deal architect

The Super Formers

The singer formerly - and again - known as Prince will grace Super Bowl 2007

The companies formerly known as Apple Records -and Apple Computer will also supposedly be there together

The network formerly known as Cingular does not plan to be there - but it will be on YouTube

Consuner Reports on Cell Service

Wish the phone companies would spend less on TV ads on how good they are and how bad the competition is - and invest in dramatically improving their networks.

Consumer Reports (sub required) says

• Cell service still leaves a lot to be desired. As a group, cellular carriers scored only 66 on a scale of 0 to 100 for overall satisfaction. (A 100 would mean that all readers were completely satisfied.) That's worse than many of the other services we cover in our surveys, and in a league with other perennial low-scorers, such as cable TV and computer tech support.
• Call quality remains an aggravation for many cell phone users. In fact, 54 percent of our readers who switched carriers during the past three years attributed their decision to poor phone service, including dropped calls and no service at home. By contrast, 33 percent were motivated to switch by the promise of a better price.
• Most consumers aren’t ready to give up their landlines and go all wireless, all the time. Someday that may happen, but probably not until cell-service quality improves significantly and its 911 issues are more fully resolved . This year 5 percent of our respondents told us that they currently have a cell phone but no landline at home.

As Apple hypes up its phone and all the cell companies peddle their new Blackberries, Treos and other PDAs and Pocket PCs and voice and content traffic grow dramatically, the complaints against cell service will only increase in the next year.

"The Bastards say, Welcome"

In the Pulitzer prize winning "The Soul Of A New Machine", Tracy Kidder wrote of an ad that Data General produced but never ran. It read "They Say IBM's Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome"

Zach Nelson CEO of NetSuite sent his staff this message this week picking on SAP ( but not Oracle - Larry Ellison is a big investor)

"Yesterday during its disappointing earnings call, SAP fired a shot across NetSuite’s bow and pledged that future growth would come from its mid-market initiatives.  To date, those efforts have been based on a product called SAP All-in-One, an on-premise version of SAP’s R/3 enterprise product.  Not surprisingly, this has not been a particularly successful effort, given that it takes the world’s largest corporations millions of dollars and multiple years to get R/3 up and running.  SAP has also spent millions this year targeting smaller companies with TV ads, and if truth in advertising laws were enforced they would have to change their marketing slogan for All-in-One to “The world’s most complex and expensive software, now for mid-sized companies!”

For years, SAP scoffed at the idea that customers would embrace an on-demand model for their core financial/ERP operations.  Most recently, an IDG News article indicated SAP’s President, Product and Technology Group Shai Agassi argued that “…companies, even smaller ones, will never be willing to trust their core operational processes to an outsourced provider.”   I guess he missed that fact that NetSuite became the fastest growing company in North America delivering on-demand software that does exactly that for thousands of customers worldwide.

Now, it looks like even SAP has gotten on-demand religion.  The question is, what is it that they are doing?  SAP didn’t provide much detail on their “new” strategy, called A1S (a name almost as catchy as R/3), but on the product side here’s what they could be up to: 

* A hosted version of All-In-One -- that’s great news for NetSuite because the only way to make All-in-One more expensive is to have SAP host it for you.  All-in-One lacks the capabilities that make NetSuite so attractive as a mid-market solution – deep functionality combined with a multi-tenant architecture where customizations migrate.  We upgraded NetSuite 460 times last year and didn’t lose a single customization.  Companies using any SAP product rue the day they have to install a patch -- much less upgrade hundreds of times – for fear of losing customizations and functionality.

* A brand new code base -- also great news for NetSuite because they will be years behind us.  It took NetSuite 8 years to build the world’s only on-demand ERP/CRM business application.  If they are lucky, it will take SAP at least 8 years, and by then the game will be over and we will be the SAP of the mid-market. 

Larry Ellison once told me that the best thing that happened to Oracle in the early days was IBM’s pre-announcement of a relational database years before it was available.  It gave credibility to the then new idea of relational databases and created demand that IBM could not fulfill.  Well team, this is our “IBM Moment.”  SAP’s announcement will cause confusion within their customer base and sales organization while it creates demand for a solution that only NetSuite has.   We are watching the evolution from Stone Age solutions like SAP, Microsoft and Intuit to the Internet Age solution of NetSuite at an even faster pace than we could have anticipated.  It doesn’t get much better than this! "

Of course, DG is long gone, and IBM continues to lumber along. So, do you want to Build to Delight or Build to Last? Debate that over a bottle of Fat Bastard...

The "Flip Test"

Prof.  Andrew McAfee at HBS has a brain twisting post using a comment from a panel he was on:

""Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.'  It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries.  You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply.  Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?"

Fascinating. Something every technology vendor or participant, in my opinion, should be game playing, because the "flip" may scaringly become reality - and soon - in their markets

Some of the "flip questions" I would ask:

a) All technology vendors - What if consumer/retail brands dominated enterprise technology markets?
b) Outsourcers - What if Intel was a service provider?
c) Software vendors - what if companies only bought business process functionality as an outsourced service?
d) Hardware vendors - what if companies had little or zero IT capital budgets and little physical space for gear?
e) US Telecom vendors - what if US broadband/mobile markets were like the auto market and customers were used to Japanese and Korean standards?
f) CIOs - what if you did not report to the CFO?

I have one for myself. What if I flipped lives with Bill Gates? I know one thing for sure - I would not spend much time reading his blog -)

Integrate This!

My cousin broke out in to a series of profanities. I told him what the Odyssey navigation software, Pharos GPS chip and Blue Ant portable speakerphone for my PDA (Cingular 8125) cost. All 3 for under $ 225. He had paid at least 10X to get similar functionality installed in his BMW. And he has to pay for Hertz NeverLost every time he travels. And his maps are already outdated.

