Walking a fine line

Full disclosure: I am an employee of TechRepublic's parent company, CNET Networks, and work with
TechRepublic's IT Directory, a repository of 60,000+ pieces of vendor
content.

At one point
not that long ago, publishers covered the goings-ons of vendors in the
industry, customers and vendors went to trade shows to meet with each
other and to get the latest from vendors and their peers, and then if
someone was interested in a product they would call in a vendor to give
more detail.

We've come a long way. You now have the ability to search sites like
TechRepublic for vendor information, speak with your peers about all
sorts of topics, and you can blog (or read other people's blogs) on
these items to your hearts content. This change has occurred in the
space of 10 years and have radically changed the way IT buyers research
vendors and products and the way vendors communicate to their customers
and prospects. The best vendors are getting really good at providing
information directly to prospective customers.

I plan to blog on various issues pertaining to the relationship between
vendors and customers, the tech industry at larger, and possibly a few
other items as well. Hope you enjoy.

The article today on Is computing getting to complicated made me think about a world where computing - especially corporate computing was simplified. 

Would that mean more vendor offerings or fewer? 

Would simplified standards stimulate more innovation?  Would some
of the resources devoted to current issues be diverted to making better
products or would the resources be devoted to something else? 

Can business continue to produce the kind of productivity gains we have
come to expect without a highly functional and flexible computer
system? 

Would the IT marketplace - both the people managing and supporting
devices and creating systems and software be much smaller?  Would
I have a job? 

Ah, the ivory tower!  Bold, visionary predictions broadcast for the world to hear.  More focused, consulting, reports, etc. available for sale.  The TechRepublic community expressed some strong skepticism around the value of these kind of analyst reports.  The consensus of this discussion:  Gartner may or may not be right on this front but they've been wrong enough in the past to be very suspicious of future predictions. 

My take, like all thought provoking predictions, it is scandalous enough to provoke interest but general enough in its application that it may be interpreted many, many ways. 

Am I the only one that liked the mystery of Deep Throat? I was
surprised to see how saddened I was to learn Deep Throat's identity.

What is the most visited IT site in the world? By most measures, it is
Microsoft.com and the related sites produced by Microsoft - MSDN,
TechNet, etc.  With the huge marketshare held by Microsoft for
most products it produces, there is a clear need to stay current on
these products and it makes sense that these sites would be heavily
used. 

At the same time, much of the comments by TechRepublic members are very strongly against
Microsoft.  So where are the Microsoft supporters?  Research
we've done at TechRepublic has shown that (not surprisingly) there is a
huge Microsoft installed base within TechRepublic's membership. 
Where are they? 

There are many possible explanations -

1.  It is more popular and fun to be against Microsoft than a
Microsoft supporter.  There may be just as many (possibly more)
strongly in favor of and behind MSFT products etc.  Just like
employees often make fun of their boss or kids make fun of their
parents, students their teachers, etc it is fun to ride those at the
top of whatever food chain you find yourself in. 

2.  While many need to use Microsoft, many of those people would prefer to be using some other technology. 

3.  TechRepublic and the many other forums out there are in aggregate the "anti-MSDN, TechNet, etc."

4.  There are two very different sides to Microsoft - the side
that produces the technical information and the side that produces the
more polarizing studies and marketing pieces. 

My involvement with TechRepublic's white paper directory provides me
with a great deal of data to support any and all of the suggestions
above.  We see many white papers, webcasts, etc. that are focused
directly on reasons why businesses should choose Microsoft products
over Linux products (TCO, ease of management, etc.) and they are among
the most popular titles in our directory.  The popularity of the
papers doesn't mean agreement however, we receive a large number of
e-mails commenting on these papers and rejecting many of these
claims.  While we get a lot of member feedback, this is the only
time that I know of where the members responded directly to the content
of a paper. 

Clearly Microsoft hits some pretty sensitive nerves.  I'll continue to watch for the the more vocal supporters.  

It is rumored that Apple will announce today a partnership with Intel for chips
starting in 2006. It is easy to read too much into this. Where could this go? Apple's X OS running
on all Intel machines? Apple servers running on Itanium or Xeon in the future?
A world where Dell could ask you - do you want OS X or Longhorn on your new PC?
Not likely but the possibility intrigues me. Steve Jobs' history certainly doesn't suggest that a wide
open new world with Apple is likely. He squashed the Apple clone market as soon
as he got back to Apple in the 90's. He certainly has had chances to have the
ipod work with other music services and he didn't do anything there.

Still, if Apple can make PCs more cheaply or if they can make some
inroads to get their market share up above, say, 15% this could make for some
interesting situations in the workplace. At CNET Networks, TechRepublic's
parent company, we already have a large number of professionals using Apple at
home and requesting support for Apple in the workplace. So far, only select job
functions get that support but the requests continue and I suspect they are
increasing.

When I talk to our support teams, they talk about the
challenges of making Exchange work with Apple devices, trouble rolling out
proprietary software, etc. But with more and more going through a browser even
our support team admit that this is less of an issue than it used to be. Could
potential security gains and user productivity/happiness make this a reality?

I'm excited to see how this plays out.

In the past few months, my discussions with tech vendors have focused
increasingly on new vertical market solutions. Many vendors -
including IBM, HP, Oracle, and others are rethinking their product,
sales, marketing, and consulting efforts to better accommodate specific
vertical industries.

This raises some questions:

When is a database not a database? If IBM is marketing the
DB2 database for hospitals, how much of that database is configured
differently? When a committee scoping out a new database solution
in a hospital conducts their research, at what point do they need very
specific vertical industry information about DB2? When do you look for industry specific information rather than more general technical information on a solution?

At what point does industry specific information, product adjustments,
etc. become a requirement for purchase? Certainly, there are
areas where only one industry would require a product and there are
many companies large and small set up to serve those industries.
But, for solutions that currently are used across industries are there
really enough common features within a vertical industry to customize
software or hardware for that specific vertical?

Dan Farber at
ZDNet blogged about two vendors taking very different approaches to this question earlier this year.
Clearly industry customization is important. This isn't a move
being made by one vendor in isolation. Still I wonder how deep
these "industry solutions" really are. It seems to me that the
differences from one shop to the next go way beyond the vertical
industry. Operating systems, hardware infrastructure, development
platform for custom applications, their dependence or independence on
web based applications, their policies and procedures surrounding a
whole host of issues.... Is this simply a way to channel potential
customers to highly trained sales and reseller channels versed in the
language of your particular business or does this increased focus
signal a much more fractured and specialized marketplace of the
future?

