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Looking Back at 1998
Merger, Captain, Dead Ahead!!The great corporate ships just seemed to be running into each other all year.
It was a bit like Titanic, except instead of hitting icebergs, they kept hitting each
other.
There were mergers, almost-mergers, failed mergers and sorta-mergers enough to keep the
word processors at your local financial reporting shop working over time.
We saw banks that had just merged and had just taken down their old signs, merge again
and have to order yet another set of signs. It was good for the sign companies, proving
once again that it's an ill wind that blows no one any good.
Car companies merged. Phone companies merged and almost merged. Consulting firms
merged. Even a local barber shop in my area wound up merging with another when the owner
retired.
The top outcome of all of this, from my humble perspective, has to be the really,
really dumb names some of these outfits came up with. I mean, DaimlerChrysler not only
doesn't have a nice ring to it, it has a sorta clunk. At least, though, it follows the new
trendy convention of having capitals in the middle of the name.
Aside: A really stupid naming fad in the last few years is putting numbers into words.
Like 3Com. It all reminds me of the old Tom Lehrer joke about an eccentric friend named
"Henry" who spelled his name H-E-N-3-R-Y. The "3," Lehrer tells us,
was silent.
I really wish more of these mergers and dumb names had been silent. But my vote for the
stupidest name of all time has to go to the firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Three names,
three capital letters.
600 Pound Gorillas and Mutant Turtles
At the start of the year, the 600 pound gorilla in the business world
was clearly Billy Gates Microsoft. Little Billy's company was SO big that it scared lots
of people, not to mention stomping on more than a few.
So, just like those old horror films, when the monster got really, really big, the call
went out for government help. The whole Microsoft anti-trust case has the feel to me of
Sherman tanks, seen in black and white, wheeling up to fire on the evil monster of the
moment. "My God, Major, we can't seem to stop it!!!"
Despite all the firepower turn on it, Microsoft still did a whole bunch better than the
other monster of the year -- Godzilla. That's not saying much though, since the movie
makers' brains in aggregate look to be smaller than those of their monster.
Ok, so the government isn't doing so hot here. Hey, what if we got another gorilla to beat
up Billy's?
Enter AOL. Well, hey, if Microsoft reminds me of the "it came from Arcturus"
movies, the AOL saga is like the high school science experiment that ate Cleveland.
It wasn't all that long ago, that Netscape was thinking about buying AOL. Those tables
turned right around. It was a bit longer ago, but still not long, that CompuServe was the
world's largest online service and given to making disparaging remarks about its upstart
rival. Ooooops.
AOL has acquired CompuServe, and Netscape and a company called Mirabilis that makes
really neat messaging software called ICQ. AOL has cut a deal with Microsoft that gets it
great distribution and that probably contributes to the trouble that Bill and the boys
have getting the Microsoft Network right. And AOL has cut a nice deal with Sun Micro that
puts it right on the road to computing on every palm, desktop, automobile and microwave.
It's like little Stevie Case got tired of being whaled upon by Billy Gates. So he went
off and started eating right and lifting weights and practicing martial arts. Now the
mutant turtle is squared off against the gorilla. It's a big turtle, too. ZDNN reports
that AOL is not larger than all the local ISPs put together. It's part of the S&P 500.
It's here to stay.
AOL was shrewd, for sure, in getting the wins they've gotten already. But part of that
was being constantly underestimated by the folks in the information technology community
who seem to have formed a Bash AOL Society, complete with secret handshake.
Don't expect this to keep happening, though. The computer press may continue to
underestimate Case, but you can bet that Bill Gates won't.
We've got a ringside seat on the great Monster Fight. It could make a movie that Joe
Bob Briggs would love. The gorilla springs from the desktop and trys to control the net.
The turtle parries and tries to make the desktop operating system irrelevant. Who'll win?
Beats me.
When the Monster is Dead, the Movie is Over
Before we move on from this topic, let me point out one more way all
this merger stuff looks a lot like old time horror movies. The monster almost always dies.
Even the good ones.
It's easy in the excitement of merger mania to forget that most mergers simply don't
work. They don't result in more profitable companies, the don't create value for
shareholders but they do create displacement, woe and lost jobs.
It will be fun next year to look back on how these mergers fared. Then we can blame any
failures on the Millennium.
The Sky is Falling
Enter Y2K. Now, Y2K is not Chicken Little. But it does seem to spawn a
bunch of Chicken Littles.
There's a real problem here, folks. Some computer systems are not likely to work right
when the big old century turns over a year from now. All because programmers went about
saving space by using two digit dates (99) instead of four digit (1999).
Doesn't seem like much, right. I mean, what's two little digits. Well, they're involved
in date calculations. Like the ones in computers and cash registers.
To make it worse, there are computers in just about everything. That includes your
watch, the gates to your plant, your elevator controls, your pacemaker and … just
about everything.
If you doubt that, take a quick inventory of all the things in your life that have a
computer in them.
But we're not done yet. Those computers? They're connected to each other. They depend
on each other for data and for calculations. So if a few of them start acting strange, the
whole system, which is to say the world could have a problem.
If you doubt that even a little, think back to May 19. That's when PanAmSat's Galaxy IV
satellite lost service and communications systems around the world sputtered to a stop.
But wait, there's more. Since this is a real problem with real urgency, you would know
that there'd be lots of folks out to profit from it. Some are charlatans, but some are
sober responsible folk who know what they're talking about.
