bizzXceleration: Performance, Value and Profit

Continuing on the theme of slowing capital spending combined with increased pressure on foreign economies we turn our attention to the Tech Sector. And with the NDX down 1.4% so far today on the heels of Apple's surprise this might be even more timely than anticipated - purely accidentally of course. Which nonetheless reinforces the point that, at the end of the day, the state of the economy and general business matter even for a superb innovator like Apple. If this keeps up consider this an early fore-shadowing of a future buying opportunity.

Just to put a point on it consider the accompany multi-company chart graphic, which shows pairwise comparisons of key tech bellweathers. The top contrasts the NDX with CSCO where Chamber's honesty and directness has led to a more serious decline in Cisco's stock than many techs so far. Meanwhile the new and the old (AAPL, IBM) show two companies that have held up very well but highlight key concerns with consumer spending domestically, the likely downturn in capex and the issue of foreign demand. Which leads one to the next pair of GOOG and MSFT both of which blindsided with lower than expected performance. The final pair is also a new and old contrast in the software business showing Salesforce.com vs SAP. Both of which holding up well. Lots and lots of issues hiding there as well that get to the heart of the Tech outlook. Besides the general the key question there is how will spending on softward hold up as the economic malaise grows and extends worldwide ? One might suspect future surprises in store - unless of course the thesis that software spending saves money in a downturn holds it up. Not a thesis btw that's historically well-grounded. Which leads us back to yesterday's international economic outlook summary (Economy (Int'l): Re-coupling Redux and Deterioration Accelerations).

How all these conflicting forces play out is illustrated after the break with another set of worthwhile readings excerpts, starting with Cisco but then comparing and contrasting INTC vs AMD. There you get an almost perfect contrast between innovative strategic transformation PLUS superb execution and scale verses self-inflicted foot-shooting. But the real poster child for bad execution is Sprint which continues to suffer tremendously from terrible customer service problems.

The other interesting pair of excerpts is on the transformative nature of Apple's recent iPhone announcements which change it from a very smart customer gadget to a new computing platform. A fundamental game-changer that's not being widely recognized as yet but calls for strategic re-positioning on the part of all the players involved. Jim Jubak is one of the few widely read commentators who gets it and his discussion of GOOG vs NOK vs AAPL highlights some interesting aspects. And creates a list of future buying candidates that you need to table for evaluation.

The final excerpt discusses Kleiner's strategic shift to green tech investing and away from its' traditional base - which could serve as the exemplar for the paradigm shift emerging in the VC community and is worth thinking about. 

Continue reading "Readfest(Tech Indstry): Playing it Again, Same...oops Sam" »

Posted by dblwyo at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that we've got all this machinery listed, cataloged and presented it might be time to apply a bit of it so that's what we propose to do with the Tech Industry news from the last few weeks. A lot of that's either gadgets, related to Telecom or the Yahoo Wars...all of which we'll come to in separate posts. Here we'll focus on a couple of things in the classic mainstream of the industry - where the primary big news that caught our eye in the last few weeks is HPQ's acquisition of EDS. Before we comment on that per se this is our time to talk about the industry in general.

When you look at the analysts consensus forecasts for Q4 it's the Tech industry they expect to save the day. Earlier this year the bottom-up estimates were 20% for Tech and 29% for Telecom. It'll be interesting to see how/when/where/if these other industries follow the financial guys who've been madly revising downward. There are two sets of problems you need to think about. First there are some major breakages in the logic regarding economic fundamentals. Second there are further breakages with regard to the analyst's methodologies.

But let's start with a chart on the NDX and, pardon the experimentation, it's a "Point and Figure" chart which may be as new to you as us but does offer up some interesting perspectives. A column of X's indicates a day where the price rose a pre-set amount and O's the converse - start a new column when certain limits are exceeded. The result is almost a pure price trend chart though dates are indicated by numeric/letter entries where 1=Jan...Oct=A and so on. And this one you really do need to click thru on. The chart on the left is a daily chart that runs back ~ Oct peaks while that on the right is a weekly chart that runs back to '06. Interestingly the shorter-term chart didn't quite break the uptrend this last week - the innate sentiment in favor of Tech is therefore intact. Yet on the longer-term chart there is a significant downtrend and the software suggests a bearish target of 1760 ! But that's only a 9% drop from here. 

The Fundamental arguments that have floated around are that spending will still occur on Big Tech because it helps companies save money. Got some bad news for folks - I've made those decisions and sold to those who day and that is not the way they think. When things tighten up they cut capital budgets and live with what they've got. So here are the four exposures on fundamentals: 1) a slowing economy which is likely to tip over will lead to a downturn in capex with the normal lag; i.e. Tech spending will be pressured and the signs are already in the surveys. 2) For some players the "consumer shift card" has been played,e.g. Apple and iPod/iTunes. Please - consumer spending is going to be the first and is already headed for the basement. 3) Foreign sales are the next shibboleth - based on currency conversions and de-coupling. Well as a matter of fact many of the majors have shifte large chucks of business into the int'l economy - a major structural shift in fact. But it's still not their dominant businesses and they've enjoyed a revenue runup mostly based on currency effects not jumps in unit sales. 4) On top of which it turns out that not only is de-coupling mythological but the BRICs et.al. are experiencing their own unique set of problems in addition to slowing growth; e.g. Europe. C'est la vie for that arguments set - does the earnings estimate hold up ? Do you think it'll be "just" a 9-10% if it doesn't ? 

The key to re-thinking earnings is coupling economic fundamentals with company performance analysis - which is where the analyst community should come in but, with some notable exceptions, generally doesn't. Earlier (Readings (Earnings): The Real Earnings Realities that Ain't...YET) we'd gone thru a long, careful and documented dissection of some of the characteristic flaws of analyst work that might be worth reviewing. Aside from the fact they are often wrong they also tend to lag the realities and all too often their work is biased because it's based on management prognostications. Which in turn are all too often looking backward to the last quarter instead of the readily discernible general trends that should govern business outlooks. In other words executives are telling folks how it is and was - not reading the tea leaves about how the currents are running. Which was, at the end of the day our whole point with the "Dashboard" series. 

