I found this story today, entitled Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Goes to Court, about ZL Technologies who, citing damages of $132M, has decided to sue Gartner over its Magic Quadrants. From ZL’s web page on the suit: The complaint alleges: defamation; trade libel; false advertising; unfair competition; and negligent
Databases
Dear CIO, What’s wrong this picture? * At 50%+, Oracle’s operating margins have never been higher * The differentiation of Oracle’s database technology, however, has never been lower and the number of both core and specialized alternatives has never been greater. So what’s going on? You, kind Sir
Marketing
In 1988, Listen To Your Heart was the third single issued in the USA by the Swedish pop duo Roxette. In this post, I'll use the song as fun example of flanking marketing strategy. First, the original song/video. (Sorry, but EMI disallows embedding, so you'll
You won't be surprised to know that I use a series of Google Alerts to help me track events relevant to Mark Logic. I often have two problems with them: * Old content is mis-identified as new. You can ask any Mark Logician about the number of times
About six months ago, I blogged my notes from a speech given to the Alliance of Chief Executives by Tom Siebel, entitled From IT to ET (from information technology to energy technology). While I enjoyed the speech, I had a few problems with it: * It struck me as unduly and
Culture
The blogosphere is lit up with discussion of this 128-slide internal presentation on culture at Netflix, dug up by the Hacking Netflix blog and discussed in this TechCrunch story. I'm a big believer in the importance of corporate culture as a competitive advantage and often use colorful
Just picked this joke up via a (warning: expletive) cartoon a friend mailed me. To spare those who want to avoid the expletive, here's the text. Bob: So, how do I query the database? IT guy: It's not a database. It's a key-value
I've been off filling my brain at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the past two weeks, so I haven't been able to post much. I have nevertheless managed to keep my Tweetstream going so, if you're not already following me on Twitter,
Marketing
Quick post to highlight this New York Times story, Spinning the Web: PR in Silicon Valley. The article starts with the story of a start-up first pondering, and then deciding not to pitch the big tech blogs like TechCrunch. Excerpt: Instead, [publicist Brooke Hammerling] decides that she will “whisper
Mike Stonebraker spoke today at SIGMOD (see Tweetstream) where, among other things there was a 40-year anniversary celebration of the relational DBMS and, in what I suspect is non-coincidental timing, Mike did a post on the CACM site entitled The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon
IPO
I just finished reading Right-Sizing the US Venture Capital Industry by Paul Kedrosky, author of the Infectious Greed blog and wanted to share some thoughts on it here. He starts with an interesting swipe at two of the more popular claims of venture industry marketing: (1) the citation of
Entrepreneurship
Here's another report that crushes the myth that entrepreneurship is only for the young: The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom by Dane Stanler and published by the Kauffman Foundation. Excerpt: Contrary to popularly held assumptions, it turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of entrepreneurial
