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Bright Minds in Dark Suits

Posted on October 4, 2006 ·

I’m sitting in the lobby of the Charles Hotel, waiting for my flight back to CA after a really interesting conference by Longworth Venture Partners, where I had the chance of participating on a panel moderated by Harvard Professor  Andrew McAfee, along with fellow Enterprise Irregulars Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalimi and Roth Boothby.

 It’s interview time, the place is swarming with law firms and dark suits: Harvard Law School students. They all look alike in their “uniform” … I haven’t seen this many (dark) suits ever since I moved to California:-)  Guys arrive in full gear, girls’ ritual includes sitting down at the lobby and switching their sneakers to the mandatory torture devices (i.e. high heels).  

Wait!  what’s going on?  A guy in a dark suit, open-collared shirt and no ties arrives… he walks kind of funny, smiles and has his iPod headsets in his ears… greets his friends and heads for the elevator up. 

Will he get eliminated right away?  Or is being “different” the winning strategy?  Whoever you are, if you read this, let me know how it went.  And all you other interviewers, I feel for you… good luck.  And remember: there is life outside the mega-firms.

Update (10/4): What a coincidence that Robert Scoble just posted The suits vs. geeks.   

Filed Under: Business, Misc ·
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Windows Vista Value Analysis

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

You gotta love this bottom-up value analysis of Windows Vista. It is based on a “feature-by-feature analysis of how much the upgrades are worth to the user.“

The final tally: $133.

“Unfortunately, to get all of these features, you’ll need to fork over $400 for Vista Ultimate Edition, a full three times what the OS is really worth. Better news: The upgrade is $260 (not $360 as previously reported), which puts us a little more in the ballpark, but still twice what it’s really worth.”

Oh, well, I know I won’t get Vista until it’s time to buy a new laptop….

 

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Google’s Costly Garage

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

HP GarageGoogle purchased the 1,900 sq.ft. home in Menlo Park where founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago to start the business.   The rent back then was $1,700 a month.  Yes, you read it right, $1,700, and it’s not the entire home, just the garage! 

In comparison, HP co-founder William Hewlett rented the garage where HP was started for $45 per month.

Only in California ….

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business ·
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Sleeper Blog Awakening: Burnham’s Beat

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

A long-forgotten, dormant blog came back to life today: Burnham’s Beat.   Bill Burnham explains his long silence: it was due to his lawyers’ advice while setting up his new hedge fund, Inductive Capital.  He’s back online and plans to blog on.

Burnham’s Beat was one of my early picks as a favorite blog: Bill did not post every day, but quite regularly on software, startup, VC subjects, and whenever he did, it was worth reading. Here are a few of his “golden oldies”, in no particular order:

For the Love of God People, Enterprise Software Is Not Dead

Software’s Top 10 2005 Trends: #3 Software As A Service

Is Open Source Becoming Over-Sourced?

Honey I Bought The Wrong Company!

Conflicts and Cash: Industry Analysts and Start-ups

Cash Rich vs. Cash Poor VCs

When to Catch A Falling Knife 

Deal Flow Is Dead, Long Live Thesis Driven Investing

 

Back when Burnham’s Beat was still alive there was a good conversation on Dead  Blogs  Walking, the essence of which was:

“So I say this to these bloggers, treat your blog like a startup – don’t let your labor of love become labor of lame. Update more frequently or shut it down completely.”

The return of Burnham’s Beat proves the above wrong.  I could easily list several other blogs, that for some reason or other are dormant: 

  • Mayfield VC  Allen Morgan’s Ten Commandments, in fact his entire blog should be mandatory reading for startup Founders, but it’s been in radio silence since January 2006.
  • Joe Kraus’s It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur has become a classic with 167 comments and 107 trackbacks, and is being quoted at numerous panel discussions – yet his last post was more than a year ago.

The list could go on … are these dead blogs?  Who knows…  I’m not about to “delete” them. The key is to use a feed reader that has the capability of displaying only the blogs with new posts. You can have hundreds of dormant blogs in your opml, they don’t waste space, don’t consume resources, won’t clobber yor screen.  The are sleepers.  Some of them will wake up, and when they do, they are worth reading again.

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Windows Live Writer Tracing Bloggers?