There's the potential here for some screw-ups. Some may be funny. Imagine a government
inspector informing the government computer says all your operating certificates expired
100 years ago.
Ho, ho, ho. Those government people are too funny!! But malfunctioning medical
equipment is not, along with lots of other equipment and systems based on computer chips
and dates.
I'm not an alarmist. I don't own a single piece of camouflage clothing. But I'm
watching this one carefully and taking what precautions I can. At the very least I'll be
prepared if the falling Y2K sky results in a state of chaos similar to a natural disaster.
Jargon Alert!!! Jargon Alert!!!
Human beings are jargon making creatures and 1997 was not without its
own special choices. "Push" technology (a big hit in prior times) was aced out
by portals, knowledge management, and rich media.
I'm a portal, you're a portal.
Seems like only a year ago that Yahoo et al were search engines. Now they're (drumroll
please) "portals." You get to be a "portal" by adding lots of
community building features.
Now, this is stupidity growing in the soil of a good idea. The good idea is that if you
can get more people to visit your site and stay longer you can sell ads to the folks who
want to reach them and make more money. Those sites that are calling themselves portals
did very well this year.
But was it because they were portals. I think not. First of all the main drivers of ad
spending on the net seem to me to be two things. Number one, lots of new web endeavors
from big retails chains. They know how to advertise, or at least spend money on
advertising. As they came on the web this year, ad spending went up, up, up even as banner
clickthrough went down, down, down.
Then there was the market for initial public offerings of Internet stocks. This has a
decidedly South Sea Bubble feel to it. Stock are hot because folks say they are and stock
price bears about as much relationship to economic performance as Mike Tyson does to Billy
Graham.
What's that go to do with portals? Every time there's an IPO there's an infusion of
cash, a large chunk of which seemed to go to setting up exclusive deals between the newly
public market darling and the portals.
Some if this is obscured by rhetoric about community or community-building features.
Lycos crows about its community of members. What makes it a community? Oh, well, I guess
it must be chat rooms, or personalized news. Nonsense, horsefeathers, balderdash.
Communities form when human beings have frequent, mutually-beneficial interaction.
There may be some communities forming in Lycos chat groups, but I really doubt that a
single person in the known world seriously identifies him or herself as a member of the
"Lycos community." Or the community of any other portal, for that matter.
Is Knowledge Management like Postal Service?
No, probably not. There are some things we can point to that define what knowledge
management might be. My own personal definition is that knowledge management is all the
things a company does so it only has to invent a wheel once.
Don't like that one? Make up your own definition. Pretty much everyone else is. The
problem is that none of them seem to agree.
A lot of what's labelled "knowledge management" these days is simply new
variations on the old, "one button" idea. That's where the CEO says he or she
wants system where they only have to hit one button to get an answer. Ain't gonna happen.
Not now. Not ever.
Or it's a variation on the Great Teaching Machine. Teaching machines have been the
stuff of futurist predictions since the turn of the century. We still don't have one. Why
not? Because by the time you prepare a computer to educate a single child in a truly
one-to-one way, the child is collecting a pension.
Unlike portals (and extranets) where I think the jargon will go away, knowledge
management will probably hang on as both jargon and a concept. The good reason for that is
that we're finally starting to understand what knowledge is and how it's important to a
firm. And we're just now developing tools for, if not managing it, at least keeping track
of it better.
The bad reason this term will probably still be with us next year is that every
software company and every consultant worth their per diem is re-engineering (speaking of
terms falling into disrepute) into knowledge management companies or experts.
With all that I recommend the following handy phrase to be used in the presence of the
term "knowledge management." "What exactly do you mean by that?"
Rich Media is Like Rich Food
Sometimes rich things are good. Sometimes not. Rich media is a not.
Rich media ads are the web ones will all the motion and interruption. They're the ones
that try really, really hard to be an entertainment medium, like, say television. They're
the ones that jump up in your face, hold you hostage and sing you the company song when
all you really want is to find the price for a particular pair of pants.
If you haven't seen rich media ads, it's probably because you haven't waited for them
to load. They take a very long time t do that, you see, and so many people don't wait,
they click on stop and head elsewhere.
Around the end of 1998 we saw several articles talking about how bandwidth was really
increasing for most people and so rich media ads were in our future. I hope not. I
devoutly hope not.
First, let's challenge the premise. Is bandwidth really increasing for most folks? I
don't think so. When I look at logs from websites I see lots and lots and lots of visitors
from AOL. I know there's not superfast connections there. When I survey the people I deal
with on a regular basis I find one ISDN line that doesn't work all the time and one WebTV
installation that keeps losing out to sitcoms.
Most of us are chugging along with 28.8 dialup unless we're on a corporate connection.
Even at that, the net itself is getting overloaded. There are times of day when it would
be faster for me to use carrier pidgeons to handle the mail than my national ISP.
But even if we had faster connections, would rich media be a good idea. In some cases,
maybe, but mostly, rich media is like a horseless carriage. A concept from a different
time and, in this case, medium.
My research with business users and other research I read, plus what I pick up in the
random conversations of life tell me that folks go on the web mostly to solve problems or
answer questions. They don't go to be entertained.
The real challenge is to find ways to use the technology to do the things it can do
well, not to suffer from TV envy. Pay attention to load times, navigation and information
design. Then, if there's time left over, make Mickey's little arms go up and down while he
plays the Opus 111 Piano Sonata through those crappy little speakers on someone's laptop.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 12/31/00
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