Strategy and Tactics – Page 162 – IS Survivor Publishing

Fun from the intellectual property police (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Alas, poor Yorick.

I may have known him, Horatio, but I don’t know my Shakespeare as well as I thought I did. Several weeks ago, in reference to gripes about technology becoming pervasive in our lives, I said the fault lies not in our technologies but in ourselves.

I ascribed the quote to Hamlet. It should have been Cassius, who was speaking to Brutus at the time. Fortunately, IS Survivalists are a literate lot. My thanks to all who wrote. Just as fortunately, the Great Bard is in the great beyond and can’t sue for misuse of his intellectual property.

While we’re catching up on the subject of intellectual property:

In January I described the absurdity of Warner Brothers legal department threatening children with lawsuits for putting up Harry Potter fan club sites on the Web. It appears Warner Brothers isn’t the only company with out-of-control brand police. DaimlerChrysler is seriously considering a lawsuit against General Motors. Why? GM’s new Hummer H2 has seven slots in its grille, infringing on the Jeep Grand Cherokee’s grille slot count.
Inspired by DaimlerChrysler, Sesame Street filed a class action suit on behalf of two regular sponsors for misuse of the letter M and the number 3. (Not really, but the way things are going, it could happen.)
If you still don’t think intellectual property concerns are out of hand, The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) reports Australia has passed strict new laws that forbid forwarding e-mail without the author’s permission, out of copyright infringement concerns. Once again, the law exceeds satire’s ability to ridicule.
Sometimes the brand police need to be more alert: Who on earth came up with Microsoft’s ad campaign for Windows 2000? Filling half the ad with a Windows 95 Blue Screen of Death does show a key benefit of Windows 2000. But doesn’t this do just a wee bit o’damage to Microsoft’s overall image?
A column last July predicted Amazon.com would have to open retail stores to survive. Close: Various rumors are floating around about Amazon.com alliances. The first was WalMart — an odd choice, logical from an internally focused process perspective but illogical when thinking from a customer perspective — the WalMart and Amazon.com shopping ambiances have little to do with each other.
The most recent Amazon.com alliance rumor is Best Buy. That makes a bit more sense — Best Buy even carries a few books in its stores these days — but still seems strained. I still expect Amazon.com and Borders to merge one of these days. That marriage has compelling logic — Borders.com has nowhere near the mindshare of Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble; Amazon.com still needs bricks to complement its clicks.
Okay, it’s old news. Last July, in an interview, a spokesman for eBay told an LA Times reporter that its fast-paced Internet business will be ruined if it is subjected to laws meant to govern the brick-and-mortar world. Not that many years ago, a company might be embarrassed to suggest that obeying the law is a problem for it. Bad for the brand, you know. Now, in the BIG/GAS era (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid), company spokespeople have declared open season on all laws restraining corporate behavior, no matter how egregious. So don’t be surprised if (to take a ridiculous example) power companies insist we need more research before labeling CO2 a greenhouse gas. What’s that you say? They already have? Oh.
Last but not least, a branding conundrum. Sharp has announced its plans for a new Linux-based PDA. This should worry Microsoft. Why? It’s a flank attack on the desktop. Any PDA can coexist with all other PDAs so long as it syncs, so unlike the desktop there’s no market barrier for Linux PDAs. An installed base of Linux PDAs, means a population of buyers accustomed to using Linux applications. Their purchase of Linux on the desktop is an obvious next step.

What can Microsoft do to counter this threat? It could market its own Linux product. If Microsoft stayed in character, the only Linux component of its Linux would be the label. Which would lead to an ethical paradox for the Linux community: If it protects the Linux brand, it acknowledges the legitimacy of intellectual property ownership. If it fails to protect it, Microsoft redefines Linux as it chooses.

This is sheer speculation, of course, but it’s fun to imagine Eric Raymond suing to defend the ownership of intellectual property.

Commissar Ellison? (first appeared in InfoWorld)

The New Economy must truly be dead.

In the New Economy, I’ve been told by experts, the customer is king. If it were alive, how would you explain Larry Ellison?

Even notorious industry bad boy Computer Associates thinks good customer relations are important, and is promoting a new image as a kinder, gentler software company.

But then there’s Ellison, who, at Oracle AppsWorld, told his customers … his customers! … that they should customize their companies to his software. Customizing the software is wrong. Complementing it with third-party software is wrong. Building applications in-house? Don’t you dare! That would get in the way of your company’s primary mission according to Oracle: Software integration.

The right thing to do? Adapt your business to the predefined processes Oracle has thought up for you, and run your business on nothing but Oracle software, of course.

This attitude would be predictable coming from a communist, but Ellison’s a rich guy. So what is he thinking of? He’s telling us to trust a central planner (Oracle) to anticipate everything we need, and to figure that if he didn’t anticipate it you don’t really need it.

That’s a centrally planned information economy. Memo to Larry Ellison: Centrally planned economies don’t work, and it takes a long time to recover from the failed effort of trying to make them work. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the Russian economy.

Ellison’s mandate is bad for his customers for two entirely different reasons, both related to the fall of world communism.

The first: Ellison ignores the complexity built into every real company — the same complexity that causes all centrally planned economies to fail. Market-based economies don’t out-compete centrally planned ones because they’re more efficient. They’re actually inefficient in some ways, encouraging redundant effort (we call it “competition”). What makes market-based economies superior to centrally planned ones is their ability to recognize and fine-tune the satisfaction of demand.

So while an ERP vendor’s information-economy central planners can recognize and satisfy the big-ticket items like supply chain management and financial reporting, your IS organization is more likely to recognize and satisfy requirements that are closer to home, like (for example) your real estate management department’s need for an investment management system.

Nor does it stop there. Your IS organization also consists of central planners. They’re unlikely to recognize and satisfy (to take another example) your marketing department’s need for a system to schedule use of your company’s trade-show booths. That’s what personal databases, electronic spreadsheets, and Jane, who’s “good with this stuff,” are for.

Unmet need isn’t the only problem, either. There’s also the clothing-size issue: Just because a suit is well-made doesn’t mean it looks good on you. It also has to fit.

Oracle’s process designs are, I’m sure, neither better nor worse than any other carefully plotted swim-lane diagrams (the standard way to graphically describe a process design). It’s just that they almost certainly don’t all line up with your current processes, so taking Ellison’s advice means process re-engineering on a massive scale. The good news is that the process designs themselves are done. The bad news is that the good news only covers about 10% of the total effort of changing every process in your company.

Ellison isn’t completely wrong, of course. Many ERP implementations are unnecessarily complicated because of that’s-how-we-do-things-around-here thinking. It’s quite true that many companies don’t give their ERP vendor’s shrink-wrap processes a fair hearing.

But imagine your meeting with the CEO, COO, and CFO where you explain the benefit of standardizing on nothing but Oracle’s software and processes: “Sure, we’ll have to change how every bit of work in the company is done, but in return we’ll save on the cost of Oracle upgrades! Not only that, but we’ll operate exactly like every one of our competitors. Think of the benefit to our customers — they’ll be able to switch among all of us at virtually no cost!”

Good luck finding your next CIO position.

The whole thing is silly. If every company took Ellison’s advice, then every company would follow identical processes throughout — those envisioned by their ERP vendor, and only those envisioned by their ERP vendor. Taken to its logical conclusion, the result would be that every company in a particular industry would be identical to all others.

Hmmm. Maybe he is a commie after all.