I just had to make a few comments about the latest global economic burp that started when Standard and Poor’s dropped US the credit rating to AA+ from AAA.
Wake the fuck up!!
This is the same credit ratings agency that told everyone that sub-prime mortgages were a good investment, AIG was as solid as a rock and Lehmann Brothers, well Lehmann Brothers is a bulwark of Wall Street and we can trust them…honest…and we all know how well that went once the dominos started to fall.
Nothing’s changed. Not really.
Does anyone really think that the United States is not going to pay its bills?
Does anyone really think that the economy of Greece and the economy of the USA are in the same situation?
I mean how do you call in the receivers on a country that’s got more guns, planes, boats, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons than anyone else? You’d have to be a pretty brave accountant to make that house call and which bankruptcy court would have jurisdiction?
This is just another case of Wall Street wunderkinder showing that their idea of long term investment strategy is “how much money can we make in the next 30 minutes?” after getting their market guidance from a ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News financial report.
The only thing this has been good for is taking attention away from News Corporation and their woes.
Rupert wouldn’t have…nahhh…that’s as preposterous as a news organisation being involved in…oh...
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Now Star Trek is a Corporate Strategy. Beam me up. Please!
One of the journalists I like to follow is John Dvorak from PC Magazine.
Opinionated? Yes. Been around long enough to smell the bullshit? Absolutely.
One of the pieces that he wrote that got my interest was one entitled Microsoft’s Wacky New Direction: Star Trek!
But this got me thinking about some of the more practical problems with Microsoft’s (Ballmer's) new idea and why its doomed to failure.
Imagine if you will, for a moment, an office populated with this technology. Hundreds of cube rats in an open plan office, stacked, racked and packed to extract every single dollar of value out of the insanely high rent they’re paying per square metre, all interacting with their computer by voice and having that same computer talk back to them.
In case you have any trouble imagining that go to a loud, busy bar.
Quite apart from the technical issues who would want to work in an environment like that, not the bar, the noise, we’d all love to work in a bar, not great for productivity but fantastic for staff morale.
You know, when you’ve got a CEO talking up stuff like this that Microsoft is in deep, deep trouble and that Ballmer recognises that he’s got a great big target painted on his forehead.
Good luck Steve. I think you’re going to need it.
Opinionated? Yes. Been around long enough to smell the bullshit? Absolutely.
One of the pieces that he wrote that got my interest was one entitled Microsoft’s Wacky New Direction: Star Trek!
But this got me thinking about some of the more practical problems with Microsoft’s (Ballmer's) new idea and why its doomed to failure.
Imagine if you will, for a moment, an office populated with this technology. Hundreds of cube rats in an open plan office, stacked, racked and packed to extract every single dollar of value out of the insanely high rent they’re paying per square metre, all interacting with their computer by voice and having that same computer talk back to them.
In case you have any trouble imagining that go to a loud, busy bar.
Quite apart from the technical issues who would want to work in an environment like that, not the bar, the noise, we’d all love to work in a bar, not great for productivity but fantastic for staff morale.
You know, when you’ve got a CEO talking up stuff like this that Microsoft is in deep, deep trouble and that Ballmer recognises that he’s got a great big target painted on his forehead.
Good luck Steve. I think you’re going to need it.
Monday, August 8, 2011
What do you call stupidity sent to University?
I’m paraphrasing P.J O’Rourke for the title of this blog and I want to talk about boards of directors and IT Governance standards over the next few weeks.
Now I know that most Boards are about to be mightily offended by this, but, lets face it, as the ultimate authority within corporations, the apex of the pyramid, the pinnacle of success, they are the ones responsible for the economic mess we all find ourselves in.
Now they want to stick their all-seeing, all-knowing fingers into the world of technology. They’re going to take everything they learned in creating economic chaos apply it to the technology used in their companies under the banner of governance - as soon as you hear this word uttered you will see rapturous faces as the hallelujah chorus comes up.
This isn’t a good thing. The Hallelujah Chorus is about the end of the world.
The first reason you know your screwed is when you start hearing about COBIT, ISO38500, AS8015. This alphanumeric upchuck represents the rules you’ll live your life by after the Board has finished applying them. Not to improve things in the company mind you, but to cover their butts and make sure they don’t get fitted for an orange jump suit and set up for the ‘perp walk’ from the front of the building.
Don’t buy into the bullshit, this isn’t about efficiency, effectiveness and oversight.
