VIEW FROM THE VALLEY
Yahoo employee John Briggs, clearly intoxicated on stock and technology, got the company logo tattooed on his backside when the stock price reached $50. Now the stock is over $100, he will not be getting tattooed again.
Not surprisingly, it is Briggs' wife who has kept his feet on the ground and his other body parts tattoo-free. 'She thinks I'm a dork for doing it in the first place,' he admits. Quite.
Kids aren't us
Just when I think I've heard about the most expensive computer disaster in Silicon Valley, another lands with a thud on my desktop. An audit of the State of California's deal with Lockheed Martin Information Services, to develop a system to track child support payments, has been found to have cost about $250 million. It was mismanaged so badly that auditors cannot put a final figure on it. I only have time to give you the highlights, Des Lynam-style.
Thirty-one counties were given computer equipment worth $13 million, but they were never linked to California's system. Smashing. It took 19 months to discover Lockheed Martin was paid twice for the same work - a total of over $500,000. Nice one.
There's more. The state may have to implement a new system from scratch.
It lost $111 million on the project, it's suing the integrator and, worst of all, will be fined $144 million by the US government because it has missed the deadline set for all US states to install a child support system.
Des would call that the own goal of the season.
Say what you mean
One of my favourite events of the year is, surprisingly, a banking conference.
The Hambrecht & Quist Technology Conference is the place where IT executives and chief financial officers sell their companies to the investment community.
Many of these execs rarely speak in public or answer questions from anyone, so the event is just worth the 7am kick-off.
This year, there were many big names packed into the 30-minute time slots. It was interesting to see the strong emphasis on profit in the presentations, to appeal to the money-wielding investors, and the different
tone used by companies with different fortunes. It was a snapshot of the industry.
Like Sybase itself, the database vendor's CEO Mitch Kertzmann's speech was roughly honest but, honestly, it was rough. Microsoft COO Bob Herbold arrogantly said the company will continue winning the battle to dominate the desktop and making the money to go with it. Netscape CEO Marc Andreesen, a techie who knows his stuff but is learning about marketing, spoke about Netscape's strategy. Like Netscape, he was determined to be sound but he sounded desperate. Intel guru Gordon Moore may have recently said his law may not hold in the future but many others remain valid.
It's what I've always wanted
If at first you don't succeed, blame your computer. The number one cause of computer problems is computer systems. He who laughs last probably made backup copies of everything. And when working on a computer, follow this law: when working on a story or anything else, remember if your work is not good, you should 'behave as if it is the result you wanted all along'.
The bigger the better
If Microsoft is stopped from launching Windows 98, it will hurt its business.
If NT continues to fail to support the enterprise to the satisfaction of everyone, it will also hurt Microsoft. But the main threat and promise for Windows is Windows CE.
When everyone starts to buy computing in everything - watches, TVs, phones and smart cards - the opportunity will be enormous for the leaders in the smaller embedded market. Sun Microsystems and Java will be the obvious winners, although this is far too early to predict.
In years gone by, IBM and Digital owned the computing industry but that is not true today. The amount of money in the embedded market must be many times the size of the PC business, and the top company could become another, bigger Microsoft. It could even be big enough to break the hold of today's Microsoft on the PC software industry.
Talk of the town
It started with rumours in Silicon Valley that the reality does not match the hype. It can't be true - everybody wants it, don't they? No. Then people starting saying nobody wants it and they are not buying it. I'm not talking about video conferencing. I'm not even referring to Opal Fruits, now that they have been renamed Starbursts. The issue is layer 3 switching.
It has been the talk of the networking business for while, but all too often in this industry the hard sales do not follow the soft marketing dollars.
The main group not jumping on the layer 3 bandwagon is the Vars, the most crucial group for many vendors. Vars and systems integrators say the technology is too new, businesses don't need it and they are not demanding it. Modern routers and switches are now fast enough to leave most networks with spare capacity. Vars say they cannot compete with vendors' direct sales or telcos, so they won't.
People may accuse the Var community of not trying with layer 3, but why should they? They are influenced by margin, customers and vendors - in that order. The vendors, such as 3Com, Bay Networks, Cabletron Systems, Cisco Systems and Ipsilion Networks, all admit the technology is in the early stages of adoption. Pointing out that layer 3 combines the pervasive IP and switching technologies, they all predict huge reseller channel sales in 1999.
I'm not so sure. If strong direct sales forces at Bay and Cisco continue to plug layer 3 and corporates don't really need faster switching, layer 3 could produce a bigger flop than Giant Haystacks.
James Harding is US editor of VNU Newswire, based in San Francisco.
He can be reached at [email protected] or on 00 1 650 306 0879.