deal architect

Verizon: The low-tech, high-tech sale

Get a knock on the door this fine Saturday afternoon. Someone pitching Verizon FiOS.

"Just arrived in your neighborhood, sir. Blazing fast". "What do you use for internet access?" Verizon. Puzzled look. "For high-speed". Yes, Verizon DSL. "Oh, really?" "Anyways, you qualify for a free upgrade". Where do I sign? "Let me check with my colleague". Guy disappears.

Novel, old fashioned way to sell its high-tech product. Actually, its high-tech marketing also calls it blazing fast, and its engineers appear to deliver blazes - leading to the wise crack, FiOS stands for Fire is Our Specialty:)

Anyways, Verizon if you want to upgrade my DSL - and also move my cable TV service to you, you know where to reach me. Just don't expect me to go through this process again.

Weekend Stuff: You calling me a numbnut?

Funny moment from the nail biting Spelling Bee contest this week

Weekend Stuff: Penalizing being "under budget"

My daughter who knows Anjali Datta from her chess play pointed out her story.

Because she finished school in 3 years versus 4 she will not be named school valedictorian in spite of a GPA which may be the highest in school history - the rules were written for the calculation to be over 4 years. She may also miss out on some college scholarship money.

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

Netflix streaming video

Technology Innovation and the New York Times

10 Overachievers under 21

The surprising new eBusiness - Pizza

"Self-Driving" Car

A Faster, more energy efficient GPS

But will the gel be disruptive?

 I have written before about huge printing costs, and how businesses are changing their usage patterns.

So along comes Xerox announcing a printer gel.

The question is will it disrupt current industry economics? Or will the disruption more likely come from businesses going more and more paperless as this BusinessWeek article points out?

A kind word for Dell

Brian Sommer pointed me to this Dell fraud case. He had personally experienced their debt collectors. In our start up he had personally guaranteed for some of the equipment, and as I was winding down the company and negotiating a settlement with them and other creditors, they chose to go around me directly after him.

I wrote Michael Dell a "you were once an entrepreneur" letter, and would like to acknowledge they accepted our settlement offer and called off the bulldogs. So while I expect they will get crucified for the New York court decision, at least I can point to one instance where they actually acted in a pretty fair manner.

More New Renaissance

More innovation

The Carbon Footprint of different lifestyles

GPS to fight school truancy

Casa Futura: Home of the Future

"Space Archaeologists"

Crime-Proof

HP and the Crystal Skull

The Real Deal: Jackie Bassett - Stop educating the CEO about the business value of technology

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well.

Jackie Bassett is founder and CEO of BT Industrials Inc., a strategic management and technology consulting firm that helps CEOs and CIOs of global companies integrate technology into business strategy. She is a co-author of the book "A Seat at the Table for CEOs and CSOs"

"Why stop? It’s not working – and it will never work.

We need to stop selling FUD to the fearless. We need to stop leading with compliance to justify IT spend (when was the last time you bought stock in a company using compliance as a key motivator?)

We need to stop focusing on emergencies and efficiencies or we become the very definition of a cost center. The only thing a CEO (or CFO) will ever look to do with a cost center is cut it.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.” - Albert Einstein.

Globalization has just met digitalization and we’ve just run out of time.The average tenure for a CEO at a Fortune 500 company is 3 years. He doesn’t have time for Linux or Vista or patch Tuesday or SOA– he must deliver the results that the Board, the shareholders and the market are looking for.

He needs to deliver what customers want, when they want it and how they want it or he will miss the market. He knows that if he can’t deliver, he will lose customer business to someone who can.

Want a seat at the table? Take the lead here!

Your CEO won’t return your call asking for $100K on WAN optimization but he’ll chase you down the hall when you offer to help build a product that will win new international customers.

IT knows what customers want or at least knows how to figure it out. Customer conversations, requests and insights are right in the network! The right answers are in their emails to your sales teams and their phone calls to customer support.

They’re in every transaction between your customers, partners and suppliers. They’re in structured and unstructured data. They’re right in the hands of IT!

It’s not what keeps the CEO up at night that matters. It’s what gets him up in the morning that matters – the sound of Ka-Ching!

Focus on the many, many ways we can turn IT into a Profit Center. Ka-Ching! No CEO or CFO ever looks to cut their profit center. As Rudy Provoost CEO, Philips Lighting says:

“Technologies are just a vehicle to respond to needs and come up with absolutely brilliant solutions and applications.”

Jackie can be reached at: [email protected]

What? No immunity request?

If Deutsche Telekom was a US company, can you imagine with a 32% effective government stake, how much more it would run to the FCC and Congress for protection?

Sure sign social media has peaked

Mike Arrington writes a one word blog post - "Twitter!" - and it still makes TechMeme.

The "Perfect Storm" of Social Networks - Mike, Twitter and Techmeme. Deserves to have 400 people comment about it.

And suckers like me blog about it!