Check out this very funny area on LiveVault's site.
Have no idea how much they paid John Cleese (and Michael Dorn of Star
Trex Next Gen fame) to do this or how much it cost to produce but it
wasn't cheap. I found it very well done and entertaining. But I'm not
buying a backup solution in the near future so I wonder how effective
LiveVault is finding this project from a marketing perspective. The person that
watches the entire video DOES get a pretty good sense of LiveVault's
value proposition and I have passed this link to at least 25 people
prior to this post...

On another note, I keep feeling like I should be getting tired of John Cleese's schtick but I'm not.

Must rent _A fish called Wanda_ tonight...

Happy viewing!

Software breaks. It's a fact of life. If it didn't, there
wouldn't be a site called TechRepublic and most of TR's members would
be working in other lines of work. Because the software
breaks, everyone in IT must think about and work with vendor
support teams. Today I found a ZDNet Blog with the following quote:

"I have a friend that works at Dell in support who told
me of the thousands of calls they took on Linux last year - only 12
needed to be escalated to level 3." Level 3 calls were calls the required the assistance of the software provider.

Given the large amount of time that is devoted to
the support of
business software and the large market share position of Dell holds in
the server space, this seems really exceptional. I would expect
Dell (or Redhat) to make a lot of noise about this. In general, I see
very little discussion about support on any of the vendor's websites that are available to the general public (as opposed to
special areas devoted to existing customers.)  If there is a mention of support
it is always full of marketing speak - "and of course this is backed by our
crack support team..." 

Our company's IT team have been feverishly working to make sure that the
entire company has the new Windows patches installed after Microsoft released
some pretty disturbing alerts this week on some potentially serious holes found
in Windows. Major security issues get mentioned but what about the more mundane
but important support issues every business faces?   I find lots of discussions
about Microsoft Windows and Microsoft support.  I don't see the same kind of
discussions for other applications - databases, systems management tools, etc. 

Obviously software support is a major issue in any business.  But how do you
evaluate support before you purchase?  And, who do you evaluate, the hardware or
software vendor?  Or both? 

I received a call today from a major (albeit unnamed) software
vendor. Actually, I'm quite sure I received a call from an
outsourced telemarketing firm representing a major software
vendor. At any rate, I get these calls rather frequently and I've
noticed such a big difference in the quality of interactions from one
vendor to another. This vendor was among the worst. The guy
on the other end of the phone clearly had a script and, from the sound
of it, was reading said script for the first time.

I realize that telesales staff work is hard to fill and you don't want
your best salespeople doing pre-sales qualification. That said,
it seems like it might be worth some real effort to make this contact
with a prospective customer more educated about the market and the
product. At the very least, have some interesting pieces of
information you can give TO me as you ask all sorts of questions OF
me.

What propelled me to blog about this is that I just received just such
a call from another vendor in the same space. We had a nice
conversation and she gave me 4 to 5 items to consider as I do more
research. At the end of the call, I asked her what her background
was - "oh, I'm just college student but they made me take 2 weeks of
paid training before they let me loose on the phones." Money well
spent.

Lenovo announced yesterday a rebate program on Canadian laptops and monitors.
I hadn't realized until reading this story how far ahead of the United
States some Canadian provinces are in this important area. While IBM
offers rebates for recycling and others offer services that will take
and recycle systems without a rebate I feel it is time for the United
States at the federal level or individual states to either offer
legislation requiring or tax incentives to recycle PC, Laptops,
monitors, etc.

There are also services, like Retire IT that will do this for your company for a fee.

In addition to the environmental necessities of proper disposal, there
are many charitable organizations that will take old equipment,
refurbish it, and give the systems to underprivileged communities all
over the world. Again, it would appear that other areas of the world are ahead of the US (or at least
better at optimizing their web sites for search.) 

I'd love to hear from
the TechRepublic community about how their company deals with decommissioned
PCs.  Are there services your company use for recycling old equipment?  Are you
aware of charities that a company can utilize to make the most of their old
equipment?  Are there other vendors leading the way in this area? 

I love a good glass of wine and have become known as a person that will
readily offer a recommendation for any occasion. I hear
the following - "Wine just scares me, there is so much to learn before
you can even order!" In many respects they are right. To
easily navigate a wine store or a wine list, you do need to have a
pretty firm grasp on all sorts of terms, geographical areas, etc.
Entire books are available on the subject.

Recently, some wine vendors have done something to buck the trend and I
love it. They've decided to market their wines without all of the
winespeak. The market is rewarding them with huge sales.
The basic feedback is this - the winemaker made it easy for me to fine
what I was looking for so I bought it.

I think tech vendors could learn a thing or two from these wine makers.

The tech industry has a long history of battles over standards - punch
cards for early computers, betamax vs. VHS, mac vs. IBM compatible, etc. Sometimes the customer wins. Often, the
companies buying these products are left to fend for themselves.
Given this history, I don't think it should be surprising that we are
at a point where even the basic language vendors use to describe their
products are divergent. This falls into two categories -

1. Vendors using the same word/phrase to describe different technologies: Grid
computing anyone? Do you mean a bunch of small servers clustered
together in one location or do you mean a grid of independent computers
across the country or globe all sharing the computing work for a
specific application? What does vendor X mean when they talk
about Service Oriented Architecture?

2. Vendors using different words/phrases to describe the same thing: On-demand
computing or Adaptive Architecture? Both IBM and HP would discuss
the various differences in their strategies and you could argue that
companies need to develop language specific to their solution in order
to really "own" the discussion.

Perhaps this is why some of the most popular white papers in
TechRepublic's white paper directory are focused squarely on helping
professionals simply understand the terminology surrounding a
solution. Many of these papers could be titled - "What we mean
when we say SOA/Grid/web services/etc."

Of course, even the most clear speaking wine vendors need to have a
good product to back up the labling (some do and some really don't) and
the same is true in technology.  

Here I go again, more about recycled PCs. I wrote my last blog
entry as a simple reaction to a news story I'd read last week.
That article and the responses from TR Members to the blog post
prompted additional research.

