Skip to main content

What companies plan their purchases strategically?

Craig Bailey posted this link on Twitter regarding Sun's lacklustre performance last quarter -
Jonathan Schwartz's Blog: Our Q3

Choice quotes:

"Why don't you just stop giving your software away?

Because we prioritize developer adoption. Let me give an example....the MySQL team had scored a design win - ahead of the proprietary competition. What should we have charged them beforehand? No matter what it was, they wouldn't have used the product - startups and developers don't pay for software...We didn't pay them, the MySQL team earned their adoption."

"Why does Sun's CEO waste time writing that blog?
Because I believe in providing clarity surrounding our strategy and operations - not just once a year in the Annual Report. I believe clarity behind our direction is useful for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees."

It's a great post, full of honesty (as far as I can tell) about what's going on at Sun and it contrasts with the Microsoft/Yahoo debacle.

The most disappointing thing I have heard regarding the proposed (now dropped) merger was Balmer's assertion that he wasn't buying Yahoo for the technologies but rather simply for the online advertising business. While I can appreciate that to some extent (there was a fair bit of overlap) , it's also a bit strange because both companies are now getting known for their ability to scoop up companies and then let them languish. I think Microsoft does a far better job of integrating their purchases into their entire system (consider FoxPro into SQL and other technologies) but some obviously don't think so.

Microsoft does a great job with their development tools and getting the message out (Rock the Launch was a great example of that) - but their direction can be spotty or there is a rush to get something out and then to correct it later.  And yet, there are lots of technologies within Microsoft just dying to see the light of day, be they internally-developed or purchased.

There was a FoxPro devcon quite a few years ago when the mantra was not "Fox Rocks" but rather "Challenge Me" - the premise being that you could do virtually anything with FoxPro.

Microsoft continues to do that but it seems, to me at any rate, that it's in areas that they are already behind the curve. As a result, it's seen as a "me too". Consider that Yahoo introduced Pipes before PopFly and even though they are different, they are also similar enough to let people make a connection.  As Joel Spolsky wrote, even Mesh seems like something that's been done before.

Where is the Excel 3.0 of the next generation of web apps?

Microsoft - don't just challenge me - challenge yourself. You've done it before - show us you can do it again.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .
4 comments
Read more

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparing education systems based on their technology

(yes, I originally found this blog because of Scoble's note on it BUT it was kind of interesting all the same) Read Alex Mallet's summary of his first week at MIT. Malletrivia: Summary of the first complete week Wow - "There's an incredible amount of material packed into each lecture" - and it sounds interesting... Compared to some of the lecture content I have seen at our universities, you really must get what you pay for. While it sounds like Alex is writing frantically down notes in his classes, at least he's finding something worth writing about in them. Case in point: one of our local universities ( Carleton ) puts some lecture classes on the TV (like many universities do) - but you would think they purposely find the most boring professors to teach them. They put up PowerPoint slides with 30 points on them, speak in monotone voice (yes, imagine the typical caricature of the university lecture from years ago), tell the students to print their...
8 comments
Read more