IT Investment Research

HP's Wohl Kicked Upstairs for Killing WebOS, Buying Autonomy, Other Mistakes

The marketing communications business is a lot tougher than when I last practiced it 25 years ago. 

HP (HPQ) has had a bad week in the market because it admitted it wasted a ton of money on Palm, is planning to make another foolish acquisition, and has announced it is getting out of the consumer business. So HP canned its Marcom guy according to Bloomberg. Huh?

In a sense HP has a bad year with its then new CEO having to avoid going to headquarters, or apparently anywhere in the United States, for a while after he took the job.  In fact, let's face it, HP is having a bad century.

But back in the day, those were not the kinds of decisions that Bill Smith and Dick Brown made. Really, those are the real names of two of the greatest information-technology marketing-communications/PR professionals of all time and they worked back to back to back to back at Data General. That is, Smith was replaced by Brown who was replaced by Smith who was replaced by Brown between 1973 and 1983 as the company went from $20 million in annual sales to over a $1.2 billion (remember that's in 1970s/1980s dollars).  And PR guys certainly didn't get blamed, as some others have speculated, because some breaking news hit the wire 20 minutes before it should have on August 18. 

The fact that Wohl is being replaced by another ex-SAP guy actually tells the story.  I'm pretty sure this is another Brown replaces Smith replaces Brown sort of thing.

But at least someone remembered enough PR 101 that the news was released on a Friday afternoon(eastern U.S.)/nite (in Europe) in August in the northern hemisphere during a hurricane. Smith and Brown would be proud.

-- Dennis Byron

Obama and New York Times Are Both Like Match-Play Golf and "Tin Cup"

(Note: There is nothing to do with investment research or information technology in the following.)

There is a kind of meandering, non sensical column in the New York Times August 24 that compares former Illinois Senator Barack Obama to either or both Tiger Woods or to Kevin Costner's character in the golf movie, "Tin Cup." (I'm not sure because of the meandering.) The article popped on my little search doo-hickey because of the word "golf" but through the mention of golf strategy and "Tin Cup," the column is really a great metaphor for the Times itself and Obama.

Relative to the Times, the article begins with an odd description of the strategy of competitive golf, something along the lines of "play the course, not the opponent." "Play the course" is always good advice but the strategy that the Times associated with match-play golf in the article is more often associated with stroke play, the type of golf where you have to count every stroke, the lowest absolute stroke total wins, there are no "gimmes," and no running up a big stroke total into a  loss on one hole and yet make things "all even" on the next. Judging by its corrections page, the Times is always in need of match-play rules, not "playing the course" rules.

Then there is passing reference to Woods. It has nothing to do with his private life thankfully (if the timing had been right they could have done that column about Bill Clinton). 

Finally the article concludes with a paragraph that reads:

"There is a great scene where Dr. Molly Griswold is trying to help Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy, the golf pro, rediscover his swing — and himself. She finally tells him: “Roy ... don’t try to be cool or smooth or whatever; just be honest and take a risk. And you know what, whatever happens, if you act from the heart, you can’t make a mistake.”"

That's where the metaphor for Obama comes in.  In the article the Times fails to tell the rest of the story.  Following this advice and against all sensible golf strategy (including the advice to "play the course"), Tin Cup proceeded to dump five shots in  row into a pond -- costing him 10 strokes and the chance to win a golf tournament. Isn't that the way his term as President has gone?

-- Dennis Byron

Beat Wang! Sell More Minicomputers!

All the Internet fun being caused by Congressman Anthony Weiner helps explain why New Yorkers and Bostonians are always at odds about baseball, hockey, clam chowder, and so forth and so forth. I'm a Bostonian.  All these years I honestly thought a weiner was a hot dog.  But Weiner's weiner (actually, as the link describes, he's not sure it's his) is not that kind of wiener. 

Which reminds me of the good old days when men were men and none of them would get caught dead saying the word Twitter. This was when mincomputers ruled the information technology world, and New York was a place where your company had both a Wall St. and midtown office (so it was easy to make both a morning and afternoon meeting, stop off in Chinatown or Little Italy for lunch, catch the Eastern Shuttle in both directions, and still be home in time for twilight golf).

I worked in the marketing department at Data General and one of the copywriters came in with a great idea for an internal sales promotion piece. It pointed out all the ways that the Data General minicomputer of the day was far superior to the Wang Laboratories mincomputer of the day (or DG office automation was better than Wang office automation... or whatever).  So we polished up the comparison, had the art director make it look good and readable, and together the three of us -- all Bostonians -- came up with a headline:

"Beat Wang! Sell More Minicomputers."