I. If you want to take the effort to recycle your PC, it can likely be done in the US. Dell,
HP, IBM/Lenovo, Gateway, and other vendors have recycling
programs. Many have incentives attached so if your company is
happy with its PC Platform you can likely get a discount on future
purchases - here are links:

Dell

HP

IBM

Gateway

2. If you don't want to recycle your systems with a
vendor, there are likely local/national organizations you can
utilize.
There are a number of options outlined here at this pretty interesting site run by eBay. If people find other local non-vendor options aggregated please share them!

For a long time, people would claim that IT pros wouldn't get fired for buying IBM.  While that might still be true in some companies it is far less true today than it was 20 years ago.  More often now I hear accounts that essentially cite Microsoft as the current equivalent to the IBM of the past.  Behind the statement is the understanding that a vendor may not always have the best solution but your job security is much higher when the powers that be upstairs understand the decision.  People will hold you less responsible for the failures that may be ahead when implementing the market leading solution. 

Companies spend millions of dollars annually in support of their brands and the larger the company the more they derive benefit from their market stature.  Still, every year many new and interesting start-ups hit the market with new solutions.  Other companies are growing rapidly despite being outside of the top 4 in market share.   I hear members talk about these smaller companies more frequently and see these getting strong traction with the members of TechRepublic.  Sometimes it is because the less well known company provides a solution at a lower cost and sometimes it is because the solution offered is their speciality whereas a larger vendor may not have devoted the same kind of attention to their solution. 

A great example of this is in the area of Security.  Information security is a top concern for all companies.  Not only are there an increasing number of threats to productivity but legislation has mandated that organizations protect and control their data and the access to that data.  So, what companies are helping members get their arms around these issues? 

According to our BT Trax tool - an tool used to analyze what vendor content is being read, what technology is being discussed, and what vendors produce the content - it isn't the market share leaders like Symantec, MacAfee, and Trend Micro.  Instead it is vendors like Sophos, Webroot, CipherTrust, etc. 

Why? Let me take a stab at the answer.  First, the topics receiving attention are those topics that organizations don't have control of yet - spyware, spam (maybe,) compliance issues around identity management and messaging, etc.  Second, these less well know vendors are providing much more content on the most recent threats effecting the marketplace than their larger competitors  Thirdly, the security market is one where many vendors are intentionally looking to work with multiple vendors.  Working with multiple vendors securing your data/network provides a business with insight and innovation from multiple R&D teams and potentially provides a stronger solution than one vendor. 

We're seeing some of the larger vendors start to address these newer threats - CA recently bought PestPatrol to compliment their eTrust Security suite, Trend Micro is starting to put some real energy around the topic of Spyware as well.  It will be interesting to watch how dynamics change as the larger vendors enter the fray.  

Stay tuned.   

I was on vacation last week and was by and large taking a vacation from
the internet and e-mail, including this blog.  Like a great many
others, my first instince is to blog about the bombings in
London.  I will spare you most of those thoughts.  I live
just outside of New York City and commute on a train into the city most
days.  My return to work yesterday produced the following:

1.  Walked to my train
2.  Saw a national guardsman in full body armor with a HUGE machine gun on my train car. 
3.  Relief. 
4.  Tremendous sadness both at my relief and the events that caused me to feel this way. 

I just wanted to shine whatever light this blog might have on a fantastic blog post on ZDNet.
In the blog, Paul Murphy details his frustrations with Sun's customer
service and contrasts this with the passion and enthusiasm of Sun's
R&D group. No matter how great the products (and I'd be
interested to get a sense from Paul on what he thought of Solaris 10
once he ultimately received the information he requested)bad customer support will quickly diminish any benefits that might come from a well engineered product.

MIT Technology Review's July issue had an interesting article about UPS' $120 Million wireless system upgrade.  Essentially, UPS tapped Symbol Technology to design a handheld device that connected to a belt mounted 802.11b transmitter (pictured here.)  You can read what UPS had to say about this here.

I found this article and the technology they described really cool.  I'm hoping to blog more frequently about these new, interesting, or unusual tech innovations and tag them all with the tag "Check it out."  If you share my interest in these topics click on the tag to see others.  If you have items you'd like to share with the community, please feel free to tag those items with the "check it out" tag as well. 

I've long believed that bad, and I mean really bad, advertising
works. It must or how else can you explain Carrot Top pitching for
1-800-Collect for so long? Or most commercials on the radio? Perhaps
the studies that justify those marketing moves were used to justify the
official name for Longhorn - Vista.

Microsoft announced
the official name yesterday and boy would I have loved to be a fly on
the wall during the naming process. Was it heated? What were the other
options? How many people were involved? What role did Gates and Ballmer
play?

My first thought was security holes. To use in a sentence, "through
the vista the hacker could view my computer and all the personal
information stored within it." I then started thinking conspiracy
theories, is this subliminally supposed to make us think of open
systems and somehow neutralize some of the momentum of Linux? Not
likely. I miss the numbers I think - "windows 2006ish" would have been
good. Vista, Tiger, Solaris, Windows 95, OS 2, Irix, ... Let's call the
whole thing off.

Product naming is supposed to generate an emotional response to a
product. Would a Mustang be the same with any other name? All the good
names feel like they've been taken. I'm happy Microsoft didn't make up
a word. I've always wondered about names like Accenture, Integra,
Phaeton, etc. Bottom line: everyone works to create positive
associations: Speed, Power, Beauty. No one calls their product
crapola... While they work to create positive associations few seem to
do a good job of making those associations stick. I will say that
Accenture is certainly better than Andersen Consulting...

I'm sure there were thousands of dollars in consultant fees around
this whole naming event. In the end, it feels like a non-event to me
although I'm sure this is a huge story. Vista or Windows 2006 is news
because Microsoft made it and most of us will ultimately use it. Cross
this off the list of things to be done before launch - naming, beta,
larger beta, pre-launch, launch.

Actually, I liked "Longhorn" better. Ultimately, the announcement
will be in every major tech and general news outlet, 1000s of people
like me will blog on it, and Microsoft will generate tons of awareness
with business and personal buyers.

