Fans of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffet have come to love his lengthy, poignant, wide-ranging, well-written, and often funny annual letters to the shareholders of the company. His recently released 2007 letter is no exception and I highly recommend reading it, here. Among other topics, he talks about
BI
It seems to me that SAP hasn't spent energy much getting the Business Objects story out, particularly when you consider that they spent $6.8B to buy them. What I do hear about the strategy, the integration, the overall story, I get through my BOBJ alumni backchannel. Thus
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who I now call Tim 1.0, as opposed to Tim 2.0 (O'Reilly), recently did an interesting one-hour interview with Paul Miller of Talis on their Nodalities blog. You can listen to the interview here. Because the sound quality isn't
Marketing
I've had a few marketing inquiries of late so I thought I'd devote a post or two to some of my favorite marketing topics: messaging and the marketing mission. This post’s on messaging. Surprisingly, when you Google “how to develop a marketing message” you don’
I'm here at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York this week and had the pleasure of hearing Tim, himself, speak about his own media business in a speech entitled Free is More Complicated than You Think. Here are some excerpts and
Go here (QuickTime required) to check out an interesting, if rather deadpan, review of the iPhone user interface by UI and data presentation master, Edward Tufte. Click here (not on the image, sorry) to see the video. I'm a big fan of Tufte's work and in
Autonomy and Google are at it again. Per this InformationWeek story: Google I've not yet had time to dig into the detail of this, so I'm sharing it more as a news item for now and will -- if it proves interesting -- come back with analysis later.
As predicted in this post, Fast Search & Transfer yesterday announced that it intends to restate 2006 results. See this Reuters story, entitled Norway's Fast Says to Restate 2006 Results, for more. Excerpt: "Restatements of the 2006 accounts may have an effect on the 2007 accounts,"
I feel like this is becoming an M&A blog, but there been a lot of relevant M&A activity of late that I felt I needed to cover (e.g., Microsoft/FAST, EMC/Document Sciences). Yesterday's big news (aside from Oracle / BEA for I think
On 12/27/07, EMC announced the acquisition of Document Sciences (DOCX) for $85M in cash. DOCX's stock has been flat in the $6 range for most of the past two years, recently moved to the $8 range, and is up to about $14 on the announcement of
It's a busy week so no time for a deep analytical post (yet), but I wanted to get this news out fast. Microsoft has bid $1.2B for Fast Search & Transfer. See this New York Times story for more. My initial take: * It's a quite
Making the point that messages don't always carry well across media, check out this video parody of Facebook, translating it from webpage to live TV news show. Enjoy. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SH9iEn8Jfk&rel=1]
