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Jason Stamper's Blog: February 2005 Archives
What Have You Been Thinking for the Last 24 Centuries?
February 25, 2005
Check this: "We have done very little about thinking for the last 24 centuries. I have developed tools for human thinking and am now working with Tata Consultancy Services [TCS] to turn these into usable digitised versions that can be utilised by all organisations across the globe," said Dr. Edward de Bono. 24 centuries? Not 23, or 25 centuries?
24 centuries ago was 395BC. Why did everyone stop thinking about thinking in 395BC? I can't find anything in Wikipedia about 395BC, unless that's just because no one has given 395BC much thought since, erm, 396BC? Answers on a postcard please.
This insight comes as Tata Consultancy Services, Asia's largest IT services company, teamed up with Dr Edward de Bono [no jokes about whether The Edge will be helping it out, if you please] and de Bono Thinking Systems to offer solutions to organisations to aid business transformation.
But the press release was able to back up the need for the new service with hard, fast statistics, so there: "A Harvard Business Review survey shows, 'Creativity and Innovation' is one of the Top 3 items on the agenda of several CEOs across the globe," it stated. What was that? Several CEOs across the globe? Well that's conclusive evidence then, isn't it?
You've got to be kidding, surely. I may not be a statistician, but even my limited grasp of the field would lead me to believe that the opinions of "several CEOs" do not constitute a statistically relevant finding. In fact if they can only find several CEOs who say that 'creativity and innovation' is on their agenda, I would personally assume that for the vast majority it's not on the agenda at all. It's not even close to their agenda. Not within 24 centuries of it.
Should Geac Be Buying Again?
February 22, 2005
With all of the recent M&A activity in the enterprise applications space, competition is getting hotter all the time. Not least in the mid-market space, where Oracle has just bolstered its presence with the acquisition of PeopleSoft (and JD Edwards).
Despite this wave of consolidation though, one former serial acquirer, namely Geac Computer, has been rather quiet. Its last acquisition was in August 2003, when it bought business performance management (BPM) company Comshare.
Its lack of M&As surely has something to do with the hiring of a new CEO, Charles Jones, to the position of CEO in July 2003. He came in to do some housekeeping after the company had overstretched itself with too many, overly diverse acquisitions around 2000. He clearly wanted to get the house in order before he became distracted by too many acquisitions. It is also possible that the company had started negotiations with Comshare before he joined.
Well, he at least now has the company on an even keel. Its latest six-month sales were roughly flat, while profitability was much improved. But if he is trying to grow the company organically, he’s failing: in its latest quarter the Ontario, Canada-based company saw software license revenue of $15.1m, down 1.4% from $15.3m a year ago.
So is the company about to rejoin the M&A frenzy? Not according to Alastair Middleton, the company's EMEA marketing director, who told me last week that Geac has "turned its back on simply being a serial acquirer" and is instead focusing more attention on growing license sales organically. He said the company might still make targeted acquisitions. Either way, with the rest of the enterprise applications industry believing scale and breadth is everything, and Geac’s sales pretty much stalled, it seems unfeasible that the company’s Comshare acquisition will be its last.
Is Capellas the right man for HP?
February 18, 2005
Since Carly Fiorina quit her post as HP's CEO after differences with the board, there has been speculation that Michael Capellas might be just the man to come in and take the lead of the computing giant. Capellas was CEO of Compaq before HP bought it, and he became president of HP after the merger. He said he would stick around to help with integration of Compaq into HP, but in the event he was quickly poached by Worldcom - since renamed MCI - and a $50m salary.
There are three things bothering me about the speculation that he could be the right guy to take over from Carly Fiorina. For one, Mike has a job already. Yes, MCI may well get bought, but it is going to take a while for Verizon and Qwest to work out which of them wants it most. Even when they do, the CEO is often asked to stay on for a while to help with integration. It is likely to be tricky to extricate himself from MCI at such a delicate moment.
Secondly, people say he at least has HP experience. Well yes, but he was only HP president for six months, and during that time was focused on integrating Compaq into HP, not HP's longer-term vision.
Third, he's actually not a very experienced CEO. He joined Compaq as CIO, not CEO, and was only CEO at Compaq for two and a half years. During that time he was focused on getting Compaq into a fit state to be sold, not on its longer-term growth strategies.
On the other hand, he may well be just the man for the job. I interviewed him shortly after he sold Compaq and joined HP, and I can honestly say he seemed one of the shrewdest CEOs I've ever met. Even if, relatively speaking, he was a newcomer to the CEO role. You have to start somewhere.
Inconsistencies Plague Data Accuracy Market
February 08, 2005
Sometimes you just have to laugh. In January last year I wrote a news story in which Datanomic claimed it had an integrated suite of data quality tools, and one of its closest rivals, Trillium Software, quickly rejected the claim.
Then VP EMEA for Trillium Software, Tom Scampion, told me: "[Datanomic] do not have an enterprise-level offering. They only run on a PC, which does not mean it is not good, but it is suited to a departmental level and below, not the enterprise. There is an inverse relationship in this space between the amount of noise a vendor makes in the market and their proven ability."
