The Stranova Blog – Strategic Innovation

The European Union said yesterday it has a bit of a problem with the $7.4 Billion merger between Oracle and still-industry-giant Sun Microsystems over anticompetitive issues.

There may indeed by issues regarding decreased competition as a result of the merger, but the reasons the EU’s Executive Committee cited in their November 9, 2009, statement of formal objections have it wrong. But that they have it wrong isn’t really the biggest story here; the big issue is about how “old school” approaches to thinking about antitrust do not apply any more in our modern world of global innovation and Open Source software.

What the EU complained about is the potential antitrust issue of bringing Sun’s MySQL database software under the same ownership as Oracle’s own powerful and dominant corporate database software.

At a surface level, that just might sound logical. After all, Oracle had about 43% of the corporate database market in 2008 according to a Gartner research study. And Sun’s MySQL database is the most popular open-source database software in the world, with over 60,000 downloads a day. Oracle’s database systems drive decision-making at massive corporate enterprises on a massive scale worldwide. And with its ubiquitous presence, the MySQL database system works on an equally massive scale on a micro market, powering everything from internal business database management systems to even the very blog entry you are reading right now.

The problem with claiming this is a major anticompetitive deal is the EU is trying to say that Oracle’s ownership of both its globally dominant proprietary Oracle database software with Sun’s “open source” software makes for a new lock on the database industry.

Even on a pure numbers basis the argument does not make sense because, for all the penetration of Sun’s MySQL database, its share is only 0.5% of the worldwide database market — again according to Gartner. So is an increase in share from 43% to 43.5% really an problem?

Ah, but this is about the brave new world of the internet and cloud computing markets, the EU might argue. MySQL is clearly the wave of that future and even if the numbers are small now, we are talking about the long-term future, after all.

Nice argument, but Open Source software is a completely different product offering category than Oracle’s proprietary “closed source” database product. Open Source software may have a single company behind it as a guiding force, but the licensing provisions of Open Source (unlike those of proprietary software) allow for others to modify, reuse, and republish the software more or less at will around the world. So even if Oracle were to attempt to use its control of MySQL to attempt major anticompetitive moves, the broad worldwide user base would likely just take its own version of MySQL and happily (and legally) propagate it elsewhere.

As someone who has overseen the move from closed source to open source product lines himself while running the Graphics organization at Silicon Graphics, I can assure you that trying to wield too much authority as the corporate parent of an Open Source product is like trying to hold tightly onto a greased pig. You get messy and the pig still ends up running where it wants to.

I agree there is something to consider here in how antitrust rules apply in a new world with a wide variety of Open Source applications. It does and will justify further study, both in the Universities who help us model such things and in the Courts who judge them.

But just as in the case of the greased pig, in this situation it is time for the European Union to let go and allow a merger with much potential to go forward.

July 7, 2009 — Mark today’s date on your calendars

July 4th may be Independence Day for the American people, but computer users may come to see Tuesday, July 7, 2009 as a standard for independence in the future. Google has just announced a new project of theirs, to develop an open-source Operating System called Chrome OS that will be available in the second half of 2010. It should boot up and run fast, be lightweight, and “start you up and get you on the web in a few seconds” as Google’s official blog says in its July 7th blog post describing the project and why they launched it.

You’ll see it first in netbooks, but with the clout of Google behind it to push industry-compatible solutions for all kinds of related software, this is a major strategic kick in the pants to both Microsoft and Apple. It is going to move fast into all the other places PC Operating Systems show up, with the only major exception probably being in the server market.

What Apple will probably do is focus yet again on its tight integration and brilliantly user-friendly applications. Based on past history, they’ll also probably find a way to create some important strategic partnerships with Google on this, at least as much as they can without — not kidding here — getting inadvertently accused of an antitrust action. This kind of approach is something Apple is very good at.