Which leads us to this next chart which is a little more traditional and uses ETF's as proxies for various Tech sectors starting with the common index of IXN - Global Technology stocks which turns out to track the NDX almost exactly. On the top are IXN, IGV - Software and IGW-Semiconductors. The bottom is more Telecom oriented with IGN-Telecom Equipment, WMH-wireless provides and mfg., FDN - Internet players (GOOD, Yahoo, et.al.) and TTH - telecom service providers. On the whole everybody has enjoyed the benefits of the bear market bounce AND the tech mythologies, particularly software which'll power thru any possible downturn of course. This whole discussion reminds us of nothing so much as the discussions circa '05 about how the homebuilders were safe this cycle 'cause they'd been careful to maintain the health of their balance sheets and not over-invested in land. Think about the metaphor there for a bit...please !

If our economic outlook has any validity to it the estimates of Tech earnings are wildly overdone due to a lack of sensible business analysis coupled with grounded economic fundamentals. Potentially an textbook case in why our mantra makes sense. Which then leads us to the pick good companies who'll do well as survivors in any downturn and prepare yourself to pick them up as/when/if we go thru a significant adjustment. Which in turn leads to the HPQ/EDS news. Which was a real puzzler to a lot. There are two key questions, perhaps three here. First can Hurd apply his strategy-based execution improvement magic to EDS which sorely needs it having kept tripping over it's own feet for years. Two - out of necessity EDS targets the big companies for advanced and complicated services - is there enough HP business there to grow a well-running EDS's revenue ? Or, converesly, can EDS bring in HP behind it on it's client base ? HP has a large enterprise component but that's not been its' primary emphasis so this represents a real strategic addition, if not a shift. And, I guess, third, EDS has done very poorly at building an international presence and capacility unlike IBM, in particular, or Accenture. If that can be developed and leverged there some real potentials. In any case HP is both an extremely well-run company which also has a very thoughtful and considered strategy by line of business. IOHO they go on any value oriented investors shopping list, post downturn of course. 

After the break, in addition to some excerpts, you'll find pointers to some recent vidclips on CNBC with some analysts who actually reinforce much of what we're arguing for here. Worth your time. Bon Appetit'. 

Continue reading "Technology Industry: HPQ/EDS, PCs and Prospects" »

Posted by dblwyo at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two industries where we've ended up taking particularly deep dives are Technology and what we're calling Technomediatainment - the emerging composite of Telecom, New Media, Entertainment and Consumer Electronics. After the break you'll find the usual summary tables with all the previous posts in these areas separated into those categories.

The two industries are interesting for their own sakes, as exemplars of the approach we take to business analysis and for the implications and impacts on the broader markets and economy. The first two Tech posts focused on the market situation and pointed out with slowing Capex spending (thereby linking back to our "understand the context" theme of coupling to economic analysis) that the unusual performance of the Tech indices was unlikely to continue. An argument which seemed to  first be born out from Oct to Mar and then wrong as the NDX/Nasdaq bubbled up over the SP500. Notice however that, literally today, the NDX is now moving in concert with or lower than the S&P. Interesting, eh what ? That question will be settled by whether or not earnings hold up unusually well - something we don't think will happen as the Economy continues to tip over but which is likely to lag other indicators.

Exactly how the Tech & Techno enterprises perform will result from the confluence of changes in industry structure, the emergence of new products, services and solutions and the performance of individual companies. All of which is discussed in more detail in these prior posts by some of which can be briefly reviewed here.

Technology

1. Industry Structure - Technology per se is essentially a commodity, at least on the bottom part of the stack. On the top part, the applications/content/solutions portion, there's still lots of room for value creation. The former assertion leads to the wave of consolidation we've been seeing among the platform providers and middleware vendors. The latter on-going challenge leads to the struggles of the application vendors as well as the emergence of SaaS, e.g. Salesforce, to try and fill in that gap. The biggest untapped opportunity is to provide reasonably sophisticated business applications to the grossly under-served mid-market.

2. New Frontiers - the  Application Space. The interesting thing is the continuing challenge on the part of vendors, customers/users, analysts and service providers still wrestling with the multi-decade old "two cultures" problem where Tech guys like bright shiny things and resent adult supervision. Contrawise business guys just want it to work but aren't willing to invest the hard...hard work in learning enough about Tech - at least in terms of end-use - to provide the guidance, participation and supervision required. That btw also means that those invidual user enterprises who can and do learn how to manage their Tech investments will continue to enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage. Sadly and surprisingly that's the same list of the "Usual Suspects" it's been for decades, e.g. Fedex, WMT, et.al.

Technomediatainment

1. Industry Structure - the key factor here is the rapid convergence of the various networks to a common infrastructure based on the same "stack" that underpinings the Internet and creates the strategic opportunity for XoIP where IP = Internet Protocol and X = Data, Voice, Video, etc. etc.

2. The Techno Stack - this shift creates huge opportunities for the Equipment Sector and the Service Providers (Phone and Cable companies). It also enables a revolution in the New/Old Media and Consumer Electronics companies, an exemplar of which is Apple's successive introduction of the iPod and iPhone. Which are really digital consumer electronics that are complete end-to-end solutions that are destroying the underpinnings of the old analog world in both media and consumer electronics. Whee...we're having fun now.

Winners and Losers: the Undiscovered Country

The separation between the winners and the losers will be between those who establish an on-going, sustainable and repeatable innovation capability and those who do not. And we DON'T just mean invent new crap but also execute on the delivery of those inventions. The relevant operating distinction between invention and innovation is whether or not you deliver it and make money in the process. Clever is fun but doesn't count. This will get interesting in all the sectors of these industries but is particularly fascinating to watch as as the New Media companies adapt to the "Content Wars". The series of posts on Innovation walk thru the general requirements and characteristics involved - here illustrated by contrasting pathways. So where do MSFT vs YHOO fall ? How 'bout Dell vs HPQ ? Or Nintendo or AAPL ?

Anyway...that's certainly not all the accumulated graphics digging into various aspects of these Industries. And definitely all the discussions, analysis and readings. If anything strikes your fancy you'll have to follow the pointers below to dig in some more. Bon Appetit' indeed. We are definitely living in interesting times. 

