Category Archives: Markets

Markets

Micro-hoo?

Posted on by

In the all business, and especially in technology, there are three ways to grow: you can innovate product, you can change the rules of the game (marketing), or you can buy your way up (cash). When I see a hyper-competitive company like Microsoft making a multi-billion dollar plays to buy their way up a market, then I know they failed to innovate or market. And that is the condition in which we find Balmer and Company with their mega bid for Yahoo. We’ll call the merged company-to-be Micro-hoo? Microsoft — despite making the Internet a consumer product by bolting a TCP/IP stack into Windows long ago — was slow to see that former Sun CEO Scott McNealy was right when he said “The network is the computer.” The Internet is the only infrastructure bigger than what Microsoft had already created. As such it is a glorious place to make some … Continue reading →

Commoditized Consolidation

Posted on by

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 →

iYear

Posted on by

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 →

Consolidation Crazed

Posted on by

I love watching markets, because they are at times very predictable (which doesn’t explain why I lost my shirt investing in alpaca futures back in the 1990’s). Presently we witness market consolidation in various technology sectors. IBM, Oracle and SAP are pillaging every available Business Intelligence (BI) vendor who survived the initial market shake-out. And Mark Hurd, HP’s chief, is predicting an ongoing slew of mergers and acquisitions as part of a broader technology market consolidation. Even my broker thinks the technology market is ripe for thinning the flock (let’s hope his predictions about tech are better than those llama fleece demand). At the risk of repeating myself yet again, all markets consolidate over time. When first invented there were dozen of telephone companies, and eventually there were but a few. When cellular phones were whelped, there were a dozen domestic carriers, and they have merged and purged down to … Continue reading →