deal architect

Tricky Transparency

I remember my alma mater TCU (actually more credit to the coach Jim Wacker) in 1984 voluntarily reporting college football recruiting violations - and yet getting the full brunt of the NCAA's penalties. Why come clean - was the question then.

It still is today, as Congress debates immunity to the telcos for their role in the NSA's secret eavesdropping program. How would you like to be the chief blogger for Verizon or AT&T?

And what about about risks of on-line confession sites?

And in a move about to really push personal transparency to a new limit is Fox's new reality show The Moment of Truth with lie detectors and incentives of up to half a million to "tell the truth"

Makes Naked Conversations seem tame.

Statistical Outlier. With a Massive O.

When your peers can deliver one every 3 years on average what takes you 32 years to do for the first time...you are really slow, incompetent, unlucky or a combination thereof...

1864 previous tries in 497 games by 139 previous players toiling over 37,395 yards. Yup, no Tampa Bay Buc had ever returned a kickoff return to the house. Talk about a monkey on your back. More like a whole pack of them.

Till yesterday.

Micheal Spurlock finally did it.

Yes, that Micheal with a E before the A. Another statistical outlier. And forever a hero in this town.

Even the monkeys cheered.

He forgot Generation G

Charlie Bess of EDS has a nice way to classify the generational gap in communications...but he forgot what I call Generation G

When I travel around the world, I see grandmas with headsets speaking on Skype to their loved ones at the other end of world. I see people crowding in Internet cafes. I see teenagers furiously texting each other. I hear unusual phrases like "I left you a missed call". I see people using their mobile phones to buy from vending machines. Try pigeon holing these habits by generation.

Somewhere up there, Alexander Bell, yes the one with Patent # 174,465  in his name, is beaming with marvel.

Boil the ocean. And solve world hunger.

This HP press release attempts it.

"The new offerings help CIOs accelerate better business outcomes by mitigating risk in electronic data discovery and compliance, driving growth through better alignment of IT and business, and lowering cost through better use of data center assets."

There are at least 82 HP products under that one sentence.

In response to the WSJ asking it if it serious, HP responds “It’s a challenge when we have to talk about complex solutions,”

“It’s a tradeoff between a 54-page press release and a two-page press release.”

Reality Check

Around the globe it seems like telephone companies are not that popular...and within technologists even less so with AT&T around iPhone, net neutrality, roaming  and WI-FI hotspot charges etc etc.

Like it or not...here's the reality.

The top 5 telcos - Verizon, Nippon, Deutsche, Telefonica and France - - just the top 5 - equal the entire Software 500 revenues.

Laugh or cry, whatever Google or Skype or cable companies might do our old faithful will continue to reach out and bill someone...

The demise of the CIO is greatly exaggerated

CIO Magazine State of the CIO '08

"CIOs don’t just lead IT shops. The best are business strategists. The CIO position continues to grow in stature in the business world. At more companies, the person leading the information technology organization has the CIO title. More CIOs are reporting to CEOs than in the past. And compensation rates overall continue to climb."

Ralph Nader, Michael Moore and Bloggers

I was talking to Mike Prosceno at SAP this week.  Mike has been instrumental in getting SAP executives to be  much more conversational with external bloggers and also encouraging a stream of internal blogging initiatives. And Mike told me with a tinge of sadness about the negative reaction of bloggers to the recently announced Blog Council. SAP is a charter member (along with reps from several verticals and Microsoft, Dell, Cisco and Nokia from tech world).

My first reaction - call me naive, but I welcome the Council. May be 3 weeks ago I would have been more guarded. But Mike sat in the same room at the SAP Influencer Summit with us Enterprise Irregulars as we asked Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP and and other SAP executives pointed questions. Mike did not censor a single question. His executives did not wince during the session. I am known as one of SAP's toughest critics and after that session wrote a couple of tough blogs (and some generous ones).  I should be persona non grata, but Mike then had a couple of executives respond to my blogs.

The amazing thing is Mike recently told me he did not know much about my other New Florence blog where I am milk and honey - as I celebrate technology innovation. He has mostly seen my piss and vinegar, curmudgeon side on this blog and still encouraged the conversation. If Mike represents the quality of the executive being assigned to the Council, external bloggers should welcome it.

Of course, some bloggers will be more suspicious of corporate America than I am. I have few qualms there. Heck, the customers I represent on this blog are corporations - unhappy with their fellow corporate tech vendors. I know my client executives as living, breathing moms and dads - not evil corporate types. In fact, many are downright boring, spending way too much time in meetings.

I do have one concern with the Council. It could become like the groups of Analyst Relations Managers who gather to discuss how to deal with the Gartners and Forresters. A whole ecosystem of them (BTW - Mike used to run analyst relations for SAP) - focused on influencing the analysts, often with little insight into product or customer issues. If the blog council turns in to something similar it will be a waste. By all means involve bloggers like me in the conversation - but don't dance around the customer and product issues being raised in those blogs. And please don't turn your internal bloggers into contemporary PR engines.

General Motors is also a charter member of the Council. Made me think what if GM had engaged Ralph Nader in a conversation in 1965. Or given Michael Moore the interview he sought with Roger Smith in 1989. We have come a long way. One reason to be optimistic about the Council.

I wish they would put us on inactive list

Blizzard, the publisher of the very successful World of Warcraft, apparently has had billing issues where they put some of their customers on inactive lists.

I have been trying to get on their inactive list for 2 years now. We could never get it going on our home network, in spite of paying 2 "experts", changing the DSL modem and a few other suggested solutions. I cancelled the account, but faithfully every 3 months they bill Amex, and every time I dispute it. I have asked Amex to block their charges but apparently they cannot do that unless I change my card number, which then ripples in to other accounts with an authorized regular charge.
What a waste of their, Amex and my time. If some considerate soul from Blizzard reads this, can they please stop the treadmill?

Blah, blah...then bang

I was disappointed there were no aha's in this Forrester 2008 trends podcast sponsored by Citrix...till the final trend.

That enterprises are investing in their own R&D. With so many new products and innovations in so many areas, makes sense for CIOs to invest in their own labs. Also, larger vendors have not been investing enough in R&D, so makes sense to negotiate them down and use those savings towards your own R&D.

Lions and Tigers and amazon....O MI!

O MI as in Oracle, Microsoft and IBM...reacting to amazon's database in the cloud

at a price of...get this ...14c per machine hour ...it that wizardry or what?

Utility computing moves up the value chain.

Update: Phil Windley who teaches at Brigham Young writes about it here