Zynga CEO Mark Pincus Explains The Pros And Cons Of Being A Public Company

Sure, going public in a predictable industry would be more fun. But being a company in transition doesn't make an IPO less necessary.

With Zynga’s stock trading at about 20% of the price it opened at last December, it was surprising that, when asked by Fast Company Editor in Chief Bob Safian about the consequences of becoming a public company, CEO Mark Pincus chose to start with the pros. “We want to build an Internet treasure,” he said at Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored Conference in San Francisco Thursday. “From the beginning…I wanted to build a company that could sustain not for two years or four years or even ten years but be something that really matters over time the way Amazon and Google and others have.” “The only way you can do that is to go public. I haven’t seen another way.” Liquidity helps sustain quality talent and investors, and going public is a way to achieve it without selling the company. But Zynga has lost several key employees as its stock price has tanked, and going public has also brought with it some clear cons. Transitions can be more difficult under the scrutiny of Wall Street. At the beginning of its life as a public company, Zynga is going through what Pincus calls its biggest transition ever. Long almost entirely dependent on Facebook for its income, the company has recently refocused its efforts on mobile games. Where once its mobile division focused on "with friends" games, this quarter no games were greenlit without a mobile component. “Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability,” Pincus says. “And we have not delivered on that predictability lately that we would like, that our investors would like.” Listen to the full audio: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in conversation with Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Robert Safian: Meanwhile, he says, employees go home for Thanksgiving and need to answer questions about the company because its news is now "everybody's news." “It’s hard, but I think it’s hard for any new company in a new industry to be public so early,” he said. “We’re still in an emerging and transforming market. It would be more fun at a point that the platforms and markets were if the market for social gaming were more defined and predictable. “ [ Image: Flickr user Joi]
Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Microsoft's Q1 Figures Plummet As PC Market Splutters & the World Waits for Windows 8

The financial earnings numbers keep piling up — and after a week of poor performances, the closing bell in the stock exchange is beginning to sound a bit like a death knell. Last night, Microsoft released its figures for Q1, which fell by 22 percent on the same time last year as the PC market tries to pull out of a massive wobble.

Microsoft’s Windows 8

At this point, after looking at all the figures, the wobble is beginning to look like a terminal skid on the black ice of tablet sales. But with Windows 8 in the works for next week, Microsoft is hoping to get itself back on track.

While there are a lot of positives to be taken from the figures — despite the fact that, in most business sectors Microsoft declined — everyone was focused on PCs. Specifically, they are wondering whether the Windows 8 OS will have enough umph-factor to create interest in a market that has gone tablet mad.

Indeed, most analysts suggest the timing of the Windows 8 release is a response to the growing popularity of tablets, since it includes new functionality that favors touch screens aimed at PC makers. Those PC makers are already talking up new ranges of laptops that will be able to double as tablets with detachable screens, or screens that fold down onto the keyboard. Is this where the Microsoft rebound will happen? Only time will tell.

Microsoft Q1

But returning to the figures; Microsoft was well below analysts’ expectations. Net earnings dropped by 22 percent, from US$ 5.74 billion this time last year, to US$ 4.47 billion for the quarter ending September 30 this year.

Revenues were US$ 16 billion, down 8 percent from US$ 17.4 billion in the same quarter last year. Revenues from Windows declined 33 percent to US$ 3.24 billion  — though if Microsoft had not deferred revenue related to Windows 8, that decline would be only 9 percent

Even the lucrative business applications division that develops and sells Microsoft Office products, which would normally be sustained by a buoyant PC market, declined by 2 percent, to US$ 5.5 billion in this quarter.

The Server & Tools business reported US$ 4.55 billion in first-quarter revenue, an 8 percent increase from the prior year period, driven by double-digit revenue growth in SQL Server sales and more than 20 percent growth in System Center revenue. This was also helped by the release of Windows Server 2012.

Standing back and looking at the numbers as a whole, they are in keeping with the figures of other major players in the market. IBM, which also reported earnings this week missed out on analysts’ expectations.

Microsoft’s PC Market

But for Microsoft, the real issue is how the PC market is going to hold up in the coming months and whether Windows 8 is going to help it pull it out of the doldrums.

The company is betting hard on this release — the biggest software product from Microsoft in years — with a US$ 1 billion global advertising campaign (already underway in the US) to counter act any negative feelings users may have about changes in Windows 8.

In fact, for this quarter Microsoft is using Windows 8 to explain many of its ills, which sounds a bit like placing too many eggs in the same basket.

While enterprise revenue continued to grow and we managed our expenses, the slowdown in PC demand ahead of the Windows 8 launch resulted in a decline in operating income. Multi-year licensing revenue grew double-digits across Windows, Server & Tools, and Microsoft Business Division products as businesses commit to our technology roadmap,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

DreamForce 2012: Closer Towards the Cloud Based Intranet? #df12

In last month's column I took a generic look at whether an organization could move its intranet to the cloud, lock stock and barrel. As ever, my conclusion was "maybe" as it very much depends on your organization and what exactly you want to do. While at DreamForce, I had the opportunity to return to this question.

Last week I, along with allegedly 90,000 others, attended SalesForce's DreamForce conference in San Francisco. This was my first DreamForce and it was interesting for many reasons: for example the product announcements and consolidation of acquired products and functionality into the SalesCloud, ServiceCloud and MarketingCloud product streams. But I was there with my work hat on, there to dig into and learn more about Chatter as a specific product, and to meet with other users and learn from them about their implementations.

The SalesForce teams definitely split the Chatter news into two broad categories: external facing use of Chatter in the form of the new Chatter Communities and the internal enterprise use of Chatter, which was largely focused on the ChatterBox file sharing offering. They even went so far as to have two distinct product road map sessions built around these two specific use cases.

Chatter for External Use - Communities

The SalesForce press release for Communities firmly places the functionality in the context of the ServiceCloud offering.

The story is all about enhancing existing customer facing web portals with social interactivity; it foresee's user based communities where customers can go to ask questions which may be answered by your staff, or by other communities members (wisdom of crowds and all that!).

In one session, the presenter used the term "next generation portal" in conjunction with the Service Cloud offering and istated that this would be based on Chatter Communities, Site.Com and applications built on the underlying Force.Com platform. I had an interesting discussion about the intranet possibilities of this combination with a SalesForce person, but we'll come back to that later.

Chatter for Internal Use - Chatterbox

ChatterBox is a file sharing solution able to sync documents between desktop, cloud and mobile devices. There is a simple FAQ online.

It should be noted that the apparent sweet spot for this product is the synchronization service. Unlike some others, I really don't see this killing off SalesForce's relationship with partners like Box.net or Spring CM. I can see ChatterBox's synchronization being useful if its use is built into certain processes, and of course if those processes are largely based on the base CRM (Sales Cloud) or Service Cloud, or Marketing Cloud etc, then so much the better.

Chatter IS your Intranet?

So as I mentioned, I had a quick chat with a SalesForce person about where the use of its platform and products could go from an intranet perspective. He stated that Chatter IS the "social intranet." I disagree. Some organizations are just not ready to make that leap!

I understand that Chatter is delivered via the portal layer of the Force.com platform, via the VisualForce user interface development tool kit, and thus you can use the (confusingly named) Force.com Sites capability to publish data into new tabs in the Chatter interface.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com