Tech Innovation and The Game of Cricket. I know your thinking what is Adapage thinking what does Tech Innovation have to do with the game of Cricket? Well, we have all probably played cricket a few times right? Raise your hand if you haven't. That's right I thought so most of you raised your hand. Okay so now how many of you have played the game of cricket after having one too many Guinness's or the beer of your choice? Less hands but still quite a few out there. So as most of you know the game of Cricket is a simple dart game
that is played as follows players take turns trying to be the first ones to get three 20's, three 19's, three 18's all the way down to 15's and then 3 bulls eyes. The first one to get three of everything wins if they also have the most points and you score points by hitting anything that your opponent doesn't have three of. Pretty fun game actually and the loser buys the Guinness. Not very smart huh give guys who are drinking sharp objects to throw. But that's the way it's been for eons. So, what does this have to do with tech innovation? Simple a long time ago when I was just a boy my brother taught me a valuable lesson in the game of Cricket "Don't Follow" which means simply this, if your opponent in Cricket just closed his 20's then you need to go to your 19's to get ahead of him to have something to make points on if you can close your 19's ahead of your opponent, then go back and close your 20's when you get a chance. If you simply follow your opponent you will follow them all the way down to bulls eyes and then lose the game.
Tech innovation lately has just been following what I mean by that is look at Apple. They were this company that hadn't really had a hit product in a long time. Then along comes the iPod so what does the rest of the tech world do they simply follow hoping to get a piece of the mp3 pie. They don't want to go out and make their own pie or god forbid aim for those 19's like in cricket.
Then we come to phones the iPhone broke all the rules of what a phone should or could be and the rest of the tech world didn't really innovate it pretty much just said how much of Apples market share can we take if we market lower priced touch screen phones?
The iPhone sold so well and people loved it so much Apple said why don't we make it bigger and the iPad was born and everyone followed. They didn't listen to my brothers advice. Don't follow, they just wanted a piece of that market share so now how many tablet are a no go? How many of your friends own a RIM tablet or a Samsung tablet? I thought so.
But there is someone out there not following. Amazon, they are shooting 19's all day long with the Kindle Fire. Yes it's a tablet and it will take market share but we are not talking a few percent here we are talking an actual competitor for the iPad. Not only did they take Google's operating system and retool it to serve their own products thereby basically not serving Google's services but their own but they are actually competing with the iPad 2 not bad considering that this is a company that sells books, oh yeah and everything else you could ever want. Heck even Apple products.
