Dortch's Digressions

Autonomy: HP's Last, Best Hope?

And in the buried lede department (to paraphrase the great Harry Shearer), HP buys (and likely overpays for) Autonomy.

A "lede" is the lead or first paragraph of a news story. The term "buried lede" refers to stories with headlines about one thing, but details deep in the story that are likely more interesting, important or both. And much of the reporting about HP, PCs and tablets seems to bury what I think should be the real lede: the purchase of Autonomy. Whether or not HP "overpaid," as some of the overheated coverage I've read indicates.

Why? Three reasons.

1. Autonomy is successfully selling enterprise software into a market in which enterprise spending on technology is growing, even while IT budgets are flat or in decline. (Autonomy's software supports enterprise search and what the company calls "meaning-based computing." These are areas already generating both revenues and promises of whole new classes of business solutions.)

2. Software solutions like Autonomy's, both premise-based and increasingly cloud-based, help to sell more server, storage and management hardware and services, things HP continues to sell.

3. HP needs a cultural makeover at least as much as it needs strategic refocusing, and Autonomy might be the key to both.

HP should never have bought Palm or tried to make WebOS any kind of market presence. It should have played to its historical strengths in business markets, and thrown its weight behind whichever tablet and smartphone platforms came to dominate the market. And I can't help but feel that some earlier iteration of the company would have seen that.

As I posted in this very space back in September 2006, Mark Hurd's tenure as CEO saw the undeniable death of what was once proudly known as "The HP Way." That death was certainly not all his fault, but it happened on his watch, while he held the office where the buck's supposed to stop.

What HP's customers, partners and fans need to hope for now is the arising of a "New HP Way." One that puts enterprise customer success ahead of clever corporate machinations. One that sees customer success as a path towards and not in competition with personal success and aggrandizement. (Nothing wrong with either of those, mind, as long as they're the result of good intentions and actions.)

I and everyone who cares about HP is waiting with bated breath to see if the current management team is seriously, willfully committed to such a path. Autonomy is a successful player in a tough market HP cares about a lot. The Autonomy purchase is likely HP's last, best chance at successfully reinventing itself, strategically and culturally, and recalling any of its former greatness. I'm pulling for it to succeed -- but won't be surprised if more wrenching changes precede or even preclude that success.

 

Why I Bought -- and Use, and Love -- My iPad

I've been in the information technology analysis and observation game for more than 30 years. In all that time, I've never bought a first-generation anything. That streak has now been broken by the iPad. Why?

1. With the Documents to Go app, I can read, edit and create Microsoft Office files in their native formats, compatible with everyone with whom I work who uses Office or anything compatible with it.

2. Documents to Go also lets me synchronize copies of files with the Google Docs online file management service (and with several others). Another app, SimpleNote, lets me synchronize copies of files with SimpleNote servers. By saving copies of my files in the cloud, I can always get to them from any device I have that can access the Web, nit just my iPad (or my wife's -- we got her one, too).

3. I spend hours on buses each week and elsewhere between my home and office. Now, I can always get to my e-mail and my most critical work, even when there's no Wi-Fi where I am. (I'm still not a big fan of the AT&T network, but it is improving, it's better than no connectivity, and the iPad does enough offline to make occasional network hiccups tolerable.

4. I have almost all of my critical documents and notes, all of my critical contacts and appointments, and all of my favorite music and entertainment with me or accessible to me wherever I am, along with navigational assistance, local information and other resources, in a package I can fit and take almost anywhere.

5. The iPad is basically the coolest, most elegant piece of technology I've seen since the lever and fulcrum. (Yeah, I know. Geeky. I went to the Bronx High School of Science and M.I.T. I can't help myself. Sue me.)

I know all about its challenges and limitations. By the way, the on-screen keyboard is not the challenge it's sometimes made out to be. It takes some practice, but in landscape mode at a comfortable angle, it's pretty usable. And if you disagree, the Apple Wireless Keyboard may be worth the additional investment, and adds to the coolness factor. And yes, I also know that future versions are coming with more features. But the first-generation iPad does enough of what I want and need, and enough more cool and neat stuff, in ways even better than I'd thought or seen described before seeing and touching one.

It may not be for you, but it might be more for you than you think or have seen, especially if you rely on a computer and the Internet for work or other important aspects of your life. Ignore the political, religious and ideological arguments, and just check one out. Or ask any of the growing number of iPad users you'll soon see at your local coffeehouse, waiting for a shopping spouse at the mall, or on an upcoming flight. And if the user you run into happens to be me, please forgive my nearly irrational exuberance.

Sometimes, Technology Works TOO Well...