You see the principles espoused in these tomes of wisdom are documented, codified and formalised in this way to provide cover for the board and keep the auditors off their collective backs because their trusted lieutenants, their management team, actively avoid and sabotage at every turn everything that is defined in those ‘governance standards’ and they don’t want to, or won’t address that problem.
The dirty little secret is that COBIT, AS8015 and ISO38500 are all about getting business to own and take responsibility for their part of the technical puzzle that is information technology and telecommunications within your corporate environment.
This explosion of standards and guidelines is documented, defined and cross-referenced because common sense isn’t common.
In a future blog entry I’ll talk about why, regardless of standards and the miasmatic alphabet soup above this is doomed to failure without a wholesale change in corporate culture and the reversal of 30+ years of business practice.
Now I know that most Boards are about to be mightily offended by this, but, lets face it, as the ultimate authority within corporations, the apex of the pyramid, the pinnacle of success, they are the ones responsible for the economic mess we all find ourselves in.
Now they want to stick their all-seeing, all-knowing fingers into the world of technology. They’re going to take everything they learned in creating economic chaos apply it to the technology used in their companies under the banner of governance - as soon as you hear this word uttered you will see rapturous faces as the hallelujah chorus comes up.
This isn’t a good thing. The Hallelujah Chorus is about the end of the world.
The first reason you know your screwed is when you start hearing about COBIT, ISO38500, AS8015. This alphanumeric upchuck represents the rules you’ll live your life by after the Board has finished applying them. Not to improve things in the company mind you, but to cover their butts and make sure they don’t get fitted for an orange jump suit and set up for the ‘perp walk’ from the front of the building.
Don’t buy into the bullshit, this isn’t about efficiency, effectiveness and oversight.
You see the principles espoused in these tomes of wisdom are documented, codified and formalised in this way to provide cover for the board and keep the auditors off their collective backs because their trusted lieutenants, their management team, actively avoid and sabotage at every turn everything that is defined in those ‘governance standards’ and they don’t want to, or won’t address that problem.
The dirty little secret is that COBIT, AS8015 and ISO38500 are all about getting business to own and take responsibility for their part of the technical puzzle that is information technology and telecommunications within your corporate environment.
This explosion of standards and guidelines is documented, defined and cross-referenced because common sense isn’t common.
In a future blog entry I’ll talk about why, regardless of standards and the miasmatic alphabet soup above this is doomed to failure without a wholesale change in corporate culture and the reversal of 30+ years of business practice.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Alas poor retail, we knew you well...
I ran across this interesting piece on the excuses that Bricks and Mortar retailers use when they’re trying to explain why The Internet ate their homework.
Old retail’s five fallacies.
Worth reading
Old retail’s five fallacies.
Worth reading
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Vodafail. Let my people go!
According to this piece from the Sydney Morning Herald Vodafone has themselves a big problem.
Vodafone exodus: 375k customers leave this year
Their numbers look pretty ugly for the second half of last year they booked nearly $18 million in profit. This year they’re showing a loss for the same period of just over $78 million.
That performance is nearly as good as the reception on their network.
Losing 375,000 customers in 6 months averages out to be around 203 customers a day. Where are they going?
According to this article from The Australian it looks like all of them and a whole lot of others are going to Telstra. The quality of their network is the key here and I think the differentiator is the backhaul capability of the Telstra network allowing it to better cope with data consuming smartphones and tablets.
Its been my experience that Optus and Vodafone really invested in voice carriage and projected growth in voice carriage and were caught ‘wrong-footed’ when these types of devices exploded onto the market.
That being said Telstra did their level best to screw every user of mobile data by charging, what seemed like, more per MByte than the current spot rate for gold.
This is where market segmentation really came into play. Vodafone was pitching for the low end of the market, but, these customers were also more likely to upgrade handsets to the latest gadget and roll over their contracts early.
When the iPhone hit, no one expected the explosion in the growth of mobile data consumption and when the rest of the smartphones really hit the market the wheels fell off.
Will Vodafone manage to get their act together and stop the arterial haemorrhage of paying customers? I really don’t know but if this doesn’t get fixed really quickly they could be in a lot of trouble given their capital commitments for network expansion. In fact we’ve been here once before, they were called One-Tel.
Vodafone exodus: 375k customers leave this year
Their numbers look pretty ugly for the second half of last year they booked nearly $18 million in profit. This year they’re showing a loss for the same period of just over $78 million.
That performance is nearly as good as the reception on their network.
Losing 375,000 customers in 6 months averages out to be around 203 customers a day. Where are they going?
