My Shrinking Microsoft Footprint…

Got to thinking on my drive in today about how varied my apps/tech usage is getting.  Pre-2008, my world was primarily MSFT based… Office for Apps, Windows Media, mp3 player (no iPod), Communicator for IM… In 2008, look at the changes… have been won over by my iPod, Twitter/Twihrl for  communicating with  colleagues instead of Communicator, YouTube for videos, Facebook as another form of communicating/reaching out to friends… and now Google Apps.  I needed to set up a survey and was thinking of using SurveyMonkey or some other entity but heard they are filled with Ads, etc.  Chis mentioned that he’s used Google Spreadsheets to run a few surveys.  So I went and tested it out, and viola (though I like to spell it wallah as well!) I had a survey set up to meet Likert Scale survey specs (Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree) in 10 minutes.  One area that I have started using more from MSFT is OneNote… does a great job of tracking/organizing mtgs on the fly.

What does all of this mean?  Not sure for the long term except for the fact that the competition for MSFT continues to heat up… which is why I was a bit shocked when I read Bill Gates making a comment a month ago something to the effect of “Google doesn’t understand the applications business”.   Pretty bold statement to make, though I would have to believe internally they do not believe this.  If they do believe it… l see a lot of unused cube space in Redmond in 10 years.

PLM Results Starting to Come In…

Yesterday PTC reported their calendar Q108 financial results and it was a mixed bag… Pro/E revenue struggles, but Windchill fared well. EMEA and AP were up, but Americas suffered. The Americas results follow what seems like every software vendor is facing… major pullbacks either in backing out of deals, or reducing the size of the deal. Also, ex the acquisition of CoCreate and overall growth was what could be termed as “OK”.

Dassault reports next week and I look for similar results… albeit with the usual French “flair”… EMEA/AP strengths and Americas weakness.

Update - Thursday PM: Autodesk preannounced on the positive side this AM for total revenue… will be interesting to see what caused to upswing. One would think that certainly not the Americas region as it is currently in a major housing slump. We’ll see if we get any indication this afternoon.

Update - Friday: Appears Autodesk positive pre-report is due only to currency.

3 Dots… and an earthquake…

Earthquake?  In the Midwest?  That’s right, our family was greeted with some tremors from a 5.4 earthquake that hit ~200 miles away… We all woke up wondering what could make our house shake like it was… lamps, shades, anything not nailed down was shaking…  It was over in about 20 seconds and I commented  that must’ve been an earthquake… everyone laughed and went back to sleep… later when turning on the news, sure enough an earthquake… funny thing is, the bird that usually wakes us up around 5:45 AM each morning was not heard at all… Think I’ll take the bird singing from now on…

Saw some cool co-branding from Yahoo last night… A Honda Odyssey commercial where at the end, it showed a Yahoo search screen and directed viewers to type in “Shop Honda” as a search for more information… Pretty interesting since you really want shoppers to go to your site instead of someone else’s… I get the aspect they’re partnering… just looks like it benefits yahoo far more than Honda…

This and that…
OSU plays their Spring Game this Saturday in Columbus.  Last year they had 75,000 watch in person… It’s time to get back to skiing/wakeboarding.  Lake water is still chilly but a wetsuit solves that.  This is the year I master some new tricks…

Is the “Rock” music genre dead?

I was recently checking out Buzznet (social site on the music industry) and noted the lack of what I would call “Rock” bands.  This dawned on me when I was looking at the “Metal” section and it was dominated by bands whose names would possibly scare even the hardiest souls out there (Napalm Death, Black Dahlia Murder, etc).  I recall in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s there was a distinction between various music genres… Rock (Rush, Ratt, Van Halen, Pearl Jam etc ), Hard/Metal (Dio, Iron Maiden, Guns etc) and Thrash (Metallica, Slayer, etc.) seemed to cover them all.

So where are the “Rock/Hard Rock” bands of today?  Seems it’s either Thrash or Alterna-Rock (Blue October, Funeral for my Friend, Silverstein).  One might point to 3 Doors Down and the Foo Fighters, and I could go for that, but just strikes me that the overall Rock genre is fading away for the time being (No, I do not think the White Stripes fit the bill).  Am I missing some of the newer “Rock” bands out there?

Are Analysts Stepping up to the Plate?

I work with Industry Analysts quite a bit and while I completely recognize their value, sometimes think they are too soft in their analysis… Perhaps this is the price of their business.  Recently though I’ve seen AMR Research take what I think is a step forward… They put out a piece bi-weekly called “Chain Reaction”.  It seems they look to tie current events to their messages on Supply Chains.   Written by Kevin O’Marah, it doesn’t hold back in its analysis and hits hard (for an Analyst Firm) at areas that are deemed a hindrance to businesses succeeding (from African instability to Unions in N America).

Here’s the latest one on the state of N American Mfg and Unions.

Could this be an early indicator that analysts will be taking stronger positions in their reporting.   Here’s my vote to follow this path.

FUD… in Everday Transactions…

Part 2 in the series on FUD in the business world comes completely unplanned. I was planning on writing a piece on FUD in the Airlines industry but will save it for later with some interesting FUD examples at work in everyday life.

…earlier this morning I had an appointment to get 2 new tires as Firestone reminded me that mine had dangerously low tread. While I’m waiting in the lobby, I overhear the Manager talking to a customer and out popped some of these FUD gems… “What X won’t tell you about their Road Hazard Warranty is that it doesn’t cover a, b, and c”… and “at X, they advertise that everything is included, but they leave out certain fees”, etc. The customer seemed interested and agreed to the repairs needed. Now, I don’t know if the FUD he painted was true, but it clearly shows how this works in a retail store where they need to just get the customer to step over the last line of defense in order to buy.

…The second example, and perhaps more interesting from my viewpoint… Yahoo FUD against Google. I was going about some standard web browsing when an ad from Yahoo caught my eye (this is of particular interest in that I typically have zero recall of any ads)… the ad essentially painted the picture that… searching for movie reviews on Google was akin to finding the needle in the haystack and that with Yahoo, it’s just a simple title search. So, I decided to try a little comparison to see if their FUD was accurate…

At Yahoo’s main search screen, I typed in an obscure movie “the ruins” and sure enough the top result was the movie’s website, followed by the trailer and third, the coveted movie reviews. I then went to Google and tried the same… I couldn’t tell what the first hit was, but it looked like movie start times… after clicking it turned out it was for reviews… subsequent links were the imdb site and the movie site. So the FUD ended up not being as accurate as one might think… BUT, after actually trying out Yahoo’s search engine, I see some aspects that are appealing…

1. The search results seem very similar albeit staged on one simple search… must do more detailed comparisons before jumping over
2. I really liked the Yahoo “Search Assist” that populated the possible results as you typed. Guessing Google may already have this but I tried it from google.com, google desktop and google taskbar and none of them did this.

I may not move over to Yahoo exclusively for search, but it certainly opened up my eyes that there is another real player in this market… which means the Yahoo FUD builders have done their job.