For the last decade, integrated, sole source has been the mantra in software and in other technology. As customers discover lock-in, lack of portability, integration issues of a different sort, the tide is turning. Example: a client about to re-bid his IT infrastructure outsourcing is pretty sure he wants to break the contract into components.  His incumbent  "integrated provider" has actually lost him transparency where trouble tickets are really getting bogged down. And it is frustrating when vendor reps blame their colleagues and throw their hands up and say - wish that was another vendor  I could have been a lot meaner.

Of course, I risk putting too much integration in to my little device - it is my phone, my black book, diary, email and web access on the road, my camera, my Garmin, my MP3 player, my modem, sometimes even my TV.

As back up, I bought a different GPS chip (OnCourse) for another $ 100. And it's nice to know there are plenty of alternative PDA choices coming (including Apple's). And since many of them will also run on WI-FI, still not become too dependent on Cingular's (previously AT&T, again AT&T) wireless network.

Back to my cousin. He almost choked me when I said "at least for the money you spent, it is tightly integrated into your lovely car". Gosh, integrated must be  a far worse profanity than I thought -)

Update: Garmin has introduced its own Bluetooth GPS chip

Hasta La Microsoft Vista

I got this note from Intuit today about Quickbooks incompatibility with Vista. This is not going to make millions of small business owners too willing to move to Vista. Wonder how many other apps will be similarly affected?

"You may have heard about the upcoming release of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista. Microsoft has made significant changes to how software runs on Windows Vista.

I'm sending you this important service alert because you are using a 2006 or earlier version of QuickBooks software.

Since QuickBooks 2006 and earlier versions were developed
  and released before the introduction of Windows Vista,
  these versions may be adversely affected when used on
  a computer running Windows Vista.

This will impact Simple Start, Basic, Pro, Premier, Payroll and Point of Sale, as well as other QuickBooks products and services. We recognize that your QuickBooks software is an important business tool and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you."

Update: David Berlind presents the Microsoft POV on the issue. My question is why both did not manage this upfront - e.g. sharing a rebate for QuickBooks 2007 for those who do plan to go to Vista in 2007. They can blame each other but Microsoft did not need this distraction and Intuit could have locked in customers for another few years. Most customers buy payroll and other products from Intuit.

Emulating "Babe"

Let me start off by saying this deals with pigs. Not doing it to offend religious sentiments.

So, I am reading InfoWorld and a letter says changes to SAP are like dressing up a pig. A few weeks ago a CIO told me he had a project to pretty up the SAP UI. Lipstick on a pig, he called it.

Then I read Thomas Otter's post on SAP efforts with its Design Services Team, and I say good stuff. SAP is rolling out widgets, and other UI improvements (though I cringed when I read they have already been at it for 2 years. I guess there are no 90 day projects in SAP world).

But here is what I commented on Thomas' blog 

"I will be delighted to see that. I am tired of Apple this and Google that, but don’t just throw out widgets and pretty UIs. Thomas, it is all relative. If you were a start up I would already be impressed with what you say above. Customers pay you $ 5 + billion a year in maintenance. There has to be substantive new functionality and business changing innovation for that. And I think you are playing catch up for the last 3-4 years."

To me what is important is to see SAP help its customers deliver their own innovation around business processes. Vertical best practices. Regional innovations.  Helping them lower their cost of utility IT and free up more for innovation IT. And so on.

This is not so much about making Babe look nice. This is about how Babe helps Farmer Hoggett. By learning to be a sheep dog.  By navigating the mean streets of the city. By helping him save the Farm. Lipstick is optional.

More New Florence Posts

on technology innovation on my other blog

CarChip
On-Line Volunteers
Near-Field Communications
Wireless Energy
Mobile Phones and Disaster Alerts
Hyperlinking to reality
InfoWorld Top 100 projects
The economics of Spam
Technology Innovation and Mimes
Disappearing Ink

Thinking about Moore's Law

I was reading Randy Mears at the EDS blog.

"I have often thought that focusing on Moore’s Law may be too single minded. When it comes to barriers in IT, it may turn out that the issues won’t be with hardware advancement but rather with fixing software technologies."

Actually he is missing out on 2 of the biggest spend categories in IT - services and telecomm. Our industry's productivity is hugely driven by performance in  those 2 major areas.

As I have asked before "what if Intel was a services vendor?"

Can you also imagine if we had an Intel like player in place of a Verizon or a T-Mobile how much faster and cheaper broadband, cell service etc would be?

Our software, services and telecom sectors may never deliver to the high Moore's Law benchmarks of doubling performance every two years, but is 25% to 50% improvements every two years too much to expect?

Update: Moore's Law is not dead yet. Scoble on Intel's latest breakthrough.

Integration as Innovation?

Fellow Irregular Dion Hinchcliffe writes about Enterprise Mashups - great read.

But balance that against the comment Dave Watson (he is CTO at Kaiser Permanente where he has all kinds of integration issues amd technologies) recently left on my SAP-Ora-fic post:

"As the big players, like SAP and Oracle, continue to acquire other companies they bleed off any innovative energy from their own efforts and from those they acquire. They make an unfortunate swap of integration for innovation."

So, I am thinking - may be IBM, Oracle, Infor - all the big acquirers should first try out any new integration technology on themselves before they unleash even more integration products on their consumers.

When I look at all the magical integration tools SAP alone has delivered to its customer base over the last decade - ALE, EDI, IDoc, RFC, BAPI, DCOM, Java Connector, ESA - I have a hard time believing any new integration technology - even using contemporary terms like mashup - is truly innovation.