The fun begins with the other guys. So do watch carefully for what Redmond does here, and know that what they may say at the beginning of the public discourse on this is going to mean little. Because this is an even bigger threat than being “asleep at the switch” when Microsoft way-too-calmly watched Netscape almost take over the Internet browsing business. And remember how methodically and, many would say, ruthlessly Microsoft devoured its competitor.

Also note I’m not exactly rooting for Google on this either. Like Microsoft, they have their own agenda for world domination also, just of a different sort. But this is the kind of street fight that could, as they say elsewhere, make things very interesting for all of us.

Microsoft just announced that its online encyclopedia MSN Encarta will cease operations by the end of 2009, except for the Japanese edition (which I expect will shut down shortly).

Many are writing about this today as a symbol of what happens when one dares to fight the internet. The message seems to be that Wikipedia, an encyclopedia edited and managed by its global readership, has won a sort of David-versus-Goliath-like battle with the Redmond behemoth Microsoft. If you dare fight “free” and if you dare fight “the power of the masses”, both of which are characteristics of the admittedly highly innovative concept of Wikipedia, you are doomed, it would seem.

From my perspective, the message is actually more subtle and more profound all at the same time. And that message is that any business model will eventually die unless in a constant state of regenerative growth.

At the beginning, Encarta launched by introducing its own new business idea for what an encyclopedia could be. The concept was that by providing a more user-friendly form of access to information (in the form of beautifully-illustrated CD-ROMs in the earliest incarnations), tools to allow ready cross-connecting between articles, and the always powerful stimulus of charging a much lower price than say, the Encyclopedia Brittanica, people would flock to the new publication.

Microsoft itself initially bought content for the online publication, first acquiring rights to the old Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, which some of you may remember from earlier days where you purchased a volume a week at your local grocery store. They immediately added some of their own content, then augmented it again with purchased content from Collier’s Encyclopedia and the New Merit Scholar’s Encyclopedia.

Over time, Microsoft Encarta evolved into a dazzling DVD-ROM version, first as a standalone version, then with regular disc-based updates, then with integrated online and DVD versions, and pure online versions as well. It was magnificent, well (enough) researched, and my guess provided the basis for at least seven years of background content for tens of thousands of high school and college research papers. It was also fun.

What happened? Competition. Some people are blaming Wikipedia for the competition, but the true competitor is probably the search engines of Google, Yahoo!, and others, along with, of course, the wide variety of content available today on virtually any topic imaginable. Wikipedia, with its more structured gathering place of user-generated encyclopedic content, may also have sealed Encarta’s fate, but I think pointing at Wikipedia as what brought Encarta down is missing several important points.

What are some of those key points?

One is that however Encarta may have changed the details of its content over time, other than moving to combined web/CD/DVD and web-only versions it never dramatically updated its business model after the first few innovations.

A second is that, in an internet world where people demand the most up-to-date information at any given time, Encarta was still stuck in a (more or less) old-fashioned approach to presenting information that was gathered, digested, re-crafted, and disseminated very slowly.

A third is that, once again, Microsoft missed the opportunity to harness the power of social networking and information sharing. They started by first underestimating the importance of the Internet (by almost letting Netscape take over leadership as the platform of choice), then later by jumping in too late on innovations such as the Digital Music Downloads market (scooped by Apple’s iTunes), web-based telecommunications (via tools such as Skype and even now Google Voice), and even major social networking communities such as MySpace and Facebook.

So how can a company avoid this kind of fate for their own products? Clayton Christensen’s disruptive technologies model might argue that, for someone as big as Microsoft it is almost unavoidable because of the many internal barriers to considering truly revolutionary changes in a business model. I would argue instead that, by designing product categories like Encarta where every aspect of the value-adding chain involved with the product is constantly being regenerated, this could have easily been avoided.

To explain further, If you think of Microsoft’s Encarta product of having, at a simple level, a value-adding chain flowing from how content is gathered and extending to how it is distributed, you can see where Microsoft’s innovation drive was focussed: how the information was accessed, displayed, sampled, and distributed.

