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Laura spoke to the concept of interactivity. The gating step is how much data can be delivered how fast over what system to the destination. I look back ten years ago and Netscape was the rage. My customers changed markedly from 1990 to 1996. In 1990, they were mostly software oriented people who could pop the top of a computer and fix stuff as fast as Gyro Gearloose could. Ten years before that, most computers with any power were the size of a refrigerator and word processing was something that required a special set of hardware - and Wang was its name....

Hollywood on the run. Hollywood is worried, although they have not yet had a full-blown panic attack. Their bedrock market - the one they have always taken for granted - is eroding beneath their feet. Generation X, is growing up and their tastes have changed. The once captive audience that grew up on the “Star Wars” movies that their parents took them to is finding that their own children are not nearly as impressed as the Gen-X parents once were with special effects....

Customers don’t want a 1/4-inch drill; they want a 1/4-inch hole. So said Ted Levitt and his article, “Marketing Myopia,” stands as a classic. In my own experience at Hewlett-Packard Medical Electronics, our engineers were positively charmed by their inventions, but what the savvier marketing folks understood was that the patient’s vital signs were not the central reason the equipment was purchased - although it was very important - but more to the point, the physicians and staff wanted a trend line....

The HP Way was not gentle. The principles that Bill Hewlett and David Packard set down to run Hewlett-Packard, HP, are not always accurately reported. For example, recently I heard a seminar where the speaker waxed on about corporate values. The speakers cited the HP Way, and nowhere is there a mention of a bottom line. I beg to differ. It’s rule number one. Packard writes, profit, [is] a measure of success, a source of strength; maximize it so long as you do so in ways consistent with the other objectives;...