Oracle's absorption of Peoplesoft has done wonders for their image.  While I'm sure there are still issues (when aren't there issues at a corporation) it appears as if the integration of the Peoplesoft business into the Oracle product, sales, and corporate infrastructure is complete.  For a company like Oracle that is working hard to become a bigger player in the business applications side of the business, the apparent ease (and I'm sure it was anything but easy) of this acquisition is a powerful case study. 

To read more about this and other issues surrounding Oracle, read the News.com interview with Charles Phillips, Oracle's Co-President. 

I'm on the road a lot and battery management is always an issue -
laptop, cell phone, mp3, etc. etc. etc. Well, the future is here - solar collectors on your laptop bag.
This is the Voltaic Messenger. This isn't an endorsement, I don't have
the bag... yet. But it is pretty cool. Strangely, it doesn't charge
laptops and I would wait for them to figure this out before purchasing.
I'm also concerned that I'd need a number of other power cords to
function. Already too many of them in my life. Still, pretty cool.

I've
tagged this with the tag "Check it out" and encourage others to do the
same when they blog about something cool. A few people have started to
do this and I invite you to click on the tag for this post and check
out what others are finding cool.

ZDNet has an article discussing
the potential shift away from laptops to the Desktop/Smartphone combo.
The article cites this as a potential solution for executives that
typically use e-mail, web, and MS Office almost exclusively. As a
recent convert to the Treo 650, I have to say I think that the day is
not far away but I'd handicap the point where this is a common
configuration for businesses at 5 - 7 years.

I'm amazed by how rapidly Blackberry, Pocket PC, and Treo adoption
is occurring. When I walk to my seat on a plane, nearly every person
not looking like a person on vacation is cranking away on their device.
On my train, I get about one question a week about my Treo and how I
like it. Everyone is "just about to buy one and anxious to buy the
right one." This comment usually enlists a blackberry user to join the
conversation and offer their viewpoint as well. On the Long Island
Railroad this is significant. Usually, the only time someone talks to
you is when they target you for verbal abuse.

Clearly the combination device is one its way to mainstream use. But
will it be a Smartphone or a laptop with VoIP? If e-mail is your
primary application, then you are ready for the desktop/smartphone
combo today. But if you're like me and need to spend time with huge
spreadsheets, use web based corporate applications behind firewalls
that aren't optimized for these devices, and generally use the internet
for your job in a regular way, I have to wonder about the viability of
a laptop-killing handheld device anytime soon. Perhaps the future is
more like this - a very small bluetooth enabled device that can easily
connect to your ultra-light laptop and a duplicate image stored on a
corporate server.

There are few items more expensive for a company than a new
enterprise application (CRM, ERP, SCM, or other acronym.) Of course the
creators of that software want to help you sign that big check. But all
too often they try to encourage you with promises that seem really hard
to keep or with a kind of "plug and play" pitch that is just not
believable for most complex businesses.

Kristen Zhivago is a consultant that specializes in technology marketing. Her latest blog post
focuses on the experiences that have lead to some real resistance from
businesses. She refers to the skepticism of software buyers as a
"swamp" and she offers some really useful advice to marketers trying to
sell to businesses - make their product offerings easy to understand.

Watching
TechRepublic and its sister sites ZDNet and News.com offers additional
evidence of how correct Zhivago is in her assessment. The top white
paper titles on enterprise applications for June:

1. Change Management: The Other Half of the Story
2. Sustainable IT Compliance
3. Customer-Centric CRM: Fully Optimized CRM Performance

In fact, all of the papers in the top 10 (listed here)
were focused on the side of the story that doesn't contain the bold
promises.  They focus on the the issues that make the software
really work or explain how their technology (64-bit optimized programs)
will create real performance gains.  Given the information choices
available to customers now I think that the software vendors leaning
into this sales and marketing approach will experience success that
will force others in the market to follow suit.

News.com is reporting on the broadening of the LinuxWorld show.  The reason?  The perception that companies using linux are more likely to adopt other "new" ideas.  With many vendors exhibiting products and making announcements at the show, News.com notes that this isn't only about the OS but about corporate computing in general.  The marketers logic seems clear - "people at the show made the choice to adopt Linux, they are more likely to become an early customer of my solution."  These people are the all important early adopters that can give a smaller technology company the reference accounts they need to really grow their business with more risk-adverse companies.  For larger companies, this becomes another opportunity to leverage their linux story into significant new initiatives - IBM's commitment to Linux as a platform to run everything from their Mainframe to their entry level Xeon blade server presents clear opportunity that justifies their investment in Linus support and marketing. 

Certainly, the 11,000 people at the show  are involved in working with more than just the OS.  These are people that are using Linux to run very mainstream business applications, develop new applications, etc.  But marketers must not mistake LinuxWorld or the people LinuxWorld promises to deliver (whether they are at the show or not) as carbon copies of the professionals attending a Microsoft show, or a UNIX show in the past (anyone remember the booming Unix shows of the mid-90's?).  The businesses using Linux do many of the same things that a business running Windows Server are doing but they are empowered in a way that a Microsoft customer is not - they always have the the ability to shape the path of the the OS. 

The vendor's must be care to make their pitch knowing that their customers will expect more control than customers of the past. 

I love the web.  I started reading an article about Japan's plans to build a new supercomputer and suddenly found myself looking at this graph detailing the OS run on the worlds fastest computers since 1993. 

Source www.top500.org

IBM has a bunch of photos of "Blue Gene" their latest/fastest supercomputer.

(Photo provided with permission from IBM)

Now that's a computer room! For more on Blue Gene you can
visit IBM's site or the DOE site that describes the architecture in
some detail. IBM is offering the Blue Gene solution
commercially. This one cost $100 Million.

A while back, I bought a Treo 650 from PalmOne. I'm generally
happy with it. At least I was until I saw the sneak preview of the
Motorola Q on our TechRepublic's sister site cnet.com.

I
hate this feeling. You buy a computer, and then something cool comes
out 3 months later. You finally break down and get a smart phone and
something really cool comes along.

Actually, it looks cool but
I'm not sure if I'd buy it over the Treo - I've heard mixed reviews
about Microsoft's smart phone OS... Motorola is doing a great job of
sprucing up its product line and bringing back the cool.