Where Microsoft missed a critical opportunity was in considering how important it would be to innovate at the very beginning of the value-adding process — at the point at which new information would flow into the Encarta article directory. If Microsoft had experimented with allowing for at least some degree of user-generated content to be included, that could in and of itself have provided the impetus for further innovations that only a company with Microsoft’s financial reserves could have brought to such a solution.

There is, of course, the additional issue that Wikipedia is free, but I still believe there are other ways to re-market and reuse content of the quality that Encarta could have been presenting (even from a user-generated basis). This is also a place where targeted advertising would probably pay off well, since those doing research (such as in encyclopedias) tend to stay on sites longer than for others.

Having said all that, a logical question is as to whether there is something that will eventually put Wikipedia out of business. The answer, without question, is yes. Whether it is a tool such as James Burke’s “The Knowledge Web” where knowledge connections may build deeper understandings of any, or perhaps new immersive online learning and research environments that are still yet to be developed, something will come. And yes, Wikipedia itself could benefit from looking at a regenerative approach to its own “business model” as it looks to stay ahead in the future — because even non-profits do have a model to nurture. But as with all things there will eventually be a new idea that will come forward that will make Wikipedia look old-fashioned on its own.

Please take a moment of silence to memorialize the gentle passing of Encarta in 2009, and to honor the creativity and vision that brought it into place in the first place.

Comments and questions? Write a comment below, or contact us directly at ideas@stranova.com.

This is for all of Congress and the new Obama administration: It is time to stop bailing out companies and start demanding strategic change in the way our economy works.

Perhaps I am stating the blindingly obvious, but if your ship is leaking badly, just bailing it out is an exercise in futility. Further, even if if you patch the leak, if the reason why the leak happened in the first place is still there, it is going to leak again. You have to do something more, something systemic, to change the future course of events.

And, with all due respect to the experience and sincerity of those leading our current economic fix-it programs, we are not only doing a poor job of bailing out the current economy, we are also laying the groundwork for an even bigger mess in the future.

Yes, there is an economic crisis out there well beyond the ability of any individual to possibly comprehend, and emergency measures were called for. I get that. Many banks and other financial institutions are falling apart, triggered in part by the domino effect of bad mortgages, the layering of complex financial instruments on top of each other, and complicit greed at every level of the structure. The stock market has plummeted, free cash is drying up, small businesses and individuals can’t get credit, and job losses are staggering.

There is also a corresponding crisis of confidence in what lies ahead for all of us, very much in part because the economic mess is so complex to understand.

All of which is why the vast majority of the American public was in agreement with the initial authorization of bailout funds when Congress voted for them. Something had to be done. Quickly.

As time has moved forward since those funds were approved, two things have become very clear. The first is that releasing them quickly (and moving rapidly to deploy them) has indeed probably kept many banks from failing. The second is that it we seem have done almost nothing to deal with the underlying processes and root causes that catapulted us into this particular mess.

Think about it. One financial enterprise begins to tip and the Fed arranges a shotgun wedding to merge it with a bigger enterprise, again and again. Weakened companies are grabbed by other, temporarily healthier, entities. Bank of America acquires Countrywide, one of the home mortgage companies that started the dominoes falling. JPMorgan Chase acquires Washington Mutual. Wells Fargo buys Wachovia. Bank of America comes back again and acquires Merrill Lynch. We may be preventing bank failures but we are building larger companies which could fail just as easily some time in the future.

One of the major complaints about those institutions that received the money and the mergers that happened in parallel is that there was no requirement to have these companies actually help out the American public in the process. Helping out could mean lower interest rates for mortgages and credit cards, plus easier access to loans both for individuals and small businesses, and — with no requirements tied to the bailout funds — very little of that has happened, apparently. Credit card and loan rates appear to have dropped primarily because the Fed has reduced its own rates, while the lending institutions, if anything, have actually increased the margins on their customer base.