Continue reading "Key Postings Vb (Technomediatainment): Maturities, Barriers and Disruptions" »

Posted by dblwyo at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The prior post took a look at the multiple wars going on at the bottom of the Telecom value stack. Now we'd like to look at the smaller but growing ones at the top. If you will yesterday's post was on the technology and infrastructure wars while this one is on the content wars and the distribution debates. Just to refresh your memory about the Content & Distribution Wars you might want to look at a prior discussion (WRFest (Telemediatainment): The Content Who Would Be King) which offers up some other examples that play nicely with these. And lays out a "model" of Content value chain, which we have in mind here.

In the last few weeks there have been some startling new developments that continue to accelerate the changes in New Media "cusped" by Iger's coming to terms with Pixar and the Internet a couple of years ago. Now we're talking about the top of this stack where the strategic questions are: 1) who's content will appear on 2) which device and 3) what kind is it ?

TWX and Apple have agreed to have new movies come on iTunes the same time as the DVD while Viacom (cf. the earlier post) is starting up a new channel aimed at, among many other things, doing something similar. Since Paramount is captive they might have an easier time of it even. At the same time Apple is revisiting its' not-too-successful' foray in Apple TV.  It may have a long way to go but they've also got a lot of runway considering everything else that's working well for them. That re-visiting is syngeristic with the iTunability of movies.

Meanwhile Europe is acclerating its' experiments with Mobile TV - think of it as TV on your smart-phone. Back to the 4A paradigm as well as the bandwidth/infrastructure wars. And ATT is following suite in the US. Whee....Katie bar the door. A lot of challenges before the cup really gets to the lip but again consider this, really mixing metaphors, another big canary.

On the other side of the house traditional content generators are still struggline with the problems of migrating to this brave new world. Unfortunately, aside from online web sites and blogging, old media is still struggling mightily to re-think itself for this new environment. That is - they still haven't figured out two key things. First - how to create an interface that takes advantage of the new media instead of just mimicing the old one. And second - how to make money in either/any case. On the latter I'll bet, at least for now, that they end up back at the answer of the last 100+ years - advertising. Maybe with a dash of subscription thrown in. On the former though, as the prior post, discusses at more length, several interesting or key players are beginning to really re-think what can be done online.

This'll be really interesting, eh what ! 

Continue reading "Technomediataiment (Content): the Revolution is HERE" »

Posted by dblwyo at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watching the Superbowl this year was an interesting experience this year for lots of reasons, not least of course because it was one of the best games I've seen in a long...long time. But another thing really interested me because my hosts had just gotten a new HDTV which the man of the house was eagerly looking forward to. Unfortunately the sound quality on the HD channel was terrible with most of the announcer's gabble almost washed out in noise.Contrawise the picture was very good but when we switched to the regular channel at his wife's insistence we of course ended up with a mediocre picture. The moral of the story - other than who rules the roost - was despite all the hype and hoopla that the cable company (Comcast in this case) didn't have the bandwidth to support even one good HD channel with the most important sporting event of the year !

Now we've talked for some time about convergence and competition in the telemediatainment industries but underlying a lot of our, and many others thinking, was that the cable companies had an innate advantage because they already had fat pipes into the premise. What that little anecdote tells us is that it just ain't so. Worse, as many of the stories below illustrate, our experience was by no means isolated. We've tried to represent these issues in the Telecom Industry stack chart which shows both the technology requirements and integrated value proposition that all the underlying service providers are wrestling with. We've talked before about the 4As - Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, Any device. If the cable companies are already struggling with things as they are that means $Bs of new infrastructure investment will be required to compete with the traditional phone companies and completely disrupts the entire competitive landscape. The "Bandwidth Wars" are going to take on a whole new character that will determine who wins and looses up and down the entire stack. This dynamic will also impact the extent of the convergence where XoIP, x being anything from Voice to Video and so on, becomes the underlying enabling technology. Just as an example that all means that Seidenberg's strategy to pull fibre for Verizon is looking more and more brilliant, not just gutsy.

After the break you'll find interesting stories about device wars as RIMM struggles to up it's game against Apple's iPhone where ATT/Apple are cutting prices for more functionality ! Whoops indeed. You'll also find an interesting story about the next wave of competition on the services being offerred - which puts tremendous requirements on multiple layers of the stack but is the value proposition requirement to make all these myriad devices and the new media offerrings viable. Then ther'es a popourri of Sprint the Disaster stories - nothing like combining bad strategy with worse execution and abysmal customer service to watch your cusotmers leaves in droves. Hmmm...Telecom and customer service... an oxymoran ? Or just morans ? And then there's a special section reinforcing our point about the Cable industry's struggles and attempts to find strategic alternatives. Interesting times indeed !

Continue reading "Technomediatainment (Telecom): RIM, ATT, Sprint, Cable Wars" »

Posted by dblwyo at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's take a look at the big tech news from the last week or so (deferring the HPQ/EDS discussion for now) and focus on the APPL vs MSFT and MSFT vs YHOO campaigns. In both of which there was some big news everybody covered and some that may have passed you by. In an earlier post/survey (WRFest 27Apr08(Tech Ind): Innovators, Survivors & Also-rans) we introduced some ways/weighs of thinking about innovation and typical patterns. You may want to refer back to that as here we're going to build some more charts to dig into some other patterns to set the stage for our discussion. You might also find reviewing the earlier discussion (Sailing Into the Storm: From Execution to Innovation) of innovation a worthwhile review, especially if you buy the argument that Innovation is not just an issue in the Tech Industry but is both a general requirement and the biggest challenge beyond Execution facing all businesses. And one that most are failing at. We think the framework for analyzing what works and is required vs the typical barriers applies to P&G just as much as to MSFT...a view which, judging from public statements and observable behaviors, P&G agrees with.

So consider the chart at right which shows how many companies face the "Renewability Challenge". Chrysler is almost the perfect poster child, along with MOT, of a company who lurches from breakthru hit to hit and hopes it survives the downturn. That behavior is apparantly deeply seated in its' culture. What you'd like to do is have good strategy, translate that into excellent and on-going execution and, on that foundation, build up a repeatable capability for innovation. And better yet embed that capability into the core of the Company. A path that Lafley at P&G appears to be well along on after close to seven years of hard and sustained effort.

There are two big questions. First, can you get the Innovation process going on a regular and speedy cycle show that new products and offerings begin to take off before the old starts into decline. And second, and as or more important, is the question of what path is the Company on. That is are innovations moving the company forward, marking time or eroding despite apparent cleverness.

