Monthly Archives: January 2008

Mobile Mambo

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If I were a young pup just starting out into the big, bad, brawling world of technology marketing, I’d run like the Devil himself were chasing me into the mobile market. It is a wild place, with zero loyalty between vendors, customers, partners, and technology. It is currently one huge cesspool of competing interests, awaiting a shakeout, collapse, and consolidation. But since we — as an alleged society — have only started to explore the potential of carrying and wearing wirelessly connected computers, the market-wide shakeout is still a long way off. What better challenge exists for a marketing maven than making a buck in utter chaos. Which brings me to Nokia (I’m betting my friends at Nokia just soiled themselves). Nokia is a smart group of folk. They saw the early rise and global opportunity of the mobile market, and were one of the first firms to profit on … Continue reading →

Commoditized Consolidation

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I have written often about how the technology industry is commoditizing itself. I have also written about how consolidation is an inevitable process in every industry. Now we see how the two work together and create what some might view as the End of Days (of course those same people had apocalyptic visions when Microsoft announced NT). The big news of the day, week, month, and thus far the entire year is that Sun Micro (of all people) is buying MySQL for a cool billion dollars. So much for Mister Mickos growing rich slowly. This takes the world’s most popular DBMS (in terms of number of installations) and gives it a global sales and support team. Not bad for a hardware company. (The wisdom of forfeitting 8% of Sun’s current market capitalization is suspect however — you can buy a lot of offshore programmer time for a bill) MySQL, like … Continue reading →

Netscape Necrology

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Alas, poor Netscape. I knew them heretofore. It is indeed sad to see the reaper claim Netscape Navigator. And sadly enough, the very thing that brought them fame may well have killed them — namely buzz. When the net was first being popularized, and HTML was still a quirky technology at best, we had limited choices for web surfing. People with graphical terminals (you lucky *#&**#^!) had Mosaic. Primitive as it was, it at least allowed for direct and intuitive access to the few thousand web pages in existence at that time. It was a durn site better than the text-based browsers (lynx) to which I was restricted. Then along came Netscape. They picked-up where Mosaic left-off, adding polish and professionalism. Andreessen, Clark and the rest of the Netscape team knew the net better than most anyone at the time, and leveraged that knowledge in one of the earliest instances … Continue reading →