Archive for the ‘Link Love’ Category

It’s fascinating sitting in the ‘real world’ and observing the announcements flood the news this morning. First Sun with new servers, then eBay buys Skype and then Oracle takes Seibel…

Only one of these intersects me in my current life and that is Skype. I’ve come to depend on it for hours of communications each week too and from New Zealand. I spend more time on it than my mobile. I’m also a keen eBay user. And I am totally stumped as to what possible value eBay can derive other than a full frontal assault on the VOIP world. Which they are now brilliantly positioned to do.

The rest of it I can’t figure out… I don’t want to chat to anyone I am bidding with and I definitely don’t want to talk to anyone I am selling to… The whole point is that this is just a really simple way to sell. And I definitely don’t like PayPal… It ain’t my Pal… I just want to use my Visa card.

But Ross has a point in that it might be in eBay’s DNA not to constrain communication… and that VOIP will become the dominate way we seek to communicate in the future via our computers… and so, it makes sense from that POV.

And, they also have been moving to create a significant developer community which I am sure Skype will plug into.

Om has a good point in that bringing VOIP to eBay could be useful in countering fraud.

The eBay Skype announcement really lacked any compelling customer-centric messaging – and this is the fastest way to convince investors of the move. Now, having been wrapped-up in hundreds of acquisition announcements I know how hard it is to get this done… But, Oracle took a good shot at it in speaking to the ability to reduce complexity and provide a single integration and management point. And they spoke to a customer – GE – as a driver.

Update: Dan also has another perspective related to privacy…

And… David hits on the most amazing aspect of all of this…

From my point of view however, the part of this deal that should ignite the best water cooler discussions is it’s size.  Imagine this:  Oracle buys Siebel for $5.8 billion.   Siebel has been around for long time.  The company is public, has a huge installed base, and lots of customers and employees.  Meanwhile, after only three years in existence, Skype gets swept up by eBay for $2.6 billion.   How amazing is it that the young, tiny Skype is worth nearly half of what Siebel is?

MIT Magazine has a great piece on Blogs and Hurricane Katrina. It points to a variety of sites covering the disaster.

Barnett’s blog, The Interdictor, had previously been a "private little journal," according to Barnett. But when he began chronicling Katrina’s destruction and the terrible aftermath, it became a lot more.

Currently, tens of thousands of readers a day visit it. "I get thousands of instant messages an hour, I can’t keep up with them," he writes in the blog. Barnett’s blog is just one of tens of thousands of blogs covering Katrina’s aftermath…

Then there is this terrific quote from Clay Shirky: "The so-called ‘memory hole’ that many politicians of all stripes have relied upon is now closed," says Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of interactive telecommunications at NYU. "The blogosphere has become the institutional memory for the country."

As Eric says: "Blogs have made a leap toward legitimacy: a story is now a story whether it originates on a blog or on CNN. The medium is no longer the message. The message, in fact, is now the message."

Well, you’d hope so right?

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, wants military leaders to better monitor soldiers’ Web sites and blogs for the posting of sensitive information that could aid the enemy.

Schoomaker said some soldiers, for example, continue to post pictures “depicting weapon system vulnerabilities and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).”

“Such OPSEC (operational security) violations needlessly place lives at risk and degrade the effectiveness of our operations,” he said in a memo issued earlier this month obtained by the Federation of American Scientists and posted on its Web site.

Interesting read from the former Ad exec Shona Seifert – the "Proposed Code of Ethics for the Advertising Industry" as required by the judge who sentenced her in U.S. District Court to 18 months in prison and $125,000 fine. It even includes what AdAge suggests (registration required) might work as a tagline for her own tattered brand:

“Boring work has never resulted in a prison sentence. Poor timekeeping practices have.”

This whole Dell thing is just getting rather dull. Dwight takes a good swing at the issue. I also agree that the thinking on what Dell should do when confronted by bloggers and it’s little crisis are lame – these are PR tactics reframed for the blogosphere. Same old same old.

Who would have thought the echo from a blogger would be so loud? Well, me for one. The problem is that the thinking on how to deal with this as an issue is to treat the blogger like some new breed of journalist. Wrong. The way to deal with this is to fix the very problem that created a pissed off customer. Dell is listening. Like HP is listening and IBM is listening. The issue is, who is doing… One old PR pro once gave me some wise counsel… all business problems are communications problems, but you can’t fix communications problems without first addressing the business issue.

Dell built an incredible business on the back of incredible customer
service. I worked as a consultant to Dell for many years. It was the customer service that pulled Dell through
many a battle. Growth clearly comes with challenges. And if there is one thing I am certain of, within Dell, customer service will be undergoing scrutiny like never before. They understand that it all starts with the business, not the blogger…