Meanwhile, these now even-bigger enterprises have announced major layoffs, with Citigroup saying it would jettison 50,000 jobs, and Bank of America up to 35,000 jobs, among others. Further, as of early 2009, as the economy continues its decline and the combined debts of the new merged companies are beginning to be fully tallied, bond ratings for these enterprises are being projected downward — fast. Oppenheimer’s analyst Meredith Whitney, quoted in an article in Reuters on January 7th, 2009, expects to see substantial increased losses by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, which in turn will put pressure on capital markets and the U.S. government to find other ways to keep these leaking vessels afloat. She is far from alone in these predictions.

As serious as these concerns are, to me the bigger issue is that, even as we may find ways to continue to patch the new leaks to appear, we are just building bigger boats (with more weight to put pressure on the temporary patches our government is applying) while missing the chance to make major strategic change in how our financial systems — and other companies (such as the automobile industries) — will operate in the future.

Within the corporate turnarounds I have been involved with (through strategic realignment, targeted product innovation, and focussed tactical plans), crises of any kind represent a rare opportunity for strategic transformation of their businesses. There is broad acceptance that something big is wrong as well as that something even bigger is needed to change their future. Just getting the next product out or landing the next customer is understood almost never to be a solution to this scale of an issue. It is easy to get the attention of the management team and to launch big initiatives.

Unfortunately, the most we seem to be doing with our current government approaches is, after banks and others have received their bailout funds, to threaten them either not to give any more — or to take take away what has already been awarded if their situation doesn’t improve (as they have told the auto companies).

What we need instead is first to launch a high-level strategic effort to reshape the fundamentals of our economic structure. We need to tell the companies that have received these bailout funds that they must disclose previously privately-held information in order to assist that strategic effort. We need to form teams to support this which include both those who understand the system intimately as well as brilliant strategic thinkers who come from outside the existing system, so we do not get stuck in a quicksand of old ideas. And we need to prepare the American public that we are going to be shaking things up in a way never seen before.

The Titanic is sinking, people. We should insist on far more than just paying for new patches to keep it afloat.

We are running out of Renaissance People, it appears. And if the trend keeps up, the pace of true innovation in technology companies may slow to a virtual crawl.

According to a research study entitled “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?”, presented by Ben Jones of Northwestern University in September 2005 — and referenced by a short article in the December 2008 issue of The Atlantic, we are in trouble.

The thesis put forth there is that technologists need to learn a great deal more than ever before in order to be put together that true breakthrough product idea. This means either more formal education and related study just to keep up with a given technology area, or becoming more narrow and specialized in one’s work. More often than not nowadays, the choice is to narrow one’s studies.

Becoming more specialized makes the learning challenge more manageable, but with that specialization comes also a critical lack of knowledge of alternative technologies and ideas. And in that vacuum one tends to see all solutions as tied to the knowledge one does understand well, just as, as the old saying goes, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail”.

As one who has had the privilege of leading many highly innovative teams — and continues to innovate himself — I would agree with Mr. Jones’ conclusions, amplified even more strongly than he has made them. To me the issue is even more serious because, as we’ve chased deeper understanding of the fringes of technology, we’ve not only lost critical breadth in our technology understanding, we’ve also lost the strong cross-field connections (whether with different technologies or perhaps between technology and the humanities in general).

I personally come from an unusual educational background where my undergraduate technology college, Harvey Mudd, insisted on — and still requires — a very high percentage of non-major course work. I, for example, majored in Physics and minored in English Literature (a serious pursuit that I’ve continued over time, even if it doesn’t bring home the income that the major has). My graduate work was focussed solely in the specific disciplines of Optical and Electrical Engineering (for two different degrees), but even then I was allowed considerable freedom to explore a wider range of topics within those disciplines than is true today.

