The invisible risk for the product development

The recent news about the acquisition of the microprocessor design firm, ARM, made me think about the invisible risk for product development.

In previous articles I had written about strategies for a successful product development, as well as what is the focus of the product manager.

Before we continue, lets address the elephant in the room.

ARM is a huge asset

ARM as a company has almost unlimited potential. Many mobile devices use their technology to power the heart of billion devices—their CPU.

Another important factor to take into an account is the future. Both Apple and Microsoft have a plan to introduce or had introduced ARM powered devices and tablets. And we all know that Apple has the largest market cap in the history of the stock exchange.

This means that the technology and its current neutrality are important globally.

Why neutrality?

ARM does not manufacture its own chips, what it does instead is the creation of reference designs. Those CPU designs are used by different manufacturer companies to produce their own products. This business model reduces the potential conflict of interests.

Think about Google.

Google is the custodian of the Android operation system. Everything was fine until they bought Motorola division and the HTC division. After that, Google introduced the Pixel brand. Now the company is competing with other mobile phone makers. At the moment, the Google market penetration in the mobile market is really low, that’s why no one from their competitors is raising any red flags. Here we have to acknowledge Huawei which are not allowed to use USA technologies, and they are now faced with the challenge to build their own operation system. According to statistics from statscounter.com, their current marker share is around 2,36%.

The risk for the product development when NVIDIA complete the acquisition

NVIDIA is a producer of graphic card chips and had manufactured a tablet in the past, the so-called NVIDIA Shield. This means a hardware chip manufacturer with a dominant market presence has now a key technology which both Apple and Microsoft will rely on.

This position NVIDIA to a key place in the future, at the same time many product development divisions have to ask themselves what does this mean for their products. If they continue to use this technology, will they still have a competitive advantage?

What If NVIDIA decides to manufacture mobile CPUs? How will Exynos and Qualcomm be positioned?

Was there a similar risk for the product development in the past?

We can learn from the past and use it to predict the future.

I can name another big acquisition that affected the industry for good or bad. The acquisition of SUN Microsystems by Oracle. If you don’t know, SUN owned the technology Java and actively developed it. Java is a platform for independent programming language, which powers many modern enterprise software solutions.

At the time of the purchase, SUN developed the technology and distributed it free of charge. After Oracle took control, one of the first thing they did was to sue Google for copyright and patent infringement.

Product Management and Plan B

When we develop product and key technologies are not under our control, we should always have a Plan B. Yes, this could cost us time and money to develop, but what we learn from the past is that once a big player with key technologies is purchased, there is a good reason for that.

We might not know what the future of the ARM vendors will be, but one thing is sure. The future of the product development hardware will become more dynamic and hopefully we will see bigger competition of ideas and innovation.

What is your opinion about the purchase of ARM?

Please share it in the comments below!

Aleks Vladimriov is a Senior Software Developer, recognized Project Manager and Soft-skilled trainer and a coach.

Aleks Vladimirov

Solution Engineering Manager at Thales | Senior IT Professional | Startup Mentor and Product Manager

Bio

Aleks is experienced Product Manager with an engineer background and over 10 years of experience as a software developer. He works with different governments and is responsible for negotiation features and requirements, understanding the customers’ needs and supporting the senior management with regular reports and analysis. He held various positions starting as a software developer, moving to a team leader and software architect.

He strives in waterfall and agile environment alike. He is certified Scrum Master and Prince2 Practitioner and he knows how to design business processes and help teams optimize their work.
During his tenure, he had to wear many hats, prioritizing business requirements, delegating work and mentoring team members, creating mockups with Balsamiq, providing MS Project plan to the senior management.

He had worked in many international teams, located in the same city or distributed in different countries and continents. He had been a team leader of cross functional international team of 8 people.

In his current position, he is very much client focused. He has excellent presentation skills.
He delivers training sessions on presentation skills and leadership and he had helped hundred of people to improve their presentation skills.

He is also interested in creating more positive changes in the workplace by using entrepreneurship skills.
He had won startup competition where his team had validated and develop a business idea from scratch.

In his free time, he writes in his blog about effective product development.

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The invisible risk for the product development