According to this article from The Australian it looks like all of them and a whole lot of others are going to Telstra. The quality of their network is the key here and I think the differentiator is the backhaul capability of the Telstra network allowing it to better cope with data consuming smartphones and tablets.
Its been my experience that Optus and Vodafone really invested in voice carriage and projected growth in voice carriage and were caught ‘wrong-footed’ when these types of devices exploded onto the market.
That being said Telstra did their level best to screw every user of mobile data by charging, what seemed like, more per MByte than the current spot rate for gold.
This is where market segmentation really came into play. Vodafone was pitching for the low end of the market, but, these customers were also more likely to upgrade handsets to the latest gadget and roll over their contracts early.
When the iPhone hit, no one expected the explosion in the growth of mobile data consumption and when the rest of the smartphones really hit the market the wheels fell off.
Will Vodafone manage to get their act together and stop the arterial haemorrhage of paying customers? I really don’t know but if this doesn’t get fixed really quickly they could be in a lot of trouble given their capital commitments for network expansion. In fact we’ve been here once before, they were called One-Tel.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Random Thoughts
Here’s a few topics that I ran across while sitting in a hotel room in Brisbane.
Nokia results are bad, I mean flushed down the toilet, this dog won’t hunt bad.
I came across this piece on the Mobile Review website and the numbers really aren’t very pretty. I’m not so sure that moving to Windows Phone 7, or as a friend of mine calls it Windows MoPho, is going to help Nokia here.
Nokia Quarterly Results - It’s Even Worse than we Imagined
Google is doing some really smart stuff.
Google has just released an update to Android that has a whole bunch of cool features. The one I like is that you can have custom ‘ringtones’ set for incoming e-mail so you get an audible alert for the inbound items you really want to look at.
Gmail v2.3.5 for Android adds label-specific ringtones and sync priority mail only options
What does my phone contract really cost me?
Telstra has decided to be the first to market with a document that details the the actual cost of a new service. This is something that a lot of telcos have been fighting against, they say that its too hard. Strange that the first telco out of the starting gate with this information is Telstra rather than one of the ‘low cost’ carriers. It’ll be really interesting to see how cheap or not they are when everyone is using the same base for calculating the real cost of a service.
Telstra lays out the true cost of service plans
Retailers are breathtakingly, galactically, stupendously stupid when it comes to online!
Myer announced earth shattering news. They’re going to offer free shipping and this will help them to go from $5M p.a to around $50M p.a in online sales as a part of a ‘wider strategic plan’.
If it was only that simple. Retail genius at work...again.
Nokia results are bad, I mean flushed down the toilet, this dog won’t hunt bad.
I came across this piece on the Mobile Review website and the numbers really aren’t very pretty. I’m not so sure that moving to Windows Phone 7, or as a friend of mine calls it Windows MoPho, is going to help Nokia here.
Nokia Quarterly Results - It’s Even Worse than we Imagined
Google is doing some really smart stuff.
Google has just released an update to Android that has a whole bunch of cool features. The one I like is that you can have custom ‘ringtones’ set for incoming e-mail so you get an audible alert for the inbound items you really want to look at.
Gmail v2.3.5 for Android adds label-specific ringtones and sync priority mail only options
What does my phone contract really cost me?
Telstra has decided to be the first to market with a document that details the the actual cost of a new service. This is something that a lot of telcos have been fighting against, they say that its too hard. Strange that the first telco out of the starting gate with this information is Telstra rather than one of the ‘low cost’ carriers. It’ll be really interesting to see how cheap or not they are when everyone is using the same base for calculating the real cost of a service.
Telstra lays out the true cost of service plans
Retailers are breathtakingly, galactically, stupendously stupid when it comes to online!
Myer announced earth shattering news. They’re going to offer free shipping and this will help them to go from $5M p.a to around $50M p.a in online sales as a part of a ‘wider strategic plan’.
If it was only that simple. Retail genius at work...again.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Wintel Market Share Slips
I noticed an interesting piece today about market share.
It seems that Apple shipped 20+ million smartphones in Q2 2011 an increase of 12 million over Q2 2010. This eclipsed Nokia who shipped 16+ million smartphones in Q2 2011. Interestingly, if you look at Nokia’s results they’ve only been able to move this many by shaving their margins to the bone. If they were making their regular margins it looks like this number would have plummeted.
To make matters worse Samsung shipped in excess of 19 million smartphones for the same period.
To put some context on this Nokia has lost over half of its smartphone market share in 12 months.
