It's a darn shame what's happened to stock options. When I first started in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, stock options were seen as a real innovation, a creative way to align employees with shareholders, a way to help employees particpate in the value they were
If you somehow haven't heard, Google today announced that it will acquire YouTube in a stock transaction worth $1.65B. The official press release is here. The New York Times has an excellent article on the transaction. I've pulled a few excerpts related to YouTube (and
I recently ran across a cool (sister, Sequoia-backed) company, called Port Authority Technologies, that sells information leak protection solutions. They sell an appliance that sits next to your firewall and looks, at a network level, for content that's getting sent outside that shouldn't be. What
Here's a post where O'Reilly's Dale Dougherty writes about a talk at EuroOSCON by Greg Stein, of Google Code, where Stein talks about building a bug-tracking system. Traditional applications have been built on a traditional database view. That view requires that everything be
I found this excellent post, entitled Top Ten Geek Business Myths, on Ron Garret (formerly, Erann Gat's) blog today. Garret worked early on at Google, wrote for Xooglers (which appears defunct), and has become a venture capitalist. Here are his ten myths: 1. A brilliant idea will make
Those over 40 probably recall the movie Animal House, the fictitious Faber College at which it is set, and the college's motivational slogan, Knowledge is Good, which I'll use as the theme for today's post. First off, let's address the semantic one-
Having spent most of my career in software marketing, I have a definite opinion on what it takes to create and maintain a world-class enterprise software marketing organization. While I think I created such a team in my last job, that group has mostly disbanded in the two years
Respected online analytic processing (OLAP) pundit, Englishman, and curmudgeon, Nigel Pendse, once wrote in a product review that “with Gallic subtlety” Business Objects, the company, was two words while BusinessObjects, the product, was one. The observation, unnoticed by most people, was absolutely correct and I chuckled the other day when
Just a quick post to this very interesting article on slate.com by Paul Boutin that I found here on slashdot. Using the tools at splunkd.com and the search history records on 650K members that were released (and subsequently retracted) by AOL, Boutin makes a taxonomy of seven different
With all the M&A activity of late in the ECM space, I thought it would be a good time do some comparison between the ECM and the BI markets. Recall that prior to joining Mark Logic (the content world), I spent nearly a decade in business intelligence, or
I just got back from vacation in France. Showing great restraint, I will resist the temptation to rant about the continuing lack of customer service there (note: avoid renting from Hertz in France when possible, and most certainly at CDG). Instead, I'll talk about the book on read
Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, was once quoted (see page 7) as saying: "In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store we sell hope.” While his customers may not have appreciated this characterization, I have always remembered it as a pithy quote that dramatizes the ultimate
