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Hello, goodbye: It's the IBM hairball (again)

Make a quick mental note that a company called Ascential (nee Informix) used to exist because it's been swallowed by IBM's giant integration hairball called WebSphere.

With the advent of Web services, integration was cool. But no longer. A combination of market dynamics and the maturity of Web services is tractor-beaming us back into cardigan country. Integration's become an excuse for devouring the competition and assaulting IT execs with nebulous business cases for ill-defined software projects that morph into never-ending maintenance contracts.

ARN quotage highlights the search for meaning:

"What the combination gives us is a broad capability to bring those technologies together and to solve the kind of problems where customers want to be able to combine and do analysis based on historical information but also to have access to real time information from transactional systems," (Ascential President Peter) Fiore said.

WSJ (sub req.) also picks up on the hairball theme:

IBM, Armonk, N.Y., says the Ascential deal is its 21st software acquisition in four years, a pace more rapid than in prior eras. It extends a string of recent purchases around data integration and "business intelligence" -- the process of extracting useful nuggets from heaps of corporate data.

Office digs Groove

Question: Will you be more inclined to upgrade to the latest version of Office now that Groove's officially part of the Microsoft family? (CW story)

As a blogger, I'm a big fan of collaboration tools. But I used Groove while at InfoWorld and it left me wanting. It was a cumbersome, think client that consumed significant resources on my laptop. I reluctantly ejected it after the editorial team around me lost interest and moved on. In that regard, I could also be nasty and say that this represents the collision of two resource hogs, the Office 'system' not vying for the featherweight title by any stretch.

So, no, Groove alone is not a big enough draw card. But Ray Ozzie is one of the shining lights in the collaboration space, and you can only hope that he helps Gates sort out the Office upgrade mess. That's the real story here. Give us some truly compelling integration across the Windows ecosystem that doesn't feel like you're trapped in a slow-moving revolving door and only one exit marked "passport."

The WSJ (sub req.) also has a good report. And this WSJ video is entertaining, sort of. I cringed at one point as the CNBC presenters leave the real collaboration conversation to take up a good chunk of air time apologising to Ozzie. Words to the effect: "Sorry, Ray, if we ask Bill more questions because he never talks to us and we've finally got him on air."

They continued in spectacularly light-headed TV fashion by asking Bill about work/life balance with his wife, US corporate ethics, Bill's insight on the US dollar (a weak, unnecessary link to his relationship with Warren Buffet) and whether they should call him "Sir Bill." Sigh.

Spim

ClickZ: Of the 52 million adult Americans who use instant messaging, approximately 30 percent have received "spim," or unsolicited commercial instant messages, according to a surveyPew Internet & American Life Project.

This amounts to approximately 17 million adults who have received the instant-message variant of spam.

Really? That many people? Call me behind the times, but today's the first day I heard about spim, let alone receive any.

The mergers that sealed Fiorina's fate

With hindsight on our side, it's clear the fate of HP's now former CEO Carly Fiorina was sealed by two fateful mergers: IBM PC division with Lenovo, and the union of HP's PC & printer divisions.

From the outset, Fiorina's Compaq acquisition strategy was built on the assumption that greater scale in the PC & server business would pave the way for an even more profitable services business.

Meanwhile, IBM saw that train-wreck coming and pressed the eject button on its PC business. Its brand already withstood the pressures of the high-end services sell - PCs were merely a distraction, a warm fuzzy for its customers' desktops.

Fiorina was faced with generally positive reaction to the Lenovo deal (or at least not overwhelmingly negative, which is what counts for Wall St), so in response she sandwiched together HPs PC and printer divisions. Kinda clever because you can easily hide the PC losses amid the sea of black from toner cartridge sales. But sadly not enough to convince the HP board that she was merely playing at the edges. If all you are doing is reducing back-office expenses and doing nothing to generate strategic revenues and thought leadership on the services side, the game is over.

And you can almost feel sorry for Fiorina. She had the right idea with HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy. On the upside, it was a twist on the IT-as-a-service model infused into the corporate psyche by IBM's On Demand marketing team, Sun supremo Jonathan Schwartz, and Salesforce.com CEO Marc (end of software) Benioff. On the downside, Adaptive Enterprise was a poor second cousin to many of its competing philosophies, so the market continues to spit it out like luke-warm water.

If I was working at HP's PC unit I'd be a little nervous. It's not surprising that some analysts have suggested HP follow IBM and jettison the PC business. (See Computerworld story.)