When you think about the Big Three here you reach very different conclusions. Apple appears to have created a sustainable culture of Innovation with one hit following another. Admittedly largely due to Steve Jobs...yet none of the major innovations Apple has produced are from a one-man band but represent the efforts of entire teams. And even more interestingly, in a rather Disney-like fashion, Apple is beginning to see cross-feeds and synergies. The iPod effort led to the iPhone which was and is a major breakthru in the entire Telecom business model. Both together are causing a rapid growth in Mac sales. Even more importantly big business is beginning to give serious consideration to Apple computers. A critical strategic enabler is a brilliant decision on the Operating System which is modular and scalable. All Apple lacks now is a portfolio of small business applications along with a good development platform. That would allow them to become a major player in the empty dumbell space of ill-served SMBs. (WRFest 2Mar08(Technology): Small to Large - IT Industry Structure)

In contrast MSFT has not only failed in its Yahoo acquisition - which you may recall we thought was a disaster from the get go.(B2C Wars:Yhoo/MS Merger - Disaster in the Making ?) But it really hasn't had any major successes in any of its' new endeavors in years. Instead it's milking the cash cows and monopoly positions it enjoys in OS share and Office Suites. And doesn't appear to have made much, if any, headway in the SMB space. Largely we're given to understand because of a lack of cultural understanding of the applications development process. Now apps are different from middleware, culturally as well as technically. Yet at the end of the day MSFT's core competence MUST be software development. Yet we ended up with a new OS (Vista) that was grossly de-featured from the original innovations promised in Longhorn, has been rather badly recieved, even resisted as it doesn't provide significant advantages over XP and throws open the door to competitors. Particularly in the business marketspace. 

How 'bout that YHOO ? Well after the initial breakout as the most successful portal,with a business built around display advertising it failed to find a way to grow that business. Terry Semel was brought into to provide a little adult supervision, which he did and effectively, but his "new media" initiatives, which presumed that increasing the portal attractiveness and thereby number of eyeballs, both built on the display advertising theme and failed. Meanwhile of course GOOG's wild, and unexpected, success with search-based advertising blind-sided them completely. So what does Yahoo do now ? So far it's failed to take its' huge footprint and sustain it, failed in developing its' own superb search engine (though admittedly with major improvements) and faces an incredibly daunting uphill battle given Google's share, penetration and street cred. Nor can it tell us what it wants to be when it grows up.

Looking at the chart and the three different timepaths illustrated we could just about assign names to each path: Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. These interesting times are really tough. From a stakeholders perspective you'd have to argue that Apple has found a sustainable path that appears to make it a great place to work but one that's more than fully valued in the markets. That MSFT is sufferring from Red Queen syndrome with major investment after investment that have not succeeded in major incremental growth opportunities. Which makes it an intermediate-term value play and a long-term question mark. For Yahoo the future is now - they appear to be locked into downward path that may metastasize into a death spiral if they don't pull themselves together, execute enormously better and deliver value to existing users/customers and find new paths (vistions, value props, strategies, business models) forward. At best this is a "turn-around" opportunity but it'd take time, money, blood and enormous effort. 

Continue reading "Tech Industry:APPL vs MSFT vs YHOO Wars" »

Posted by dblwyo at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's an interesting accumulation of Tech-related readings (after the break) that are worthwhile in their own right but also are perfectly illustrative of many of the themes we've tried to strike here. Both for the Tech Industry itself and for it's inter-actions with the larger economy. Most of us, myself included, have this wonderful, romantic view of the Tech Industry as being its' own thing running on an internal dynamic. Unfortunately most of the major names are now mature companies struggling to find the NBT (next big thing). Worse many of them are experiencing severe organo-sclerosis in their core disciplines. Tech is not the only industry driven by Innovation however. In fact it is more central to the Pharmaceutical and Aerospace industries than what we traditionally think of us tech. And, as I hope we've established, innovation is returning as a fundamental requirement for survival let alone prosperity. Put all this together and you have two broad mis-conceptions to adjust:

1. Patterns of Innovation: Once a company or industry matures it is no longer driven by internal dynamics, e.g. the famous "S-curve" of fame and fortune. Worse when a company is used to living on the curve it gets both complacent and, with growth, harder to manage. Often its' core disciplines deteriorate as well, so that one ends up with desperate gamble after desperate gamble to recover the glory years. There are however key players who have managed, thru discipline, execution and insight, to find sources of renewal. 

2. Business Cycles: one you're off the curve then you become just another capital "equipment" supplier (or consumer supplier for those migrating into the entertronics industry). Which means normal business cycle consequences begin to show up. In this downturn, which we've barely seen the beginnings off, first consumer demand will slow and turn down, likely severely. And companies will cut their hiring and capital expenditure plans. All of which we're beginning to see and more of which is coming. As IT budgets are constrained what do you think happens to IT spending and tech industry outlooks ? Wouldn't ask the analysts on the Street :)

The trick is to sort out the survivors from the also-rans who are going to struggle. And then sort the survivors into the so-so's and the real men. As you skim over the readings we think the portents for the future are pretty clear. Which means in terms of evaluating investment and performance we're back to asking Economy - Industry - Company questions. You're hopefully looking for the companies with the skill, chutzpah and resources to gain new high ground. And IOHO those are the folks who've re-made or are re-making themselves. Those will be the buying opportunities after we get thru this current unpleasantness.

A perfect contrast is AMD vs Intel. The former had a hit but failed to follow-up, sustain it or execute. Instead it made an acquisition gamble looking for the easy fix. In stark contrast Intel transformed itself by building on it's base skills in chip design and manufacturing as well as operational excellence and is now extending those capabilities to whole new markets. (We can't recommend some of the last investor presentations highly enough btw). MOT is the perfect poster child for what we've called decliners in the charts. IBM on the other hand could serve as the example, if not exemplar, for the sustainer.

The real interesting contrast is APPL vs MSFT. There are a lot of readings below but consider what we think is the most fascinating and powerful contrast. At it's heart MSFT is a software company and it's most fundamental  discipline should be product development. Yet it delivers Vista late, emasculated, bloated, missing an ecology and buggy. What Longhorn was going to be and what Vista became reduces in large part back to Code Red - when internal development broke down almost completely and they had to do emergency surgery.

