in 1958 a young mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot went to work as a research assistant at IBM. His first task seemed to be a direct issue, but it appeared to be terribly complex. He had to figure out the noise that appeared in the communication lines and find out how to reduce it.
His solution was simple but innovative. I realize that there is only one type of influence; two types. The first is what he called Joseph's Influence following the good seven-year story followed by a lean seven years, an effect that could have been predicted, and the second called Noah's Effect, an anarchic and unforeseeable effect. It is then discovered that these two influences are found in more than one line of communication, but in almost everything from the flood of the Nile to the collapses of the financial markets plays a destructive role in our ability to see the future and, more importantly, can help us understand the fragile, uncertain, complex and long-term work environments.
How Google took advantage of Joseph's influence to create the world's most popular e-mail services by 2004. Was already dominant in its class and making huge profits, accounting for 90% of Internet searches, valued at $ 20 billion, which is a large amount in time. After five years of work it seemed that the company could not be stopped.
But the company was having a problem. People would go to the site and find what they were looking for and then leave. While this was great for users, the company realized that it could take advantage of their survival for some time. The question was: How does the company increase the time people spend on its platform without compromising the main research mission?
The answer was found in Gmail, a new mail service launched by Google with an offer that could not be rejected: 1 GB free storage space. This did not resolve the competition completely but it changed the game altogether, provided hundreds of times the space provided by market leaders, Yahoo and Hotmail at that time, which was 2 MB and 4 MB
Google could jump on every competition because it understood the impact of Joseph. With few users on the e-mail service, 1 GB would cost competitors more than Google would pay, while the cost of storage devices fell very quickly. With a 1GB user base, it will be cheap. By understanding the expected continuity of Joseph's influence, Google caused a coup.
Why are Microsoft and IBM still successful?
Each company is essentially a pig box waiting for a circular opening (such as English indicates the inability to adapt to the community). No matter how you analyze and plan, every business strategy is a pure luck process. You do your best to reduce options, but in the end you have to be aware of the many opportunities available.
Microsoft and IBM are two leading examples of this theory, both companies have been able to stay in the market for decades and more than a century in the case of IBM and have survived many technological cycles. Most of their former rivals are not late or out of the market, but the two companies are still making profits with strong margins.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the two companies fell prey to the irregular influences of Noah. Microsoft has missed the mobile phone market terribly, as well as the recent cost of moving from installed systems to cloud services, an estimated 20 percent loss for IBM. In the end every business model fails. But both companies are booming in new technology fields. Microsoft's cloud services business grows 100% annually and IBM has a leading position in industrial intelligence and quantitative computing. By understanding the unforeseen effects of the Noah's interruptions, Microsoft and IBM were able to compete in the long term.
How does it matter to Google to embrace "the effects of Noah"?
As we mentioned above Google is a lady taking advantage of Joseph's influence. For nearly two decades, the company has dominated the search engine market and has benefited from the development of other major business ventures such as YouTube and the Android mobile operating system. The company is also making huge profits, with net profits exceeding $ 30 billion, with an annual growth of over 20%.
However, its success in the search engine market remains a Achilles' heel for it. More than 90% of the company's profits come from ads related to its central search system. In the end you will face the same problems that Microsoft and IBM have faced. What will happen to Google if the search is no longer profitable enough?
It is clear that the company understood this and embraced the principle of the effects of Noah. The company regularly invites 30 top researchers to spend a full year at Google, offering them the best technologies and data sets in the world to work on. It has also established new organizational structures such as Section X and Fairly to seek opportunities not related to its main area of operation. None of these bets has yet come to fruition. So from the perspective of Joseph's influence they do not seem very useful, but from the perspective of the effects of Noah it is always better to build the ship before the storm.
Not everyone who walks around is bewildered
In 1993, IBM successfully carried out its quantum quantum experiment, where the experiment was a scientific victory, helping to refute one of Einstein's last theories. But it did not benefit IBM much commercially, which was approaching bankruptcy at the time. Many thought that IBM was an impact from the past decades and the scientific experiment did little to change that perspective.
But today it is paying off. As the Moore Law draws closer to its theoretical limits, the predictive effects of Joseph's path give way to the discontinuity of Noah's effects and the need for new computing geometry becomes urgent. So IBM's recent announcement of the 17Kobit computer makes IBM's early experience a truly smart one. This is the dilemma in which every business finds itself. We are governed by clients and investors and how we deal with Joseph's influences. We must accurately anticipate what customers want and how much we should provide. If you expect this wrongly, you will pay a heavy price.
In the long term, Noah's influence becomes dominant and it becomes necessary for us to prepare for a future we do not see. In the last analysis, it is more important to explore than to expect, we will never know what the flood looks like, but we can be sure it will come.