Monthly Archives: October 2010

Caffeine Headaches

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The easiest way to kill something nice is to make it popular. This certainly is the case with restaurants and bars.  Pleasant, cozy cafes and lounges become unlivable hellholes once they gain notoriety.  You can’t find a seat, a table, a waitress.  Service vanishes, quality suffers and you can’t enjoy the environment once 347,890 of your closest friends go there … every night.  The same may apply to software, though the mechanics of the destruction of value differs. Such may be the fate of Java. For all its early warts, Java became an important technology.  It was the first cross platform application language that didn’t suffer from 4GL rigidity or opaque stupidity of design.  Once woven into the fabric of web pages, it provided the first major addition to HTML and made web applications behave more like desktop applications.  The web became more intuitive while server-side applications became more fluid, … Continue reading →

Infected Marketing

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B2B marketers could learn a lot from influenza. Actually, they would learn from Walgreens and their annual flu shots.  A few weeks back I received snail mail from Walgreens, the chain pharmacy which I haphazardly selected last year to get my annual influenza inoculation.  In the envelope was a colorful reminder about flu season and the fact I could get an injection, the location and hours of the closest store, a sheet detailing the hazards of catching the flu and the inoculation forms already filled out with the info I provided the previous year. This helps explain why Walgreens’ return on equity, investment and assets are higher than competing CVS and why their stock price is doing better as well. Promotions need to provide a sense of urgency, a solution and then ease the path to acquiring the product.  Walgreens did all that in one mailer.  Their literature reminded me … Continue reading →

Shift Happens

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A start-up client of mine maintains an interesting page on their intranet that showed when employees typically come and go.  The CEO routinely arrives at the office around 8:00AM, the software architect by 10:00AM, and their hotshot Java geek leaves the building at o-dark-thirty. Technology is shifting time.  In the bad old days (say 1998) lives were regimented.  Between work and television, most Americans kept static and well matched schedules.  Most everyone was at work at nine, home by six, integrated with their couch by eight and using Jay Leno as a nightlight for foreplay around midnight.  Lives between people were synchronized out of practice and the necessity of both communing at work and the nature of broadcasting. Technology has made work life at the start-up asynchronous and may well spell the death of broadcasting as we know it (expect the water cooler phrase “Did you catch blah-blah-blah on TV … Continue reading →

Apotheker Approach

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“If you liked Hurd,” began the email from an HP employee, “Then you’re going to love Leo!” Yes, it was sarcasm on his part. Mark Hurd was a darling with Wall Street and a demon to HP employees.  Hurd did what imported CEOs often do, which is cut expenses by cutting employees and burning deadwood.  HP employees lived under unemployment fears but HP’s bottom line improved.  Some souls who still fondly remember Bill and Dave and a kinder, gentler and more stable HP didn’t much care for Hurd (or Carly for that matter).  Where as HP once stood for innovation and nearly family-style employee relations, it now more closely resembled Oracle in its ruthlessness. So it surprised nobody in HP that Hurd landed at Oracle after HP auditors found a soft-core porn star on Hurd’s expense report. What HP staffers and the larger tech and investment communities were surprised about … Continue reading →