In contrast Apple made a decision to create a new, elegant, powerful and portable OS that not only drives Max OSX but the iPod and iPhone because it's modular, componentized and scalable. (Shades of NEXT and it's object-oriented OS and application platform). That means that every product Apple makes runs the same software base and therefore can share applications, within limits of course. So MSFT is wrestling its' own kudzu and Apple has created a self-sustaining, evolving and growing eco-system. Which holds the most promise for the future do you think ?

Of course there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip and MSFT is still a huge, tightly run profit machine and Apple will need to sustain it's innovations with the NBT on top of this wonderful foundation. Which merely makes it easier and more likely. But it's looking like Apple joins Cisco and Intel in that pantheon of folks who've made the necessary cultural changes to embed innovation in their DNA. (Sailing Into the Storm: From Execution to Innovation)

Continue reading "WRFest 27Apr08(Tech Ind): Innovators, Survivors & Also-rans" »

Posted by dblwyo at 06:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With network convergence, the shift of consumer electronics from analog to digital technology and new tools for content generation and management we're seeing a major evolutionary event emerge in front of our eyes. And are participants willy-nilly. But are we knowledgeable ones ? Gaining ground on that is helped a bit by framing the changes. What we're seeing is the Telecom industry going thru network and service changes, and increased overlap with Media and Entertainment, shifts in Consumer Electronics and the growing force of things like games in the later. In my mind that leads to the re-labeling of the new industries as Telemedia and Entertronics. The individual components will remain by thes new hybrids are also forming. And at the end of the day it'll be all about the content - who creates it, how it's packaged, who distributes it, over what kind of networks and where/what/when it's delivered.

In case you haven't noticed in the last 18 months we've seen ginormous changes in the way content is presented on the Web. People talked about Web 2.0 which was really just extensions and developments on the capabilities of the existing capabilities into social networking, collaboration, etc. IOHO what we're seeing now is something truly deep - a fundamental re-think of how content is presented. Which is accompanied by a change in who the players are. It started with Iger taking over Disney and striking up a deal with Apple for content distribution - thereby becoming the first major media player to seriously embrace the web and begin the landslide beyond small-scale participants. The other big change, which we first really noticed about two years ago, was that content generators were beginning to really re-think presentation instead of just adapting the formats and thought processes inherited from prior generations. Now things are much more inter-active, non-linear, multiply connected and wide open. And we're seeing it just in the last couple of months. The first example was Amazon's re-think, the WSJ has done some really good stuff over the last year or so but now it's spreading like wildfire. And a great example is Hulu. 

All of a sudden a huge wealth of old and new content is readily available on-line in a decent intercface with more coming.Now personally I think some of it needs to be worked on, more is needed and they've already exceeded the limits of managing the sortation and searching. In other words they need a much better content architecture and information management capability. But when you look at the quality of the material, as opposed to say one more YouTube amateur nightmare, content quality matters. And when you've said that you've said it's about the people, skills, money, networks, resources and management capacities to create, build and distribute content. This is the REVOLUTION folks. Just in the last month I've been able to re-discover Dougie Howser, Babylon 5 and Studio 60 (Fair Disclosure: my TV went away a couple of years ago and I've been online for things like Rose, etc. for that long). Here's one my favorite S60 episodes which proves the point. Sadly the show went into a nosedive after the creator moved away from exploring deep and great issues and started writing to his personal troubles. But while he was on a roll he was looking at US culture, what it takes to run a creative business, Corporate America, the wasteland of TV all inter-woven with personal stories. It could have done for culture and the corporate world. Sorry about the sidebar. Now wait - that is the point. It's all about the content !

Now it's going to be about the Value Chain the emerges and evolves for the Telemediatainment Sector(s). Consider the picture at right which shows the ecology of that value chain as it was. To get an idea of how it will be "simply" add more major "Distributors" to the framework. We'll take a deeper dive sometime in the future but the excerpts below should be looked at in this context. The Telecom industry faces huge demands for bandwidth and shifts in types of service, which'll impact the Equipment providers. Major Web 1.0 content providers (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, AOL) are showing widely varying ranges of adaptability and innovation to old challenges and new ones. Yahoo in particular is a sad....sad story because it had the world's largest portfolio of high-value content which it let go fallow thru neglect and an inability to sell and then monetize. Now it's looking for quick fixes but can't explain any of this (for the record I read the latest major investor presentation which hints at some interesting things but is so discomboobulated that, as a mirror on executive thinking, it's scary). You also find stories on new ways to manage content, alternate distribution experiments, e.g. Blockbuster's bid for CC (!! yikes) and the problems with providing economic access to bandwidth which could kill the whole thing.

Continue reading "WRFest (Telemediatainment): The Content Who Would Be King" »

Posted by dblwyo at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As usual there's a lot of tech and related news so we've accumulate and sorted key stories and prior posts that span the suddenly exploding Yahoo Wars, the search wars, iPhone news and rippled effect changes in the telecom, media, entertainment and related distribution industries. It's kinda hard to sort it all out and put it into an organized context but we'll take our best shot. Ram Charan had an interesting article (When -- and How -- to Reposition Your Business) on one of the most fundamental strategic requirements of business - looking outside the business and re-thinking it when things change. And they're changing enormously and rapidly across multiple industires.

Telecommunications is seeing the bandwidth wars between cable and traditional providers with alternatives coming up fast. New "phonelike" platforms, e.g. the iPhone, are going gangbusters AND forcing major re-thinks of the traditional business model, at the heart of the Yahoo discussions are two things. First off, and let's not kid ourselves, was a profound lack of execution on a large and rich portfolio of sub-businesses. And second the fundamental debate over getting and monetizing eyeballs. Yahoo's model was create attractive content and then DISPLAY advertising. Google stumbled into the alternative of embedding advertising in search and the brilliant notion that they could collaborative with any and all content providers.

Meanwhile in the last week old media has finally really, truly been heard form. Not only did the Yahoo/Msft contretemps boil up and over but all of a sudden the promised disruptions of old media by new took on new life with Time-Warner's and Fox's entry into the bidding wars. This is a cusp-point SEE change that we've been waiting for since 1995 and the development and distribution of content will never be the same. Media is beginning to re-think itself.

