deal architect

Life is one big multi-task!

From the nice folks who brought us MS Calendar - etiquette for multi-tasking with a laptop/PDA during a meeting. They forgot this invalauble piece of advice which works as well as when someone jerks you awake in a meeting - say "when?", not  "what?"

I wish Microsoft had a calendar label called "What am I doing here?". Like the hour I spent yesterday trying to help my daughter invert text for a school project. MS Word allows you to underline, strike through, bold, change colors, but not invert. As always there is a workaround. Still could not get the font size right, though. Think of the number of Twitter messages I could have sent in that hour! My daughter managed to get/send a few IMs during that time. I think she is in awe of Justine for the 30,000 IMs she sent out in a month.
 
Back to meetings - Dean Hachamovitch of Microsoft explains how they view laptops and other personal gadgets during meetings. I wonder if they code during meetings - may explain some of the quality issues -)

My personal confession - sure I have used laptops to multi-task during meetings. But only in sessions where there is almost guaranteed Death by Powerpoint.

 

The "iPhone Napsters"

Last month, as the iPhone came out, I wrote:

"It's taken a few years, and resistance from the music industry, but iTunes is finally moving away from DRM. It may take a few years but I would like to see Apple similarly move away from the equivalent in the telecom market - the locked SIM card."

But just like Napster and other P2P sites did not wait for Apple, neither are some folks who just don't like locked SIM cards.

NY Times

"Mr. (George) Hotz, a resident of Glen Rock, N.J., published detailed instructions online this week that he says will let iPhone owners abandon AT&T’s service and use their phones on some competing cellular networks."

I had already heard of folks using the Turbo SIM product from a Czech firm, Bladox to use iPhones on European networks. I thought it was interesting their site talked about secure messaging and employee tracking, but not iPhone support as its apps.

Can you blame them? Engagdet reports AT&T's legal team has sprung to life. Napster 2.0.

Let the legal games begin. Apple will eventually get there. Google may beat it, though in the race to open mobile networks. And eventually, even AT&T and Verizon and Sprint will learn to love the huge volumes which will come from the "pay by the drink" model.

The Ash Heap of Management theories

Ever had the sneaking suspicion there are way too many management theories and fads...well here's proof

Two Buck Chuck

"The connoisseurs may cringe, the snobs may even sob, but the judges have spoken: California's best chardonnay costs less than $3.

Charles Shaw Chardonnay, better known as "Two Buck Chuck," beat hundreds of other wines and was named the top prize in a prestigious tasting competition in California."

ABC News

There is a revolution going on in most industries. More efficient airlines, the $ 2,000 car, the $ 100 (well ok, $ 175) laptop, the 15c a gb a month amazon storage. Business 2.0 has a whole issue focused on the next generation of "disruptors" in different industries.

Against this backdrop, I see my friend Charles ("Chuck") Phillips at Oracle mouth off about SAP and R&D. He calls SAP legacy conveniently ignoring that 3/4 of Oracle revenues come from 40 year old relational database technology. His acquired R&D is so "low intensity" that tiny competitors can release earlier and much cheaper code. Like the other Chuck above - cheaper and better.

Do either SAP or Oracle, so fixated on each other,  see the disruptions happening in their market?

Dennis Howlett's response to Charles (see at bottom of article) is "Totally Oversold Excrement".

Fred Franzia would agree. He is the owner of Bronco Wine which makes Charles Shaw and other inexpensive wines. In a recent interview, he was quoted as saying "We can grow on asphalt. Terroir don't mean shit"

Update: Phil Wainewright picks on Charles's on-demand and SaaS statements.

More Green, Less Blue

Sure it is bone headed to kill so many trees in this day and age. But instead of just moving bills on-line, AT&T Wireless could be offering analytical tools to its users like  pattern analysis, mashups with maps, weather....

But back to earth ...how about just plain, good old trails of who you called (names, not just numbers using its reverse look up), for how long and for how much. And some multi-period analysis capabilities. And more graphs, even basic.

And some basic blocking and tackling. How about being prompt with posting bills on line? This month they were 4 days later than the bill date of 18th, and the email notifcation of the bill just arrived this morning. (My Verizon online bills are even more tardy).

And, how about Sunday customer service, when we do have questions? Surely for a company with 60 million subscribers, a few million would find it convenient to check bills and have questions on the weekend? I remember having called Cingular on at least a couple of Sundays...seems to have gone away since the brand changed.

Sprint may drop you if you bother their support too much. AT&T is turning blue - along with its logo.

Update: Verizon finally notifies me by email this morning of the bill supposedly dated August 19. Ten days later. Happens every month. Electronic billing, but paper deilvery times. Of course, the payment due date does not change, and Verizon is pretty aggressive about charging late charges.

