The past several years have proven to be a sadly painful experience for Brockmann & Company on several levels.
First of all, my largest client went chapter 11 in early 2009 as the financial industry and the US economy sank into a deep recession. Our other clients in the communications industry cancelled their services, one was acquired, others were shutdown and many others cancelled their subscriptions to the point where our new services around mobile UC and consumer video conferencing and subscription service model did not catch on at a sufficiently profitable level. We’ve cancelled our publishing timetable and returned the funds to those paying subscribers.
In the meantime, we modified the site so that our extensive research library could be made available to those searching for relevant research results along the lines of our customer insight methodology. And find it they have. Our annual visitors to the website has grown to over 10 million, six million in the last two years along. And then, we’ve been developing products and services more in line with our potential and ambitions.
We partnered with several senior executives from a former communications equipment company and created a unique product idea that would deliver a new communications paradigm across the leading smartphone ecosystems, but in our search for funds, we weren’t able to get the engineering team or financing assembled to do the work, despite our initial strides in getting a business plan together. So, we all went out and found work as sales executives except I continued to build up my personal skill in creating iOS apps. That endeavor, called Digital Hermosa, is a platform for a modest success. Then, in 2011, Peter Brockmann found work with Apple, as a retail ‘Genius’, responsible for troubleshooting customer’s technical difficulties including executing repairs on all manner of Apple products in a local Apple store.
Although it is against company policy to speak or write publically about working at Apple (only corporate communications officials are empowered to do that), I do think it is helpful to me professionally and intellectually to continue to write about my personal experiences, not related specifically to the Apple store, the Apple brand or Apple products.
That being said/written, the humungous collection of writings over the past decade are here, under this heading on Brockmann.com for your perusal and are made available for insight and just plain industrial history.
