David Acevedo's Blog

In technology innovation is key. Innovation tends to run contrary to typical business behavior which is still based on the industrial model of create and replicate. Innovation is about discovery, research, on-going creation. Fail to do that and you'll be in trouble. The second key is execution. Innovate but fail to deliver and you'll be in just a bad a position. New is not better than good. Deliver good even if not new and people will love you, but it has to be good. Blackberry's company, Research in Motion (RIM) is in deep trouble right now due to both of these issues. It had a good product, so it failed to innovate. Because good is better than new, it still did well, until the competition got better. A failed tablet, a sclerotic operating system and lack of a viable app stores have seriously wounded this once titan of the industry. Now to add insult to injury they've lost a multi-million dollar case . RIM will be a study for business schools now, but not just as...

Dear Apple, Why should you reconsider your green registry pull out . I know that innovation and the “wants of the customers” are business pressures that are hard to ignore. They want it faster, lighter, cheaper. And you so want to satisfy all that. The designers want it sleeker, cooler, svelte.  Now is not the time to pick short term over long term. While it may seem that having products that aren’t easy to repair, recycle and take apart is what people want, like Henry Ford said: “If I’d asked people what they wanted. They would have asked for faster horses.” It’s easy to forget the big picture. Apple had its start catering to that tinkering vision and recently providing a mesh of engineering and design unparalleled in the world. It’s not design alone. It’s not engineering alone. It’s that alchemical combination that when it’s right it’s magical. The computer, the tool, melts away and the crafters of words, images, music, presentations, code, see only their cr...

I'm starting a Non-Profit in Puerto Rico in 2012 that will revolutionize entrepreneurship on the island through the use of mentors in the broad Puerto Rican diaspora and the Hispanic community. I don't know how to do this, and I'm doing it anyway. There is a Buddhist story about a man that is poor and living on a hut. Underneath the hut is a large cache of gold but the man starves for lack of money; not knowing the wealth he possessed. This is so true, for there is no worse poverty than the poverty of the mind , not seeing the options that could be taken is far worse than having no options . And this is what I want to see impacted directly by my Non-profit. Entrepreneurship is a state of mind . It's how one approaches life, failure and risk. It's not about making money, the same way the human body is not about eating, shitting and sleeping. Money, profits are necessary like food is to the body, but the Olympic marathon runner doesn't run to eat ...

I am marveled at how incredibly blind to the consequences of actions CEOs can be. I know it's impossible to predict certain things (Qwickster's spin off backlash was to be expected but the size surprised me) but some things are really easy to see coming. When Hewlett Packard decided to spin off it's PC business (see post here ) and kill it's webOS tablet, it seems it somehow failed to realized that the PC business is synergistic with it's printer business. This strikes of such obviousness that even Homer Simpson would get it. When people buy a computer from HP they are more likely to buy a printer form HP than say Canon which makes excellent printers but not PCs. Then of course the retailers that sell HP computer are more likely to want to sell HP printers too. So with no HP PCs to sell would they give the same priority to HP printers? Of course not. Now HP realizes this consequence . And are rethinking dropping the PC division. Honestly this feels like amateur ...

This is an interesting time for Silicone Valley CEOs. Yahoo fired their CEO, and now HP after the fall out of the previous CEO's decision to quit Hardware (read my previous post here ) they've hired Meg Whitman as CEO. HP has gone through many CEO's in this fashion: Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, and the last one, Apotheker. he total cost of ousting these CEOs has been around $80 million . Man, I wish I'd be getting anywhere near that money to get fired. Wow. Now with Meg Whitman, I have even lower hopes for the company. While Whitman will probably turn the company around back to profitability, she is no visionary. With the amount of money she poured into her campaign, she would've won if she'd had any coherent vision. Every now and then I hear someone say that the purpose of a business is to generate income or to put it bluntly "make money." Otherwise they say "you don't have a business." Well that's like saying that the purpose of ...

About a year ago Microsoft came out with a highly publicized phone called the Kin. You might remember the commercials about a girl wanting to do a trip to meet her friends face to face. Well, a few weeks after the phone was out in the market Microsoft killed it. Why they went ahead with producing it only to kill it? Hmmm. Now Hewlett Packard (HP) has pulled the exact same maneuver. A few days ago I saw a commercial with of all people Many Paquiao for the HP TouchPad that uses the WebOS. Yesterday I read how Best-buy is returning its huge order of HP TouchPads. And today HP pulled a M$ dropping the tablet and the modestly successful Pre phone that works on WebOS. Dumb asses. Really. Dumb asses. They killed the platform by starving it. It's like being disappointed in Einstein because he was bad at math as a kid, saying this kid will never do any good in school. He's not a prodigy let's pull him out of school. What were they expecting? With Apple dominating the...

This week Cisco announced it's killing the Flip , the super simple video-recording camcorder that was such a hit that Cisco bought it for $590 million two years ago. This seems to be a typical thing big companies do. Microsoft bought Danger the maker of the popular Sidekick, had them made the Kin (Microsoft's way) and then killed it. Activision bought the Guitar Hero Franchise, then killed it (buried it actually, by milking it for all it was worth then essentially laying off the developers). Makes me wonder if this is a new-toy syndrome . The company buys a shinny new company and it's excited until the new-car smell wears off, then they dump them like a petulant child that should be Harry Potter's older and portlier cousin. But what I really think is going on is bad planning and unrealistic expectations. I think Cisco bought Flip with the impression that it was going to give money like a cow gives milk. The minute they start under-performing, they just extirpate ...

The Hollywood studios created a small storm in a glass of water with this, but by moving the way they did the storm became huge, and has already swallowed up Blockbuster. The decline in DVD that saw me get laid off from my previous job in the DVD post-production chain is due to many factors but all of the factors were foreseen. None were a surprise and none could have been for-stalled. But in a good example of a communal pool where nobody has the incentive to help everybody, (that sounds rather reminiscent of Green Market's theory of the communal fishing pond) the individual incentives ended up hurting everybody. In Green Market's example a pond's fish stock is failing. It would be advantageous to all the boats in the area to reduce their catch for a few years and let the stock rebound less the fish stock could collapse. But lacking rather enlightened fisherman or regulation you don't get that. What you get is that as the individual's boat's catch reduces they m...