"Deploy Google Apps, get fired"

Deploying Google Apps could be a "career-limiting move for enterprise architects," according to a new Burton Group report. That's like saying it is a CLM for an architect to quote Burton's research instead of Gartner's. It's comparing a specialist to a generalist.

If you want a career-enhancing move,  take to your CIO an estimate of 75% of your Office users - those who don't use pivot tables, macros and other advanced features. Calculate the savings of not moving them to Vista and Office 2007. And potential savings from buying them more basic PCs with much less storage and compute power. And  the savings from not downloading thousands of bug  patches on their machines every year.  Finally, sign up for a bunch of "phantom" Google Apps users. That should earn you a nice bonus as well. At $ 50 a user a year, use the 10GB of storage each qualifies for and negotiate down the storage your current outsourcer is charging $ 50 a month for.

Two other questions for Burton: how about Google's recent packaging of StarOffice? And if not Google, how about Zoho and other apps being showcased at Office 2.0 in a couple of weeks?

Burning Question: Do telecoms need more regulation?

This continues a series of burning questions I pose to my readers to hopefully spark some debate in the comments.

Our choices certainly seem greater. We can buy land line, broadband, hot spot, conference calling, prepaid mobile cards and transferable SIM cards from cable companies, utilities (over power lines), VoIP providers like Skype, rural providers, municipalities which provide or subsidize WI-FI and a bunch of telephone service aggregators. Google wants to bid for future spectrum. In the developing world, many private telcos now provide majorityof broadband and mobile services compared to older state run ones. In business, telecoms actually provide nice competitive alternatives in many infrastructure areas to IT outsourcing firms.

But then I read this startling statistic. "90 percent of voice calls in the European Union and 80 percent of broadband Internet traffic traveled at least partly over networks of former monopolies". And in the US, the mobile carriers have a chokehold on innovation (David Pogue of NY Times calls them "calcified")  and market access (Verizon, AT&T and Sprint/Nextel have almost 80% market share). And through their Double and Triple play bundling are locking in customers across long distance, mobile, content services.

And it's when they do not have much competition is when they appear to get you. AT&T 's $3+ a mobile minute when you call back to the US from several countries. Verizon's large WAN charges to businesses where most IT outsourcers cannot match their capabilities.

The EU's approach to telcos appears to be more regulation. In a stunning move it recently capped mobile roaming charges across all its 27 member nations. (Not sure if it applies to US carriers. I just checked AT&T Wireless site and its call back rates from Europe have not dropped). The EU is now looking at forcing former state run telcos to separate legally from their  transmission networks to give competitors equal access.

What do you think? Is the EU on the right track? Do telcos inherently have monopolistic DNA and need to be regulated? Or is that 90s thinking? Technology advances and disruptive new vendors will help keep telecom competitive?

Post your comments below...

More in New Renaissance

On my innovation blog

Web 2.0 world
The "anti-iPhone"
Extreme Telecommuting
CAPTCHA this!
Learning from Online Virtual worlds
Home made video games
Chindogu

Thank you, Skype

I got a free week extension on my annual Skype subscription, as an apology for the breakdown they had last week. And I feel guilty accepting it. While every one is beating up on Skype, I say thank you.

Skype, you have democratized long distance, especially international, calling. You bring joy to over 200 million consumers around the world who "reach out and touch someone" many, many times a week. And you barely eke out a profit while connecting so many people for so little.

Skype, I want you to continue and make money - not give me more freebies.

To my friends in the business, if we are going to be harsh on Skype, we should accept a lot more from Microsoft for all its bugs, systems integrators for all the billions in ERP overruns and plenty more in our industry for which there is no apology. And certainly no rebate.

Why salespeople should blog

In my day job, I deal with technology salespeople all the time. They like me when I bring them bluebirds, hate me when they lose, hate me even more when they win but not at terms they would like. But deals get done. They bluster and posture  - but in the end, they know the market realities and when to walk away or sign up.

In contrast, I find many vendor marketing and investor relations folks live in a dream world. What they put in their brochures and investor packages is to them the only version of truth. Clearly IR folks have to be careful about statements, but if they had their way company blogs would look like today's version of yesterday's press releases. Most marketing folks like one way communications - debates in blogs cause them heartburn unless they are focused on a competitor.

But the real world, as any good salesperson will tell you, is full of bare knuckles debates and negotiations. Technology vendor and customer. Vendor and investor. Vendor and partner. Lots of direct - sometimes - heated talk. Which makes marketing and IR folks cringe, but happens every day, every hour.

Salespeople are too busy making money to waste time writing blogs. But if they did, their blogs would be far more "naked conversations" that those their marketing and IR colleagues are allowing their companies to propagate.