Not too creative I admit but straightforward and to the point. That's what sales promotion is supposed to do. So we took it to the vice president, who was a New Yorker, to get his sign off. Here is the cleanest explanation I could find on the Internet for the problem we had with the VP. It comes from a parenting web site on the Albany NY newspaper so don't be afraid to click on it. (I can only guess at what vulgar lists I got myself on looking for this clean explanation.)

And this whole different meaning of words thing really bothers me now because two of my grandchildren are New Yorkers. 

-- Dennis Byron

Now Let's Move On

"It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place."

-- Judge Vinson,
Senior Federal District Judge,
Northern District of Florida,
Pensecola Division,
January 31, 2011

wikileaks Connects Enterprise Software Ecommerce Dots

If nothing else, the whole wikileaks-drivel story illustrates how many questionable characters get a hold of your credit card number -- and who knows what else -- when you "buy" over the Internet. According to The Canadian Press/Associated Press, an Icelandic company called Datacell plans to sue Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V) because they are no longer letting you charge a donation to wikileaks.org. Datacell got its cease and desist from a Danish company called Teller. 

Who are these guys?  According to their web sites, Datacell  is a subsidiary of an Icelandic cell phone company that operates in Iceland and Switzerland.  Datacell itself is  a hosting company whose claim to fame before it jumped on the wikileaks bandwagon was "clean, green IT" because its datacenter in Iceland ran with power from a hot spring or some such blah blah blah.  Apparently if you donate to wikileaks, the good guys at Datacell take a cut off the top, hence Mastercard and Visa are "hurting" Datacell "in high figures."  (Sorry about that.  Something must have got lost in the translation from Icelandic to English.)  What a threat!

Teller is now called Nets, but I guess no one told the Icelanders. According to a September 2010 press release Nets is

"a new payment group, ... the result of a merger between Norwegian Nordito AS and Teller. Nordito AS, the parent company of BBS and Teller, the holding company of the Danish entity, PBS, are united within payment cards, payment solutions and the exchange of payment information through Nets."

Apparently Teller is a subcontractor to Visa and/or Mastercard and/or both.  According to the CP/AP story, someone from Teller is going to Iceland to do "due diligence." What the due diligence is about is unclear but talk about drawing the short straw... a week in Iceland in December.

So long before your debit gets into the Oracle (ORCL) or SAP or Lawson (LAWS) or Infor ERP software at your ecommerce supplier, if you use a financial services firm such as Visa and/or Mastercard to pay for your online purchase, you might really be using those guys in Iceland and Switzerland... the ones out there standing on the glacier by the volcano.

 (As an aside, I think "Paul Murphy" of zdNET is on to something with his conjecture on the physical security aspects of the wikileaks-drivel story.  Match his analysis of IBM zOS and Oracle/Sun Solaris security features up with some of the spy-thriller theorists that are blogging and you begin to believe the idea that this particular wikileaks leak was all orchestrated by U.S. intelligence to officially out the Saudi position on Iran, China's support of North Korea selling nuclear material, Gordon Brown's personality quirks, and so forth. As noted in my earlier blog post, the wikileaks appear to be all old news. I have yet to see anything that is really new in what I've read of the millions of pages now "leaked.")

-- Dennis Byron

(no financial interest in companies mentioned).

Wikileaks Drivel on Enterprise Software

I first looked at wikileaks in March 2009 when it breathlessly released some supposedly secret document about Microsoft (MSFT) and open source software  supposedly being secretly influenced by some supposedly secret front group in America. The supposedly secret document was being written by some supposedly secret working group in the former European Union. The document was amateurish drivel full of demonstrably false data.

That being said, I defend wikileaks right to distribute such drivel. 

Based on the press reports the week of November 29 about the release of U.S. State Department cables and what they supposedly contain, it does not appear that wikileaks.org did anything different than the NY Times did in 1971 relative to the Pentagon Papers. The U.S. Supreme Court said then that the press had the right to print stuff that was leaked to it, drivel or not. I define most everything I've seen since from wikileaks as drivel because I have yet to see anything about either information technology or the U.S. government or anything else that has not already been widely reported or opined about. That's my definition of drivel; repetitive innacurate or irrelevant background information.

Daniel Ellsberg -- who gave the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971 -- argued on November 30 that the Pentagon Papers were important but that the diplomatic cables wikileaks distributed were drivel.  I believe Ellsberg was later charged with espionage but that the charges were dropped because of U.S. government misconduct in prosecuting him.  The U.S. government employee or employees that leaked the State Department cables should also get his or her or their day in court.

But that does not apply to wikileaks today anymore than it applied to the NY Times 40 years ago. In fact, strangely, wikileaks says on its web site that it -- unlike the NY Times -- does not solicit leaks.

I looked at the wikileaks site today and find that the 2009 Microsoft/open source memo does not even seem to make its list of important drivel leaks as described on its "about" page. I also could not find the Microsoft/open source memo  itself on the site and the link from my March 2009 post seems to be broken (possibly because of heavy traffic on the wikileaks site or possible denial of service attacks or possibly because wikileaks decided to delete the Microsoft/open-source drivel after lack of press interest). 