And two of the major changes enabling and driving it are the sudden appearance of new platforms that are alternatives to the ones we're all used to. The iPhone being the preminent example but the gaming industry, which combines platforms with content, being another and bigger one. Which is also driving enormous changes in distribution. And in the entertainment business that means re-thinking and re-structuring the networks. In parallel the other form of distribution is the retail channel which is experiencing very hard times as the steady stream of profitable new consumer electronics drys up. So at the end of the day we have five major industries that are going thru huge disruptions with new value propositions, strategies and business models to be developed and established. And with a profound dearth of good operating execution on the old models, which contributed to the problems, and no apparant clues as to what the new operating models should be let alone examples.

These are not critiscisms per se, by the way. They're observations reflecting a natural state of affairs that ALWAYS results when new technologies, products and services emerge. Cast your mind back to when mass-market newspapers took off in the 1890's - how long did it take Hurst and Pulitzer to develop new models ? How 'bout when radio emerged in the '30s and the models had to be re-thought ? And again in the '50s in the early days of TV ? Everybody always started with adapting what they knew to the new formats and capabilities. And then slowly evolving more effective and efficient approaches.

We're in the first inning of what promises to be a long game. And an early season game in what will be a long...long season. Now that the bigs have emerged from their cocoons this'll get really interesting. 

Continue reading "WRFest 13Apr08(Telemedia, Entertonics): Let the Wars Begin" »

Posted by dblwyo at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Almost more than any industry the Telecom Industry has been the "beneficiary" of a series of perfect storms that have shaken and re-shaken it from the telecom bubble and bust to the displacement of wirelines by wireless to the VoIP shift to the fat pipe wars that are going on now. And as the underpinnings of the industry have changed so have the players - people still under-estimate for example how revolutionary the iPhone is for product development, commercial relationships and industry structure. But the realizations are growing.

There was a fair amount of news in the last two weeks which we've gathered up here which reflects a lot of this change as well as how the individual companies are coping. The first harbinger for example of weakness in the Tech outlook was Chamber's discussion of earnings last Fall which scared everybody. What everybody forgot is that when a tech company says everything's all right now they are capital goods and capex spending lags in downturns. Well that's beginning to be visible. Meanwhile on the coping front a lot of equipment suppliers are still failing to cope with this brave new world, for example Siemens and Sony/Ericsson. But the unfortunate poster child is Motorola which under pressure from Icahn is proposing to go thru yet another breakup. We think this is, at best, only a short-term financial good idea and is a terrible strategic choice. MOT's problems haven't been so much strategic focus as a total lack of execution on a sustainable basis. This'll be the third time in the last decade that they've broken off a chunk on the theory that this time we'll fix it. And each time failed and it failed because they couldn't figure out how to change the way the company operates.

Continue reading "WRFest 30Mar08(Telecom): More Perfect Storms a'Comin" »

Posted by dblwyo at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In case noone's noticed the Technology Industry as a whole has reached the point where it is mature, which we define as being able to provide products and solutions who's capabilities exceed customer requirements. If that sounds a bit like Clayton Christiansen's arguments in the "Innovators Dilemma" it should because it is. In fact we're on record as arguing that the PC industry reached that point circa '98/'99 when speeds and feeds were adequate for the software, e.g. Word, who's functionalty was well beyond any reasonable cutoff point, say 60/40 and meandering around the 95/5 or worse. Unfortunately costs tend to go up non-linearly as you add bells and whistles.

The chart at right traces out this industry dynamic. It's kind of simple but hopefully it gets the point across. We show customer requirements slowly evolving over time along with two products which have high demand initially because the gap between requirements and capabilities is large and negative, that is customers want more than can be delivered. New products may have some special capability or vastly lower cost but not meet current requirements and have to be introduced in a niche. So does a company keep investing in old products or gamble on new and jeapordize the franchise and cash flow ? You have to apply this thinking to each major business segment in the stack as well because their history, status and outlook are all different. But for the bottom layers of the stack, by and large, capabilities vastly exceed requirements. The top layer, applications and business alignment are very different as the capabilities are vastly exceeded by requirements, especially in the SMB space. But NONE of the customers believes the industry can deliver value-enhancing, businss-driven solutions. As you go thru each of the readings below you might keep all this in mind because a lot is explained.

Continue reading "WRFest 30Mar08(Tech Industry): Commodization, Consolidation, Consequences" »

Posted by dblwyo at 05:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DLS stands for "Dirty Little Secret" in case you didn't know and it refers to those "inside baseball" hidden characteristics that, once all the formal stuff is out of the way, actually determine how something works. The Technology Industry has two major ones, one of which we'll focus on. The first is that the cultural gap between business and technology continues to be wider than any other Mars/Venus split you can name. Men understand Women better than IT gets business and visa versa. That was sorta o.k. when all the bottom of the stack was new and obvious needs exceeded capabilities. Now it's a continuing disaster. We'll focus on that but just FYI is that the other DLS is that decisions are made on technology use by politics, not what best serves value and service. IT needs adult supervision but doesn't get it from the business side, which has abandoned it's responsiblities.

But when that gap is bridged the results can be truly magic. Unfortunately the small list of comanies that use IT strategically is largely the same small list it's been for almost 20 years. Until actively managing the "two-culture" gap becomes standard business practice companies won't use technology systematically, systemtically or correctly. Vendors will keep building the wrong things. And investment returns will still be commodity-like because the bottom 3/4 of the IT stack are commodities. It's what's hurting Dell and MSFT for example. On the other hand what Jobs and Apple has done is concieve and execute total technology solutions that start with customer value, translate it into high-value strategies and execute it comprehensively in total solutions. IF technology worked as well in general as Quicken did in managing your home finances a lot of money could be picked off the table. The graphic shows how it should be and isn't. Now here's an interesting fact - it dates from circa 1991 ! And is based on work, some from IBM's Business Institute dating back to the late '70s !! BUT when you find a tech company who can bridge that gap you've found a real winner. Or a company who runs its' own business by using technology truly strategically.

Continue reading "WRFest 16Mar08(Tech): DLS's, Two Cultures and the Breakdwon" »

Posted by dblwyo at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Somehow or another all the business news is either finance or technology news these days. I'm sure that's not true but that's the net effect give my readings. The huge wave of finance industry news is, under the circumstances, not a surprise and we covered it yesterday. It's worth bearing in mind that the Industry was a whole appears to a) be as badly broken thru its' own self-inflicted wounds compounding and b) as the credit markets go thru an extensive de-leveraging process that the industry will be badly shaken up and re-structured. And perhaps c) we may have a long way to go.