Found a site that is pretty fun called "The Red Ferret Journal."
Essentially, the site profiles a bunch of interesting and cool items
you're likely not to know about like the personal helicopter

It's now TR Linked.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting (registration required) that companies using the term Linux for commercial use will have to now pay for that right.  This is interesting, you can use the OS for free but you need to pay for the trademark.  The fee is relatively small ($A200 to $A5500 says the paper) and endorsed by Linus Torvalds.  If proven true (I can't say that I've know anything about the Sydney Morning Herald but it sure looks like they've crossed their t's and dotted their i's) then I would imagine that this would soon be enforced in other areas of the world as well.  I can't imagine this presenting much of a barrier of entry for most companies.  The paper cites Jon "Maddog" Hall, the executive director of Linux International in the United States, as confirming the move and pointing to the protection of the Linux name as the reason for the move. 

Despite the small monetary amount, this feels like a major inflection point for Linux.  Am I alone in thinking this? 

On a side note, I just love RSS - one of my feeds picked this up and I've yet to find it anywhere else.  I'm still waiting the day when there truly is too much information.

I was on TechRepublic's sister site, ZDNet, yesterday when I ran
across a link to this story from ZDNet Asia:  S'pore insurer to
save millions by going paperless. 
If I had $20 for every time I've had discussions with people about
creating a paperless office.  While in grad school, I worked in
the engineering department of a public TV station  (I pushed
play, rewound tapes and had lots of conversations about the tragedy
of the VHS vs. Beta war) that was, supposedly, a paperless
office.  My boss at the time was very proud of our paperless
process.  Because we were a public TV station, we were always
giving tours to potential donors, schools, etc. and my boss would
always take tours into the engineering department and talk about our
paperless status while leaning on the typewriter that I had to use to
create my end of shift report that we would send to the FCC. 

Ever since then I've been keenly aware of businesses desire to be paperless. 

Back then (this is now over 10 years ago) my boss was very enamored by
how cutting edge a paperless office would be.  At that time,
storage was very expensive, e-mail was just becoming something that was
offered to everyone (instead of being a request by some for access,)
and scanners were available but not very good. 

The world has changed a great deal - grandparents are using e-mail,
storage providers have created cheaper, smaller, and higher capacity
storage devices, and software companies have vastly improved businesses
ability to locate, access, and manipulate stored data. 

Yet this story is still news and my desk is far from paperless...

So IBM is now top of the heap in Unix Server Market Share. 
But Sun is saying that Gartner and IDC aren't tracking the market
correctly.  Volume of shipments or revenue?  Sun moves from
#1 to #3 (behind IBM and HP) in this space.  They obviously aren't
happy.  IBM clearly loves to be #1 in this market as well as most
of the other server markets that they dominate.  But at the same
time, Sun now enters the x86 market.  IBM is selling large servers
that used to run OS390 with either Linux or AIX.  What is a UNIX
server anymore anyway? 

As someone who has followed, and at some points in my career, anxiously
awaited the market share reports, I now find myself wondering what this
all means?  Do customers really care?  Do YOU take this into
consideration when planning to buy a server?  And, when there is a
change in leadership, is it because of technology or
pricing/packaging?  Until I can know for sure, I'll keep following
this stuff but I could use a little help here....

Is this part of the larger trend where industries really can't measure
anything?  Network and cable broadcasts complain about Nielson
Ratings, Politicians complain about polls and cite technical
differences between one poll and the next, and book publishers complain
about how few bookstores are REALLY measured to create the bestsellers
list...

Are marketplaces getting harder to measure and understand or do we just
have more sore losers raising objections.  Ultimately, it matter
less what is right and more what is being used so if these metrics
drive future sales it is a big deal. 

While moving your mouse to click on the blogs area on TechRepublic you
may have noticed our new news area. If you didn't see it
yet, I encourage you to take this for a test drive.
TechRepublic will be aggregating content (news, blog posts, press
releases, security releases, etc.) by topic allowing you to efficiently
gather information on everything from supply chain management to wireless networking to EMC to Bill Gates
from TechRepublic and across the internet. We are just starting
to integrate this this content into TechRepublic and eagerly anticipate
any feedback and suggestions you might have regarding this
service. Please feel free to drop me a line via the "send private
message" button on my profile page or by posting a comment to this blog post.

Happy browsing!

A great many of us here at TechRepublic have been taken in (and sometimes put off) by James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds.  The book's tagline sums things up pretty well:

"Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations." 

A very good read and I recommend it highly. 

A great many tech vendors are terrified by "the crowd."  Specifically, they are terrified of blogs.  I've been in a great many conversations recently where vendors ask the question "what do you think we should be doing about blogs?"  I've seen reports saying that blogs aren't used to research products and that they are more effective in attracting the attention of reporters and the media than actual customers.  If that is true I doubt it will stay that way.

We at TechRepublic have long believed in surfacing the voice of the many (even when we were owned by The Gartner Group - the epitome of ivory tower thinking in IT.)  We have discussion, Q&A, and now member blogs. It is pretty safe to say that the people who work at TechRepublic are pretty bought in to the idea of surfacing the wisdom of crowds.  So it is with some excitement that I started digging into Intelliseek's BlogPulse product.  BlogPulse scans the blogosphere (beginning to really hate that term) and isolates coverage of particular topics.  So, you can learn that blogs about Linux comprise .3% of the entire Blogosphere.  Go to blog pulse yourself and take it for a spin.  And the next time you're going to make a major investment with a vendor, see what the blogosphere is saying about them.  And pay it forward by blogging about your current investments while you're at it. 

ZDNet is reporting a story
about a trojan horse that intercepts browsers (not just IE mind you)
when a someone visits a porn site (or other site that the code sees as
porn like a medical site) and displays a message from the Koran in its
place. 

This is an interesting twist indeed.  People have talked about
cyber terrorism for some time and it has always been assumed (at least
by me) that attacks would come in the shape of very malicious viruses,
DOS, etc.  What if attacks on objectionable content is the next
wave of cyberterrorism?  Sites contain information on an
objectionable topic?  Redirected.  Reading an op-ed piece
that doesn't match your political views?  Redirected. 

