Innovating In The Rearview Mirror
Thank you all for being subscribers and for supporting this newsletter. I would have written something earlier this week on the Microsoft releases, but we've covered the major themes in previous newsletters. Much of what they released was an introduction to on-PC or on-device AI.
We've already discussed intelligent agents and intelligent assistants, as well as how they will evolve over the next two to three years. We covered how a partnership with a company like Qualcomm will change where machine learning models run. Bringing models on-device has significant advantages for privacy. That will result in greater personalization, and the evolution from intelligent agent to intelligent advisor.
Innovating From Behind
What I’ll focus on instead is what I saw over the last two days at IBM's Think 2024 conference. Some trends are worrisome, and others are very optimistic. The challenge for a company like IBM is they have a massive legacy business and legacy customer base. When IBM innovates, innovations must be backwards compatible.
I call that ‘innovating in the rearview mirror.’ Microsoft has successfully let go of the past, both in the AI and cloud migration eras, to embrace the future completely. Microsoft has been willing to cannibalize older product lines in the transition to a more modern company. In that process, they find new opportunities to deliver value for customers, which leads to new and more significant revenue streams.
Companies like Google, on the other hand, have held on tightly to an older paradigm, search. Holding on to the past makes it almost impossible to embrace the future completely. A company that innovates in the rearview mirror will not become AI first in the same way that a startup that's built from the ground up could. That's the threat.
A company that builds from the ground up can disrupt an incumbent that must innovate in the rearview mirror. With IBM a balancing act was on full display at the conference. However, the direction IBM is taking with its messaging and platform is one I haven't seen before. Its approach aligns with two of my frameworks, Continuous Transformation and the Maturity Model.