Author Archives: admin

HP Handsets

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Just keep reminding yourself that Compaq was an odd deal too. Today Hewlett Packard palmed Palm for whopping $1.2B, or about 1/10th of HP’s petty cash.  This was newsworthy for many reasons including the fact that Palm’s struggling handset line will now join HP’s struggling handset line (bet you forgot that HP makes cell phones — so did the rest of the market).  In a world where RIM owns the corporate market, Apple owns the consumer market, Microsoft hasn’t helped HP’s market, and Google/Android are changing the rules of the market, this marriage seems slightly more absurd than half of Hollywood hook-ups. The deal is not without upside.  First, the market for mobile is not yet saturated.  Especially on the low end, there is plenty of green field. As unlocked handsets become more prevalent and popular, HP can use its retail savvy to shove cell phones into public ears.  I … Continue reading →

Stack ‘Em

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So, when will Oracle buy Brocade? Well, they might buy Juniper, Alcatel or maybe even pick-up Nortel on a distress sale, but I’m pretty sure they will jump on Brocade to secure their data center dominance. Several vendors have been assembling stacks in attempts to become one-stop shopping centers for CTOs.  Cisco shocked many by getting into the server business, HP by buying 3Com, and Oracle buying Sun and not realizing the mess they had gotten themselves into.  IBM is oddly the laggard, evidently content to rake in huge margins on services instead. But IBM may well buy what Oracle doesn’t. Let’s ignore applications, if for no other reason than to give Larry Ellison a reason to panic and read this blog.  The major components of the data center infrastructure stack include servers, storage, operating systems, management suites and networking.  HP has all of the above, and wedding ProCurve, 3Com … Continue reading →

Fretting Flash

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Listening to Hugo Chavez or Steve Jobs is becoming eerily similar. Dictators have some common but not commonly endearing traits.  They tend toward being monomaniacal, focused fiercely on their perception of order.  Anything or anyone that denies the beauty of their utopian vision challenges authority, and can later be found swinging from trees without needing to use their arms or legs. Jobs is trying to string-up Adobe, and in the end might make Apple look like Il Duce on his last day. For folks fond of the Silicon Valley geek gladiators — visionary founders who see business as war and as life — the latest rattling of cyber sabers comes from Apple and Adobe, with Apple’s insistence that Adobe Flash be banished from Jobs’ walled garden of iEverything.  Certain slurs have been sounded, including an odd instance by Jobs proclaiming that Adobe Flash was bug ridden. Jobs is obviously not … Continue reading →

Mobile Movement

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The mighty fall, upstarts rise, and nothing is guaranteed. Comscore published their periodic post of positioning between portable platform providers (tell me when you get sick of my constant alliteration … it won’t stop me, but I do like the feedback).  Of interest are instances where major players are advancing, retreating, or showing signs of stagnation.  In Comscore’s latest totable techno tout sheet we see: RIM:        42.1% rising slowly (+1.3) Apple:      25.4% stagnant (-0.1) Microsoft:  15.1% falling fast (-4.0) Google:     9.0% and rising fast (+5.2) Palm:       5.4% and sinking (-1.8) Most noteworthy and yet most predictable is Microsoft’s plummeting while everyone else is either growing or staying steady.  Microsoft’s mobile operating system has been derided, insulted, defamed and dismissed by many, for sound reasons.  Unlike competing platforms, one routinely needs to buy a new handset whenever Microsoft releases a new OS (I say this with my tongue buried deeply into … Continue reading →

Branding Support

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By “branding support” I am not suggesting that one apply a red-hot iron with rancher’s logo to the flesh of a technical support representative.  However, having worked ranch when I was a kid, and having recently experienced tech support, the thought has a certain appeal. Your brand is created with every buyer interaction.  Some interactions occur in advertising. Others occur between buyers and cut you out of the interaction loop. The rest occur whenever your buyers visits your company, be it your web site, your sales office, or your support department. The letter can destroy you. Not long ago, Dell was flagging. Part of this was a change in the market which they failed to anticipate and were also slow in responding. Yet a good part of their fall from prominence was due to ill-advised shifting of technical support (something that had been a glowing aspect of Dell’s brand) to … Continue reading →

Social Inequity

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Short is sweet. No, this is not another diatribe on compact market messages, though that lesson is well worth repeating.  Where sweet and short nicely collide is in the sales cycle.  The shorter the cycle, the sooner the revenue, the happier the stockholder and the fatter your bonus check. Marketers know that social media is becoming an intrinsic, if not superior, tool for finding and landing customers.  What has not been well quantified is the degree to which social media helps.  The folks over at the Software and Information Industry Association, where I am a perpetual CODiE judge, recently presented some data that indicates how and which social media may be helpful in shortening the sales cycle (click the graphic for one large enough to read). The blue bars represent sales closing in less than 90 days, and the gray bars sales lasting more than 90 days.  Where you see … Continue reading →

B2B Socially

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I’m hoping for antisocial media.  I can see how to make a buck off of that. Meanwhile, social media continues to gain dominance in marketing, and for good reason.  Humans, and even politicians, are social animals.  We commune for pleasure, profit and procreation (which pretty much describes a day in the life of Eliot Sprtizer).  Even the most sterile of pursuits requires some social aspect.  Every poor blogger, alone in his office, hammers out prose in order to asynchronously connect with other humans. Business-to-business (B2B) activities are thus social interactions.  Oracle commits social acts when it interacts with other enterprises, aside from the select few it eats.  Thus social media should be a component of B2B. The oddest aspect of B2B social media concerns who in the relationship needs to socialize and why.  The failure to think through these two questions have led to various B2B social media catastrophes including … Continue reading →