The first two stories below are on Chrysler and Pfizer - both of which industries have backed themselves into similar corners. The Auto industry by getting stuck in its' own rigidities and denying the need for change for 3+ decades. As we've mentioned the core of the Pharma industry is their R&D activities and, very unfortunately for them, their core business model of chemistry-based drug development is broken by exhaustion. And the nextgen replacement (bio-chemical/biological) is not a near- or intermediate-term potential (though depending your horizon you should be lookin at systems biology and what's going on with "synthetic" life). Whic leaves us a bunch of Tech industry stories. Which in turn are stories about escalating pressures for cost control and change, companies failing to innovate and some succeeding.

In the latter class are Apple and TIVO both of whom have focused on defining and delivering value. Preceeding them is a story about one MS fantasy about Yahoo - that it'll help take them into the on-line software arena by combining Yhoo's on-line DNA and MS's software development DNA. Excuse me - their core strategic value propositions at which they've been failing miserably for years now ? Yahoo obviously but for those of you not enchanted with Longhorn, excuse me Vista the pitiflul remenants of a grand(iose) vision terribly executed and perhaps flawed in conception (btw do a search on Code Red and MS sometime for an understanding of how badly their supposed core competence in programming failed them). The other side of the coin is HPQ which is well on it's way to re-balanced and re-factoring itself, illustrated by a story on Hurd's moving to the next step by starting in on re-directing their R&D labs toward a stronger commercial focus (a step Gerstner took at IBM back around the mid-90s).

The first two tech-related stories are more general interest tech stories which define the ecology of the industry. One counseling IT departments to start putting pricing pressure on their vendors. The other on the topic of business vs technology alignment. We've all heard the stories about businesses able to change an industry thru the strategic use of technology. The problem is that for 20 years it's generally the same small handful of exemplary firms, e.g. WMT, FDX, Schwab, et.al. What you may not be aware of is that there's a huge gap between the MIS department and the operational business which the industry has been struggling with for decades. And despite the bottom of the "stack" becoming a commodity the top part where business solutions live is as much about magic, mis-communication and 70% failure to deliver rates as it ever has been.

As a friend of mine with almost 40 years in the business said:

La plus ca change, la plus ce meme chose.

Continue reading "WRFest 9Mar08(Business):Auto, Pharma & Tech News" »

Posted by dblwyo at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Odd as it might seem we're still, at the end of this week, just catching up with last week's news summaries. Here we want to focus on the Technology Industry with several interesting stories. In the process of several of these recent Tech focus summaries we've been wrapping the excepts with some charts that show how the industry is put together. Earlier we introduced a simple stack picture which showed all the elements from platform to middleware to application to interface that are necessary for any particular solution to be put in place. Think of that as the basic characterisitcs of the industry's ecology. Another dimenation that structures an ecology is the number of large and small players and what niches they go over. Which we try and capture with the accompanying chart.

Continue reading "WRFest 2Mar08(Technology): Small to Large - IT Industry Structure" »

Posted by dblwyo at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's not necessarily any major new sources of growth in the Telecommunications industry in the sense that major new capabilities are appearing. At the same time there is a fundamental, tsumanic structural change going on with changes in the nature of the underlying network. That basic change is the shift of all forms of Telecom network infrastructure to the new platform, VoIP. Or Voice-over-IP where IP is Internet Protocol. Actually it's much broader and more complex than that and isn't happening all at once but we tried to capture some of the simple characteristics in the accompanying chart. Many of the results of which you can see for yourself.

For example with the writer's strike when's the last time you watched TV ? Being a victim of what Comcast laughingly thinks of as it's customer service it's been at least two years for me. But that hasn't caused me to miss any programs I was particularly interested in. Many of my favorites happen to be available on-line for free. And then there's always DVD rentals. Both of which are being supplemented and perhaps replaced by downloadable audio and video files. Apple is now the largest music retailer in the country for example thru its' iTunes store. This is going to go on for a while and not only continue the changes you see around you but accelerate them. It'll also change the industry - actually it'll change several industries from Telecom & Cable to Telecom equipment to Semi-conductors to the entire Media & Entertainment complex. A decent start on understanding it is to understand the structural shift.

Continue reading "WRFest 2Mar08(Technology): Telecom, Media & Entertainment" »

Posted by dblwyo at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the theory that if you're going to take the trouble to analyze somebody's work and comment you might as well post the work instead of restricting it. Today's WSJ had an interesting "Ahead of the Tape" pointing out that other than Financials earnings were holding up well. Reasons for which we've discussed extensively before.Grading the Takehome: Bottoms, Earnings & Outlooks,Review the Bidding, Count the Cards: EPS Growth Rates,Have You Seen the Elephant ?: More on Earnings. These are btw worth reviewing in their own for some differentiated perspective on the earnings outlook from what you may be hearing on bubblevision. Now we may be wrong but at least we've laid out the argument with data and our feeble attempts at logic. Feel free to disagree but given stories like this you should have an alternative toolkit for compare and contrast.

The parts that caught our eye was the discussion of how well Tech earnings are doing and how poorly their stocks are in general. Here are some relevent excerpts with our 4-Part assessment of some fundamental problems after the break.

 Earnings Slump Still Confined:Technology earnings have been an important, and potentially overlooked, bright spot. In the latest earnings season, the technology sector has been the Best in Show. But tech stocks have been treated more like mutts.Fourth-quarter earnings of technology companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are on track for a 26% increase from the prior year, according to Thomson. That makes it the best performance of any sector in the index. Even computer maker Dell, which has struggled to compete with rival Hewlett-Packard, is expected to report healthy operating earnings growth today, at 36 cents a share, up from 30 cents a year ago, a 20% gain.There have been some scares, but 76% of tech companies beat analyst estimates for the fourth quarter, according to Thomson.
Taken together, tech earnings have been 5% higher than expected. Yet the tech-stock-focused Nasdaq Composite index hasn't benefited much. Though it has recovered 2.5% from its late-January low this year, it lags behind the S&P's 5.4% rebound and the Dow's 6% comeback. And the Nasdaq is still down 18% since Oct. 31.Could investors be missing an opportunity?