Scampion said that for enterprise-level data quality tasks, software that runs only on a Windows platform is unlikely to be up to the job, whereas Trillium's software runs also on mainframe and Unix platforms. "For data quality tasks like fraud detection and other heavy lifting, users are unlikely to go for software that runs only on a PC, it just won't have the horsepower," he said.
Well, last week Scampion jumped ship and joined - you guessed it - Datanomic, as VP of sales. Commenting on the move he said, "Organisations are now investing in data quality software to gain a competitive edge and meet regulatory requirements. As such conventional name and address products no longer suffice. The current market demands solutions that go far beyond traditional data quality management, which is why Datanomic is pulling ahead with its powerful and unique approach.”
It is not surprising that competition is becoming increasingly aggressive in the space, as data quality is rising up the corporate agenda. Inaccurate and inconsistent data is known to lead to serious errors in software applications and data analysis, and the Data Warehousing Institute found in recent research that up to 75% of organizations have identified costs associated with so-called "dirty" data. I wonder what the cost of inaccurate or inconsistent marketing messages amounts to.
Too Little Too Late for Quark?
February 02, 2005
The news yesterday was that private desktop publishing company Quark Systems is trying to improve its standing with its customers, adding five new UK dates and locations to its 'Let’s Talk' road show.
Quark has suffered from a reputation of having disenfranchised many of its customers in recent years, but since hiring a new CEO at the start of 2004 the company has made a concerted effort to rectify the situation.
Still, a number of high profile organisations switching lock, stock and barrel over to rival Adobe InDesign software would suggest that Quark is starting to lose its grip on the desktop publishing market. While Quark late last year insisted that BBC Magazines' switch from Quark XPress to Adobe InDesign was not a trend, there are those who remain unconvinced. As a private entity Quark does not break out financial results, but going on anecdotal evidence the cracks are appearing.
Its road show strategy is clearly designed to stop an exodus of XPress customers to InDesign, but the question is whether it is too little too late. BBC Magazines said one of the reasons it switched was that Quark had not kept in lock step with the latest release of Apple's operating system at the time the decision was made. But perhaps another of its reasons - that Adobe is able to offer better integration with its own market leading Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat image and graphics applications - will be the reason to move for many customers.
Quark may have a new CEO who realises he needs to get the company close to its customers once more. But Quark appears to have fallen into a common trap for privately held companies: to think that it is possible to grow a business without actually keeping customers happy. Whether the new chief can re-establish customer enthusiasm for the company is debatable. But it seems clear that if he cannot, Quark could in short measure find itself with little more than a stagnant maintenance stream from a declining customer base. If it were public, I wouldn't be buying its shares.
My Search is Bigger Than Yours
February 01, 2005
MSN has come out fighting in the web search space in an attempt to claw back some valuable market share from market leaders Google and Yahoo. So whose search is best?
Microsoft spent two and a half years working on its search technology, though perhaps its developers took the instruction to go and build a Google-like web search a little too literally: the MSN search is not just close to Google, it's practically a patent infringement case waiting to be brought. Just click on the MSN search settings button and compare the configuration options to Google's - the similarities are somewhat striking.
Still, while the features may be similar, whose engine produces the most hits? I tried a search for the terms 'Google', 'MSN' and 'Yahoo' in each of those three search engines to see who's the daddy.
Anyway, Google beat Yahoo for all searches and kicked the living daylights out of MSN. For the term 'Yahoo', Google found 281 million, compared to 102 million found by Yahoo itself and just 19.6 million found by MSN. For the search term 'google', Google found itself 155 million times, while Yahoo found 'google' 58.1 million times and Microsoft's MSN found it 68.6 million times. You get the idea - a search for 'MSN' at Google produced 104 million hits, way more than MSN itself which only found the term 68 million times or thereabouts. So you could say Google knows MSN better than MSN itself.
I also tried an image search for the phrase 'Britney Spears' - the most popular search term of 2004, according to Google. Who would find the most pictures? In the settings page, I of course kept my settings on the 'Use moderate filtering' for all searches so as not to cause any undue strain on my heart. In the Stamper Image Search Benchmark Test - i.e. a search for Britney Spears - Google found 121,000 moderate images, compared to Yahoo's 103,000 and MSN's approximately 11,000.
Still, perhaps none of these results matter very much. The key is not so much how many hits you get for your search, but how high they are in terms of relevance to what you were looking for. This is much harder to measure. I tried a search for 'Telecaster versus Stratocaster', and it was Google that put the most relevant result for my purposes at the top of its list. Yahoo put it second, and MSN didn't feature a page that had a discussion of the merits of a Strat over a Tele in its top 30 hits. But had I been looking for something else, MSN may have performed best - it just depends exactly what you're looking for.
Perhaps what makes the power of Microsoft's new search engine less relevant still is the amount of marketing muscle that the company will bring to bear to promote it. Apparently the company's ad campaign is going to include television, print, Internet and outdoor promotions. The advert will run during the Super Bowl, the Oscars and the Grammys. Not even Google, flushed with the cash from its IPO, will be able to match that. Nor can Google leverage the fact it is the market leading desktop operating system vendor, as well as the leading browser vendor, whereas Microsoft can. The Google-style search engine wars are far from over - they are only just beginning.
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