EDS put a big stake in the ground by declaring friends and foes yesterday when they created the EDS Agilty Alliance.
When EDS acquired The Feld Group at the beginning of the year, Charlie Feld became EVP Portfolio Management – think of it as a role where the CTO and CIO report to him and he defines and builds both the product / service strategy and the internal systems to support the strategy (massive in EDS’s case.) One of Charlie’s classic moves whenever he becomes CIO somewhere is to lock down a finite set of well defined technology relationships to act as the backbone for all future buildout of technology. I remember a few examples of the top of my head – he did this at Frito-Lay with IBM (I think at one point, Frito-Lay was one of the largest users of OS/2 in the world) and Delta with Tibco.
Reading between the lines, EDS has decided enemy #1 and enemy #2 are IBM and HP respectively. The EDS Agility Alliance draws a line in the sand. If you add it up, you’ve got a “virtual company” that has $150 billion of combined annual revenue and $13.6 billion of annual R&D spending.
There are lots of good nuggets in the press release, including the signalling that “EDS will announce its application, business process and industry alliance members in the coming months.” (e.g. expect more to come.) If you are interested in the evolution of the high end of the IT services world, it’s worth a look.
Several months ago I had a massive spyware problem. Today, I have none.
The solution – I replaced Internet Explorer with Firefox. That’s it. We’re better (after cleaning up my machine with Spybot – which is free.)
Before switching to Firefox, I went through the cycle of hell of trying the various anti-spyware programs while continuing to use IE. None of them worked – in most cases I’d get rid of “some” of the spyware on my computer, but within 24 hours it’d be back. The daily scans were time consuming (and often ridiculous – all my GOOD cookies would get deleted, IE settings would get changed, random weird things that never happened before would start happening, and I was constantly downloading “updates” that – in many cases – seemed worse than their predecessor. I played with the three most popular – Adaware, Pest Patrol, and Spy Sweeper – with no real satisfaction. I kept coming back to Spybot as the only one that consistently cleaned everything up, although it just got bad again within a day or two.
Ross (my IT guy) told me to try Firefox. I did. Problem solved. Within a week I was totally addicted to Firefox and my spyware problems were completely gone.
Last week, Bill Gates was quoted as saying “This malware thing is so bad,” he said in a speech at the Computer History Museum here. “Now that’s the one that has us really needing to jump in.” “I have had malware, (adware), that crap” on some home machines, he said.
After seeing this quote, I decided to run Spybot on my home machine and see what was on there. I hadn’t done this in a month. The result – I had three “bad cookies” – all benign. Obviously, Gates quote (and revelation) is hugely ironic since the vast majority of spyware is infecting machines due to security holes (and features) of Internet Explorer. I imagine that some of the spyware nasties will target Firefox as it gets more popular (there have already been a few mentions about Firefox security holes that got plugged quickly), but so far my personal experience has been remarkably positive.
I’ve used IE since version 3. I’m a loyal and happy Microsoft customer and partner (many of my companies are partners with Microsoft and I’ve always been a huge Microsoft fan.) But – I’m done with IE for now. And – thankfully – I’m done with the spyware circle of hell – including having to deal with all the anti-spyware programs on the market that don’t really work.
For now.
The famous “Do No Evil”, of course. Given some of the recent negative chatter on Google, I’ve been thinking of what bold move they could do that would cause most of the technology industry to stand up and cheer for them. How about buying SCO?
1. It’s cheap, only $60m or so.
2. Fire everyone (ok – maybe it’s $100m when you get done with all the winddown costs and golden parachutes).
3. Open source / GPL all of the SCO products in exchance for settling all the lawsuits.
4. Be done with all the SCO nonsense.
Disclaimer: I’m not a shareholder of either Google or SCO nor do I have any non-public information about either company.
Paul Berberian, chairman and founder of Raindance, wrote a provocative post today called Free Conferencing is Theft. Paul knows this business extremely well – I was an early investor in Raindance (I left the board two years ago and am no longer involved in the company – but I continue to be a strong supporter and fan of it).
While Paul’s position is influenced by his role as a major investor in a leading web conferencing company, he describes clearly how the regulatory economics of the conferencing business works as well as the loophole that free conferencing companies are taking advantage of. He makes the point that someone is paying for this and – eventually – if the cost gets big enough – “someone” will notice and the dynamics will change.
Paul refers to the free Internet access business as an example of a bad business model that wasn’t sustainable that tried to take advantage of a shifting a cost disparity. I know this all too well as an early investor in PeoplePC (now owned by Earthlink and a paid service) – we spent a lot of money and acquired 600,000 customers on the path to having a non-sustainable business model. Part of our problem was the cost arbitrage we were trying to take advantage of – we thought we could provide retail ISP services at free prices but make up for it through our share of margin on computer sales, partner rebates, pull-through e-commerce sales, advertising revenue, and credit card incentives (all of these were revenue opportunities that we had that were associated with each new subscriber we acquired.) While we weren’t arbitraging regulatory issues (as with free conferencing), we applied a business model that required scale to a well-established business infrastructure, and ultimately failed. In hindsight, if we’d merely charged a commodity price for Internet access, we would have likely had a sustainable business.