Three themes keep coming up on TechRepublic and I see them all pointing
to one place a fundamental conflict between standardization and
innovation within this industry. A news story and its subsequent discussion
helped crystallize my thoughts on this. I share the three themes
here and look forward to any reactions you might have:

Theme 1. Microsoft vs. Linux. Much has been written on this
and I'm really not trying to fuel that fire here. The subtext
(sometimes not subtext at all) of these
discussions/arguments/observations is this - Microsoft makes an
inferior product because its market dominance allows it to do this
again and again. How much of this is fair depends on who you
speak with. Some point to real issues with software quality,
program bloat, and security issues etc as indications of Microsoft's lack
of quality. Others talk about the fact that being a market leader
attracts this kind of attention. Bugs are not exclusive to
Microsoft and most malicious code targets the market leader, especially
a leader with 90% market share. Of course there are more
complaints about Microsoft products, there are more people using them
than anything else.

Theme 2. The need for standardization. Businesses need to
easily manage and lock down systems. IT wants to have systems
work well with one another, be able to swap out items easily,
etc. The stronger the standard the easier it is to control and
manage a system. The reaction by many to the "Intel: Friend or
Foe?" story could be summed up like this - " a business gives discounts
and special treatment to good clients? So what?" (This
discussion is still very young so the thread may evolve to include very
different views over time.) People may cheer on David when he
fights Goliath but in some instances it is nice to work with Goliath
because he usually wins.

Theme 3. Desperation/frustration with the IT field and
requirements for success in IT. Professionals need to constantly
study the technology to stay on top of the field. The job often
demands long hours repairing systems and getting systems up and
running. More time is needed to learn what's new and the
risks/rewards for being creative are significant. However,
commoditization can create a reduced need for expertise. The more
standardization the more work can be outsourced which contributes to the despair and frustration found by some in IT.

These three items are all part of a challenge to our industry that
affects both the vendors that sell the products and the professionals
that use and support those products. Vendors want
standardization ONLY when the standard is theirs or one they are
aggressively supporting. It is their job to distinguish their
solution from the rest of the market. This drives innovation and,
often, improved products. Diversity drives their business
innovation until they are at the top of the heap and then they work to
incrementally improve their product while defending the real or
perceived standard.

IT looks for better, more secure, easily managed products. They
want to the pieces of the puzzle to fit together the first time and
they want to go home at night with the sense that they will be off of
work until the next morning. Yes, innovation and improvements are
welcome but not at the expense of security.

So we deal with these conflicts - the more standardized a product
becomes the more it becomes a target for attack. The more diverse
the product set the more IT has to learn, hack, patch, etc. to make the
pieces fit. The more challenging the job, the more their
expertise is in demand.

So what? I wish this post were leading to a big finish where I
point to some light at the end of the tunnel. We cheer on open
source threats to Microsoft products because they will either steal
Microsoft's market share or force Microsoft to produce better
software. We watch with interest and concern as Google expands
its scope and people now talk about Google as the "new
Microsoft."

Ultimately, I don't think it is in our DNA to standardize so we live
with the challenges that this diversity bring. We make strides
forward with standards only to then create entirely new products that
make the old standard obsolete.

Getting off whatever soapbox I was on. Thanks for letting me rant.

I'm not sure if the rumors ever really stopped but the Mercury News ran a story this weekend
about the potential acquisition of Siebel by Oracle.  Oracle has
become a company I watch pretty closely.  Primarily because I've
been very impressed with how they absorbed Peoplesoft or, at the very
least, how they controlled any negative PR around the actual absorption
of Peoplesoft.  Given the amount of resistance from Peoplesoft
customers to the merger, it would seem that they have done a remarkable
job absorbing the company while continuing to grow their own
business. 

The tone of the Mercury News article suggests that this is
inevitable.  I don't know about that but I usually would say that
these big mergers rarely work.   Oracle has convinced me that
they can.

Anyone experiencing significant issues with the Peoplesoft acquisition in their business? 

Don't often blog twice in the same morning but I thought I follow up on my morning post about these rumors with a pointer to the announcement.
The market contracts a bit more. Is salesforce.com next?
The tech market could be described in biblical terms:

In the beginning was Ellison and many talented employees. After a
time, Siebel, Conway, and Benioff went into exile and created their own
tribes.
Siebel acquired UpShot.
Conway acquired JD Edwards
Benioff acquired 1000s of followers.

Later still, Ellison welcomed back the followers of Siebel and Conway....

OK, my last post on this today I promise.  Just wanted to point
out the utility of one of our new features on TechRepublic - our Technology Updates section. 
If you want to look at the coverage of a news story as it evolves or
what to see many different takes on the same event you can easily do
this via this service.  Take a look at the coverage of the Oracle/Siebel deal.

Or, the ebay/skype deal also happening today. 

Gas prices are high, many of the airlines are in real trouble, and
businesses continue to focus energy on cost cutting and increasing
productivity. Bandwidth is cheaper and you can get more of
it. So why aren't video conferencing solutions growing more
quickly? Sure, people are using these tools but I have heard very
little about significant purchases in this area. It still feels
very optional with most companies. What's more, I hear and see
very little about conferencing solutions that work across an
industry. What conferencing that is going on seems to be isolated
to a particular company.

As someone who's been asked to fly a very long way for one meeting
(and, once, only to arrive and learn that the meeting was cancelled)
I've got a vested interest in this. I have to admit that I really
don't like videoconferencing. It is a poor substitute for a good
face to face meeting. I think it could be better pretty easily I
just haven't really participated in a video conference that was really effective.

King of the mountain was one of those games that every kid played but
very few really enjoyed. It always ended badly.  I think it is a
game designed to teach children how to behave in a corporate setting at
as early an age as possible.   Well, it seems as if the adult
version of the game has gotten a bit more intense recently.  While
Oracle's acquisitions, ebay's purchase or Skype, News Corp buying every
internet site it can, etc are all interesting, for my money the real
game is between Google and Microsoft.  Let's be clear, Microsoft
is clearly king of the tech mountain.  But Google is charging
hard.  The latest assault may come from the rumors of Google's interest in buying AOL.  Of course Microsoft is also rumored to be interested in AOL  and is reorganizing itself to, some think, counter the threat presented by Google. 

What's interesting to me is how no one really likes the king of the
mountain.  Oh, we respect the king.  We will align ourselves
with the king but it is much more fun to actively root for the hard
charging challengers.  Of course, as a challenger emerges from the
pack and becomes a more serious threat, the glow wears off and people
start to view them with fear and suspicion as the potential new
king.  Interesting to watch Google turn from the little engine
that could into the big bad wolf in the space of a little over a
year. 

