“We didn't start the fire,
It was always burning,
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire,
No we didn't light it,
But we tried to fight it” – Billy Joel, We Didn’t Start
The Fire
During the holiday break, newspapers make “fluff” pieces
to fill the print while the news desks are vacant. Most
of them are looks back or looks forward. Some of them
are lists, such as a list of great quotes of the year.
I will save my 2008 prediction piece for, well, 2008. I
thought I’d have my fluff piece be random quotes,
stories, blog posts and other Internet flotsam about
technology that I found interesting.
Bill Gates says "The business computing market, which
is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one
pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal,
and you think, oh, this is the paper they're going to
tell me about business computing; no, it's all about
consumer computing." (from Don Dodge)
Sounds like Bill is about to have a little hissy fit
about how the media likes Facebooks and not Quickbooks.
I tried to find out what “way bigger” actually was: it
looks like enterprise software products and services is
around $150B in the US alone… that’s revenue. Cash
paid. Not valuations of companies. If you assume that,
Club Penguin notwithstanding, most of the consumer
software revenue comes from advertising today, it is
about a $35B market, WORLDWIDE. Heck, toss in the video
game market (software component) and you are still only
at $42B worldwide. Not bad, but still ¼ to 1/5 of the
business market.
Bill has a point. Why does the media want to do a story
on Flickr instead of a story on warehouse management
software? Well, meaning no disrespect to my
hard-working journalist friends, mainstream media does
not have the background knowledge, nor the broad enough
audience to care about improving performance in the
enterprise.
We investors and entrepreneurs know where the money is
and we’re with Bill.
"RIM is creating large new markets which are expanding globally, with
diminished competition from mainstream handset vendors
and alternate email solutions."
(From Bear Stearns analyst, Andy Neff)
I can’t find the Jim Balsillie quote where he says, “Na
na na na na na” or “Thbbbbbfft” when referring to those
that doubted that RIM could jump from the nerdy
financial sector enterprise market to the consumer
market. I bought RIM stock when my 62 year old mother
got a Pearl and actually used it almost exclusively for
her e-mail. RIM is leaving Palm and other smartphones
in its dust. And its ability to create stylish designs
with Curve and Pearl are winning customers and stunning
competitors.
If you want e-mail AND you want ring tones, cameras and
sleek designs, you buy a Blackberry. Last year at this
time, people believed that the AND was an OR and you
only bought from RIM if you needed e-mail. They
absolutely blew out the numbers to the end of November…
I was at a minor hockey executive meeting yesterday and
4 of the 8 people sitting at the table were shooting
each other message on a Blackberry. RIM might be the
biggest success story in Canadian technology history…
and we are only at the beginning.
“I was skeptical about a derivatives market in the Wii actually
existing, but now I have confirmation that one does
exist, and it's happening at Best Buys and Toys 'R' Us
stores and other retailers trafficking in Wiis
nationwide.
Here's the m.o.: shoppers get wind of when a Wii shipment is due to
arrive, either by greasing a store manager, or by
watching ads carefully, and begin lining up hours before
the store opens. A store employee will then come out,
hand out tickets or numbered placeholders to keep things
orderly, and then the buying and selling begins.”
(Jim Goldman, CNBC)
So, you get a ticket to buy a Wii, and you sell the
ticket to the highest bidder… with risk that the store
may sell out, depending on your ticket number. I love
it! Capitalism at its best! If you don’t have a Wii
for Christmas and there is someone in your house between
6 and 16, you are likely headed down to Best Buy this
Sunday morning to try and buy an option to buy a Wii.
The video game market is going through its boom cycle
now as all three console vendors are selling their new
generation platforms hard. In Vancouver, this
translates into huge activity at Electronic Arts and
Activision Blizzard (formerly Vivendi Universal,
formerly Radical Entertainment locally) and at the
start-up or smaller studios that dot Yaletown and
Gastown.
Forget movies and TV, the future of big dollar media in
this town should be the gamers…
“There is a bubble in Web 2.0companies.”
(or some variant of that quote, which can be attributed
to me, Paul Kedrosky and a hundred other pundits).
All you believers and non-believers: go watch this video
Here Come Another Bubble, a hilarious spoof of
Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire… (thanks to David
Raffa for sending me this on Facebook… irony intended).
Something Ventured is a bi-weekly column designed
to supplement the T-Net British Columbia web site with
some timely, relevant and possibly irreverent insight
into the industry. I hope to share some of the
perspective and trends that I see in my role as a VC.
The column is always followed by feedback (if its
positive or constructive. I'll keep the flames to
myself, thanks).
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