Ironically, one of the very visible free ISPs (NetZero) has turned into a very successful paid ISP (United Online). The successfully transitioned enough of their large free customer base to a paid customer base – along with some smart financial engineering and good operational management – to use their initial “free” arbitrage position to create a sustainable and successful business. For those of you enjoying “free conferencing calls” today – don’t get too used to “free”.
Last month Mediathink published a White Paper title RSS: The Next Big Thing On Line. It’s the best starter piece that I’ve seen so far for people – especially in a business context – that are trying to figure out the answer to the question “what is this RSS thing and why do I care.” It’s a short piece (seven pages) – about a third is an intro to RSS, a third talks about aggregator technologies (and gives my favorite – NewsGator – a great review), and the final third talks about implications of RSS on marketing, email, messaging, search engines, and rich media.
Remember – it’s an introductory piece – so if you are an RSS / blogging pro it’s unlikely that you’ll see any new information. But – if you are either trying to figure out RSS or trying to help explain to collegues or customers why they should care about RSS – this belongs in your document toolkit.
Seth Godin’s ChangeThis project has officially launched. ChangeThis – in their words “is trying to create a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDF files, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.” As one would expect from Seth, the content is stimulating, provocative, and easy to quickly digest.
I’ve agreed to host one of the manifestos on my site – I’ll be putting up a link to How To Be a Boor. It’s a great piece that talks about proper email ettiquite which – as email becomes ubiquitous – is useful to be reminded of.
I was involved in a deal this week that finally closed at 4:40am PST on a Thursday morning. The lawyers were chasing down signatures until 3am PST.
Amazingly, several of the signatories in the deal did not have fax machines at their house. Now – the deal should have been done in such a way that everyone had signed the docs and they were in escrow well before close of business the previous day; it was totally unnecessary to be chasing down signature pages in the middle of the night. However, it never occurred to me (and – apparently – it also didn’t occur to the lawyers who were the ones responsible for getting the signatures) that the people involved wouldn’t have fax machines at home.
Interestingly, everyone had Internet access and a printer. The problem wasn’t getting the documents to them (although no one really appreciates having to wake up in the middle of the night to “sign just one more document.”) However, once the document was signed, the idea of driving to the office at midnight to fax one page was ludicrous. Fortunately, everyone involved that didn’t have a fax machine was in the bay area, which was where the lawyers were, so the couriers had a busy, but lucrative night.
This deal had a real timing deadline as we had a number of announcements that assumed we would be closed before the markets opened in the morning. Since the acquirer was a public company, the timing was critical and not easily (or conveniently) changed. We got it done, but it was close.
I’ve been a long time user of integrated printer-fax-copier-scanner technology (I used to have three separate devices and no scanner – I dumped this as soon as the “all-in-one” models came out several years ago.) I currently have an HP Laserjet 3330 in each of my houses and my folks have a different, but similar model at their houses. When you can pick up an HP LaserJet 3015 for $299.99 I just don’t know why you wouldn’t at least have a low end “all-in-one” machine around for those unexpected late night emergencies.
So – while it’s not Christmas shopping season yet – consider putting this on your next “computer buying spree list” if you currently don’t have a fax machine. With all of our current technology, until electronic signatures work and are widely accepted, fax machines will continue to be useful.
I’m an email junkie. As a user, I not-so-fondly remember Compuserve, Novell MHS, and Pine. As an investor, I’ve been involved in Email Publishing (first email service bureau), MessageMedia, Infobeat/Exactis, Critical Path, Postini, and Return Path. Recently there’s been a lot of noise about how email is on the decline. I don’t understand this as I use it more than ever and see its adoption continuing unabated.
Matt Blumberg has a great, thoughtful post on email that’s worth reading if you have anything to do with the email business. Matt’s the CEO of Return Path and he acknowledges that his post is self-serving, but it’s content rich and right on the money.
I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer when Windows 98 came out. Go figure. I’ve been stubbornly using IE and refused to even look at Mozilla / Firefox given that I spend so much of my time in email and I always felt (incorrectly) that Outlook and IE would be better integrated than Outlook and Firefox.
I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with IE lately for a variety of reasons, including some bugs that I can’t figure out workarounds for, occassional grungy performance issues, endless popup Windows and Spyware problems, and all the well publicized security issues.
I decided to break down and give Firefox a try. I’ve been using it for two weeks and love it. If you are a heavy browser user and still using IE, you should absolutely consider Firefox. Following are some quick reasons:
As a NewsGator user, there’s even an extension for subscribing to an RSS feed in NewsGator.
Thanks Ross for pushing me over the edge.