Will the US ever win the Ryder Cup again? Thrilling finish, but..
Who is the “greatest quarterback”? Let the controversy begin (continue?). as Tom Brady is the fastest to win 100 games.
Is it a “monumental blunder”? That is the most polite comment I have heard so far about the Rays decision to start James Shields in game 2 of the ALDS.
Oh, yes unbridled sports passion - sure signs it is October.
Meanwhile, October in software means a run up to conference season and curveballs of our own.
NetSuite announces a “Hairball Campaign” which includes “a contest inviting users to share the details of enterprise software hairballs plaguing their companies.”
Anshu Sharma points out so no self-respecting cloud comes at a starting price of $1,075,000. I cannot wait to see the hardballs his boss Marc Benioff will throw at Oracle’s “cloud in a box” at Gartner Symposium next week.
Yes I do love October – time to celebrate Columbus, bosses, ghosts. Or throw stuff at them.
Sean Parker, Leo Apotheker and “lazy journalism”
The College of Cardinals was sending out dark smoke signals for weeks. But when the white smoke finally came out and the bells chimed announcing a consensus candidate, the press went “whoa!” They should have been in Rome covering the Papal Conclave; instead they were focused on the antics of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
The scene was not the Sistine Chapel. It was Palo Alto, headquarters of HP, one of the most storied technology companies (and from a journalist POV with all kinds of juicy bylines from its checkered recent past). For weeks the board had been evaluating candidates – and astonishingly little of the media appears to have covered the process. Or knows much about the chosen candidate, Leo Apotheker who has only built field teams which have sold over $ 200 billion to the largest companies across the globe. They describe him as “mysterious” and the choice as “curious”.
Adam Lashinsky of Fortune admitted “By the way, so much for sources who told The Wall Street Journal almost two weeks ago that HP's board was leaning toward an insider and that a decision was imminent, which generally means soon. So much also for my predictions, which at least were sourced solely to my brain.”
Sorry, Adam, you are one heck of a smart journalist, but what are you doing relying solely on your brain? You and WSJ should have had full time teams focused on the HP process – it’s only the largest technology company in the world. With your contacts in the industry you are one degree of separation from just about everyone on the HP board.
In contrast, most media cannot focus enough on Sean Parker and the new movie. Nothing against Sean – he is a brilliant young talent, as are Lindsay and Paris – but with everything else going on, somehow get more of the attention of my teenage kids than mine.
I first heard the expression “lazy journalism” during a book event in Dublin this summer (way before Mark Hurd was fired). I was expressing puzzlement that even the largest newspapers and magazines in major international cities overwhelmingly focus on consumer and social technologies, not enterprise technologies. If you run searches on key words “Apple”, “Google”, “Facebook” on the websites of Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, Financial Times, Washington Post , The Economist, International Herald Tribune there are disproportionately more counts (1000X in some cases) than around say “IBM”, “GE Healthcare” “Bloom Energy”. And many of the articles around IBM or HP tend to be around quarterly and annual results picked up from wire feeds.
Sure, you can understand the Fort Worth Star-Telegram or Sueddeutsche Zeitung focused mostly on consumer tech, but with 85 of the CIOs and CTOs of the Fortune 500 within driving distance of New York, some of the largest banks in London, and some of the biggest tech spending at agencies in Washington, you would expect the major publications to be all over virtualization, BPO, cleantech and so many more enterprisey tech topics. Their readership is disproportionately business executives. Yes, these executives read tech pubs like CIO and InformationWeek and Gartner and Forrester reports, but they always have an appetite for even more reporting about vendors and topics they spend trillions a year on.
Of course, these publications have individual writers like Steve Lohr at NY Times and Ben Worthen at WSJ who focus on enterprise topics but they are drowned by the attention and ink given to the David Pogues and Walt Mossbergs who write about consumer tech.
During my book promotion planning, a publicist advised us to change the title to remove the word “compound” from the title. “Will be intimidating to a number of media publications” he said. Sure enough a few publications, told Wiley PR the book sounds “too complicated”. Are you kidding me? These are business publications who explore minutiae of financial derivatives and global supply chains, but when it comes to tech cannot see beyond their iPhones?
It gets worse. It’s one thing to just pay lip service to enterprise topics, but should you also forego journalistic standards? Dennis Howlett points out the media access Larry Ellison has recently received as he comments about HP:
At least the publications can claim by citing Larry they have something enterprisey in their columns. So much more convenient than assigning journalists to actually analyze the space.
October 03, 2010 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)