While this seems like a fight for the desktop I don't think that it is
fair to assume that this is where it will end.  Microsoft has
significant interests beyond the end user and Google has shown itself
to be willing, ready, and able to go after multiple markets at the same
time.  While I doubt they would go after the traditional database
market and SQL Server directly I do think that they could develop and
market some ASP services that are squarely directed at traditional data
centers. 

It is certain that this won't end without someone getting hurt.

One of the fringe benefits of going to the birthday party
circuit for my 5 year old daughter is that I'm meeting a lot of IT pros
from major enterprises in the New York City area. For whatever reason,
our school district has attracted many senior IT pros to this small
town about 40 miles outside of Manhattan. And they all seem to have 5
year olds.

So I'm meeting a lot of TechRepublic members in rooms with clowns,
cake, and other various diversions. During one recent party, the
Managing Director for a major investment bank told me of his company's
recent investment in migrating from Sun Solaris to an unnamed Linux
distro. For whatever reason, he was very secretive about the specific
Linux Distribution and insisted I not reveal the name of his company.

At any rate, for some reason we started talking about true TCO
measures of Data Center hardware/software and he had some very
interesting feedback on what's propelling and holding back Linux in
very large enterprises.

1. Support costs. He saw no real difference in OS support costs from
Sun to this version of Linux. In fact, he thought the supported Linux
distro would actually be slightly more expensive than Sun and certainly
more expensive than Microsoft's sever software.

2. The real savings? The other software he could get to run across
the network for no charge. He deployed a network monitoring program in
three weeks for no cost other than the time it took for him and his
staff to test the product. This software was built by university and
competes with components from many of the major software vendors. How
does it compare? His reply, I don't know but I will tell you that we
wouldn't have bought the other version because we had no budget for
this set aside and the whole process of getting budget may have made
the project a net loss. To him, Linux in his data center is about being
nimble and not making as many bets on unproven and expensive
technology.

3. Certification/training. He sees the big tipping point for Linux
in the large enterprises coming in the next 5 years. Every college kid
that cares about development and/or IT is setting up their own data
centers and training themselves in all sorts of environments and
situations they wouldn't have been able to experience until recently
without expensive certification and/or lots of work experience.

Finally, a possible solution for the heating oil price crunch in
some parts of the country - build a data center in your basement.
Dealing with the heat he generates from his pretty significant home
set-up (he estimates over 40 servers) has drastically cut down the
amount of heating oil his house requires. What about the summer? He
estimates electricity is still so much cheaper than current oil prices
that he comes out ahead. He is also working on installing a wind
turbine and solar cells to improve that price differential even
further.

I was on the Long Island Railroad this morning.  MP3 player on, laptop fired up and looking at some proposed designs for new projects on TechRepublic when I hear an announcement over the train's PA system.  I pull out my headphones only to realize that it is the walkie-talkie function on the phone of the guy next to me. 

"Server 42 didn't back-up last night. Over" 

The guy proceeded to ignore the dirty looks of about 40 Long Islanders (wow, there's a sight!) and discussed this and other items including the episode of "The Office" he watched last night. 

This got me thinking and I make this proposal to all people with or considering walkie talkie phones:

1.  Let's all agree that walkie-talkies are cool and somehow speak to that inner 10 year old. 

2.  Let's all agree that they could possibly come in handy in some instances.  Emergencies.  In your car.  Possibly when your on a site where everyone has walkie talkies.  Maybe paint ball.

3.  Let's agree that phones with walkie talkies have the PHONE part for a very good reason.  So the entire area doesn't have to listen to both halves of a conversation and preferably you can speak quietly enough that no one but you and the person you're talking to has to hear you. 

Thank you.  I fell better now. 

My wife is getting her PhD in applied mathematics.  Her upcoming thesis work will require her to manipulate and analyze massive data sets on a regular basis.  While she has a decent laptop for her work and her university has some computing resources available to her it has become clear that a new desktop for the home was in order.  Our old PC has served us well but is 5 years old and showing signs of wear and tear.  Not the kind of system you ask to crunch millions of lines of data when you have to have results for your advisor by the next week. 

So I go to buy a desktop that will ably handle the workload.  2GB Ram, Powerful dual core processor, big hard drive, etc.  I've configured everything online but decided to call in my order to discuss a few items with the sales team.  Mind you, I knew exactly what I wanted and could show the person on the phone that very exact system. 

It turns out the PC I wanted to buy was a "business PC."  Since I was purchasing this and didn't possess a Federal Tax ID the vendor (who will remain nameless) wouldn't sell me the system.  I could, however, buy an almost as good system from their home store.  The salesman proceeded to tell me that I didn't need the kind of RAM head room that the system I wanted had and that there was no real difference in the system I could buy.  In fact, I could get some cool features like a titanium case for about the money I'd spend on the system I actually wanted. 

Of course, there were real differences.  RAM is important (especially with Vista on its way) and I found myself explaining the differences of the processor to the salesman (L2 cache does matter!  64-bit architecture may not mean much when browsing the web or using QuickBooks but it does when running SAS, S Plus, and other programs.) 

Why won't a vendor sell me what I want to buy?  Why would a Federal tax ID entitle me to the better system?  Why should a vendor's internal business rules impact what/how I buy?  The answer: commission for the salesperson.  I can find no other answer.

The result?  I told the salesperson and his manager they had lost the sale.  Researched other brands and found the same rules applied there. Other vendors didn't produce the kind of system I was looking for or were much more expensive because the systems they sold were really for gamers and had expensive graphics and sound cards that I couldn't justify (as much as I wish that weren't the case.)  Finally, I just ordered online from the original vendor, left the tax ID form blank and the vendor took my order without issue. 

Take a look at the new layout and features for our news site, Technology.updates.com.
In addition to featuring more recent news story from across the web,
we've also expanded our coverage of products, companies, and topics
with a variety of tag clouds on the front door. If you want to
learn about the latest developments in linux, Microsoft Sql server, or Cisco Systems (to name a few) you can get it in one place. This is available from our top navigation bar by clicking news.

Feedback, ideas, suggestions, concerns are welcome.

