Antitrust regulators have had IBM in their sights for a while amidst concerns that the computer giant may squelch too much of its competition and hold a monopoly in the mainframe market. However, many analysts have begun to point out that IBM’s so-called monopoly on the mainframe market might actually only exist in small subsets of the market.
According to analysts, the part of the mainframe market that antitrust regulators have accused IBM of monopolizing makes up only a small portion of the wider server market, a playing field in which there is now plenty of competition. Oracle’s impending acquisition of …read more

You can bet your competition is keeping an eye on you, they’ve probably even been in to shop if you have a storefront. If you have an online store, they’ve probably checked out your website, backlinks, traffic, product availability, pricing, and delivery.

If your business is a service you can be sure your competition knows how much you charge, and what is included in the price. They’ve probably sent someone in to try out your service, or just to browse around.
You should always know what your business competition is up to. If they have a store front, go visit, shop, even …read more

Glad you asked. I’ve been extremely interested in the medical “problem” of late- rising costs, increased government intervention, corporate interests, doctor’s interests, insurance interests, and lack of ability of the patient to select procedures, doctors, and be cost effective. With political campaigns tied to universal health care, the issues are front and center.
To me the bottom line is increasing the flow of information on how services, costs and pricing work. Right now insurance and governmental programs tend to blur the visibility of that information. So, my first reaction to both is that they are full of waste.
The more you know …read more

Forbes magazine’s medicare piece on how medical costs increase due to corporate lobbying for CT scanning coverage that drives equipment sales, reveals the market’s reaction:
Congress: “…tried to rope in runaway Medicare costs by dramatically cutting imaging payments in outpatient settings…”
Private Insurers: “…Companies like CareCore Radiology, American Imaging Management and National Imaging Associates cropped up to do the dirty work of reviewing and rejecting imaging orders on behalf of insurance companies…CareCore’s research shows a doctor who owns his own machine is four times as likely to order a scan as a doctor who doesn’t.”
GE:”…a lot of the arguments against imaging are …read more

Forbes magazine’s medical industry piece “Cranking Up the Volume” comments on GE’s lobbying efforts for medicare coverage for CT scans enabling sales of CT scanning equipment:
“The party has gone on too long”.
Apparently, excessive coverage for CT scans has led to over doing and “over” covering the scans, thus increasing medical costs:
“Radiologist David Gruen used to spend millions of dollars to replace his General Electric (nyse: GE – news – people ) MRI and CT scanners every three years. It was money well spent because the machines were always busy.”
The economics of this is very interesting: more money for allowable scans …read more

Forbes magazine recently wrote about the medical industry in “Cranking Up the Volume“. Presumably, higher “volume” means more visibility into the processes behind medicare, medical equipment, and diagnosis. My contention is that our medical costs will go down if we can increase competition. Competition usually comes into play when information becomes available- information about services, prices, and costs of providing services. A useful comparison dealing with understanding costs of providing services is in the auto sales area; a few years ago information about dealer costs and margins made available on the internet enabled competition by allowing buyers to shop around …read more

Innovation. Seemingly a magical, creative art where ideas pop into the mind of relaxed and receiving brain cells (the hilarious “ideation” commercials come to mind where an incredulous manager says, “What are you doing?”, and the existential group leader responds, “Ideating”). Actually, there are NOT many NEW ideas and the “innovation” comes with successful market penetration, as it applies to new products, and with successful implementation, as it applies to new business processes. I tend to focus on innovative business processes.
Once more an innovation article failed to mention business process innovation. Times OnLine, a British publication, treated the subject with …read more

“Companies should devote R&D to new business models just as they do to new products. A new CEO today will need to preside over a changed business model three or four times in his career, but no one really knows how to do it. It’s not taught in business schools, and there is much to learn about how to manage a workforce that is no longer just within the four walls of an organization”.
AMEN!…and AMEN! This quote by Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, from CFO magazine’s “Gaming the System” article, is fascinating because of …read more

Think of a business model where a firm provides services with a global freelance resource base: is it writing? editing? software development? CFO magazine’s article on “Gaming the System” introduces TopCoder, not only as a global freelance software development operation, but one that has participants compete on providing the best code for it’s application work. This is business competition where you have to finish before knowing whether you will be paid or not, because you have to win.
It seems that TopCoder’s success and growth is based on the fact that they were more of a non-business community in the first …read more