Software - Publications - Faculty & Research

2016
Working Paper

The Reference Wars: Encyclopedia Britannica's Decline and Encarta's Emergence

The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed sale... View Details

Keywords: Market Entry and Exit; Service Operations; Emerging Markets; Applications and Software; Books; Information Technology Industry; Information Industry

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January 2009
Teaching Note

VMWare Inc., 2008 (TN)

By: Andrei Hagiu

Teaching Note for [709435]. View Details

Keywords: Competition; Applications and Software; Mergers and Acquisitions; Initial Public Offering; Management Succession; Information Technology Industry

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January 2002 (Revised February 2002)
Case

Postgirot Bank and Provment AB: Managing the Cost of IT Operations

By: F. Warren McFarlan and Nancy Bartlett

Describes a specific approach for measuring the efficiency of the groups of computers inside an organization and suggests ways this tool may be used to reduce the company's computing investment while maintaining service. It is a software-enabled industrial engineering... View Details

Keywords: Cost Management; Investment; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Style; Information Technology; Applications and Software

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Profile

Paola Lara

Paola Lara studied software engineering for a simple reason: “I thought it was the future of the world.” But once she immersed herself in the industry, Paola “realized I didn’t want to be programming the rest of my life,” and decided to... View Details

30 Mar 2022
Blog Post

How I Spent My HBS 2+2 Deferral: Adrian Obleton

transformation. I then spent 6 months at a PE fund investing in technology businesses. Finally I spent a year and a half at Turbonomic, a mid-sized VC-backed software company, in their strategy and operations team. I also spent the last 2... View Details

17 Jul 2006
Lessons from the Classroom

Developing a Strategy for Digital Convergence

course returns to the classroom in the 2006-2007 academic year with several new cases. "These range from the very technical—VMWare, which develops software for virtualization on servers, and SAP, which develops View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Computer; Education

18 Jun 2001
Research & Ideas

Caught in the Cogs: When Manufacturing and IT Meet

their IT problems, Upton explained, managers are faced with a "spectrum of solutions." At one end is packaged software available off-the-shelf to all comers, including your competitors. Trouble is, when the same product is in... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Aisner

01 Sep 2016
News

Research Brief: Cultivating Creativity through Competition

given to their competitors. Using analytical software that evaluates visual similarities between designs, Gross compared each submission with prior entries by the same designer, and related the similarity to the number and quality of... View Details

Keywords: Erin Peterson

30 Oct 2020
News

Billion-Dollar Valuations and Exits for Harvard-born Startups

Lissy Hu (MBA 2014) Lissy Hu (MBA 2014) Two harvard-born startups announced big milestones this week. CarePort Health,a web-based health care software startup led bycofounder and CEO Lissy Hu (MBA 2014), was acquired for $1.35 billion.... View Details

Web

Data Tips & Toolkits - Research Computing Services

other programs to transcribe audio. Additional free speech to text apps include: Google Gboard Just Press Record Speechnotes Transcribe Windows 10 Speech recognition The Dragon series by Nuance : software providing audio to text services.... View Details

30 Oct 2018
News

Paths of Victory

Competition had on their business. Parker Treacy (MBA 2012) Founder of Cobli, 2016 Alumni Track Grand Prize Winner Cobli, based in Brazil, is a vehicle fleet logistics business tapping into the South American market of 50 million vehicles. The company’s View Details

Keywords: Alumni New Venture Contest; Support Activities for Transportation; Transportation; Machinery Manufacturing; Manufacturing; Administration of Human Resource Programs; Government

13 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

How to Pick Managers for Disruptive Growth

venture between Intel and SAP that was launched in 1997 to create a new-market disruption selling enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to small businesses. Intel and SAP hand-picked some of their most successful, tried-and-true... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Raynor

January 2024
Case

Flashfood: The Magic of Commitment

By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti

Josh Domingues had accomplished what countless young entrepreneurs long to achieve: founding a promising company that aspires to make the world a tangibly better place. Shocked to learn that international food waste cumulatively amounted to the world’s third largest... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneur; Founder; Startup; Business Model; Business Startups; Food; Applications and Software; Mission and Purpose; Environmental Sustainability; Canada

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18 Aug 2009
First Look

First Look: August 18

approximately welfare neutral. Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-011.pdf Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity: Evidence from Software Development (revised) Authors:Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

23 Aug 2004
Research & Ideas

Strategy for Small Fish

number of niche firms for long, sustained periods of time. In the software industry, a large number of niche players have endured for many years, constantly generating a variety of product innovations. Despite the contraction caused by... View Details

Keywords: by Marco Iansiti & Roy Levien

11 Dec 2006
Research & Ideas

Fixing Price Tag Confusion

instead of being all-inclusive, was partitioned as "Hardware $1,500 + Software $500" consumers would investigate their feelings about both hardware performance and software desirability, and they might get... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

13 Jan 2023
Blog Post

Video: Introduction to the Harvard MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences

engineering prototyping, even a little bit of software and algorithm development. So eventually, when they go to launch their own venture or run their own team, they have an awareness of all the different parts that go into that. Tom... View Details

01 Mar 2007
News

Microsoft’s Ballmer Makes His Pitch

Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office suite of products, Ballmer dismissed the challengers as caring more about altruism than profit. He insisted there will continue to be demand for Microsoft software that delivers feature-rich... View Details

Keywords: News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information; Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services; Professional Services

01 Sep 2007
News

Club Leaders Get a Boost from Campus Conference

history. For two days in late May, representatives from the School’s extensive network of alumni clubs convened on campus to exchange ideas, participate in case discussions with faculty, and learn about AlumniMagnet, a new community-building View Details

Keywords: clubs; Centennial; outreach; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
Case

GameStop: Social Media Finds a Cheat Code (A)

By: Joseph Pacelli and Sarah Mehta

This case covers the events leading up to the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. Using GameStop as an illustrative example, the case explores the rise in retail trading, increased financial information sharing on social media, and the gamification of investing enabled by... View Details

Keywords: Value; Stocks; Financial Markets; Social Media; Investment; Applications and Software; Financial Services Industry; United States

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