 So Google and Sun are aiming directly at the Death Star's reactor - desktop productivity software. That is the underlying tone of about half of the news analysis surrounding the announcement by Google and Sun that they will work together on a multi-year distribution deal for Sun's OpenOffice. This has many obvious possible implications for Microsoft and the 90+% clients using Microsoft Office. I leave the discussion of those implications to other blogs. What I want to focus on is the important and so far, at least from what I've seen, overlooked point, we are viewing Google 2.0. Google is making some very definite choices with their business that reveals a Google agenda that isn't necessarily about making the entire world's information available to the entire world. Google has changed from a startingly simple and useful web application to a sprawling all encompassing information platform.

First, the distribution deal, if it is to work, will require Google to raise up StarOffice above other options.  It will not be about relevant search results based on complex and changing algorithms.  It will be about Google shining a spotlight on this solution.  It may be the best solution in the world but this is a change for Google. 

Second, this is clearly about taking out Microsoft.  At least knocking them down a peg.  While this is a good business move in my opinion it is not what Google has said it is about.  It is not a part of the promise they had set out to fulfill.  Do no evil?  Is this evil?  I don't know.  But this is fork in the road for a company with a great deal of influence. 

Could OpenOffice, the work they are doing to supposedly bring wi-fi access to the entire United States (or a least major metro areas,) and other rumored or announced initiatives bring about useful, important, and market changing solutions?  Absolutely.   And I'm not saying that it is a bad thing at all.  The challenge to Microsoft's dominance could produce much better and cheaper office productivity solutions for the entire world.   

Some will say I'm being a naive.  A goody, goody.  Microsoft doesn't sit idle while competitors challenge their business plans and neither should Google.  I'd say you're right.  My only point is that Google presented itself and won fans by being a provider of information as openly as possible.  These recent moves mark Google 2.0.  Not good, not bad, and probably not evil but not the same Google. 

The dispute between
Level 3 and Cogent Communications raises all sorts of questions around the
topic of Grid Computing.  If your business relies on very broadly
distributed computing grids, you have a new set of concerns.  While a grid
is set up to allow for efficient use of computing resources by allocating
processing power to applications dynamically it often must rely on multiple
service providers to stay connected.  The consolidation of many of the
major Telcos should help make this easier but there are still significant
challenges ahead in this area. 

Yet another example of the risks and rewards of depending on a very diverse
portfolio of solution providers...

I love new technology announcements but I've got mixed feelings when I
hear people talk about how some new development.  Whether it is an
early feedback on some medical trial ("ice cream can stop cancer!") or
some the electric car that can produce 300hp and get 130 mpg, it always
feels like early results typically get buried or the early promise gets
amplified by wishful thinking and the application to the larger world
is far, far behind. 

It is with that perspective, that I get unrealistically excited about Stanford winning the DARPA Grand Challenge. 
It was a pretty impressive feat with all sorts of implications for how
we travel in the future.  I remember watching a show on traffic
congestion on PBS that said that congestion would be basically
eliminated if a small percentage of cars were driven robotically. 
Apparently, it is a few bad eggs that make traffic horrible for all of
us.  

Clearly, this technology is still far from helping me get into the city
more quickly.  It was developed for the military to lower the
number of missions that require humans in order to reduce
fatalities.  Like the internet, DARPA may invest in this for
military functions but end up changing the world from in a much larger
sense. 

Perhaps this technology will combine with the whole flying car technology I've been waiting for since I was 6... 

There are a number of interesting discussions this week (one here and another here)
focusing on the challenges faced by public companies. The
challenge is a very human one and in both cases, the problems stemmed
from senior staff at public companies. Vendors are devoting a
great deal of time and attention to software solutions to aid in
corporate governance. It appears as if many company's management
could also use some training on the fundamentals of the law as
well.

I was talking to a friend that is opening a new small business.  Every vendor I speak to tells me how important the Small and Medium business marketplace is to their future success.  Many vendors that have made a very nice living selling to "enterprises" are now finding that their traditional customers have bought and there is reduced growth from this sector.  As smaller businesses can afford more technological horsepower, they are buying solutions that used to be exclusively the domain of the largest and richest companies. 

So I listened with great interest as my friend talked about how he was looking for a number of applications for his business - point of sales CRM packages that can handle ecommerce and in store sales, general ledger applications, etc. So he researches some vendor?s solutions using white papers and going to their sites for online demos, etc.  A solution looked extremely interesting and he signed up for contact by a rep from the company.  Now, this is a company I've met with that speaks highly of the importance of growing this part of their market.  They have bought companies to improve their product line for these smaller implementations. 

Now, the trick. 

There are 1000s of these companies looking for these solutions.  In the past, a vendor could make millions by selling to a few companies with very deep pockets and complex business requirements.  How does a company built to sell to one group reconfigure itself to sell to another?  Not very well apparently.  My friend waits for a call back.  He wants to buy - or at least hopes that the solution is one that he would want to buy.  He just needs to speak with people who can help him make that call.  

Still no call. 

He won't be the largest sale whatever salesperson assigned to his territory will make but he represents the growth market that this company identified themselves.  The road to growth for so many vendors is the SMB marketplace.  That road requires completely new products, new sales structures, and the same kind of responsiveness a major enterprise would receive.

TechRepublic recently asked members to specify how many Linux servers they had running in their business.  The answers may surprise you. You can view the results here. Only 10% of respondents claimed to have more than 25 Linux servers. Our most recent member survey (a more rigorous study to be sure) showed that the average member is responsible for a technology infrastructure supporting 1600 employees. 

There are probably many items at play here: 

1. Linux used on with limited applications.  Members are using Linux to run their web servers, e-mail, or some other limited application and the rest of their business is running on UNIX, Windows, AS400, etc. 

2.  Linux is still being tested by a large number of businesses.  I've talked to a number of members that are using Linux in test environments in advance of possible moves.  Often the move to Linux co-incides with a major installation or upgrade.  If that upgrade is still being tested, it would be on a limited number of servers. 

3.  Linux users don't take polls

The Linux footprint can easily be over estimated on TechRepublic.  Sentiments for Linux are extremely positive and there are many members that are happy to justify why these sentiments are so strong.  At any rate, rumors of Microsoft's/Sun's/etc. demise are still rumors if this data is to be believed.