But it's not all doom and gloom. HP has tentacles into almost every digital business imaginable. It has the reach, funding and research muscle to turn itself around. And it seems Wall St agrees (CNN):

The news sent shares of HP (up $1.38 to $21.52) higher in active trading on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Sold! Sort of...

IBM has finally come clean (WSJ, ARN) and officially announced the Lenovo deal which looks more to me like a joint venture than a sale.

Business Week and our sister company IDC sum it up:

IBM gets to keep selling PCs while no longer owning a PC division that has been a drag on its earnings. Lenovo, which has essentially been bottled up in China, buys itself a global PC company. "Lenovo gets what they want -- a worldwide presence. And IBM gets what it wants. They still have a product offering for their large accounts, but they don't want to be manufacturing commodity machines," says Phillipe de Marcillac, senior vice-president for international business at tech market researcher IDC.

Nope, still don't get it

What puzzles me about Segway coming to Australia, is that there's already one buzzing around the streets of St Leonards near our office, as I've noted before. So did he import the thing himself? Man, that's keen.

However, unlike the enthused Mick Stanic, I just don't get it. I mean, I barely do enough exercise as it is. Why would I pay thousands of dollars to cut out that precious lunch-time walk to the shops? And that's to say nothing of looking like a complete dweeb. :)

IBM: No comment, oh, except that quote in the Chinese press

I'm back in the saddle, feeling a bit better, and catching up on news. The biggest story still doing the rounds is of course rumours that IBM will sell its PC business to Lenovo.

Assuming IBM comes clean soon and confirms that it's all true, here's my two cents:

• Only $2 billion?
• Lenovo's got a snowball's chance of doing anything other than undermine the ThinkPad brand. We buy ThinkPads because of IBM, not the other way around.
• I hope the Sun, Citrix & Wyse marketing machines are ready to go - this could be your last chance to get your thin client message some good air time. But let's face it, it's hard to get excited about terminals.
• Will Dell counter by reinventing themselves as a server company 1st and PC maker 2nd? Clearly PCs are passe - the non-tech-savvy stock market now has proof...
• Sure, the sale is not a surprise. PCs never were strategic in the context of services and software. But IBM has opened up a hole in its "one stop shop" image.
• NYT got the scoop, but the Chinese Press actually got someone from IBM to speak off the record and get more than the standard PR line and confirm IBM was quitting PCs in China (where there's smoke...). And Lenovo's marketing manager almost gave the game away in this Wired story. Hello cultural differences.

Aussie broadband's getting faster

Primus has hopefully forced the hand of Australia's major telcos with the launch of its 6Mbps broadband service. Based on ordinary ADSL technology, Primus is claiming all it's done is open the tap to let ADSL achieve the speeds it was designed to enable.

PC World has the story from yesterday (I noticed it's currently the top Sci/Tech story in Google News Australia), as does the SMH (sub req.) which lists the states and suburbs where the services will be made available.

Not only are we on the threshold of making a significant jump from today's typical 1.5Mbps broadband connections, we're actually getting close to the broadband mecca that is South Korea where 8Mbps is considered standard, and 20Mbps will be standard for 80% of households in 2005 - yes, next year. (Source: Google/CNet article from April '04).

The age of accessing high-definition TV and integrated services, or application services, on our desktops is just around a corner or two. Nice.

Show Telstra the money, we've got iMode

Telstra launched its long-awaited iMode service today. The service promised to make it easier to browse the web, but as Gadget Lounge reports, the 2.2 cents per kilobyte is expensive. I should know - I got a stunning bill of over $800 from taking my Telstra SIM and a Treo 600 to Europe + local usage of WAP etc. So 2.2c is not only expensive, it's prohibitive in my opinion. It needs to fall a lot further and get wrapped into a capped monthly fee before people start taking advantage of iMode. According to this story in The Aus, capped pricing is expected in the new year.

Hello, it's Microsoft calling

Telstra and Microsoft have announced the two companies are working on a the integration of Office, MSN Messenger, Telstra's network and even competitive networks. The story, penned by John Davidson in this morning's AFR talks about a hypothetical example where an IM could be converted into a phone call. In the pipeline is talk of integrated voice and data services and IM-based presence technology courtesy of VoIP.

Consumer and SMB offerings are under development, and the project is reportedly the first time Microsoft has allowed third party rebranding of its software.

It's the first time I've heard Telstra, or any Aussie telco, doing something really innovative in the VoIP arena. But the Microsoft angle begs the question about how reliable these services will be.

Oh, and don't expect to read this story on AFR. Not only is this a firewalled site, at the time of this post they had not even bothered to upload this story from the print edition. Time to get with the program Fairfax.