Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Work’ Category

Nov 10

Why You Need to be Organised to be Creative

Mark McGuinness over at the Business of Design Online blog has written a series of articles (see links bel0w), on getting organized and improving creativity.  Often many of us pitch creativity versus organization and structure erroneously.  I believe organization and structure create (pun intended) an environment where creativity can flourish.  Here is what Mark thinks:

There, I’ve said it. Organisation, structure, discipline and habit – these often seen as threats to creativity. Not to mention corporate-sounding phrases such as ‘time management’ or ‘workflow’. We like to think of creativity as a space for untrammelled imagination, free from all constraints. Yet while freedom, rule-breaking and inspiration are undoubtedly essential to the creative process, the popular image of creativity overlooks another aspect: examine the life of any great artist and you will find evidence of hard work, discipline and a hard-won knowledge of the rules and conventions of their medium.

Here are links for articles 1 through 8.

Oct 31

Goodbye Myrio

Myrio Logo

Dear friends and colleagues,

As I depart Nokia Siemens Networks (Myrio was acquired in 2005 by Siemens and is now subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks), today marks the end of an era for me–11 amazing years.

When we started working on the technologies that became Myrio, we had a
dream that one day companies all over the world would be delivering TV
services over IP. We were certainly not clairvoyant enough to predict how,
what is now called IPTV, would develop over the coming years, but we knew
the power of Internet combined with entertainment would create amazing new possibilities. Although IPTV seems so “well duh” now, this was not the case–even just 5 years ago.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for
believing in Myrio and the possibilities it created. We could not have done
it without you!

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford.

Full text:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Youtube:

YouTube Preview Image

I want to share a short excerpt from that speech. He said, “You’ve got to
find what you love. [sic]. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the
heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it
just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don’t settle.”

Myrio and IPTV have most certainly been a labor of love.

As I sign off, I extend my best wishes to all of you.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

-ryan

Mar 1

1 Comment

Ready or Not, AT&T Sells Uverse

Om Malik, from Gigaom (see links on right), has written a piece on AT&T Uverse deployment of the Microsoft IPTV platform.

It is hard to get a grip on AT&T’s IPTV efforts. Dubbed Uverse, some say AT&T’s television service it is still stuck in neutral, plagued by technical problems. AT&T, however feels otherwise, and has started making a strong marketing push for the service, according to a report in San Antonio-Express News. The company claims that it has ironed out all the technical glitches and is now ready to take on the cable operators.

We’re ready to take our foot off the brake and step on the accelerator, John Stankey, AT&T’s group president for operations, said Tuesday. By the end of the year, we will be up and running in every significantly sized market where we operate.

Fascinating, since it was only a couple of months ago that the company’s tech troubles were highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, pointing to the problems with Microsoft IPTV software.

From everything I know from publicly available sources and people close to the Microsoft product, the Uverse deployment is stabilizing (apparently, enought that AT&T feels compelled to begin limited rollouts), however the actual deployed service will have far fewer features than AT&T had hoped for and an order of magnitude fewer features than the Microsoft marketing machine has been pitching for the past 2 years.

The actual Uverse product looks very little like what Microsoft has been showing to the market–at trade shows and other public events. Many features of dubious customer value, like “instant channel change” are conspicuously absent from the Uverse deployment. However, their absence is not by choice, but due to poor architectural choices and a poor understanding of service provider economics. It looks like Microsoft is learning the hard lessons about building a scalable IPTV solution–lessons the rest of the industry learned years ago. It would also appear AT&T is learning a tough lesson about listening to the Redmond marketing machine.

Unfortunately for AT&T, the next lessons will be even more painful as their “partner” begins competing with them for their own customers. Just look at what’s happening with Xbox Cinema on Xbox Live. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure their brand remains prominent in their IPTV offering. There will be no question in the mind of Uverse users that they are using a Microsoft product (insert joke here).

The Uverse service gives Microsoft a prime opportunity to upsell subscribers to other Microsoft products like Media Center PCs, powered by Vista and mobile devices powered by Windows Mobile. These devices do not have to be connected to the AT&T Uverse service but connected directly to Microsoft “over the top” of AT&T.

