There's a great article by Jeff Yang @ SFGate on How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan. While the core part of the article itself is interesting, I found a small segment of the article even more insightful.

On page 3 of the article, Yang quotes Andrew Lih, a USC Annenberg professor and its director of new media, on why Sony has stumbled of late:

Consumer electronics are so complex today that they can't simply be a checklist of features...

The brands that curate their products well, with thoughtfulness and consideration for the customer, end up the winners. And Sony has hardly done that.

The quote is especially interesting in that it's not just related to consumer electronics. If you substituted 'consumer electronics' for 'enterprise software' and inserted any enterprise software vendor in place of 'Sony', you probably wouldn't be far from the truth.

In many ways, the quote sums up how I feel about many of the bigger players in the business intelligence market. It seems to me that the vendors that do have the nicest set of curated features are the upstarts, like Tableau and Bona Vista Systems. Their feature sets may not be as sweeping as their larger competitors, but they are extremely good at the features they do have.

Each year, when one of the major BI vendors has their major announcement of a release, it usually has more to do with the announcement of more checklist items than the improvement of their already flawed features. While I do understand the vicious cycle of uninformed technology purchasers, focusing on quantity over quality strikes me as a short term strategy. Developing lock-in through the fear of losing sunk costs is not what I would consider to be the way to go, especially when open source vendors are just starting to disrupt the marketplace.

Dan Frommer, of Business Insider, summarizes Tim Cook's talk at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference:

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple's revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company. That's not just saying yes to the right products, it's saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones. I think this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris you talk about that happens to companies that are successful and sole role in life is to get bigger, I can tell you the management team at Apple would never let that happen. That's not what we're about. Small list of things to focus on.

So what's the moral of this quote?

If you look at the excerpt above that is in bold (emphasis was mine), Apple chooses to be better, not bigger.

This relates to my frequent rant about the absence of feature excellence in constantly growing feature checklists, especially in the BI realm.

Updated: Here's the audio recording of the discussion.

While the iPad is generally seen as a great media device for consumers, I'm going to put forth the argument that it's a fantastic business device.

First and foremost, any IT manager who has had to deal with, um, salespeople, should have some appreciation for the iPad to replace laptops issued to salespeople. Why? Many salespeople only need a few applications - e-mail, word processor and presentation software. Well, those are all available in the iPad, and you get the added benefit that some sales guy won't be responsible for spreading the latest virus at the office because his beer buddy sent him a naughty attachment.

My understanding is that the iPad supports XGA out, so presentations can be easily output to a projector. Moreover, any "application" demos can be simply recorded in XGA resolution using Camtasia. Well, I probably don't need to go further, but there are tons of reasons why removing full-blown laptops from sales types (and executives, for that matter) would result in fewer headaches for IT departments.

As mentioned in a prior post, I also see opportunities in the business intelligence realm. The iPad would be a great mobile dashboard. This area is fertile ground for some innovative developers.

In light of the imminent release of a new Apple computing device, which the pundits believe to be a tablet, there's been a lot of discussion about what its primary uses will be. E-book reader? Music Player? Movie player? Bathroom surfboard?

Those are all great, but the thing I'd just love to see on this device would be a live, interactive enterprise dashboard. I'm sure, however, that they'll demo a dashboard. It'll probably be a consumer dashboard made up of weather and stock widgets, but wow, can you imagine the potential?

Speaking of whizzy dashboard gadgets, Sony recently announced the Dash, an implementation of the nerdy Chumby. It's being marketed as a clock-radio like dashboard, but I think it would be great to repurpose as a desktop conduit to an enterprise dashboard.

There is really something to be said about a live dashboard that doesn't live on your primary computer's screen. A dashboard that has its own discrete screen gets more attention, and has more potential value to those who use dashboards.

Food for thought.