Product Matters

In a previous blog entry , I wrote that Starbucks was at risk of becoming Dunkin Donuts.  While the green giant is undoubtedly more successful than its northeast competitor, my suspicion that they were sliding off the fidelity axis and reaching down the convenience axis (there is, after all, usually a larger market share on the convenience axis) was recently confirmed during a recent trip back to Boston. The coffee served at conferences—is predictably lousy.  Therefore, I knew that I didn't want the complimentary coffee provided by the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, and instead made my way up and out to a nearby Starbucks (the only coffee shop within walking distance). I waited in line, and then ordered my usual; Double Americano, No Room.  Despite the short walk, I was still foggy, and was eagerly awaiting my caffeine fix.  Given the size of the line, I told myself that it might be a few minutes before my drink arrived.  To my astonishment, they had my americano in my hand in

Today was the first day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston .  Unfortunately, I only have an Expo pass, so I wasn't able to attend the majority of Monday's sessions .  However, I was able to attend the Evening in the Cloud session that took place at 4:00pm. From the description : David Berlind will open the program with a 30 minute overview of the cloud collaboration market, the major players in the market and touch on why the market is changing so rapidly . The "major players", unfortunately, were limited to Microsoft and Google.  Rather amusing considering that the event was sponsored by IBM.  The talk was rather high-level, and the key takeaways were as follows: How could an ideal cloud application improve collaboration? David began with a nice "what if" scenario in which a person just opened a word processing application and was able to save the document, share it, send it, publish it, etc. all from one spot.  He then posed the question as to