http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog Technology Marketing from a Strategic Viewpoint Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:45:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The technology business has more than its fair share of lose nuts.  Some are wealthy as well as insane, while the dot-communist are poor and insane.  Perhaps the key to success in this business is being bonkers. Sadly, some of the insanity is settling in Microsoft, as witnessed in a blog written ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/07/01/microsoft-myopia/ You gotta love loath Larry. Ellison's Oracle has been on a buying spree, snapping up enterprise infrastructure and application companies at a rate that makes even aged Silicon Valley watchers blink. Nothing, not even the Federal Trade Commission, could sate Oracle's acquisition gluttony. Only Microsoft was outside of Ellison's ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/06/24/oracle-jacks-prices-marketing-issues/ Well, that didn't take long. Assuming that rumors based on odd leaks are at all accurate, Microsoft may have learned that their Vistas are limited, and that certain competitive pressures cannot be ignored. Microsoft has heard the market concerning XP's expiration. It would be hard to ignore this considering that the ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/06/04/microsoft-minwin-windows-7-kernel-linux-compatative/ Is desperation the right word to apply to Microsoft? I avoid using terms of human psychology to describe an entire corporation, but desperation may be accurate. If a person or organization ignores basic principles, and instead chases odd and tangent opportunities, they do so in order to fool themselves, ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/05/27/microsoft-cashback-search/ Carly Fiorina's time at Hewlett Packard and Louis Gerstner time at IBM proved that decentralized management of product lines in a large company is the only sane management strategy. Lou took an ailing and heavily centralized IBM, and saved it from extinction by decentralizing its product categories. Carly took a ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/05/20/aol-decentrailzes-debrands/ One problem with Linux is that nobody really knows how big it is. Like any other virus, you have no idea exactly how many bodies it has infected. Ignore the sales numbers from Novell and Red Hat. They tell only part of the story, namely the demand by larger ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/05/13/embedded-linux-market-dynamics/ Has Microsoft lost its bearings? This is more than idle speculation. Their recent failures, when placed side-by-side, showing an interesting pattern and a prescription for peril. The two mistakes are Vista and Yahoo, and together they show a company that has forsaken its core missions and failing to defend their position, ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/05/06/microsoft-marketing-mistakes-may-be-fatal/ I recently gave a talk at the Software Licensing and Marketing (SLAM) conference where I painted a dower and gloomy picture for technology marketing this and next year. Seems I may have been overly optimistic. Though not yet officially proclaimed, we are in a recession. If my wet cocktail napkin math ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/04/22/sinking-satyam/ When Gartner insinuated that Microsoft was doomed, you heard the loudest sound from a mass of penguins since the release of Happy Feet (had to plug that movie since my step-brother did the motion capture for it, as well as Lord of the Rings, Polar Express, and other great films). The ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/04/16/vista-microsofts-death-knell/ For varied and unrelated reasons, I have been involved with many firms either in the collaboration field (VA Software cum CollabNet, Open-Xchange, Novell and their GroupWise offering) or for whom collaboration is an essential part of the product (Mobile Compete). This accumulated history led to me being the Collaboration ... http://www.siliconstrat.com/blog/2008/03/25/collaboration-software-market-opportunities/