 BtW just by way of compare and contrast consider the following headline from Bloomberg: Dell Profit Misses Estimates as Retail Expansion Falters; Shares Decline.

Not to mention Sprint, et.al. But we'll pick up all that coverage in the next Readfest. 

Continue reading "Comments on the Tech Outlook (and Earnings in general)" »

Posted by dblwyo at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well spreading the news excerpts does give us some chance to slice and dice 'em. Here we'll focus on the technology news, some of which we've either already mentioned and/or have been covering for a few weeks now. Primarily that the various analyst shops (Forrester, Gartner, et.al.) have abruptly lowered their spending outlooks for '08. Below you'll find the first outlook that anticipates a negative growth rate for Q208. Bear in mind these surveys are based on bottom-up work talking to IT departments so they reflect reality on the ground but a reality which tends to lag big picture economic cycles. By combining that with our top down look at macro-trends you get a bookend perspective - and those trends have been suggesting declining capex outlooks for a while now. So when John Chambers shows up on CNBC and says things are going well he's talking about the quarter just past and the sales activity and order stream he can see right then. NOT an outlook - keep that in mind.

The other little thing we thought we'd insert into our discussions is a way to sort and filter the tech news as the jumble of acronyms floats by. So we're going to introduce you to the infamous "stack" picture of how all the pieces in the tech industries fit together. Then to show what it's worth talk a little about some industry examples, e.g. Oracle's merger spree and then try to apply it to this week's stories. You'll have to judge whether this is useful or not.

Thinking in "Stacks" 

If you'll take a look at the picture on the right we provide a very simple version of the infamous stack, which you may have heard folks refer to. The stack is all the things you need to make a computer (or a phone for that matter work). Simple but a powerful sorting hat because it'll tell you who's in what House and how they're linked. The PC on your desk incorporates the top four layers. Likely an Intel/AMD processor which then has to have a bunch of other chips, power supply etc. IBM's announcement today of a major new mainframe will define the new large-scale server standard for some time. To make that PC or server work you need an Operating System (OS) which on your PC is likely Windows but on the server is something called MVS, or Multiple Virtual System. All this hoorah about Google's huge server farms and virtualization software - well the big guys have been doing it for three decades and your life depends on it in the sense that most banks, airlines, etc. are running on very large servers.But all the OS does is let the machine talk to itself it's what's called Middleware (MW) that sits between the machine and the applications that lets interesting things be done. So when Oracle buys BEA what you're seeing is a further consolidation in the MW space where BEA was the first provider of a Java application "server", i.e. a software machine commercially even though Java was created by Sun. Unfortunately BEA wasn't able to match IBM's inventiveness over the last decade and has lost those wars. In fact if you take IBM's analysts reports apart their growth engine for several years, for profits as well, and anticipted to be in the future is software. And when they say software they mean middleware. Finally the thing you talk to is the application - though you can debate for example whether or not a spreadsheet is an application or middleware in a sense. But when somebody talks about ERP, CRM, Sales Automation, etc. etc. they're talking about big bundles of code sitting on top of the MW that actually process the data, talk to the user and get things done.

Continue reading "WRFest 25Feb08(Tech):Dropping Outlook vs Climbing Competition" »

Posted by dblwyo at 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has been a rich week for news and stories in the general business sector but particularly in the technology and related industries. On the continuation you'll find several interesting excerpts and links but we want to set the stage with our own post on the B2C Wars:

B2C Wars:Yhoo/MS Merger - Disaster in the Making ? Among the other big news, and there was sure a lot of it last week, was Fri's announcement of MSFT's semi-hostile offer for Yahoo. An offer which apparantly is the last item in almost two years of on-going discussions and failure to reach agreement. In our humble opinions this is a disaster in the making and they only possible beneficiary is Google. That conclusion is reached by a combination of familiarity with the Industry, with companies and technologies involved and applying our model of enterprise assessment (Masterclass: Buffett on Investing and Business Analysis). It's also a lesson in business history among other things. In any case how this plays out is important for Internet users, for investors and for employees as well as customers and suppliers of the companies involved. As a start on pulling the pieces together we used our framework to put together a preliminary analysis skeleton of the merger and wrapped it in a bit of industry analysis as well.

Not only for it's own sake, that is specific to the Yahoo/MS merger talks but also for the portrait of the B2C Industry, the illustration of the business analysis approach and also for a bit on the broader telecom industry. As you read 'em put the exceprts into the context - Google's continuing it's charge on network hosted apps - how much influence does that have on MS's thinking ? Meanwhile after all the $ they haven't figured out how to monetize social sites (maybe Murdock was lucky to miss out). What does that say about Google's strategic outlook (which is dissected in the B2C Wars post a bit). Meanwhile Time-Warner is about to spinoff part of AOL but has yet to come to grips with what the rest should be. Has the industry evolved beyond their ability to morph with it ?

Continue reading "WRFest 9Feb08(Business/Tech): B2C Wars, Telecom & Tech" »

Posted by dblwyo at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Among the other big news, and there was sure a lot of it last week, was Fri's announcement of MSFT's semi-hostile offer for Yahoo. An offer which apparantly is the last item in almost two years of on-going discussions and failure to reach agreement. In our humble opinions this is a disaster in the making and they only possible beneficiary is Google. That conclusion is reached by a combination of familiarity with the Industry, with companies and technologies involved and applying our model of enterprise assessment (Masterclass: Buffett on Investing and Business Analysis). It's also a lesson in business history among other things. In any case how this plays out is important for Internet users, for investors and for employees as well as customers and suppliers of the companies involved. As a start on pulling the pieces together we used our framework to put together a preliminary analysis skeleton of the merger and wrapped it in a bit of industry analysis as well. Below the line you'll find some very interesting reading excerpts and linkages as well. In particular we highly recomment following thru the link on Nicholas Carr's article and using his discussion as a template for understanding what's going on here. To put another point on it btw - this is an excellent example to illustrate how one might begin to do deeper analysis on companies. Let's start with the skeleton in the table below:

 The emphasis here is on preliminary - a considerable amount of additional work would be needed to flesh out the details,especially at a company level. Nonetheless several key points stand out when one uses the template to think things thru a bit.

Continue reading "B2C Wars:Yhoo/MS Merger - Disaster in the Making ?" »

Posted by dblwyo at 08:33 AM |