That is, I also cannot find any contemporaneous reporting of the Microsoft/open-source document (but this wikileaks mirror site discusses it from an open source zealot's perspective and there are a few other blog posts in addition to my own). It appears that in general the press doesn't like leaks about enterprise software that aren't first leaked to it.  That's not surprising because that is how leaks work.  Just putting out a billion bytes of gibberish to everyone doesn't inform anyone. That applies to investment research as well as to foreign policy.

By the way, in case you have any juicy tidbits about Microsoft that you cannot get a reporter to bite on, wikileaks is also not accepting new drivel as of December 1, 2010. According to wikileaks that is because it is "re-engineering" its site (but see above vis a vis heavy traffic and DOS attacks or possibly a new understanding of the lack of importance of drivel). 

-- Dennis Byron

(no financial interest in companies mentioned)

SAP Needs Some Shai-Agassi-Style Global Thinking Now

Just to add insult to injury in the recent shellacking SAP took in Oakland, former SAP VP Shai Agassi -- the man who would have been SAP's CEO now (or at least co-CEO) if he had just waited patiently in line like a good boy -- has just been named 28th leading "global thinker" on the Second Annual Annual Top 100 List of Global Thinkers. 

I can't actually find the actual list on the web site of the list maker, Foreign Policy magazine, but take my word for it. The above link takes you to the guys tied for number one in global thinking, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates and that very successful tailor from Nebraska, the owner of the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) shirt company. If you keep working your way through the web site using subsequent links you get to Shai. My guess is that this is the speaker list for the upcoming Davos convention. But I don't see Bono or Al Gore?

But back to the IT investment research implications... According to published reports during the recent damages-phase of the Oracle (ORCL)-SAP trial (that was the only phase of course), Agassi said in a two-year-old taped deposition that he led the evaluation of the TomorrowNow acquisition. Therefore presumably he recommended it to SAP's boards along with a caution that Oracle would maybe/likely/probably sue SAP. Also according to published reports, Agassi estimated in an email that IT investment analysts would quickly figure out that this idea would hurt Oracle future earnings so much that its market valuation would plummet because the big profits in enterprise software are on the services side of the income statement. (In reality, investment analysts yawned at the idea and although I have not read the transcripts and filings I would guess that back in 2006-2007, SAP's boards would have spent no more time thinking about this idea than on the annual SAP paper-clip budget.)

So that was the "global thinking" part of the TomorrowNow idea. I admired what Agassi was doing at the time with the SAP NetWeaver business. It was similarly wide in scope and potentially game changing for the enterprise software market. SAP's middleware business quickly but quietly passed the billion-dollar mark. The thinking was outside the box (shame on me) even if the TomorrowNow fiasco led to some inside the buoy sailing. 

As I said, I haven't studied the transcripts. Please correct me if the public record says I'm wrong about either SAP top-executive knowledge or Agassi's personal involvement:

• If SAP knew before the acquisition that wide scale theft was a matter of standard TomorrowNow business practice, that fact has implications for the Oracle-Rimini Street lawsuit as well. I'll explain why I think that if anyone wants to discuss.

• If Agassi personally was involved in the subsequent TomorrowNow operations (he says he was not), including the illegal downloading of Oracle software to which SAP has admitted and about which SAP executives have admitted knowing post acquisition, than the whole global thinker thing takes on a different dimension.

[SIDENOTE: From an IT perspective, working through the list to Shai you also find Amazon's (AMZN) Jeff Bezos and Apple (APPL) co-founder Steve Jobs, and the Google (GOOG) Boys. Eric Schmidt did not appear to make it; it sucks to be just the hired hand. And why do non-IT people like Foreign Policy magazine keeping assuming there is some meaningful link between a retailer, Amazon, and an IT device development/marketing firm, Apple.  Is it just because some of the Apple devices are for sale at the Amazon retail store? No it's because a Kindle is like an iPad.  Gee, and a calculator is like a supercomputer too.

[Second SIDENOTE: Speaking of shellacking's, President Obama came in at number three after Buffet/Gates at number 1 and the leaders of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.  In golf, that would put Obama in fifth place instead of third but apparently the rules are different in foreign policy.]

-- Dennis Byron

(no financial interest in companies mentioned)

Kerry to Move NFL to PBS from Fox; Rockefeller Says Fox Makes Americans Dumb

What's next in terms of the Democrat party take-over of the open market and the U.S. economy? Not willing to settle for the 20% of the economy represented by healthcare delivery the Democrats are holding a hearing as of 3:00 pm November 17 on TV cable retransmission charges. What's that got to do with jobs?