With the increased emphasis on specialization, organizations of all kinds that require high innovation to stay ahead in their fields try to make up for this by bringing together people from different areas of specialization in intense collaborative efforts. Online collaborative technologies of all kinds are helping bring these people together, and companies also harnessing what is referred to as “Open Innovation”, to leverage ideas from customers, strategic partners, and even what were once thought of as pure competitors to assist in innovating. Many people, such as in the recent New York Times‘ 12/5/08 article entitled “For Innovators, There is Brainpower in Numbers”, applaud these approaches.

All of this works to some extent, but I still believe the strongest innovations are ones where individuals are trained broadly enough so they can sense into where the edges of one technology (or business) ecosystem might just flow nicely into the edges of another such ecosystem. You’ve probably seen it yourselves in your own business, when one of your brighter employees takes the time to investigate something they’ve never explored before. They suddenly have insights and new ideas they would never have considered before. Just bringing highly-specialized people together has nowhere near the same innovative potential.

There are ways to work with this within your existing groups. The most innovative companies, such as Google (in Information Technology), IDEO (in Industrial Design), and Apple (in consumer products) make building these cross-discipline bridges a critical part of their creative process.

But if we continue down the path Mr. Jones warns us of in his research paper, we are going to end up with fewer and fewer of the true “Renaissance People” that in the past have been the source of our most brilliant innovations. Neither Soichiro Honda, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, nor Isaac Newton could have done what they did without broad cross-discipline understanding. In the present day, I would argue that the founders of most modern technology businesses would never have made their companies what they are today without such an understanding as well.

And for them, as with the esteemed Leonardo da Vinci whose face graces the beginning of this article, it all started with the educational process and from the earliest ages. We must insist on a return to those cross-disciplinary explorations as part of our fundamental learning processes if we are to stay truly competitive.

Finally, within the organizations we lead and with those we employ now, we should insist on taking some of the best and brightest in our midst and giving them the opportunity to play in areas they’ve never touched before. Because it may be that only by doing so will we continue to make the breakthroughs that can solve the critical problems of global warming and global health issues, among others, while at the same time enabling us to continue to enjoy the increasing quality of life that we hope to leave for future generations.

Whoever knew that sorting email would turn out to be such a major strategic innovation?

Yahoo just introduced an enhancement to their email system that does just that and it’s getting a great deal of press. Including from us, of course.

Why is it getting all this publicity? The concept they say they’re introducing includes a means of sorting your email automatically based on key people and organization connections in your profiles. It uses Yahoo Mail’s Welcome Page to display this sorting, all with the goal of enhancing connections and suggesting new relationships to consider, all the while making it easier and faster to clear through the clutter of stuff we all receive every day.

Sorting itself isn’t all that new, of course. Spam filters themselves, from the simplest to the most elaborate, already help remove significant parts of daily mailbox clutter to make it easier to see what’s important. Smart mailboxes, such as are already provided in Apple Mail, and affinity-sensing plug-ins such as Xobni for Microsoft Outlook also provide other great features for sorting and making other use of the content embedded within received emails.

But Yahoo’s solution to all this is nicely executed, at least according to the video of the enhanced mail application video Yahoo posted on December 15 at: http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/12/take-a-tour-of-yahoo-mails-new-smarter-inbox/. It should draw new customers just for these features alone.

Beyond “just mail sorting”, however, the enhanced mail application will also will provide easier linking and connecting to networking applications like Flickr, Flixter, and Xoopit, among others. All of which makes this more efficient and fun for all, especially for those of us used to digging through often hundreds of emails a day, even with the spam filters switched on high.

For Yahoo, the strategic advantage this offers is that it may move new potential Yahoo mail users to their platform. It may also bring at least some of those that already ported their logins for Yahoo mail into Outlook, Entourage, Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, among others, back to Yahoo’s web-based client. All of which means the potential for website stickiness on Yahoo, still one of the top website draws even with their recent tactical challenges.

