deal architect

"Blawging"

If there is no money is blogging, what are all these lawyers doing? Must be the conference and training revenue   :-) Courtesy of Zoli.

Nick Carr lists several legal issues specific to employee blogging and also points to an article on blogging and IP issues. Here is another nice list of blogging considerations from another attorney.

Our day will come

We will get paid to podcast from an IBM conference. Gartner probability of 0.2.

The probability drops to 0.0 if I keep writing posts like this. And get PR treatment like this one.  Ah, the perks of blogging!

Easier to Copy than Innovate

So says Rob Carter, CIO at Fedex in this Fortune interview. But Fedex would rather innovate and has an enviable track record of technology innovations that have made its supply chain efficient, tracking packages easier for customers and its drivers much more productive.

He also talks about how UPS has caught up in a number of technology areas. See my profile of UPS technology here.

Cardinal Sins

I have heard of a UPS person being reprimanded for taking a Coke can into Pepsi headquarters.

I have heard of Citicorp rejecting expense receipts on Amex cards.

And now I hear if you are Steve Ballmer's (Microsoft)  kids you dare not use Google or try an iPod. I imagine his salesfolks dare not use salesforce.com...

Update: A contractor for Intel was asked to show his personal laptop. He is convinced if it had an AMD chip he would not have been given the work

A vendor bidding for business at Delta was asked what flight he came in on night before. The Delta exec checked his reservation to make sure he had not flown on the competition.

Why Nick Carr - and blogs - matter

Couple of years ago, Nick Carr stirred things up by saying IT doesn’t matter. He then proceeded to launch a blog on technology topics. Now he says corporations should not blog. Ironically, he says that on his blog and then proceeds to provide pretty good tips on how corporation can blog well if they decide to.

Nick is provocative and often inconsistent. But I have come to enjoy Nick’s wicked sense of humor. I read his blog on a regular basis and often comment on his posts.

He is the poster child for why corporations should learn to blog. At little cost he has a powerful publishing platform – and reach around the world. 

Just like a segment of US audiences get their daily news from Jon Stewart, many of us get our news and analysis from blogs, not MSM or industry analysts.

It could be the instant analysis and feedback. It could be the mysterious nature of where an embedded link in a blog post may take us next. It could be the fascinating, viral way in which blog world reacts to news and other blogs. Psycho-analyze that to death if you want, but the reality is blog readership – or really “readwritership” that blogging facilitates – is growing dramatically.

Corporations need to learn to use this medium to reach this growing audience. For too long, corporate executives have communicated with their customers from behind their call centers and via templatized emails on their web sites. And relied on press releases and commercials to get their messages out. 

No matter what Nick says – or reverses course on - blogs do matter.

Update: I saw on Robert Scoble's blog that he has been presenting to a group of corporate and government audiences on the hows and risks of blogging. That is a healthy trend. Corporations have to explore this medium and decide on their own rules of engagement, not just ignore it.

Salesperson Tricks Part IV

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

a) "R&D spend is not correlated to innovation"

"There are a number of studies which show that innovation is not tied to how much you spend on R&D" is a objection handler when salespeople are asked why only 5 -10-15% of revenues go towards R&D. True enough, but here is something which is even more guaranteed. No - zip - product innovation ever comes out of the 50+% that many tech vendors spend on sales, marketing and administration. So, try reversing the proportion between R&D and SG&A.

b) "Go ahead save some money now. You will need it during the lawsuit."

Implication that going with a lower priced competitor is inherently risky. Well, let's see - Southwest Airlines has consistently been a low cost competitor. And in 30+ years of its history has the best safety record of all major US airlines. There are outages every day at Oracle and EDS customers - it's just if a SaaS vendor has an outage it is more publicized. Most buyers do additional due diligence when they go with a lower cost vendor. Most come to the conclusion that incremental risk (if any) is worth the savings.

The robust US economy

Sebastian Mallaby of Washington Post on the  US economy. 

The Dukes of Decibel

Introducing THE MEN of telecom (see Sticking it to the Men).

I have a feeling we will be seeing these telecom executives more and more across the technology spectrum beyond telecom. As they take on net neutrality, as mobile applications take off, as SaaS and hosting needs explode, as global trade grows, as they get more into systems integration they will become broad based tech players and many are already bigger than the biggest tech vendor, IBM.

BusinessWeek writes about Ed Whitacre of AT&T
NY Times on Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon
Wikipedia on Arun Sarin of Vodaphone
Macworld on Kai-Uwe Rocke of Deutsche Telekom
Daily Youimuri on Norio Wada of NTT

and plenty more on this ballot for Most Influential Communications executive in 2005.

A sign of the growing global and inter-locking market: Arun is an US citizen, born in India. His Vodafone recently sold its Japanese mobile business to Softbank, and still holds a chunk of Verizon Wireless.

The "Men" and Travel

I wrote before how the telecom industry sticks it to us in "fringe" services. It is particularly bad when you travel because then everyone seems to pile on - airports, hotels, and of course the "men" themselves.

So, here is what I have noticed on my trip so far:

a) Miami Mart Sheraton (near airport). WI-FI at $ 9.95 a day or you can use one of their 10+ roaming "partners". No sign of T-Mobile or Boingo on the list, both of which I already pay a monthly fee to. Sign up for the $ 9.95 service.
b) Delta Crown Room Atlanta Airport. All Crown rooms have T-Mobile HotSpots, but the airport defaults to its own service and I end up having to pay a roaming premium to T-Mobile. In recent past travels paid similar premiums at Newark and Chicago O'Hare. (Have airports heard that their fellow administrators a few miles away are trying to offer free municipal WI-FI? It is particularly jarring when you are at an airport only for an hour to pay a 24 hour charge. Kudos to airports like Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando which are offering free WI-FI)
c) Land in UK - my phone recognizes 4 local mobile networks but they will not let me register. Must be an issue with Cingular. I suspect my accountant has schemed this because mobile calls back to the US range from $ 1 to 2 per minute from the places I am going this week.
d) Hotel in UK. Get a break. Free WI-FI. Get on Skype. Calls to US numbers a very reasonable 2c a minute. Call to a UK mobile number a few miles from my hotel - 25c a minute! Go figure.

That's just one person, one trip. Think of how much corporations are paying for mobile employees.

May be I should just get the new T-Mobile MDA?

Or may be I should wait for someone to come up with the ultimate "bundle" - land-line, long-distance, cable, hotspot, mobile....Google, interested in my business?

Best of Out of Office Auto Replies

How we cope with email!

1. I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Be prepared for my mood. 

2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.

3. I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from holiday on 4 April. Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received. 

4. Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.

5. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system... You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.