Technology & Finance
Monday, July 31, 2006
Why Don't Senior Execs Blog?
That’s what Randall Stross asked in the Sunday (July 30) NY Times (although the Lakeland (FL) Ledger may be an easier place to read the story.) Top Guns Avoid Blogging Although Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has maintained his blog, which he does personally, in his own voice even after he became CEO. The latest item is a comment on earnings. Jonathan’s Blog “We see no global slowdown in IT. Despite what one competitor said. Our key customers (those that view information technology as a competitive advantage, not a cost center) are continuing to invest. They’re investing to drive on-line relationships, fuel competitive advantage, and drive efficiencies - but mostly they’re investing because they see a return.”
And how does his personality come through? Have you read the current issue of Wired about the electric Tesla car? Here’s Jonathan:
“Being cheap (or cutting corners on components) doesn’t matter as much as delivering value and innovation. A 230 MPH supercar that gets 9 miles to a $4 gallon of gas, isn’t nearly as interesting to today’s consumer as a Tesla - that uses electricity at a cost of about 1 cent/mile (and appears to outperform most supercars, and yes, I’d like to own one, and no, I haven’t convinced my wife). And Niagara is to Tesla as [competitor here] is to an outdated supercar. (And again, if you’d like to try a FREE NIAGARA for 60 days.” Pretty good, especially for a CEO.
Ok, says Stross, Microsoft boasts it has more than 3,000 employees who blog, but where is Steve Ballmer? Perhaps he should have suggested Ray Ozzie.
Strange that Stross never mentioned the other prominent executive blog, by Bob Lutz, the “car guy” now at GM, whose Fastlane is a break from cautious corporate traditions. GM CEO Takes to the Blog The latest posting is from CEO Rick Wagoner and elicited this comment from trollhattan saab:
“First of all, we have GM CEO Rick Wagoner taking the unprecedented step of communicating his thoughts on GM’s current turnaround strategy on the Fastlane weblog. Fastlane’s normally reserved for pumping up the products and has been an historical repository for the septegenerian sausage, Bob Lutz. This time, Rick’s taking deliberate steps to ensure that all the GM faithful know that people are working, and working hard, to put things right on GM’s own terms.” Saab Guy Talks Back
This is very good give and take for a conservative company like GM.
So the challenge is for Microsoft—where are the senior exec blogs to explain where the company is going in informal terms? FSG—Any takers?
One amazing bit in the Stross piece was about Sun’s legal department. It gave Sun employees a one-time briefing on relevant security law and then trusted them to stay out of trouble. Wow!
Debbie Weil, author of “The Corporate Blogging Book,” said that CEOs could save a huge amount of time by communicating to employees, customers, partners, and shareholders through a blog. “Why not do it more efficiently? [than email] Instead of one to one message, why not a communication from one to many thousands?”
Stross concludes:
Ms. Weil, the author, spoke with me last week about the reluctance of Fortune 500 executives to share their thoughts on a public blog, and could find no acceptable excuse for their silence.
“They should come down from the mountain and communicate in their own words without handlers, Ms. Weil said. “For what they’re paid, is that too much to ask?”
Friday, July 28, 2006
Speeding up Notebook Performance
Samsung has announced a 4-Gb solid state disk will serve as a high-speed NAND flash cache for notebooks and PCs running Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. ReadyBoost populates the disk with frequently used data and readies users’ favorite applications and data in the background, accelerating the launch of applications. Samsung’s device works in tandem with a hybrid hard drive as a secondary source of cached data, according to Samsung. At the IASA insurance conference, Intel’s Gene Quaglia talked about using flash as a way to speed booting up times for notebooks—sure would be useful for travelers who have to turn them on and off for flights and get tired of waiting for the portables to boot up.
Risk Newsletter
I don’t know about your in box, but mine has more than its share of newsletters from companies more or less opening hyping their products. RiskMetrics has launched a promising one on risk topics. Riskmetrics’ Arnold Amstutz asks “Are Markets, Regulators, or Investors Moe Challenging?” and looks at the increasing skepticism surveys have uncovered in investor attitudes toward investment firms. He finds safety in quotations—while blaming Spitzer for some of this, he also quotes a former SEC economist hrired by Smith Barney plaintiffs, who concluded the firm’s advice was flawed, understated the real risk of stock-heavy investing, and that presentation materials were :very close to, if not, false and misleading.” He does conclude that firms need to provide customers with objective risk measures, which RiskMetrics just happens to provide. Who’s Riskier? Which reminds me, I was talking to a trading and risk expert at one of New York’s largest banks this week and he said a goal for them is to go well beyond the minimum requirements in compliance and try to create value, some sort of ROI. I forgot to ask if they had found any.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Wachovia CIO Highly Proactive in New Projects
Product management, familiar in software companies, is moving into the development shops at financial firms, notes David Margulius at Infoworld, and one of the leaders is Susan Certoma, CIO of Wachavia’s corporate and investment banking division. (see Windows in Financial Services for how Wachovia uses Microsoft technologies - >CIO Susan Certoma.
While most IT shops talk about meeting the needs of the business, Wachovia’s Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) CIO Susan Certoma and Tony Bishop, her head of technology product management, talk about SOA as an ongoing process of product development and evangelism—a methodology for productizing responsiveness to changing customer needs. Managing like a vendor
Wachovia has used this in rolling out an SOA approach to software development.
“It’s a multitenant model with components and abstraction,” Tony Bishop, SVP and director of product management explains. “You can get to a business or data service through multiple access channels and get consistent execution levels.”
One challenge, Bishop notes, was using both open and de facto standards, and then creating a lifecycle in which components could be reused and managed in a best-practices manner. “A lot of our stuff isn’t Web services—that’s an implementation protocol that hasn’t yet matured,” he says. “We’ve been leveraging mature technology, like Java and .Net, not getting caught up in the buzz.”
After a service or framework has been developed, Bishop explains, “we harden it, certify it as a solution stack, build our own customer pieces on top, and then work with the business developer teams to integrate with their business logic.”
A central feature of the Corporate and Investment Bank’s services-oriented platform is its focus on measuring and managing usage and performance like a utility, Bishop explains. “This is a franchise; we’re making it repeatable and scalable. You get your burgers, fries, and Coke every single time. You plug it in and it works.”
Microsoft and Nortel in Communications Alliance
The San Jose Mercury takes the alliance seriously:
“The race to win business customers who want integrated voice, video, e-mail, instant messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is ratcheting up. Combining all these services could simplify how people communicate: For example, a worker’s office phone number could work from a laptop while on a business trip, or a person could click on an e-mail to instantly call a group of people on a conference call…
Microsoft, which wants to boost sales in its office business, has announced several partnerships recently with major telecommunications companies, including Cisco. Microsoft and Nortel on the desktop
But Tuesday’s announcement is broader than previous partnerships, Microsoft representative Greg Saint James said. While deals with Cisco and Avaya were for specific products, the Nortel relationship includes developing products together, sharing patents and working jointly on sales and marketing.
``Microsoft is really uniquely positioned here and Cisco is nowhere on the desktop and this is important,’’ Bern Elliot of Gartner said. ``People who assumed Cisco was the heir apparent to communications are going to have to rethink that plan.’’