If I told you fifteen years ago that a family-owned California hamburger chain founded in 1948 was going to beat McDonald's in hamburgers, what would you have said? "Beat McDonald's in hamburgers? Are you crazy?" And you might have added: "Burger King&
One reason I give Fast Search & Transfer a hard time is that I don't like their communications strategy. For example, during their recent and ongoing financial travails there has been way too much "happy talk" in their communications for my taste. They irked me again
Here's a great presentation on this topic that I picked up courtesy of The Content Wrangler. [slideshare id=85551&doc=death-by-powerpoint4344]
I had a long overdue lunch the other day with former Business Objects co-worker, and one of the smartest people I know, Alex Moissis. While most people you talk to in Silicon Valley compare software industry evolution today to evolution of the automobile industry in the early 20th century,
Fast Search and Transfer announced their Q3 2007 results on 10/30. Here are some highlights from the announcement, some of which (the net loss, for example) aren't actually in the company's press release. * Revenues of $35.6M, down 16% compared to Q3 2006 revenues of
I am a big fan of Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog. He's clearly a data junkie, finds some remarkable pieces of data and representations of them, and makes some great, non-intuitive connections across different data sets and applications. While I did not attend his speech
I picked up via this post on the High Scalability Blog a new paper by Michael Stonebraker, Nabil Hachem, and Pat Helland entitled The End of an Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite) presented at the VLDB 2007 conference in Austria on September 23rd through 27th. From
I'd expected Sequoia's inimitable Mike Moritz and Microsoft's energetic Steve Balmer to be my favorite speakers of the Web 2.0 Summit and they did not disappoint. Moritz provided a fascinating, cerebral discussion yesterday afternoon and Balmer rocked the house this morning: see this
The not surprising answer: you end up a tiny company. Convera's 2QF08 results? * $255,000 in revenues. Yes, that's measured in dollars, not kilodollars. Approximately the amount it would take to buy an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. A nice car mind you, but a car. One
From time to time The Economist amazes me with stories of how economic analysis can be applied to test many and different theories. This one, however, takes the prize. It's about an evolutionary psychologist who decided test a theory related to, well, here it is: This theory is
My former employer, Business Objects, succumbed to its logical and natural ending yesterday, first announcing a short quarter, and then announcing its sale to SAP in a well valued transaction worth $6.7B. Here is some of my perspective on the deal: * I left Business Objects in 2004, after we
I've never liked what I call "the next" positioning. Examples: * Dan Quayle trying to position as the next Jack Kennedy until Lloyd Bensten put an abrupt end to the feeble effort. * The object DBMS vendors in the early 1990s positioning as the next Oracle. (Gartner analyst
