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Kindle Notes & Highlights
First, they anticipated a large jump in performance from putting more and more of the graphics pipeline onto a single chip.
Nvidia, by contrast, planned to use that extra density to add more parallel processors, boosting performance—a
Incumbents focused on cutting costs while nvidia focused on improving computing (incumbent inertia?)
The GPU [graphics processing unit] is going to be the center of technology and value added in consumer computing.”
Focus on value added product instead of costs by improving computing capability through proprietary design
They made this assessment after meeting with the DirectX team and finding them to be graphics enthusiasts who wanted to push the frontier as fast as possible.
Though not the end user, Nvidia understood developers well and what their goals were in delivering a valuable product to end users
looked possible to advance graphics power three times faster than CPU power, Nvidia could deliver a substantial upgrade in graphics power every six months instead of every eighteen months.
Requires agility where incumbent inertia will slow competition
Nvidia team designed a set of cohesive policies and actions to turn their guiding policy into reality.
Here's how we will complete 6 month development cycles... The coordinated actions follow
The first step in executing the guiding policy was the establishment of three separate development teams.
Every 6 months, delivering more powerful graphics cards?
Nvidia invested heavily in simulation and emulation techniques and organized its chip design process around these methods.
Such tools were the forte of founder Chris Malachowsky,
Importance of a strong team
To protect against these kinds of problems, the company also invested in the more difficult task of simulating the electrical characteristics of the chip.
Continuously investing in derisking activities that would lead to delays in a 6 month development cycle, thereby increasing value with coordinated programs
To address these problems, Nvidia took control of the creation and management of drivers for its chips, developing a unified driver architecture (UDA).
Change in business model to increase production reliability, yield, and coordination between complementary components of the business
They described the obstacles created by current industry practices,
showed the economic benefits of the unified driver architecture,
the lower prices contract board manufacturers...
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The difference is that the effects of Intel’s performance increases have been substantially dulled by hardware and software bottlenecks it cannot control. On the other hand, as Nvidia’s leaders envisioned, the performance of graphics chips is experienced directly and immediately by users.
in general, if you have a “me-too” product, you prefer fragmented retail buyers. On the other hand, if you have a better product, a powerful buyer such as Dell can help it see the light of day.
Sometimes the impediment is the innovator’s patent or similar protection, but more often it is an unwillingness or inability to replicate the innovator’s policies.
he was setting a goal, not designing a way to deal with his company’s challenge.
Second, growth is the outcome of a successful strategy, and attempts to engineer growth are exercises in magical thinking.
The network of human capital in this industry was sparse and well understood.
acquiring it would deny these scarce competencies to a competitor.
a good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown.
you first test a new conjecture against known laws and experience.
If the hypothesis survives that test, the scientist has to devise a real-world test—an experiment—to see how well the hypothesis stands up.
you are working with accumulated wisdom about your business and your industry that is unlike anyone else’s.
A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work.
it must embody some ideas or insights into new combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities.
deduction applies a fixed set of logical rules to a fixed set of known facts.
Solving a problem in a predictable way...not strategy, just solving, literally
To generate a strategy, one must put aside the
comfort and security of pure deduction and launch into the murkier waters of induction, analogy, judgment, and insight.
To expect to make money from a new business, the entrepreneur should know something that others do not, or have control of a scarce and valuable resource.
One of the most important resources a business can have is valuable privileged information—that is, knowing something that others do not.
once Schultz initiated business operations, he began to accumulate privileged information.
It did so in order to be able to mutually adjust multiple elements of its business and to capture the information generated by each element of its business operations.
When a company can buy perfectly good products and services from outside suppliers, it is usually wasteful to go through the expense and trouble of mastering a new set of business operations.
when the core of a business strategy requires the mutual adjustment of multiple elements, and especially when there is important learning to be captured about interactions across business elements, then it may be vi...
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think through the intersection between what was important and what was actionable.
To search for a new insight, one would have to put aside the comfort of being oriented and once again cast
around in choppy waters for a new source of stability.
To put it simply, our minds dodge the painful work of questioning and letting go of our first early judgments,
You can choose how you will approach a problem; you can guide your own thinking about it.”
the ability to think about your own thinking, to make judgments about your own judgments.
This experience accumulates in the form of associations between situations and “what works” or “what can happen” in those situations.
First, you must have a variety of tools for fighting your own myopia and for guiding your own attention.
Second, you must develop the ability to question your own judgment.
Third, you must cultivate the habit of making and recording judgments so that you can improve.
The kernel is a list reminding us that a good strategy has, at a minimum, three essential components: a diagnosis of the situation, the choice of an overall guiding policy, and the design of coherent action.
The concept of the kernel defines the logic of a strategy—the bare-bones minimum.
the kernel does, however, is remind us that a strategy is more than a localized insight. It is an internally consistent argument that leads from facts on the ground to diagnosis, thence to an overall directive, thence to action.
strategy also embodies an approach to overcoming some difficulty.
