Wait till you read the indictment (courtesy of LA Times) against former Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas.
Truly amazing tale of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Against that the backdating issues, even at over $ 2 billion, seem like small potatoes.
Of course, that's one side of the story. He plans to contest the charges.
Part mea culpa, part rant - fascinating this essay by Bill Lerach who terrorized many a technology company with his class action suits
He is a larger-than-life man you either love or hate. I am more in the dislike camp but would have paid to go watch the drama if he had tried Dick Cheney in court.
I am tough on Larry Ellison's company, Oracle on this blog.
But I think it is mean to say he "screws local schools" . He deserves to have a fair assessment of his property, like everyone else.
In many ways, he is a generous man. As I wrote last year, I consider him a modern day Medici.
I meant to write this after spending time with Mike Prosceno at the SAP Summit in December, but he beat me to it, as he reveals some personal details here.
He was in PR for a gun manufacturer. He was a bill collector. What great training for first analyst, and now blogger relations -)
As he says "software is a walk in the park" and most bloggers agree SAP has done a great job cultivating bloggers.
Speedo, not Naked, Conversations!
Steve Jobs delivers lots of goodies to his loyal troops every time he stands in front of them. Macworld was no different. But I think he had two lumps of coal in his sleigh this time.
The first is the promise of Maps without GPS. The experience is likely to be like this I wrote about. He should have waited for the 3G iPhone and embedded GPS on it. Cell tower or WiFi based location is close enough - to get lots of people lost and in accidents.
The other is movie rentals on iTunes. If it was Japan or Korea, where broadband is 20X to 30X faster than in the US, no problem. But people will gladly volunteer for root canals than spend hours downloading movies. And cable companies and telcos want the bandwidth but not at the flat rate we want to pay them.
In fairness to Apple, as with many of its products, its ability to innovate is often miles ahead of its ecosystem.
Microsoft will announce tomorrow that Tony Scott, currently CIO at Disney is going to become their new CIO, reporting to Kevin Turner, COO (himself a former CIO at Wal-Mart)
I cannot say enough good things about Tony. We worked briefly together at PwC (now IBM), and since then he has put together a great career with stops at GM, Bristol Myers Squibb and now Disney. Always available for a phone call or a speaking slot at a conference in spite of his schedule.
He joins Microsoft at an interesting juncture with at least some of the leadership in transition (Gates, Raikes) and the vendor seemingly more focused on Nintendo, Google, Apple and consumer markets more than the enterprise market.
Hopefully he will not just help them keep the IT lights on, but also get them far more excited about the enterprise market, and get more of the ears of his fellow CIO peers.
And I guess I will have to be just a bit nicer to Microsoft -)
Update 1/16 - Microsoft confirms
CIO Magazine and InformationWeek had earlier also reported on the likelihood. Interestingly, both think Microsoft is hiring him because of his Disney experience - so more consumer technology focus.
If it is, they will not be taking advantage of Tony's full range of capabilities. This at a time when many CIOs are not happy funding Microsoft much more so than consumers, and yet having to put up with a torrent of bug fixes and a Vista upgrade few can cost justify.
is Warren Buffett's philosophy on how much inheritance you leave your kids in this flattering Fortune article on Melinda Gates, the "$ 100 billion woman" and the charities of the Gates Foundation.
The print edition has a breakdown on the charities in global health, global development and US education. It is a full time job with the range of proposals it reviews and monitoring the grants the Foundation makes.
I am sure none of their charities get away with just putting 10% of the grants towards charitable use -)
When I read what Scoble had done to scrape info about his Facebook "friends" into Plaxo, I thought of recommending him as an ethical hacker to some of my clients.
Then Thomas Otter , a fellow EI, scares him from ever setting foot in Europe, by calling him a data pirate.
The irony is Robert is one of the most transparent people around. Data pirates cannot keep up with all the personal data he has left digital traces of. He even has his cell phone listed on his blog. I have availed of it in the past.
The ultimate in openness would be if he routes it through a personal 800 number. If he prefers, 1-800-DOT-KHAN may still be available -)
In his CES keynote last night, Bill Gates and a few of his friends - Bono, Hilary, Jon, Steve - make good natured fun of the legend as he prepares to retire.
Here is a YouTube version. Not a great copy - will post a better one when available.
BusinessWeek names Mark Hurd of HP as its business person of the year. Not only has he done well for investors, but at least in some enterprise customer eyes HP has been delivering value for money.
I disagree with the comment in the article that he has cleaned up all aspects of HP. From what I see and hear in the field several enterprise businesses like outsourcing still need a fair amount of streamlining, but to his credit Mark has been moving from one business unit to the next and in the next couple of years should have impacted other aspects of the business.
His biggest challenge to me is being able to sustain pricing premiums. Much of the PC and server growth is coming from emerging markets, where the weak US dollar is helping but likely will not sustain the premiums HP likes. In the western enterprise market, what Mark is doing to his own IT - consolidating data centers and slashing costs - is a role model for his customers. Cannot expect customers to just do as he says, not as he does.
Enough of future challenges ...let's congratulate him on the accolade. It's great to have a tech exec be designated a cross-industry leader.
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