But even that isn’t why this is such an important strategic move from my perspective. What is far more interesting to me is about how this may yet bring about the first major stage in dissolving the barriers between the major (currently proprietary) social networks.

The first step to “bringing down the walls” in this arena is Yahoo’s easy approach to giving proprietary visibility to communications from those most important to each of its users. The second step, far more insidious (in a good way), is the automatic linkage (via embedded APIs the user will never need to see) to social networking services such as Flickr (an early “linker” who is, not surprisingly, part of the Yahoo business structure). In part because using email is the initiating step and because email is truly the biggest “killer app” on the internet, this could enable social networking to grow in a big way — very fast.

As this approach takes off, customers with an interest in social networking will likely demand other APIs be made available, to connections such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among others. And then the walls will begin to break down. Slowly perhaps at first, but I predict we’ll begin to see the dissolution of proprietary walls between such services over the next few years. There will be a “tipping point” none of us will be able to precisely identify, but it will come.

And for those doubters out there, remember when all email was only readable via each system’s proprietary interfaces? That has gone by the way of the “Digital Dodo”, and so too will the walls between the proprietary networks. It may not happen by companies like Facebook and MySpace agreeing to lower their own walls; history shows us that the more successful companies become the less likely they are to take on their own “creative destruction” when perhaps it is exactly the right thing to do. But somebody, perhaps building on what Yahoo has just created in concept, will find the way around this, and perhaps even as a major open source initiative from somewhere.

Was that Google chuckling in the background?

It is tough staying in close contact with all those we need to in business these days, isn’t it?

Business is global of course, which means we all are dealing with an increasingly complex worldwide network of customers, regional subsidiaries, strategic partners, and consultants who are critical to our business success. The actual distance between many of those in our business networks is growing, and at a rapid pace.

Inside our own headquarters or company subsidiary, we’re also often so busy that it is also very difficult finding the time to listen to and share ideas with our bosses, peers, and employees. In this case, the apparent distance between us and those we should be communicating with more often is also growing.

So how do we all deal with this? For the best of us out there, we carefully allocate our time for the personal contacts we feel are musts, then make the best use we can of the modern tools of email, social networking structures, smartphones, and voicemail to keep in touch with the rest. Because the problem is both so big and so complex, however, the end result is often that we end up leaving many of those we need to stay connected with much too isolated.

Thankfully, there are solutions for this.

According to our most recent podcast guest Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski (shown at left), Chief Executive Officer of Virtual Distance International, one of the first steps is to be able to measure the effective “Virtual Distance” between members of a company team. The obvious problems which were known before will surface quickly, of course, but more subtle issues that are perhaps equally or more critical will also become visible. From there both short-term fixes and long-term process changes can be made that can dramatically improve team and company connections.

In our podcast interview with Dr. Lojeski, she also tells us about some of the false steps some companies have made as they have tried to solve this problem in too reactive a fashion, plus shares comments on the value of social networking tools such as Facebook or MySpace in shortening the “virtual distance” between us as individuals.

It’s an important podcast, and we encourage you to listen in. You can connect directly by clicking on the link below.

Stranova Vol. 34, “Virtual Distance,” with guest Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski, CEO of Virtual Distance International

Stranova has joined the Twitter cloud.

What’s Twitter? An easy way to send out quick notes on virtually whatever you want, in an “instant” mini-blog of sorts that’s open to the public — or private, if that’s what you want too.

How will we be using this? To post quick links and observations on recent discoveries and late-breaking news that we consider strategically important in one way or another. We may expand further on any of these topics in this blog — or maybe not. But either way we hope it will provide yet another way of sharing what we’re discovering literally every few hours, about issues related to Strategic Innovation in Business.

Where can you find our “Twitter” feeds? One way is via the widget in our blog’s sidebar; you will always be able to find it near the top of the sidebar on the left. You can also check out our “Tweets” via your browser at twitter.com/stranova. And if you’re already on Twitter yourself, we welcome you to “follow” us.

