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Paul Gillin's Blog - Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Roboform is great software

It's not often that I stumble across a piece of shareware that I use every single day, but Roboform from Siber Systems now occupies just such a vaunted position on my desktop. If you're anything like me, you have dozens of logons and passwords for different Web sites. Most people maintain this information informally in everything from text files to Post-It notes, and passwords are forgotten all the time.

Roboform is a spiffy little browser utility that enables you to store all your logon, password, credit card and personal information in one place. It does a great job of populating Web forms with the information you need, saving you time and preventing errors. It also appears to be free of adware, spyware and other privacy invasions that infest a lot of free software utilities. I've been using for two months with no problems, and Roboform has genuinely made my life easier. I highly recommend it.

¶ 10:54 AM 0 Comments

Interex's death is bad for HP users

Coincidentally, the same day that I posted the article on HP's sense of purpose, the Interex user group suddenly closed its doors and said it was cancelling its HP World conference. HP World had long been the one place that HP users could gather and share/support/network/commiserate about common issues. Now their only option is the HP Technology Forum, an event produced and, no doubt, tightly controlled by HP itself.

Independent user groups are a dying breed, and that's bad for the tech industry. The Common and Share groups for IBM users are dramatically smaller than they used to be. The International Oracle Users Group has feuded with Oracle, which would just as soon stamp it out. Encompass (formerly DECUS) is now working hand-in-glove with HP, presumably to insure its own continued existence. ASUG, which is the independent SAP user group, is financially healthy, but uncomfortably chummy with SAP, in my opinion.

In their heyday, independent user groups provided a needed forum for users to band together and share their common concerns with a vendor. Open-forum meetings with vendor executives could be boisterous and even rowdy affairs with users shouting down vendor reps over areas of disagreement. But much of this activism has now moved online and the industry shift to commodity platforms has lessened the "lock-in" factor that once made users so passionate about their platforms. It's a shame that there isn't a more active independent movement in the Windows world to represent the users who are locked in to that platform. Give Microsoft credit for never allowing an independent user group to get off the ground.

There is a need for these kinds of gatherings, even in the commoditized technology world. There are still a lot of legacy platforms out there, and newsgroup postings are no replacement for the chance to get in a vendor's face and make one's opinions known. Common still does a pretty good job of maintaining its independence, in my view. But most groups have aligned themselves closely with vendors in the interests of survival. Sadly, HP users now have one less place to turn when they want to make their feelings known. And it's sad for HP, too, in a way. A strong, independent user group is a sign of a vendor's continued relevance in the industry, and one can argue that Interex's failure is a blow to HP's profile as a significant industry force.

¶ 10:50 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, July 21, 2005

HP's sense of purpose

Give credit to Mark Hurd, the new CEO of HP, to act quickly and decisively in cutting 14,500 jobs, or 10% of HP's workforce, and scrapping an account-driven sales organization that had added complexity and bureaucracy to the organization while increasing the disconnect between sales people and the products they were selling.

Hurd's actions in many ways are a step toward returning HP to the decentralized, close-to-the-market culture that made the company so great in the first place. They're also reminiscent of the moves Lou Gerstner made when he first joined IBM during its financial crisis in the early '90s. Gerstner shook up the complacent IBM culture by cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs and making every project accountable to a business benefit. Painful as they were, Gerstner's moves saved IBM.

I'm not so sure what's going to save HP. HP is a great company with a great culture, but it's a perennial #2 or #3 in most of the markets it serves. In fact, outside of printers I can't think of a single product category in which HP enjoys a clear leadership position. The company has done some innovative things in the consumer market with its multimedia PCs, and its OpenView systems management suite is a top-tier product, but it's been a long time since HP has had the kind of big bang hit that gets people buzzing. This is still basically a company that makes most of its profit selling ink.

I trace HP's decline as an innovator to two events. The company partnerered with Intel in the late '90s to build a family of chips that became the Pentium family. It was an unprecedented deal and HP trumpeted it mightily at the time. But there's no evidence that the actual partnership ever amounted to much and the partnership seemed to take some of the urgency out of HP's efforts to build a competitive processor. It was basically the first major computer to concede the chip war to Intel.

The other was HP's decision a few years ago to play Switzerland on the Unix/Windows debate. By not lining up on one side or the other, the company essentially positioned itself as the safe choice on servers. It's okay to be the safe choice if you're the market leader, but HP did not enjoy such a position at the time. I think that strategy was a recipe for ambivalence. If you don't have a side to root for in any conflict, it's hard to get motivated about participating. HP, which had been a leader in Unix workstations and which had challenged in Intel-based servers through the late '90s, seemed to fall into a funk after it took itself out of the operating system debate.

I don't know how Mark Hurd is going to shake up that culture. It's a huge challenge. I do know that playing it safe would be the wrong thing to do. Hurd has the endorsement of HP shareholders, who have seen shares drop 50% in the last five years, to take bold action. The layoffs are a start. Let's hope he can stay true to Carly Fiorina's advertising slogan and find a way to make HP "innovate" again.

¶ 10:49 AM 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Marketing myopia

Tech marketers talk constantly about the need to reach "C-level" executives. But that is such a simplistic view of technology adoption. Sure, the CIO is important, but real technology change almost always begins lower in the organization. CIOs are some of the most risk-averse people on the planet. So why are marketers going to CIOs to try to effect change in the organization?

I put together an off-the-top-of-my-head list of disruptive technologies that have been introduced in the last 20 years without the involvement of IT management. It's long and I'm sure I've missed a few.

