My colleagues at work know how much I loathe wires and cables and connectors – “wireless” for me is an aspirational state of mind; like most other human beings on Sol’s third planet I had to accept the fact that most wireless devices require a tether for charging, leading me to use disposable batteries for many of my devices, with the obvious guilt feeling as I watch my pile of exhausted batteries grow.
Well, my battery consumption is about to drop like a rock, as I purchased Magic Feet, a totally stupid name for a ridiculously overpriced dock-like implement which can wirelessly charge (induction, I presume) my keyboard and mouse, with a third “place” for this soon-to-be-purchased universal spare battery.
Now, it should not be beyond comprehension that for us unwashed masses a standard for induction charging is useful and practical: as I am using my mouse, why can’t I charge my phone?
But this is an industry that took a decade to get rid of vendor-specific chargers, so I am not that hopeful.
I ‘m not sure about the year, must have been the late Eighties. Lotus, a company built around easy to understand desktop software introduced a new product, called Lotus Notes, and we had to launch it on the italian market.
Problem is, nobody understood what Notes really did. We didn’t, journalists didn’t, potential clients didn’t. A classic case of a solution in search of a problem.
What we understood, however, are a few use cases, and around these we built a play on collaboration, the power of asynchronous communication, replication, and a few other things. We didn’t have client testimonials, so we invented two fictitious companies, one backward company called Salumificio Porcelli (loosely translatable as “McPigs salami factory”) and the forward looking Frizzi & Lazzi (“Jokes & Puns”) which were dealing with exactly the same problem, hiring a junior sales executive: request forms must be filled and transmitted between the requisitioning office in Roma and the headquarters in Milano, reviewed and approved. An incident causes the whole thing to be bounced from one employee to another without much notice.
In the end, however, the modern Frizzi & Lazzi overcomes all the hurdles and completes its task without breaking a sweat, while the antiquated Salumificio Porcelli gives up, showing what a difference it makes to adopt a modern collaboration software!
This the plot; in the space of three weeks we wrote the play and “hired” the players, all of them volunteer employees of Lotus Italy, including the CFO Ernesto (the moustached gentlemen reading the intros) the CEO (yours truly), sales, tech support, marketing, receptionist – almost everybody ended up doing something and although we had to pull a few allnighters for rehearsals while we carried our our day jobs, we had an insane amount of fun doing it.
Our marketing agency built a double theatrical stage with a screen showing the product at work in the middle to allow for the conversation between the offices. The application shown during the demo was also locally custom written and tested; everybody got engrossed in making this thing a success: I do not remember exactly who sourced the huge mortadella sausage whose dusting by Enrico provokes the laugh at 7:38 but I remember we ate it afterwards.
The result was luckily captured for posterity and if you speak italian, you may enjoy it below:
Obviously it was meant to be a funny play, so parts were allocated to stir even more laughs, primarily among ourselves: so the snappy, impatient manager was played by placid Enrico, I played the lowest-ranking employee, Angelo (our oldest colleague) played the “junior sales exec” and so forth.
I doubt our US or European HQ ever knew what we were doing, I don’t seem to remember we asked permission, but again, Lotus was never a company where people asked much permission to do anything.
This story had been rumoured a lot in the last few weeks, and it finally happened: Micheal Dell is taking the company he founded private with the help of Microsoft.
So now Microsoft has its own world-class smartphone maker (Nokia), its own world-class computer maker (Dell) to complement its other existing hardware businesses (Xbox, accessories, Surface) – Ramin says this is a far cry from a unified hardware business and he’s right, but I retorted that in all this hodgepodge of disparate businesses the only entity making money (and lots of it) is good ol’ Microsoft software, which therefore should call the shots.
When I was discussing this deal, a number of questions arose:
Q: Is the industry abandoning its tested-and-true (sort of) open paradigm, in favor of a closed stack more similar to Apple’s?
A: Hard to say. I think Microsoft is still weighing the pros and cons of the two approaches: the risk of killing the hen who lays the golden eggs is very big, which may be the reason Redmond is sneaking into the driver seat of Nokia and Dell without however an overt buyout which could scare off other manufacturers.
Q: Will Michael Dell end up running Microsoft?
A: I think there is more than an hint in that direction: Dell is the kind of visionary industry figure Ballmer has ceased to be long ago. However I still maintain that a lot of Apple’ success is due to its superior software, and with all due respect for big Mike, I don’t think he gets software
Q: Is this good for the industry?
A: Absolutely yes, especially becase it will trigger a domino effect with the other big guys. What will Lenovo do? What will Samsung do? This industry does not perform well without the periodic mass extinctions and this looks has just like a meteor hurtling towards the planet.
Q: What will happen next?
A: for one thing, expect more vigorous competition. Full stacks will mean more integrated products, focused much more on the user experience and much less of the technicalitis of protocols, standards and the like. Apple does not have the answer to all questions and – besides – it’s an Apple without the genius of Steve, so a much more approachable one.
Some people will hate me for this, but there is only one person on the whole planet who will understand the significance of this picture, so this is also a test to see if he is following me a little…
This post is a few days late – on jan 26, 1983 a program called Lotus 1-2-3 was released; the full story is told eloquently in this excellent article on mental_floss.
