Has much changed since 2006?

When applying for jobs, I’ve been thinking about my greatest success(es) and my greatest failure(s). There are very few that I can claim to be solely mine – most of my work has been a team effort and I will do some posts in the next few weeks to recognise some of those teams and dig out some old photos of teams, successes and one or two failures!?

I have only really come up with one success that was all my own work, although it was only successful because of some key people who recognised what I might be able to do and took a risk on flying me and my family from Taiwan to the UK in 2006. I ended up working to help develop the Arm ecosystem for Arm 2006-12 and then Linaro 2011-19. The thing that I did alone and which brought me into the ecosystem was a presentation for my interview at ARM (sic) that looked at how the company could develop its ecosystem and increase sales by leveraging networks.

I’m posting today, not only because it’s 15 years since I applied to work at Arm, but also because I have just noticed that Amazon is sadly retiring Alexa.com on 1 May 2022 (after 25 years). How on earth could those be connected? I used Alexa.com for some of the supplementary material I created looking at ARM’s web presence at the time.?

My 2006 presentation was created for Arm when I was in Taiwan from publicly available information. I thought it would be interesting to share now to see how Arm has progressed and what has changed. The only edit I have made is removing the names of the people who interviewed me from the first page of the first deck.

In many respects not much has changed since 2006 – we had video conferencing, Skype, LinkedIn and Facebook, analytics, SEO, accessibility issues, virtual communities and community currencies (e.g. Second Life and the Linden dollar), and Twitter was just starting. There are many things in the presentation that are still valid today (with minor updates):

1. In the first deck, slide 9 Is ARM ready for interaction? I would replace blogging by “Engagement” and this is one thing that most organisations are still not ready for – they want their engagement to be messaging out and money in with people to manage crises. Engagement has to be about more than transmitting – it has to be two-way and this takes resources. The one item on this slide I don’t remember clearly and I may disagree with now is Interpret – restrict input to positive contributions – this is no longer possible because things move so fast and the key now is to be ready to let negativity disappear as water under the bridge, divert it to a manageable space, or admit issues and set out a plan to address.
2. Slide 25: Why networks and what are they? is a good summary that applies equally well today and reinforces the message that engagement is multi-way, but the methods of online interaction have grown since then.
3. Slide 26: “Networks” in ARM’s marketing mix is an interesting and valid view that could be usefully done for many organisations. The two columns missing from this table are historical and potential value/ROI, which will be different for each row depending on the target markets and nature of the business.?
4. For engagement in other languages,?I mention sites in English, traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew. My focus has always been mainly English and Chinese, but I recognise the massive value of others. With Google’s APIs and lots of good CMS options, most work can (and should where it makes sense) be made accessible (this doesn’t necessarily mean translating everything, but more ensuring all the signposts are clearly translated) in multiple languages while retaining a single master source. I was interested to be reminded of my mention of Hebrew and I had a quick look to see how companies have been using this. The most interesting piece I found on this was from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in October last year talking about how Chinese players are leveraging Hebrew media to engage with people in Israel. I note that Arm now only features its English, Traditional Chinese and Japanese websites on the arm.com domain. Their China operation has become complicated and the latest I have seen on that came out earlier today in DataCenterDynamics.
5. In the second deck, slide 2 General web guidelines still looks good to me, although printer-friendly is not so important for many now and the client-side dependencies should be changed to maximise platform support and accessibility across all platforms – mobile, portable, desktop,...

Since I can only access Alexa.com for a few more months, I thought it would be interesting to how things have changed since 2006. For slide 4 in the 2nd deck: Arm and Renesas (with much more than just processors) are still around, MIPS became part of Imagination and then came back out in 2017, ARC is part of Synopsys, Tensilica is part of Cadence, and we now have RISC-V.

As the Internet has grown, maintaining your rank actually means you are doing a pretty good job, growing it means you are moving forward against the current. At the time this was done, DigiTimes.com was in the top 20,000 websites, but it has now dropped to 100,500. They have continued to publish very similar content, but so much has grown around them. A site I used as a target benchmark was the digital photography review site dpreview.com since they were in the top 1,000 websites at that time, now they are ranked 2,999 and so this again I think reflects growth of the Internet.

I also used Netcraft to learn about some of the websites shown in the presentation and that is still running smoothly. The site title: “Artificial Intelligence Enhanced Computing – Arm?” and description: “Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and data revolution. The Arm architecture is the keystone of the world’s largest compute ecosystem. Together with 1000+ technology partners, we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing artificial intelligence enhanced computing.” are very interesting. Arm ranks top for this on Google, but it links only to their home page at arm.com and developer.arm.com with no reinforcement of the term that I can find elsewhere and Google trends has no data on the use of this term. Happy to see them still using “at the heart of” and this obviously still resonates with many, but it does not appear to now be consistently used.

On slide 6 of the second deck Things to do I listed out the ARM search ranking in Google and Yahoo! I had a quick look to see how this has changed and they have improved their ranking for microprocessor, but not by much and they have allowed Intel and Renesas to get or stay ahead of them. Looking at their pages now, it’s clear that they prioritise processor, but it’s interesting to see that Intel have two listings above them and Synopsys is not far behind.

Major changes since 2006 include the growth of social media networks, the growth in individual influencers ahead of traditional media sites, and the mass adoption of mobile platforms, but I believe many of the principles in my 2006 presentations remain the same. Thanks if you have got this far and I hope you have been able to access the presentations and found something of interest in this piece.

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