Disruptive technology - that which changes the way we do things - is never introduced at the top of an organization. It almost always comes in through the back door. In fact, I can think of only a couple of game-changing technologies that were driven by top IT management: routers and VoIP switches.

Here's my list of mainstream technologies that were successful in spite of opposition by IT management. Tell me what I missed.

PCs
Word processing software
Spreadsheets
Personal faxes
Personal printers
LANs
Unix workstations (which drove Unix adoption on the server)
GUIs
Presentation graphics
Cell phones
The Internet
PDAs
Instant messaging
Net conferencing
Streaming audio/video
Open source/Linux
Peer-to-peer networks
Wireless LANs

¶ 10:52 AM 0 Comments

Saturday, July 09, 2005

PRspeak

Here's when it sucks to be a PR professional. Cisco had four of its five top storage executives resign this week, which is a knotty image problem. So how did Cisco spin it? A "natural course of events," said a company spokesman. When mass executive departures become a natural course of events at any company, that's the time to polish up the resume, I'd say :-).

¶ 10:53 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Two podcasts I highly recommend

Doug Kaye's wonderful IT Conversations site has a couple of sparkling podcasts you'll enjoy. Less is more by psychologist Barry Schwartz proposes that the stress in our lives is due in large part to the profusion of choices that we have. Whether or not we choose to whip out the BlackBerry or our laptop during our son's baseball game isn't as important as the fact that we could do those things. We're stressed because we have so many options and we feel guilt and regret over the options we didn't chooose.

Schwartz maintains we need fewer choices in salad dressings (he counted 75 varieties at his local supermarket) and more in political parties. He cites wonderful examples of how consumers shut down in the face of too much choice and opt not to choose at all. It's thought-provoking, even if you don't agree with him (which I'm not sure I do).

Also, check out Human Nature by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the fascinating Blink. It'll challenge your faith in market research by convincing you that people don't say what they really think and that their actions are often very different than their intentions. His dissection of the failure of New Coke is particularly interesting.

¶ 10:55 AM 0 Comments

Sunday, July 03, 2005

July 3, 1991

If you Google the date of July 3, 1991, you won't find much of interest, but I couldn't let Independence Day pass without noting the importance of that date in tech history. That's the day that IBM, Apple and Motorola rocked the industry by announcing plans to cooperate on a line of products and technologies. Apple would use IBM's chips, IBM would incorporate the Mac into its enterprise computers, and the two companies would cooperate on some joint ventures in software development and multimedia.

Ultimately, little came of the deal. The joint venture companies -- Kaleida and Taligent -- fizzled. Apple continues to use IBM-designed chips, although it's moving to Intel next year. The Mac never became an important player on the corporate desktop.

But I think this was a turning point for the industry in two respects. One is that it was the first time IBM had even acknowledged the existence of PC competition and actively engaged a competitor in a joint venture. Prior to the Apple deal, IBM was an arrogant and imperious company that tried to do everything its own way. Even in 1991, it was still trying to shove proprietary designs like the PS/2 and OS/2 down the throats of unwilling users. The Apple deal was the computer industry equivalent of the toppling of the Berlin wall. It gave an important seal of approval to the concept of "co-opetition," or cooperating with one's competitors, and that concept is a widely accepted way of doing business today.

The deal was also an early acknowledgement by two prominent companies that interoperability was important to users. At that time, the industry was still fragmented into many competing and incompatible camps and the chaos was driving users crazy. IBM's stepping forward to embrace a competitor's products signaled the beginning of an end to all this.

It was certainly an interesting time for IBM. The company was about to enter a business vortex that would lead to an $8 billion loss the next year and the removal of its chief executive. But the IBM that was reborn from that crisis was one that was serious about open systems and interoperability and that is much better positioned to thrive in the long term. Like glasnost, the Apple deal was the first step in changing calcified thinking, but that change led to much bigger impacts across the industry.

¶ 10:51 AM 0 Comments

Friday, July 01, 2005

Oracle surprises, but it shouldn't

Oracle surprised a lot of people last week by reporting a jump in earnings fueled by acqusitions and North American business. What gives? Isn't this a company tormented by user dissatisfaction, a competitive onslaught from SAP and the distraction of absorbing a very large company in Peoplesoft?

Yes, but those things have very little to do with Oracle's business, which is humming along with very little reason for concern. The database business is secure, despite the ongoing challenges from SQL Server and open source alternatives. That fact is that for industrial strength applications, Oracle is still the default choice for business, and that is a very good position to be in.

The company's recent moves into the ERP market are intriguing, and I think will ultimately be successful. A lot has been made in the press of the dissatisfaction of Peoplesoft customers with Oracle's stewardship, but in its conference call last week, Oracle claimed that customer retention rates are over 90%. This should be no surprise. ERP systems are pretty much hard-coded into a corporation's IT infrastructure, and the costs and risks of switching can be astronomical. It's good PR for SAP to run something like its Safe Passage Program but you can expect very few customers to actually take SAP up on the deal. Oracle has a similar program, by the way, which will have similar results.

Switching costs are underreported and underappreciated, but they are a great source of business leverage. Computer Associates built its business on this concept. CA bought failing companies for pennies on the dollar and then milked maintenance revenue for income. It's a strategy that isn't always popular with customers, but it works. Oracle knows this, and that is why it's so confident in the ultimate success of its ERP strategy.

The ERP market is now a two-horse race, and Oracle is one of the survivors. Expect it to do very well. SAP, by the way, will do just fine, too. A duopoly is a great competitive situation if you're one of the two companies involved. Customer choice, unfortunately, suffers. That'll be a subject for another post.

¶ 10:52 AM 0 Comments

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