Author Archives: admin

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 →

iYear

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2008 will be the iYear, and no that doesn’t mean Steve Jobs gets another gazillion dollars for inventing a new gizmo with more cool than function. The ‘i’ in iYear stands for “integration.” I see on the horizon signs showing that IT is shifting priorities and now faces an exaggerated form of post-consumption integration indigestion. First, let’s be honest — the IT market goes through some predictable cycles. When the economy is good and customers have larger budgets, they buy technology that offers to give them competitive advantages. Sometimes this advantage is immediate, and sometimes it is long-term, and sometimes it is just hype. Regardless of the time frame in which the alleged benefits of the stand-alone technology should arrive, real business efficiencies come when that point technology is integrated with other technology , via integration , streamlines business operations. I have already noted that there is a tech industry … Continue reading →

Errant GPS Ad

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Upon occasion marketing professionals are under such onerous deadlines that even they make mistakes. Here’s a good one. The photo to the right was scanned from a Sunday newspaper circular by Office Depot. Like a lot of folks, OD is peddling GPS units, this year’s hot gift. They had a pretty good price on this model that was advertised in a San Francisco newspaper. It might have been so cheap because it evidently has road maps of Europe and not America (despite the ad claiming maps of the U.S. and Canada). But unit above is clearly giving directions in a Germanic language (“Ungarn- auf Louise-Schroder-Platz” translates to “Hungary at Louise Schroder place” according to Bablefish). The turn distances are in meters, not yards, and the arrival time of day is labeled “Ankunft.” Now, you and I know some harried intern or first-year graphics employee likely grabbed an image from the … Continue reading →

Wireless Wedge

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Closed systems make money. Open systems make money. And the two dynamics are co-exists … for a while. I’m pondering these realities as I comb through reports in the wireless market, where Silicon Strategies has a new client. The evolution of the wireless market will soon make a shift and the smarter vendors are rapidly adapting to the inevitable. First, a musing on closed and open markets. In closed markets, the vendor has control by virtue of either a monopoly or through customer lock-in due to the high cost customers face in switching to different technologies. The IT technology industry was a closed market for a seeming eternity until the folks at Berkeley began porting and promoting their flavor of UNIX (which could be considered the original computer virus). When Sun Micro and other vendors began using open standards (like UNIX) as a wedge into the market, the closed system … Continue reading →

Downturn

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The stock market has correctly predicted 12 of the last seven recessions. Should we have more faith in Goldman Sachs, Gartner, IDC, Regent, MGI Research, the Financial Times and others in forecasting financial apocalypse? No, we shouldn’t. But fail to put the two together and you’d be dumber than my cousin Earl, a man with an IQ so low he can only find employment as a congressman. Businesses and consumers alike change their spending priorities when times are good and when they are not. The world economy is still absorbing the effects of high oil prices (driven as best as I can tell by pure speculative fervor). These inflationary pressures are just beginning to leak their way into the free economy maelstrom as the market bottoms out from a sub-prime induced credit crunch. The net effect is that everyone is beginning to rein-in their spending, with the glaring exception being … Continue reading →