The other interesting fact that came out of the article was the following assertion by industry analysts Canalys:
“the share held by “Wintel”, which it defined as “any PC running any version of Windows in conjunction with any x86 architecture”, fell below 82 percent, its lowest point in more than 20 years“.
I know that falling below 82% doesn’t sound that spectacular, but, its an earth shattering statistic. Not that long ago the Wintel market share was well above 90%.
Something’s happening and its big.
Think about it. if we look back 20 years people were running Windows 3.0. The first really stable version of Windows released. Prior to that people were running DOS. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 were released in 1992 and the Windows juggernaut really took off once Windows 95 hit the market in mid-1995.
So these guys are saying that Windows market share has slipped to where it was when Windows 3 first saw the light of day. If this is actually the case then I'd be sweating it if I owned stock in Microsoft. Imagine if Coles or Woolworths suddenly saw their market share slip back to where it was 20 years ago the Daily Garbagewrapper would be screaming it was the end of the world, or maybe even worse than that!
Back in those days a Windows release was greeted with as much fanfare as a new iPhone. People would line up at midnight to be the first to buy a copy of Windows 95 from Harvey Norman.
I’m not going to have a discussion here about the pros and cons of lining up to be the first to buy anything at midnight let alone an Operating System but lets just think about this for a second, Windows market share has fallen below 82% since it became a stable operating system that could be used in the everyday corporate world.
This fact is even more surprising when you consider that each new PC shipped from everyone except Apple includes a copy of Windows.
Are people giving up on desktops for tablets, and I mean of any flavour?
Is everyone buying a Mac?
Are people going in Linux in droves?
I don’t have any answers, but, anecdotally I can say this; as I go from company to company, client to client the questions that I keep getting asked is ”How do we use Linux servers in our business and we also want to use Macs, iPads and iPhones as well as our Windows machines?“
One client asked me ”How come Apple can sell a new operating system for under $50 and Microsoft want to charge me over $400?“
Is this a taste of things to come or have the analysts screwed up their numbers?
It seems that Apple shipped 20+ million smartphones in Q2 2011 an increase of 12 million over Q2 2010. This eclipsed Nokia who shipped 16+ million smartphones in Q2 2011. Interestingly, if you look at Nokia’s results they’ve only been able to move this many by shaving their margins to the bone. If they were making their regular margins it looks like this number would have plummeted.
To make matters worse Samsung shipped in excess of 19 million smartphones for the same period.
To put some context on this Nokia has lost over half of its smartphone market share in 12 months.
The other interesting fact that came out of the article was the following assertion by industry analysts Canalys:
“the share held by “Wintel”, which it defined as “any PC running any version of Windows in conjunction with any x86 architecture”, fell below 82 percent, its lowest point in more than 20 years“.
I know that falling below 82% doesn’t sound that spectacular, but, its an earth shattering statistic. Not that long ago the Wintel market share was well above 90%.
Something’s happening and its big.
Think about it. if we look back 20 years people were running Windows 3.0. The first really stable version of Windows released. Prior to that people were running DOS. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 were released in 1992 and the Windows juggernaut really took off once Windows 95 hit the market in mid-1995.
So these guys are saying that Windows market share has slipped to where it was when Windows 3 first saw the light of day. If this is actually the case then I'd be sweating it if I owned stock in Microsoft. Imagine if Coles or Woolworths suddenly saw their market share slip back to where it was 20 years ago the Daily Garbagewrapper would be screaming it was the end of the world, or maybe even worse than that!
Back in those days a Windows release was greeted with as much fanfare as a new iPhone. People would line up at midnight to be the first to buy a copy of Windows 95 from Harvey Norman.
I’m not going to have a discussion here about the pros and cons of lining up to be the first to buy anything at midnight let alone an Operating System but lets just think about this for a second, Windows market share has fallen below 82% since it became a stable operating system that could be used in the everyday corporate world.
This fact is even more surprising when you consider that each new PC shipped from everyone except Apple includes a copy of Windows.
Are people giving up on desktops for tablets, and I mean of any flavour?
Is everyone buying a Mac?
Are people going in Linux in droves?
I don’t have any answers, but, anecdotally I can say this; as I go from company to company, client to client the questions that I keep getting asked is ”How do we use Linux servers in our business and we also want to use Macs, iPads and iPhones as well as our Windows machines?“
One client asked me ”How come Apple can sell a new operating system for under $50 and Microsoft want to charge me over $400?“
Is this a taste of things to come or have the analysts screwed up their numbers?
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