Thus far, Microsoft has played nice (relatively speaking) with its service provider customers in the mobile arena. This is not surprising when you recognize that they have the financial resources and investor backing to be very very patient when entering new markets. However, just as the success of the iPod precipiated Microsoft dumping its “Plays for sure” partners and building their own “iPod killer”, the Zune, I believe the iPhone will inspire the monopolists in Redmond to take a harder stance with wireless operators and begin to push for concessions that give them more control over the mobile devices running Windows–just as they do on PCs today. The emphasis for Microsoft will shift from providing capabilities that give wireless operators the platform and toolsets to build compelling wireless features, to the virtues Windows Mobile for the wireless consumer. The service providers differentiation and value add will diminish to the point that the average mobile consumer won’t care from whom they get the service, but only that they have the latest version of Windows Mobile and Microsoft mobile applications (has anyone seen this movie before?).

This same fate awaits AT&T in their wireline business as their Uverse subscribers increasingly look for Windows and Windows applications, caring less and less about the network (and service provider) that delivers them. The next few years should be interesting.

Jan 6

Siemens vs. Microsoft on IPTV

Over at ITVT, there is a two part interview with representatives from Siemens and Microsoft debating their varying approaches to IPTV technologies and the market. Of course, I am biased as my team and I make many of the decisions about the Siemens approach to the market as well as many of the technology choices in our solution.

It will be very interesting to hear the Microsoft marketing machine as they respond to our perspective as captured in part one.   The Microsoft marketing machine has typically done a very good job in “responding” to critical reviews of their IPTV solution.

For those of you who don’t understand the approach Microsoft has taken in IPTV, it is classic Microsoft..  Take the best ideas from the market leaders (embrace), and modify the established approach to enhance your competitive position (extend).

For IPTV,  Microsoft used several plays from this well worn playbook. For example, Microsoft embraced much of the established ideas in IPTV, but they created a new feature they call “instant channel change” (ICC).  Before Microsoft came into the market, no one knew they needed  ”instant” channel change, but Microsoft’s marketing team has convinced many telco executives that they must have ICC.  In my view, this is not exactly the kind of disruptive feature a telco needs to convince a customer to leave cable or satellite and move to IPTV.

What Microsoft does not tell customers, is that to achieve a nearly instant channel change,  it requires a completely proprietary broadcast architecture, deviating from accepted IPTV architectures, with extensive and costly use of unicast, and a complete dependency on Microsoft technologies (codec, DRM, streaming servers etc.).  Complete technology lock in and reliance on Microsoft.  Who really benefits from instant channel change, well Microsoft, of course.  As we and others began to question the market value of such a feature, the market finally took a critical look at Microsoft’s approach.

In the end, the technological complexity (think cost, $$$) required by the Microsoft approach and the fact that it relies on Microsoft server software (which everyone knows is not even close to carrier grade), can not be justified by the business case.  Will instant channel change come to a TV near you, possibly, but a number of vendors have shown a way to achieve the same result by using a standards based approach–with no Microsoft lock in.

Instant channel change is just one example, but Microsoft has been very quiet about most of their competitive differentiators as of late.  Why?  Well, they are under the gun to get AT&T working beyond trial subscribers.

Of course the Microsoft marketing machine would have us all believe they have “launched”, well that is a matter of perspective.  My belief is that AT&T cannot deploy anywhere, anytime to any subscriber nor can they market the service at full speed because Microsoft is still working through service debilitating bugs and cannot show the scalability that AT&T needs to go full speed ahead.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Nov 27

In Praise of Radical Transparency

One of the issues that every company faces is how much information to share with customers and employees. At work, there is a constant battle between disclosure of raw and immediate information and processing or summarizing information to ensure it accurate and will be understood.