My own personal involvment with Lotus would start only 2 years later, on november 1985 when I was hired as Business Development Manager for Italy working out of the European HQ in Windsor, UK.
Funny enough, I was not assigned an IBM Personal Computer, but an Apple Macintosh (history repeats itself…), and I remember when a companywide announcement introduced this commercial which sadly we never had the money to run in Europe:
For the younger viewers, a little help to understand what you see:
The bulky appliance on the desk of employees was called a Personal Computer or, more technically speaking, an IBM 5150 Microcomputer, a device I had already the opportunity to celebrate on this blog.
The little black things that employees pass to each other were called “floppy disks” and were the main (and for a while ONLY) way to store information to and from a microcomputer. They were called floppy because, well, that’s what they were, flexible pieces of plastic containing a thin magnetic-oxide covered circular layer mounted on a central metallic hub. In their capacious 360kB space you would store programs, data, everything.
Why do they pass them around? Well, PCs for a while did NOT have a hard disk of any size; in fact, the first IBM 5150 shipped with dual floppy disks, and was perceived as a more business machine than my Mac, which only had a single floppy. My first ever PC was an Olivetti M24 which enjoyed the unmitigated luxury of a full 10MB hard disk!
Yes, you read it right. I wrote 360 kiloBytes! And Lotus 1-2-3 did fit in a single floppy disk, all of it! No wonder it was FAST – thanks to compact code and lots of assembler programming, software was never faster than in this time: Lotus 1-2-3′ performance on a computer that had a thousandth of the cycles you have in your wristwatch would probably rival that of a modern PC running Vista and Excel. No kidding !
No, the display of the PC isn’t broken: monitors were monochrome, green-on-black things. No fancy proportional fonts, though a computer whiz could write code to display colors other than green on some more advanced displays. In fact, my first ever client assignment at IBM a few years earlier had been the programming of the “friendly” user interface for a payroll application – not on a PC, but on so-called “dumb” terminal, a gigantic device like the one you see here connected to a much bigger mainframe computer. Just for your information, screens were not called screens, but “maps” because you more or less had to figure out each pixel on the screen like in a map.
Many of these limitations did not apply to my Mac which had a white screen and a few proportional fonts, but at the price of a much lower overall speed – in fact for many years to come, Macintoshes lagged in peformance behind IBM PCs and their clones, explaining why corporations shunned them as “consumer” machines.
While we are at this, you may laugh at the keyboard, but anyone who had the pleasure of typing on an 80s IBM keyboard will confirm that no typing device ever conceived by man was more comfortable and offered better feedback than those bulky, ugly beige things – which also doubled as self-defense implements, given their mass…
Most of the times, PR types enjoy an ill-deserved bad reputation. But I hate to be considered a peer of whoever dreamed up of this paragraph
“Citigroup today announced a series of repositioning actions that will further reduce expenses and improve efficiency across the company while maintaining Citi’s unique capabilities to serve clients, especially in the emerging markets. These actions will result in increased business efficiency, streamlined operations and an optimized consumer footprint across geographies.”
It turns out that when it spent $11.1bn to acquire Autonomy in september 2011, Hewlett-Packard overpaid a tad. Despite accounting firms and lawyers who reviewed the books, apparently nobody realized the acquisition was being valued, like, 400% too much.
At the time, I was among the many who could not believe their eyes – without being six-figure Wall Street analysts, we all wondered what the hell did H-P see in Autonomy to justify the huge price tag.
Then-CEO Leo Apotheker (who initiated the deal) says he is shocked and was misled by Autonomy’ management, current CEO Meg Whitman (who closed the deal) must have been too busy in more important stuff (more important than 10 friggin’ billions ? Holy shit!!
Well, I do not care what the expert may have said, we’re talking of the management of the world’s largest computer company, should they not understand the market in which they have operated all their lives? Should they not think twice before spending shareholder’ money on an acquisition that common sense, before expert’ reports, screamed could not be right?
If I were an HPQ shareholder, I’d file immediately a class action to redress the $8.8bn which were wasted in what must surely be the stupidest acquisition ever: I’d claw back lawyers’ and accountants’ fees, CEO and all upper management salaries and bonuses, as well as the multimillion severances paid to Apotheker and Lynch. It won’t be enough, but I bet it would pay back at least ten cents on the dollar.
To put the size of the mistake in perspective, Hewlett-Packard recently announced it will be cutting 27,000 jobs: the writedown on the Autonomy acquisition, a direct, unforgivable management blunder, would be enough to pay the full salaries to all these people for over 4 years.
Every now and then I go back re-reading stuff that I find of particular significance.
One such piece is the Appendix to the report on the Space Shuttle “Challenger” disaster on January 28th, 1986. I have previously explained my link to the STS-51-L mission.
The Rogers Commission delivered to President Reagan its report six months later and Feynman, then a superstar physicist, played a key role in exposing NASA’s management misguided assumptions over safety factors.
The 9-page Appendix is great reading for anyone interested in the fine art of divulgation (download ithere): never superficial, Feynman explains the mistakes made by management in rigorous terms but with what we could call, were it not for the sad subject, entertaining prose.
At the end, however, there is a sentence that I think should be learned by heart by all those practicing the PR profession:
[...] reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
