Plumbing the depths
Dave brings you all the behind-the-scenes fighting talk as the entire channel gets in an angry mood this week
I was on the phone with another reseller boss recently, deep in discussion about leveraging some synergies in a complementary holistic joint venture vis-à-vis achieving strategic imperatives and customer buy-in going forward. This being the case, I was a little annoyed when he broke off the convo to take another call. But I was then privileged enough to spend the next two minutes listening to the most entertaining plumbing fixture-based rant I've ever heard. It seems my chum had waited longer than hoped for his radiator maker to come and address his leaky pipes. "If you haven't come round and sorted it by three o'clock today, I'm gonna rip them all off the wall, leave them at your office and they'll be your problem. Goodbye," he fumed. I hope he doesn't take too close a look at that case of (ahem) factory seconds firewalls I passed his way.
Fingering the culprit
Another industry MD has seemingly fallen foul of some anger issues of late (surprising, since most channel bosses are humble and placid wallflowers). A well-known industry chap was seen nursing a hand injury at a recent IT sector get-together. When asked about it, he passed it off as a daredevil skiing injury suffered the previous week, a story which I now see has the benefit of making him seem a bit manly and, quite probably, richer than you, pal. But a mutual acquaintance told me that the word on the street is the channel chief actually did his digits in punching a rival at a manufacturer partner event. Well, I did hear that the competition to win the vendor's Emerging Breakthrough South West UK Datacentre Solutions and Services Partner of the Year award had been particularly fierce this year.
Dell is other people
Going against type again, the channel was lampooned for being narrow-minded and misogynistic this week. Dell found itself in the firing line after hiring "well-known* public speaker and moderator" Mads Christensen to chair a customer and partner shindig in Copenhagen. (*Well known in Denmark.) The cheeky chappy reportedly has a reputation for tending towards the politically incorrect. He didn't disappoint in the Danish capital, allegedly congratulating the IT industry as a whole for being "one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out". I haven't looked at any data regarding the number of female board members at the world's leading companies or examined figures on the gender pay gap (I've got a girl in the office who does that kind of thing for me), but I assume such a distinguished public is bang-on in his analysis here. However, he was probably sailing a little closer to the wind when he reportedly asked the women in the room "what are you actually doing here?" He may have finally, irredeemably crossed the line by telling all the men in the audience to go home and say "shut up, bitch!" You can't help but wonder if Christensen did the same. And, perhaps more importantly, whether he has anyone at home to hear him.
A Siri-us problem
Apple's way-cool-looking Siri software could become something of a Frankenstein's monster for the firm. Until recently, if you asked your iPhone "what is the best smartphone ever?", the device would use the Wolfram Alpha search engine to scan reviews until it came up with what seemed the correct answer: the Nokia Lumia 900. Whoops! Apple tech bods soon stepped in to sort things out, and Siri now no longer performs a search when asked this question, instead spouting the default answer: "Wait… there are other phones?" How very droll. But Nokia accused its rival of negating Siri's positioning as an "intelligent system that's there to help" by overriding its own software if it "doesn't like the answer". All well and good, but I'm yet to hear back about my complaint to its (frankly ridiculous) answer to the question "which is the best IT reseller in the Barking and Dagenham area?"