It looks like John Kerry -- the Senator from Massachusetts except when he sails his yacht at which time he moves up the coast to Rhode Island so as to cheat Nantucket, MA out of personal property tax -- just wants to pass a law that baseball and NFL games will only be seen on American public broadcasting. The issue that these bozos are wasting their time and our dollars on is the fact that Cablevision would not pay Fox what it wanted back during the World Series.  That's Fox as in the network, not the home of Glenn Beck.

But the real stunner is that that man of the people -- Rockefeller of West VA -- is using the World Series negotiations stand off to complain that Fox -- not meaning the network, but meaning the home of Glenn Beck -- is responsible for the "dumbing down of America." I guess he did not like the results of the recent election (when dumb Americans kicked his party out of much of its power). Even his new co-senator from West VA said Obama was wrong and ran ads shooting an arrow (or a rifle/can't remember which) through  a copy of Obamacare set up like a bullseye. Rockefeller seems to think it's Fox's fault that the American people rejected his philosophy of the government taking over all markets and running the economy. This includes even who can run whose broadcast content.

It has nothing to do with the stupidity of his ideas. This guy has been heading toward dementia for years and it looks like he's finally ready to be moved to the top floor of the nursing home.

For those of you outside the U.S., we still have to put up with bozos like Kerry and Rockefeller as committee chairmen because they are Senators that are only elected every six years.  It was the bums in the House of Representatives, who have to stand for election every two years, that we kicked out two weeks ago.

 -- Dennis Byron

Obama Contributor Fleeces Immigrant Piano Player of $60 Million Plus

OK, that headline is just a hit-meter grabber. 

But my headline is as accurate as the others I've seen on this story, with the lower-Hudson-Valley Journal News doing the best job of stirring the bottom of a very small pot in a pot boiler that mixes information technology (emails and viruses) with Barack Obama, Schlumberger (SLB), the Catholic Church, Liberace and Wachovia. I'm between books right now but who needs a Ludlum novel with this story.

Give me a little more time and I think I can work in the Gulf oil spill (SLB did some work for BP on the Deepwater Horizon but had not been involved in the final fatal events of April 20, 2010), Honduran communists (allegedly Honduras was the source of the victim's virus-infected PC hard drive), and Boston politics (the Rasky connection--Rasky is the alleged victim's PR firm, a group that keeps saying that the Paris-born heir to the Schlumberger fortune is a pianist and also a group whose founder, Larry Rasky, is closely connected to Massachusetts Democratic congressmen). 

I'm with Mary Landesman of Cisco and anti-virus blogging fame in thinking the scam here may be on the press and the prosecutors in the Westchester County district attorney's office. I'd prefer that that office spend more time getting out the details concerning the events of the night of October 17, 2010 involving the death of Pace University student and Massachusetts resident Danroy Henry at the hands of lower-Hudson-Valley police officers.

-- Dennis Byron

(no financial interest in companies mentioned)

OK, Mitt, What Is "The Truth About Massachusetts Health Care?"

I don't think this is a joke or dirty politics.  There is a web site called Mitt Romney Central. It appears to be a legitimate web site (or as legitimate as such sites could be) designed to help Mitt Romney become U.S. President.

If so, hint guys.  You need help!

Currently there is a blog post or web page on the site under the headline

"RomneyCare — The Truth About Massachusetts Health Care"

But under it are the words "Coming soon."

Really?  Coming soon, after four years, we got much more expensive healthcare and healthcare insurance (those are two different things--something that neither Democrats nor Republicans ever make clear) here in Massachusetts, rising Massachusetts state taxes, reduced choice for individuals and small business people when it comes to doctors and insurance plans, doctors quitting and/or moving out of state, and the whole host of other problems that everyone fears will come from Obamacare. But sometime "coming soon" Romney is going to explain what it was all about.

The simple truth about Massachusetts healthcare is that Romney and Massachusetts Democrats in an attempt to have their cake and eat it too back in 2005/2006 ruined one of the best healthcare delivery systems in the U.S. (perhaps the world since so many rich people come to Boston to get health care from all around the world) so that they could say that Massachusetts had "near universal health care." 

In fact, what they did was take the money in what was called the Free Care Pool (designed to pay providers to help a few hundred thousand people in need) and gave it to insurers instead so that they could say those couple of hundred thousand needy people were insured instead of needy.  For these couple of hundred thousand people (over half of whom still won't sign up for the free insurance), Romney and the Democrats completely screwed up health care options and costs for the other 6,000,000 of us that live here in Massachusetts.

How to go, Mitt. 

-- Dennis Byron

(Note: if anything ever gets put into the Coming Soon box on the web page, I'll update this post.  In the meantime, see the information technology implications of Romneycare as they relate to Dell and its Perot subsidiary as explained here.)