a company. One is being a CEO, and the other being a product manager. A few reasons why I believe this. Both the CEO and Product Managers are expected to…
Developer Programs Key to Upward Cycle
By Nilofer Merchant on August 16, 2006
In grade school, one of the key determinants of popularity on the playground was how quickly you were selected when the time came to choose up sides for basketball, baseball or soccer. In the same way, the developing business model…
Sparked!
By Nilofer Merchant on May 10, 2006
Last night, a little venue called Spark was held. The notion was to connect really smart people - who are down-to-earth good leaders in high-tech - to learn from our firm the latest on transforming business and marketing models,…
Video, video — oh how you’ve changed
By Nilofer Merchant on May 3, 2006
A brainiac Rubicon teammate, Bruce LaFetra did a commentary in our last newsletter on the changing drivers of digital video capture. The premise is that the 15 second shots of video capture on digital cameras made more sense to…
Ecosystems now matter
By Nilofer Merchant on April 19, 2006
I know I’m becoming more of an introvert. I now think about things that happened 2 weeks ago and assign meaning to them. Or does that mean, I’m pondering. Hmmm. Well, anyways, that’s the context to my writing about Software 2006…
Small Business Marketing: Clarity on Customer is Key
By Nilofer Merchant on April 13, 2006
While I work with many mid to large size software firms in my day job, my other hat is being CEO of a small company. A small company with many, many competitors. Because consulting has no standard definition, anyone can…
Great Product Management starts with…
By Nilofer Merchant on March 31, 2006
One of the more common questions I hear from product management teams is based on figuring out why company A is successful and company B is not. Perhaps it’s that company A somehow does a better job of listening to…
Hey what’s that in the corner?
By Nilofer Merchant on March 25, 2006
I had another late night meeting last week, where my firm was involved in helping a company evaluate a decision to an upcoming product launch. Sorry for not being able to provide details; maybe one day. While we presented…
Cinching creates more value
By Nilofer Merchant on March 20, 2006
I’m always worried about the Valley companies that have too much funding, too much venture capital, too much valuation. In this day of American ‘more is better’ philosophy, you might think me contra-culture (or, worse, old-school) to even mention it….
Make mine the most expensive way to expand
By Nilofer Merchant on March 15, 2006
A colleague and friend got $30M in VC funding recently. Good times. It was more than he asked for, because the VC wanted to see fast market penetration into several verticals. Market expansion can be done in multiple ways —…
Finding the Core Value Proposition is Key
By Nilofer Merchant on March 14, 2006
I recently got introduced to an up-n-coming PLM (product lifecycle management) software vendor who shall remain nameless. There are several notable vendors already in the PLM space including IBM, PTC, Borland, UGS (a division of EDS) , and about 40…
Market Entry Moves by Cisco Warrant Review
By Nilofer Merchant on March 4, 2006
For every successful market entry, another 4 fail. I learned that in grad school. One of the few facts that made practical sense, and thus stuck. That metric included every type of company: automotive, pharmaceuticals, financial markets, etc. I…