Earlier today, I came across a job opening I found interesting. (In case you haven't been following my career development at www.DortchOnIT.com, I got laid off from my Aberdeen Group analyst job in January.) Clever me thought, "I'll write a blog entry about the company, then point to it as an example of how well I understand what they're doing and can help them do it." So I wrote and posted the blog entry, then went back to the company's Web site to begin the official job application process -- only to find that in the ensuing hour or so, the job was no longer open.

Frankly, I was too stunned to be very disappointed...

Apple and MacWorld: Who Needs Big Trade Shows Anymore, Anyway?

So Apple has decided that Steve Jobs will not give the Macworld Expo 2009 keynote address in a few weeks, and that the company will pull out of the 25-year-old show altogether after the 2009 edition. And speculation runs rampant across the Web and print media worlds, about (1) Steve Job's health and (2) that of Macworld Expo itself. I'll ignore issue (1) because it's none of my business, and focus on issue (2).

The large computer industry trade show has been a dying dinosaur for years, but has stubbornly hung on in many cases. However, there are now too many factors mitigating against the success of such events. These range from the abilities of companies such as Apple to turn retail stores and Web sites into far more manageable, controllable, and profitable "mini-expos" to growing requirements to reduce or eliminate costly, low-productivity business travel. (I mean, the MacBook Pro on which I'm composing this very screed already has built-in Internet connectivity, a microphone AND a camera...)

But don't cry for Macworld just yet. There is an awful lot of value to be gotten out of the event, even should Apple disappear from it entirely as a participant, or radically reduce its participation. I'm old enough to remember when networking pioneer all but owned the NetWorld trade show, but that event retained value beyond Novell itself, especially when it was combined with Interop, another pioneering big industry event. So there's semi-relevant precedent for the possibility of an Apple-free (or "Apple-reduced") Macworld continuing on successfully, at least for a while.

All depends on how Macworld Expo 2009 actually plays out, and what Apple does, if anything, before, at, and after said event. (If you want to read similar, more granular, and "closer-to-home" musings on this subject, I highly recommend "Apple at Expo: What went wrong?" by Jason Snell of Macworld.com, a corporate cousin of the company that runs Macworld Expo.) But regardless of how things play out at Macworld, what's happened to Macworld is definitely indicative of a larger truth: with few if any exceptions, the larger and/or more focused on a single vendor the trade show, the more likely that its days are numbered. And those numbers, if used to measure years of remaining longevity, are in the low to very low single digits, at best.

Sprint Nextel to Troublesome Customers: You're Fired!

So Sprint Nextel has "fired" some 1,000 of what it says are its most troublesome (and apparently troubled) customers. The company said in published reports that these customers made as many as 40 to 50 calls to the company's customer service team every month. And yet, there are folks out there in the blogosphere chalking this up to callously typical Big Business behavior, and stating with falsely ironic wistfulness that it must be nice to be able to fire customers at will.

A few things.

1. ANY business has the right, if not the ethical responsibility, to part company with any customer that business cannot satisfy. As long as the business makes the customer contractually and financially whole, which Sprint Nextel has done with its 1,000 former customers, why stay in a relationship that's not working? (Hold on, hold on -- let's stick to business relationships here, people!)

2. Sprint Nextel says it researched its customer base and complaint call logs extensively before doing this. The fact that the company was able to find 1,000 people who averaged 40 to 50 complaint calls monthly out of a claimed subscriber base of 57 million seems to indicate at least some research was in fact conducted. It should have taken a fair amount of digging -- any wireless carrier where a majority of customers were that unhappy would have gone out of business before most of us would have heard about them. (Fill in your preferred former carrier here.)

3. What happens if customer service and satisfaction levels increase measurably for the 56,999,000 or so Sprint Nextel customers still under contract? Will critics of the move lapse into grumbling silence? (Unlikely.) Will Sprint Nextel seek out the next 1,000 most complaint-prone customers and send them warning? (Possibly.) Will other wireless carriers or other types of companies follow Sprint Nextel's lead? (Unlikely, at least "out loud" among wireless carriers; possibly, in other cases.)

4. This is not about Big Bidness trampling the individual, something that constantly troubles me personally, make no mistake. Nor is it, I believe, anything about getting people to suck it up, shut up, and stop complaining about what they perceive as poor service. I do that all the time, but would have to give up blogging, if not working full-time, to get to the level of 40 to 50 calls a month. This is about a company using business analytics, business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) tools and processes to identify a relatively minute set of apparently extremely, chronically unhappy customers, and walking away from them rather than draining significant resources continuing to try to satisfy them. If it were your business, and you could, why wouldn't you, if it offered a chance to make life better for you and the vast majority of your customer base?

That last is not a rhetorical question. If you have an answer you'd care to offer, as Ross Perot said when he ran for President, "Ah'm all ears!"