deal architect

Disappointing, Bud

so I took my kids to Busch Gardens - the kids have been pass holders since they were born. In the men's room there is a note about how Anheuser-Busch keeps its profits in the US, whereas SABMiller (a sub of South African Breweries) repatriates most profits out of the US. I half expected to see Lou Dobbs walking around taping those notes. No he was not around, but there were several such notes around the rest room.

Come on, Bud. As your site proudly shows you are the world's largest brewer. You play on nationalist emotions in the US - it may bite you outside the US! Of course, Miller does not appear to want consumers (at least not US ones) to know about its parentage and went to court last year over it.

The two of you spend hundreds of millions in advertising and it has come down to restroom notices?

For the record, I am an occasional beer drinker - and my favorites depending on the weather and availability are- Singha (Thai), Miller Genuine Draft, Guinness (Ireland), Michelob Honey Lager, Negra Modela (Mexico), Coors Original and Tuborg (Denmark). The world of beer has so many more brands to offer - enjoy the bounty!

"The Deep Web"

While all the recent buzz is on the New Web - the congruence of the mobile web, blogging, podcasting, new Media -, several different data points this week brought to mind the Deep Web. As the site says the "60 largest Deep Web sources contain 84 Billion pages of content. For comparison, Google (the largest Crawler-based search engine) indexes 4 - 6 Billion pages."

I was talking to a Gartner executive last week  about the potential threat of blogging to their business model. If you buy in to the fact that Google and other search engines are becoming the de facto search interface for even corporate users, the likely search results on technology topics show blogger opinions first, then those from industry media, finally some publicly released industry analyst results.  If eyeballs are important, the analyst firms are losing that battle. 

Then I saw this Business 2.0 list of  "technologies that change everything" - and "Deep Web search" is one of them. It lists Google, IBM and Yahoo and a few specialist vendors as those to watch in the category. Oracle and Microsoft are noticeably absent.

Finally,  major book publishers sued Google this week for its attempts to digitize copyrighted materials - Google's attempt to make the Deep web a little "shallower".

I imagine the battles to digitize proprietary and other "deep" content and to optimize every growing search/database access is going to be just as fascinating to watch as the New Web evolution. 

Everything I know I learned from my Sock puppet

In 2001, over drinks with another entrepreneur, he spoke consolingly "Look at it this way. We used to be rich. Now we are just experienced!"

Business 2.0 points out a number of ideas being touted now were also  around in the 90s - but now we are more experienced, can execute them much cheaper, and have business models where customers pay!

Even with customers paying, Jeff Tash is not sure about Google's market cap...

Talking about Google, type "Failure" and click on "I'm feeling lucky".   Freudian slip?

Of blogs and egos

Jeff Tash is pretty introspective about his blog. We are all learning about these tools. Remember how labor intensive publishing can be - and see how much you are doing on your own. We are also running businesses full time.

Now, get back to writing more...I am up to 250 posts...you need to catch up! I look forward to learning more from you...

Azim Premji: "Let your child be a child"

The tech world is so full of egos that when you hear about speeches like the one Steve Jobs made at Stanford earlier this year - Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish - you just go wow!

I went wow again when I got forwarded this essay "If you are a parent" written by Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, and one of the richest men in Asia. He is a man who donates considerably to education causes, but also realizes India is creating a hyper-competitive, workaholic culture.  I have written before about his personal modesty - and most Wipro employees I have met reflect his soft style.

As for my brats, ...credit to my wife who has allowed them to stay kids...  of course, my daughter cannot wait to grow up, my son wants to stay Peter Pan...

Technology "Agenda Setters"

OK, so there are hundreds of top 50 lists...but this one of industry influencers published by silicon.com is one of the most balanced I have seen. Includes usual tech leaders (from IBM, Motorola, Microsoft), but also emerging ones (from Skype, Linux, Google), offshore firms (Wipro, TCS), new media (BBC, News Corp) and government officials (China, EC, Korea). Published from London, I was surprised to see no one from SAP make the list (Oracle did not either). Also scary to see Organized crime make the list of 50. The industry probably considers the "no software patent" advocate, Florian Mueller, no. 43 in the list an even greater threat. Read on...

Return of the dot.coms?

Sure sign that investment in consumer technologies is back when you start to get "top 5" lists of VCs  driving the "new Web".  Us who live in the enterprise world can be cynical or we can look for ways to exploit the coming convergence...

Keeping the US competitive

A wide ranging set of observations and recommendations about keeping US competitive especially with growing concerns about competition from Chindia came out last week from the US National Academies of Sciences. See the entire pre-publication copy of "Rising above the Gathering Storm" here.

Four high level initiatives recommended by the powerful committee (CEOs of Intel, Exxon Mobil; Presidents of Yale and MIT, 3 Nobel prize winners among them):

a) Ten thousand teachers, 10 million minds - increasing investment in K-12 science and math
b) Sowing the seeds - investments in basic research
c) Best and Brightest - incentives for Americans and immigrants and doctoral and other foreign students
d) Incentives for innovation - IP protection, tax incentives, broadband ubiquity

Now for some action...

The VoIP war

The battle lines are being drawn as this article lays out with the large and national telecom and cable companies using software from Narus to "block, or otherwise interfere with, (VoIP) data packets as they travel through the network". Fortunately, consumers can count of fans of IP telephony like Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, ebay (with Skype) to keep pushing their interests...

More salespeople tricks

This continues my periodic series of things sales folks say during pitches. Earlier ones are here and here.

a) "You are trying to commoditize us" - a common statement during negotiations.  Excuse me, most of corporate America makes 10 to 30% gross margins. Even the offshore vendors are close to 50% gross margin and the bigger software companies all make 70% plus. If there was a Wal-Mart like channel, tech vendors would understand what commodity pricing meant

b) "We want to be a partner, not a vendor". OK, in that case we want a board seat and some equity....

c) "Gartner (or Forrester) puts us in the top right of their magic quadrant".  Gartner has many, many quadrants and they change at least twice a year. In a recent deal, three SIs had different quadrants in which they were magically all  in the top right quadrant...

More to come...