All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Two years ago I predicted hard times for Palm. Hard times have arrived, in the form of plummeting marketshare and negative profits.

It was not a difficult prediction. When I wrote the column, Palm hadn’t given customers any reason to buy a new PDA in years, and there are still only two reasons to replace a Palm PDA: (1) You dropped your old one; or (2) you want to upgrade to something better, which means either a Windows CE-based device or a Symbian-driven PDA/telephone combo.

Palm’s meiotic “strategy” is to reorganize, separating its devices and operating systems into two separate businesses. Which, although this is probably too obvious to bother saying, means Palm is exiting the device business. The problem, of course, is that in a marketplace driven by innovation, the Palm OS is the least innovative of the contenders. Even the upcoming Palm OS 5 is basically a me-too offering, providing a subset of what Windows CE and EPOC/Symbian have offered for years. Yesterday’s features tomorrow — impressive.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a lot of IT organizations are equally backward, at least if Gartner Dataquest is to be believed. In Wireless Newsfactor, Gartner analyst Todd Kort said, “IT managers have generally been dragging their feet in endorsing the use of PDAs.” It’s a year-old story but given the events of the past year I doubt many IT managers have aggressively embraced new end-user technologies. More likely, most have been battening down their proverbial hatches.

It’s like a bad habit: End-users bring in technology they find personally useful; IT says no. Why? “Do you know how often we have to recover PCs that were destroyed by end-user-installed software?”

Actually, I have a pretty good idea. While the anecdotes are colorful, the numbers aren’t large, and PDA synchronization software is rarely the culprit. Is it worth it, when refusing to endorse PDAs gives IT an image of being sand in the gears of progress?

In the interest of providing solutions, not just criticism, here, for your use if you’ve been one of the foot-draggers, is your new PDA support policy:

“Install anything you want. Call for help if you need it and we’ll make a reasonable effort to get your PC up and running. If we can’t, we’ll restore it to a standard build.”

It’s an old saying: If you can’t lead and can’t follow, at least get out of the way.

Comments

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Marilyn vos Savant, the professional genius, proved that the egg came first. Heritable mutations happen only in sperm and ova, she reasoned, so something that was almost a chicken laid a true chicken egg. Makes sense to me.

As we sit in the rubble of Enron, ImClone, Worldcom, Tyco, AOL, and other, as-yet-undiscovered or unpublicized corporate implosions, it’s worthwhile to wonder which is the egg: The lack of accountability resulting from more than two decades of business deregulation, or the corrupt perspective of the corporate elite who acquired the resulting additional power.

Lord Acton notwithstanding, I think the corruption came first. It’s the egg, and it smells rotten.

Government regulation is what allows businesses to act ethically. Without regulation, those businesses that resort to any tactic to win have the advantage over those that restrict their behavior to conventional codes of ethics. Consequently, ethical CEOs should welcome government regulation, not fight it. It levels the proverbial playing field. The goal of an ethical CEO would be efficient regulation, not deregulation.

For more than two decades we’ve been subjected to unrelenting propaganda from the BIG/GAS (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid) contingent decrying any and all regulation as a fundamentally bad idea. Regulation, we’ve been assured, prevents American businesses from being competitive in world markets, harms productivity, and hampers profitability.

What bunk. The additional profitability stemming from deregulation turned out to be the result of an increased ability to cook the books. And if deregulation has made American business more competitive, it’s hard to find the evidence — trade deficits are at record levels — but it certainly has made it less accountable to anyone.

Business will be re-regulated. Current abuses are too simply too flagrant. The question is how; the probable answer is badly. The business community no longer has the credibility to be part of the process, which leaves it to Congress and executive-branch agencies to design the regulations. Their goal will be minimizing any chance of new abuses, unfettered by considerations of how hard or easy it will be to comply.

Every new regulation will result in reporting requirements, every reporting requirement will require new information technology, and nobody is going to care how hard it is to build.

Which means CIOs and CTOs will be reaching for the Excedrin.

Assuming, of course, that new regulation hasn’t turned Excedrin into a prescription drug.

Comments