I am not a fan of MS. The Apple zealots scary me. The fact that people get so emotional and irrational about a company, a technology or a product, has puzzled me for years. It is surely a testimony of the powerful Software Marketing machine, which turned a preference for tools into a religious war.

Bill Gates is falling a victim to the success of his own business model - “dazzle them with functions and features until they forget about reliability and performance”. Well it worked for a while, but it gets harder and harder to remember why I opened this program in the first place.

I don’t get this blogger’s frenzy about a 3 year old email either. Not that I do not see the irony, but did you really think that Bill unconditionally loves every piece of crap his company has ever produced? Is it a hate for everything Microsoft?

I find most software is designed by people who understand marketing much better than the processes they are suppose to make easier to execute. Personally I do not find Mac any more intuitive than PC, but they sure market much better and I admire that. And is there less hate for Oracle than Microsoft, because Larry got less money than Bill? Or does anyone really think that Oracle Financial’s, or any other Oracle business application, is less convoluted and frustrating for users than Dynamics? You may have noticed that I don’t even want to mention the usability of SAP products.

It seems the Software Giants got themselves into a position similar to the Telephone Giants, they are more interested in protecting their cash flows than innovating and re-building from scratch. If they treat their existing code and architecture as a capital investment, such a strategy makes financial sense, but..

It is very common to see a gap analysis as a very first deliverable in most Business Process optimization initiatives, regardless how these initiatives are branded. For that very reason, quality of the result for this exercise can either completely obliterate any chance for this investment to show any return, or give a reasonable opportunity for the initiative to succeed. Yet, many projects allocate a very small proportion of time and resources to this critical stage in the initiative’s life cycle.

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The problem with consultants is similar to the problem with politicians - both are largely useless and extremely expensive, unless they are deployed properly and managed closely. Now to be fair, most consultants, unlike politicians, are quite knowledgeable and capable, but because they are pawns in a corporate political game, they are largely ineffective.

Ben Worthen of Wall Street Journal Blog on Technology quotes “big brains” from Deloitte Consulting:

The ailing economy has many businesses trying to cut costs. But most are going about it wrong. That’s according to the big brains at Deloitte Consulting. The company, which presumably would be happy to help your business go about doing it right, interviewed execs at 70 Fortune-500 companies, more than two-thirds of which have cost-cutting measures in place. But 64% of these companies are cutting costs through incremental steps like layoffs or shrinking travel and training budgets. These efforts only make a superficial difference and are harder to sustain, Omar Aguilar, a principal at Deloitte, tells the Business Technology Blog.

These are statements which are very hard to disagree with and even harder to make any use of. Let’s try to select the area from this quote - “travel and training budgets” and look at it from a fundamental economic perspective:

1. The usual knee-jerk reaction of management at the time of economic slow downs, is to cut down on these budgets incrementally and temporarily, and then relax limitations when acceleration returns. I wonder if anybody has measured the resulting financial effects of these temporary measures over all business performance?
2. Given that globalization activity will not likely stop, people do need to work with each other across geographies. Does management expect oil prices will collapse any time soon? Given the propensity of our politicians to look for someone to blame, rather than develop a sound energy strategy, I would seriously discount that possibility.
3. The travel cost, particularly airfare and food, has nowhere to go but up to reflect inflationary pressures of fuel and agricultural commodities. Demographics of the world spells out that these changes will stay with us for a while. Airlines are already cutting the number of flights and will raise their prices.
4. Considering the cost of travel, and lost productivity while traveling, the “tele presence” conferencing technology, even at a relatively high level of investment, starts to look quite attractive. Building cost/benefit analysis model for evaluation is very easy.

I have seen reports in WSJ Technology Blog and other publications, but cannot find the links now, about Cisco and Siemens offerings, which provide high quality meeting conferencing over VOIP at the range from $5K to $25K per location set-up. Cisco predicts that the technology will really take off by 2012, but I think it is quite conservative of an estimate, barring oil price collapse. There are people who complain that “tele presence” cannot replace the quality of cooperation that personal meetings provide. I would agree that hand written books are also much more “precious”, but we have learned to “suffer” with printed and even electronic media’s shortcomings.

Corporate consultants need to learn and re-engineer “best practices” from one of the oldest and still most successful industry - the industry of religion. If the tele-evangelical mega-churches figured out how to provide a human experience over the television, which is “warm” enough to collect billions of dollars, why do Global Corporations that are rearmed with “tele presence” and Web 2.0 collaboration software tools fail to learn how to be more productive?

Eric Savitz in his Seeking Alpha blog post sites the following:

Piper Jaffray’s Mark Murphy today launched coverage of NetSuite (N) with a Sell rating and a $14 price target, well below the current level.

Murphy’s thesis is that customers are not that happy with the on-demand business software provider’s offerings. “We believe the market has yet to include the potential financial consequences of what we believe to be lower customer satisfaction levels than the broader On Demand industry,” he writes. “While we think our estimates are achievable, there is potential downside risk to our long-term cash flow forecasts if customer concerns are not addressed.”

Murphy says his due diligence with customers uncovered a “higher-than-average mix of unsatisfied customers.” He says that the product gets strong technical reviews once it is operational, but that “deployment frustrates many customers due to the over-arching nature of the project.” He also says that checks with the Better Business Bureau find a 13x higher complaint rate for NetSuite than for Salesforce.com (CRM).

Last weekend the company agreed to acquire its competitor, OpenAir, which is specializing in Professional Services Automation (PSA). The OpenAir has over 300 well satisfied subscribers, but they have to integrate their business flows with other applications, such as Financials, etc. on their own. The Netsuite, by contrast, offers fully integrated approach and sees this acquisition as an upsell opportunity to OpenAir customers. I wonder how these customers will react to the NetSuite overtures considering level of their customers satisfaction.

The introduction of “cloud” computing seem to be forcing mass modernization of IT infrastructure. The scale of required demand for computing power surely requires fundamental re-evaluation of assets, methods, and practices which have been developed and deployed during last two decades. “Down on the server farm”, the article published by The Economist, explores economical, political, and security factors involved in planning process.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts.

And we thought the herds of cows generating methane should be blamed for global warming! I wonder if anybody studied a positive impact of IT on re-forestation? With Internet news and advertising replacing newsprint consumption, on-line shopping reduces driving, etc there should be enough evidence to start balancing an impact of progress and present rational analysis of what is going on.

It is interesting to see how the industry based on “disruptive innovation” seem to embrace the challenge because it realizes profit opportunities associated with it. This quote is from “Buy our stuff, save the planet” article published in the same issue of the Economist.

It is easy to be cynical about all this. However energy-efficient computers become, the bigger task will be to generate electricity using technologies that do not emit carbon dioxide. Yet this is one case when market forces and environmentalism align. A cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, of course, would make such alignments more commonplace. But even without putting a price on carbon, there are already plenty of examples, as in computing, where adopting more efficient technology would both save money and help the environment.

Greenery does not have to be motivated by altruism; and it is far more likely to be effective when it is not. If it helps to reduce carbon-emissions, self-serving greenery is as good as any other kind. The planet cannot tell the difference.

It is a refreshing change in attitude compared to one displayed by traditional industries and governments - “deny until you blue in the face and it will go away”. Perhaps they can benefit from more competition and less regulation, because we badly need some disruption for much more decaying infrastructure outside of IT.