Over at The Longtail blog, Chris Anderson has posted an article called “In Praise of Radical Transparency“. He states,

“Perhaps the most interesting of these is the shift from secrecy to transparency. The default communications mode of companies has traditionally been top-down, with only executives and official spokespeople permitted to discuss company business in public. The standard rule, explicit or not, was “That which we choose not to announce is not to be spoken about.” Aside from some special exemptions, such as conferences where those employees trusted enough to go chatted guardedly with outsiders, employees were cautioned that what happened at work should stay at work. Loose lips sink ships, etc.”

One of my acquaintances is Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Jonathan is a prolific blogger and a pioneer for CEO bloggers. Check out his blog here: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ UPDATED: http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/

Nov 15

Belgacom hits 100,000 subs, a full year ahead of schedule

Siemens Home Entertainment’s largest European customer, Belgacom has hit 100,000 subscribers this month, a full year of schedule. See Belgacom press release. Forbes is running an article that also discusses this milestone and the cross-polination with Belgacom’s mobile division.

Congratulations Belgacom!

Nov 14

Motorola Shopping for a Middleware Company?

Friday, Light Reading reports that “several industry sources” have indicated that Motorola may have started their holiday shopping early and are rumored to be in the market for an IPTV middleware acquisition.

Plug for Siemens SURPASS Home Entertainment IPTV solution: “Siemens has done the best job of providing reliable middleware and currently leads all middleware providers in the number of households served. Microsoft has made IPTV a big focus for their company and has done an excellent job of getting IPTV contracts, but several companies have already complained at their inability to deliver on their promises, due largely to middleware issues.”

Original Yahoo article…

Oct 20

Siemens Tops Microsoft In IPTV Market

According to the most recent report from ABI Research, Siemens leads Microsoft in the worldwide market for IPTV right now, but the race has just begun. ABI just finished up a recent analysis of middleware vendors and found that Siemens was ahead of Microsoft in terms of bundling a broader set of technologies.

Siemens has been ranked at the top of the latest ABI Research Vendor Matrix.

Microsoft Corporation and Alcatel claimed the second and third spots in the company’s most recent evaluation of worldwide IPTV network middleware vendors.

The Vendor Matrix is an analytical tool developed by ABI Research to provide a clear understanding of vendors’ positions in specific markets.

Vendors are assessed by ABI Research on the important parameters of “innovation” and “implementation” across several criteria.

For this particular matrix, under “innovation,” ABI Research examined breadth of services/functions supported by the company’s solution, its interoperability with other solutions, the company’s technology partners, and the scalability of the solution.

Under “implementation,” ABI Research scrutinized the following criteria: the strength of the company’s customer base, brand identification, sales channels, regional/key market diversity, and its ability to package the solution in a broader end-to-end offering.

To view a list of the “top ten” firms in this Vendor Matrix, please visit IPTV Network Middleware Vendor Matrix. Registration on the ABI Research website (free) is required.

Access to the rankings of all companies surveyed is available to clients of ABI Research.

This Vendor Matrix forms part of ABI Research’s Multi-Channel Video Research Service. For a list of all ABI Research Vendor Matrices, please visit The ABI Research Vendor Matrix.

Founded in 1990 and headquartered in New York, ABI Research maintains global operations supporting annual research programs, intelligence services and market reports in broadband and multimedia, RFID and M2M, wireless connectivity, mobile wireless, transportation, and emerging technologies. For information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

read more

Jun 29

2006 PLM Workshop in München

Friedensengel in MunchenJune 28 and 29th Siemens Home Entertainment held a semiannual PLM (Product Line Management) workshop in München. Check out the photo album here. Every 6 months, or so, the global Home Entertainment PLM team gets together to discuss our IPTV solution. We talk about what is going right and what isn’t, as well as plan for our upcoming releases. Most of all it is a great opportunity to meet face-to-face with our incredibly talented product management team — we all have a great time.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Feb 6

Siemens Pushes IPTV

I was quoted by one of our IPTV partners on Techweb.

Tut Systems packetizes content from satellite broadcasters, such as TNT, CNN, and HBO, and makes it available for use on IP networks. Ryan Petty, vice president of product line management at Siemens Home Entertainment said the company also re-encodes the content into H.264, an ITU standard for compressing video.

read more