Dreaming of the next generation of clouds
Dreamforce this week had an even more festive feel than ever. Pennant fever gripped the town as the Giants played October ball. The Beach Boys sounded as youthful as ever during Benioff’s keynote. The many school kids invited in the keynote audience and Hillary Clinton’s talk of babies provided an even more youthful and optimistic […]
Mozilla’s Diversity Problem
The lynch mob mentality that put Mozilla’s CEO out of a job has been well covered and while shameful at every level, I didn’t expect to comment on how badly Mozilla stumbled on this… but here I am. What really got under my skin is the self-righteous indignation expressed by those calling for Eich’s ouster. […]
A Social Branding Moment
A little while ago I wrote about New Coke and the time in the 1980’s when Coca-Cola tried to change its formula (without much prompting from customers). As you may recall, especially if you were alive and drinking the stuff at the time, the customers didn’t much like it. They were miffed about the new […]
Microsoft’s New Coke Moment
Windows 8.1 is beginning to make the pre-release rounds with the influencers as this post by Ed Bott in ZDNet documents. Version 8.1 brings me back to the 1990s and 1980s for various related reasons because it is not unlike what happened with Windows 3.0 when it was followed by version 3.1. In the Windows […]
China Re-Starts Hacking Program
This is important. According to a story in the New York Times the Chinese Army is back in the business of hacking into American computer systems to steal intellectual property and government security secrets. After a three month lull that coincided with a tongue lashing by the Obama administration the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit 61398 […]
Facebook: All Your Eyeballs Are Belong To Us!
Remember how we told you it was time to stop building microsites, think like a broadcaster and build channel? Well, big brands have been doing that very successfully. In fact, according to this article in AdAge, in many cases branded sites are being completely eclipsed by “owned” social media: “Coca-Cola, with its 10.7 million Facebook […]
Will 2010 Be the Watershed Year for Media and Advertisers?
Just before the holiday, Pepsi dropped a bombshell: they are cutting their Superbowl ads, instead spending $20 million on something called the Pepsi Refresh Project, a “social media” campaign that will hand out tens of millions of dollars to people who want to “refresh” their communities via good works. Of course, the social media universe […]
Coke: The Familiar Red Bottle Stays Red in China for a Reason
Selling into the Chinese market is certainly more art than science. But without question, it’s more important to be connected with communist party members and their investments — read, state-owned companies — than necessarily having the best produc…
Never run a conference at a venue that can’t provide water dispensing machines, instead of bottled water
I attend a lot of conferences.
The two most recent ones I was at were both run by SAP. The first was the International SAP for Utilities conference in Munich, the second was the SAP TechEd conference in Vienna. Both events were very interesting for a variety of reasons but both conferences left a nasty […]
Selling that Technology: Functions, Features & Fools
We got a lot of pitches from technology companies at the recent HR Technology show in Chicago. Each of us asked vendors “What are the top 3 things we should remember about your firm?” and often we were met with blank stares; a litany of functions and features; or, that rarest of all, a polished set of messages any analyst or prospect would love.
