deal architect

The Curmudgeon King

Dan Tynan at PC World makes me sound like the Fairy Godmother...

...here he is with The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007.  Wicked sense of humor. Must read. Past hits have included The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

So, enterprise vendors - aren't you glad you just have to put up with folks like Dennis Howlett and me? -)

Let it SNOW....

So in this post I recommended we quit using the Enterprise 2.0 term and start a new moniker: SNOW - Social Networking, Office 2.0 and Wiki - Category. Or some other moniker which describes the collaborative tools  in the category.

Jevon McDonald, one of our Canadian Irregulars and an entrepreneur in the category, agrees the E 2.0 moniker has not helped much.

So does Jeff Nolan. He also invokes Tom Clancy. 

In Clancy's book Debt of Honor, Jack Ryan goes from National Security Adviser to Vice-President to President in a matter of days. It is fascinating fiction. But fiction it is.

Enterprise 2.0 fans have similar dreams. The reality is we are stuck with our legacy and not about to change that much, that fast. The more modest goal for the category should be to get in the door and at least in to the chain of command.

Consumer Reports annual survey of cell service

"Cell-phone service seems to stubbornly resist improvement. The Annual Survey of Cell-Phone Service conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that fewer than half of respondents were completely or very satisfied. That makes cell service among the lower-rated services we survey, as it has been for the past six years." Ouch!

but the survey also shows "...cell carriers are getting more consumer-friendly. Last fall, all of our rated service providers pledged to join Verizon and prorate their hefty $150 to $200 early-termination fees. Holdouts also said they would join Alltel and T-Mobile and end their heavy-handed practice of mandatory contract extensions when you make changes to your service plan."

To which Dean Bubley in the UK would ask is the subsidy (or extension) really a financing? And should banking regulators get involved?

Rather than bringing in cross-industry regulators, I would rather have cross-border telco regulatory coordination. A good starting would be if the EU has capped roaming charges for local mobile carriers how come AT&T can get away with charging quite a bit more for its US customers calling from say, Romania.

Google II?

NetSuite had a hugely successful Dutch auction style IPO. It priced at $ 26, twice as much as the conservative lower end priced last week. Phil Wainewright has more here. Even more impressive in the turbulent market we have seen the last few weeks.

The auction will bring comparisons to Google's IPO in 2004. Two major differences. Google raised almost 15 times as much, and Google had as much in profits as NetSuite has revenues. Actually three differences - Larry Ellison is a major investor in NetSuite.

Larry had another reason to celebrate today. Oracle declared a strong quarter. Of course, trying to parse which segment of the business actually did well would take all the algorithms Google's rocket scientists can dream up. Besides, Oracle 's Application Group would not exactly want to share too many details with the brash new player in the market flush with $ 160 million in its coffers.   

25 Blogging Styles

The folks at OgilvyPR have cataloged various blog types - Announcement blogs, video blogs etc. Useful list of blog types.

Of course, being in PR they recommend maximum of 5+ announcement blogs a week, and only 1 "detractor" blog.

Make that zero if it is one of their clients you are dissing -)

Cloud Computing: Stratus, Cirrus and more

NY Times this weekend wrote up 5 pages on the upcoming "epic battle" around office applications - Google's on-line versions versus Microsoft's desktop monopoly .  BusinessWeek drools over Google's broader cloud computing. NetSuite, a pioneer in enterprise SaaS, is about to go public this week. amazon expanded its cloud offering last week with its "database in the sky". Nick Carr's book on utility computing - The Big Switch is about to hit the stores.

So to provide some balance, Guy Creese at The Burton Group clarifies what he actually said when he was interviewed by the NY Times in the article above.

"...(NY Times) asked me about Eric Schmidt's assertion that the cloud (and hence Google) can handle 90% of today's computing tasks. My answer was, "Maybe in the next 30, but not in the next five."

To me the whole debate is centered around a homogeneous, unsegmented market - when in fact there are plenty of cloud patterns and weather systems.

So in the SME market, SaaS and utility computing are already been gathering plenty of steam (hey, NetSuite has been in business a decade). Even vendors like SAP with BusinessByDesign have acknowledged that is what the market wants.

On the other hand, the POV is larger companies do not like cloud computing. Most large companies have for years tried hosting, remote database administration, remote network management, software maintenance, various forms of managed services - not-on-premise, on a high-availability, SLA basis. What they cannot do is jettison their entire apps portfolio and infrastructure in one fell swoop. So they are gradually ratcheting their use of SaaS, SACS and Utility Computing.

Plenty of clouds out there. Many serviced by vendors the NY Times has never written about. And many delivering value today, not 5 or 30 years from now.

More signs of Enterprise Apocalypse

Forbes lists The Web Celeb 25 ...

...and it is full of consumer, political, Hollywood, sports bloggers and personalities.

Not one who covers Wall Street, business topics or enterprise technologies.

Not one. Well, ok Scoble - who can at least make fun of enterprise stuff and Om who writes about telcos.

But no Dan Farber or Paul Kedrosky.

And Forbes is a business executive focused magazine - claims to be "one of the most trusted information resources for the world's affluent business leaders."

NY Times does not care either about enterprise stuff.  Time to give up on the trillion dollar tech/telecom industry.

More tech innovation

On the New Florence blog

Changing Retail Payment Habits
Personal Assistants - Many time zones away
Booz Allen annual survey of Innovation and R&D
Tech Pioneers - the Davos List
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
Yahoo's Brickhouse Incubator
The Art of Surveillance
The Smart(ass) phone
Girls dominate Siemens Math and Science  competition

Red Shift, Blue Zero...where is Monte?

So Sun talks of Red Shift . JP Rangaswami at BT talks of Blue Zero. I got to get me a cool term like that.

So I go Monte Zweben, founder of Red Pepper and Blue Martini, must have something to do with these terms. Actually Monte is into a colorless, but still cool term - Life Pattern Marketing.

How about something with Cyan or Magenta ? Those poor colors just don't get the credit they deserve for making all the Reds and Blues out there look good. Especially in an election year.

The worst named software category

Think of CRM and you get big personalities like Tom Siebel and Marc Benioff.  They may have said lots of interesting stuff but never called their category Enterprise 2.0.  When Sanjiv Sidhu of i2 was worth $ 6.5 billion in 2000, he did not talk about supply chain management as Enterprise 2.0.

So why do a bunch of new collaboration technologies insist on calling themselves Enterprise 2.0 when they cannot do what ERP, CRM, SCM. PLM, EAM and about 50 other categories do?

SNOW - Social Networks, Office 2.0, Wikis - describes them so much better...and is just a bit more modest...