For those who are unfamiliar with Twitter and want to learn more, please go to Twitter’s website at: www.twitter.com.

If you see something in our Twitter feed that you’re curious about and want to learn more, as always, please write us.

Israel is the birthplace of numerous groundbreaking technology breakthroughs in fields as diverse as instant messaging, advanced telecommunications, and internet services. It also has one of the most networked technology communities anywhere, with corresponding significant benefits to the launching, staffing, and success of its entrepreneurial ventures.

In spite of such technological leadership, however, Israeli companies have seen far less success taking those big ideas and creating large companies based on them. The relative youth of the country is one reason for this, as few living within Israel have seen or been part of such organizations in order to have models to learn from. But even then, it would seem there should have been many chances for such companies to break free of past restraints and become giant forces in the world of high-tech business.

To understand more about this, we spoke with Israeli serial entrepreneur Shai Schiller, CEO of Modula, Ltd., a strategic investment firm, about some of the forces behind why this is happening and how the continuing evolution of Israeli high-tech ventures and outside forces such as foreign Venture Capital firms are stimulating business change on many levels.

With his many years of experience in managing and helping launch many different technology ventures, many of which were in the booming telecommunications field, Mr. Schiller is well-positioned to give an excellent perspective on what works — and what needs work — in the Israeli business ecosystem. We encourage you to hear out his ideas, both for an understanding of how the unique business ecosystem of Israel has evolved — as well as how that understanding may impact the very business ecosystems you work within and are helping to evolve on your own.

You can listen in by clicking directly on the link below:

Stranova Vol. 33, “The Evolution of the Israeli High-Tech Ecosystem,” with guest Shai Schiller, Chairman and CEO of Modula, Ltd.

This is an intriguing look at a highly controversial subject, and we hope you enjoy it. As always, please send us your comments by entering a comment on our blog below, or writing us at ideas@stranova.com.

As in many industries, the world of software for web publishing is dominated by one major player and a scattering of smaller players scrambling for their own piece of the market. One company that has found a way to rise above it all is Softpress Systems Ltd. of England with their flagship web design product, Freeway Pro.

The story of Softpress is an intriguing one, starting with their founding in 1993 “to address to emerging needs of professional publishers and designers for cross-media authoring tools”. They started as a page-layout software company aimed at publishing to print.

A year after Softpress’ founding, a company at that time known as Mosaic Communications released the world’s first commercial internet browser, Mosaic Netscape 0.9. Mosaic, later to be called Netscape, changed the world of publishing immediately.

As the world of the internet grew exponentially, so too did the need for new tools to design pages for this entirely new medium. Softpress then took a strategic leap, redesigning its software product line to create Freeway, a unique platform that combined the ease of page layout with a powerful platform to publish those pages to the web.

Along the way, they also proved skilled at managing strategic partnerships and customer relationships within their unique Mac-only ecosystem. Their story is a powerful one that illustrates how understanding the strategic positioning needs of a niche player in their business ecosystem can lead to strong continued success, in spite of the presence of much larger mainstream players around them.

To hear more about this company’s carefully crafted path to success, we talked with Mr. Ian Schray, U.S. Marketing Manager of Softpress Systems Ltd. You can listen in to his interview by clicking on the link below.

Stranova Vol. 32, “Freeway Pro and Softpress: Software Strategy for the Niche Player,” with guest Ian Schray, U.S. Marketing Manager for Softpress Systems Ltd.

Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, we also want to acknowledge that Stranova’s website itself was designed and published using Freeway Pro, but the software choice and the website were developed long before this interview was ever conceived.

We are proud to be able to showcase this company in yet another of our interview series with Strategic Innovators.

Update 6/13/08: We just heard today from Ian Schray that Softpress’s Freeway 5 was just honored with the Macworld UK award for “Creative Web Product of the Year”. We are happy to send our congratulations as well, in recognition of the well-deserved innovative work this company continues to produce.