Posted on September 29, 2006 ·

Like I’ve said before, I’m (almost) eating my previous words, and recognize that Windows Live Writer is a pretty good tool.   There are two more things I forgot to mention in the previous post:

Writer still leaves turd in your blog… and in your feed. So this morning I could clearly see how of my favorite bloggers downloaded the new release.  This Technorati search currently finds 4682 instances of “turd”.  Google Blog Search finds over 14K occurences.  How come Microsoft still did not find a way to detect stylesheets without this mess?  (incidentally the detection still fails on my blog system)

There’s another kind of turd … or is it more?   Every time you use the new “Insert Tags” feature, it inserts a cryptic line like this, along with your tags:

0757417C-982D-2b12-91E1-4F057A8CCCA8:c712360d-e4e6-4711-831a-05fdf7d8a894

The part before the “:” is constant (for your installation I suppose), the second part varies post by post.  What is this?  Is Big Brother watching us again?   Call me paranoid, but in the wake of the HP Scandal I wouldn’t be so surprised….

Update (9/29):   OK, I’ve cooled off.  I don’t think this is Big Brother in action… after all it’s so easily detectable, and Microsoft has enough trouble in this are to know better. But then, WTF is this?  Why do I need a unique ID in my blog posts?

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Jumpcut Jumps to Yahoo

Posted on September 27, 2006 ·

Wow, this was a fast JUMP to $.  

Three months ago at the second Techdirt Greenhouse event  I had a lot of fun co-moderating the Media discussion with Keith Teare.  Prior to the discussion we saw a 5-minute presentation by JumpCut’s  Byron Dumbrill, and I definitely wasn’t the only one who felt blown away.   As much as I am a fan of “moving to the Cloud“, I thought the last applications to stay on the PC are photo and especially video processing, due to the resource requirements.   Most of us there were amazed to see how much video-editing 3-month-old Jumpcut could do all online…

Fast forward (pun intended) 3 months, and see Jumpcut being  acquired buy Yahoo.

Congratulations to the Jumpcut Team!

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Filed Under: Business, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Vapor in Bubble 2.0

Posted on September 26, 2006 ·

After Vaporware, here comes VaporStream!    OK, let’s get serious:

“E-mail has a problem – it creates a permanent, time-stamped record that is out of our control” –  starts the intro to VaporStream, just launched at DemoFall.

Am I hearing reading right?  Is this really a problem?  I’m having a hard time thinking of legitimate reasons why a business would need to send email that’s not really email but a self-destructing image, without header information and generally untraceable.

Then again, some businesses may just welcome this. Too bad.

 

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Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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The Anatomy of Enterprise Overhead Bloating

Posted on September 26, 2006 ·

Good reading:

“Real Overhead: The percentage of your workforce that does not interact with either the product or the customer

This is always a fascinating conversation with customers. In my last startup we had 2.6% of the workforce in this category. 97.4% was interacting with the product or the customer. I just worked with a Fortune 500 client where this ratio is around 25-35% (they can’t quite figure it out). In their case thousands of people do something else but what makes the company create value.”

Full article at Right Place @ Right Time

 

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Filed Under: Business ·
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Walflop

Posted on September 26, 2006 ·

Wallop: Too late, too little.   Check out OM’s poll:

 

  • Its years too late (27%)
  • Just in time to save us from MySpace (13%)
  • Stop the Social Network madness (60%)

Thank you for voting! Total votes cast: 45

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Filed Under: Business, Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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WebEx Connect to Compete with AppExchange

Posted on September 26, 2006 ·

WebEx has traditionally been known for its Web-conferencing, but it clearly aims to be more: they just announced their own   “AppExchange” labeled WebEx Connect: a collaborative platform to combine WebEx’s own strengths in web-conferencing, IM, document sharing  …etc. with applications from their ecosystem partners, which initially include BMC, Business Objects, Genius, MindJet, NetSuite, SoonR, SugarCRM and Zoho.

Clearly, the partner-list is not (yet) comparable to the AppExchange, but this is really a pre-launch announcement, largely aimed at soliciting more ISV’s – by the time of the anticipated availability at Q1 2007 there should be a lively ecosystem around WebEx Connect as the collaboration and workflow engine. 

Talk about engine, it’s based on technology from Cordys, a BPM/SOA platform company founded by none other but Jan Baan whose ERP company gave SAP a run for their money in the 90’s, especially in manufacturing.  Business Process, Workflow expertise from Baan + Collaboration from WebEx = sounds like a promising marriage to me.

Why WebEx?   There is a simple answer… actually there are 2 million answers – that is the number of WebEx’s current user base, becoming available to partner ISV’s.   That’s about 4 times Salesforce.com’s reach.

It’s probably a low-risk speculation that we’ll see more of these “ecosystems” emerge, as  application companies strive to reposition themselves as platforms.   Eventually AppExchange won’t become *the* platform and neither will Webex Connect – they will be one of several platforms, with ISV’s supporting several of them, collaborating here, competing there.   Back-scratching some, back-stabbing some…

If you’d like to know more, the best chance to meet most of the above mentioned companies is at the Office 2.0 Conference.

 

Update: Related posts below.

 

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Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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