Tuesday, January 04, 2005

What We're Talkin' About...is Football If you get the Andy Griffith reference in the title of this column, then my condolences. You're at least as old as me, and that's not a good thing. If you only know Andy Griffith from Nick reruns of he and Ope, Barney, and Aint Bee, then congratulations. You're an astute student of pop culture but have enough years left in you to accomplish something. If you now think of Andy primarily as Matlock, then you're my mom, and will get no value from this column, not even pride of kinship. Anyway, I'm talkin' about football, specifically college football. The NFL is only for degenerate gamblers and people in Wisconsin with nothing else to do. (Hey, I'm from the Upper Midwest, I know these things.) College football has been inexorably grinding to total professionalism since at least 1968. That was the year that this country changed, and not only politically. It was the year that OJ won the Heisman Trophy and immediately started hawking Chevys in print and on TV. Big business had co-opted the college game. Fast forward to today, and you can see all the changes. An increasing concentration of financial rewards to the very top programs. (Ironically fueled by a decrease in the number of allowable scholarships, which has enabled dozens of programs to become more competitive since the 1980s. The Big 10 is now the Big Ten-Plus-One rather than the Big Two. The SEC has two divisions, both of which are competitive in some years. The Pac-10 really does extend beyond USC, although this year isn't the year to discuss that.) Anyway, as I was saying, there's been an increasing concentration of financial rewards to the very top programs. Ever bigger and faster players. Vastly more sophisticated weight- and drug-training regimens and creation of an entirely separate world for the players. Players leaving college early to join the pros. Tolerance of rape cultures and other nasty business within any number of programs. And most recently, the dreaded BCS. I have not been a fan of a playoff bowl system, even though at least one local radio personality would deem my viewpoint too stupid for consideration. The lack of a grinding series of playoff games 1:26:11 PM    comment []

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Render Unto Caesar... Nah, I don't know what to make of the Oracle/PeopleSoft contretemps. But a war it is, that much I do know. This is clearly not about synergies, consolidation, value to the customer, or shareholder value. It's a simple and straightforward effort by one of the world's leading business bushidos to slice a perceived opponent into little bits. Or, switching historical metaphors, it's an attempt by Caesar Ellisonus at a 21st-century Carthaginian Peace, one that we can imagine Rome, er, Oracle, will be only to happy to extend to other companies started by ex-Oracle guys, such as Siebel and Salesforce.com. Someone let me know when the salt trucks arrive at PeopleSoft headquarters, so I can stay away and prevent any from getting on my car and rusting it out. One of the key red herrings tossed out in opposition to the takeover is the software incompatibilities that will result. Oh come on, when has enterprise application software ever actually worked without massive support and upgrade fees? If software from any single company, let alone multiple applications in mixed environments, actually worked properly, there wouldn't be much of a software business to speak of in the first place. Companies would simply make the sale, check in on customers now and then, and die once they ran out of new customers. Instead, the ongoing licensing and support fees are the only thing keeping many enterprise software companies in business. Even for the strongest, such as Oracle, existing customer applications are essential to staying in business. Caught that we are in this metaphorical war zone, I can report a fair amount of fear and loathing spreading through the region. PeopleSoft is located in the so-called Tri-Valley region of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region in which I happen to live. In the late 90s a mild euphoria swept the region as Oracle, Cisco, Sybase, Sun, and others touted their aggressive re-location and/or growth plans for a region that had previously counted PeopleSoft as the primary technology company lining its freeways. Pleasanton (where PeopleSoft is headquartered), lying 30 miles northeast of San Jose on the other side of the Sunol Grade, was set to emerge as a serious contender to the proud Silicon Valley cities of Santa Clara County. Next door, "Digital Dublin" was going to make itself heard within the global technology community. A little further up the freeway, San Ramon was primed to add major technology companies to a corporate roster that already included Pacific Bell (now part of SBC) and Chevron Texaco. Only Sybase kept its promise, relocating from its cramped Emeryville location to striking new headquarters in Dublin, just across I-580 from PeopleSoft. The bubbleburst busted the other plans, a slight malaise set in, but there was nothing to panic about. Surely technology would come back and the Tri-Valley would recommence its march towards becoming a junior Silicon Valley. Then came news of Oracle's pre-emptive move and Chairman Lawrence's belief that the employees of PeopleSoft were of no consequence or value. The duress experienced by thousands upon thousands of residents in this since that time is tangible. The outlook is tense out here. Myself, I think that Ellison, portrayed as singularly narcissistic and self-absorbed in numerous books and magazine articles, has reached his indignant late 50s very indignantly, and is projecting his morbid fears of aging and death on an entire industry, and specifically, if coincidentally, on the Tri-Valley region. This is a man who buys Russian MiGs, who sails in his own World Cup yachts. A man who can invite Rupert Murdoch onto his boat, then witness that boat have tear off some of the press baron's fingers without apparent consequence. What does he care for a few lonely thousand people here and there? Their jobs, their kids, their schools, their communities? Most assuredly this is not a real war zone, and it's not the hapless Flint, Michigan portrayed by that big guy in the baseball cap. But the situation is much more serious than that of the stereotypical Californian being forced to cut back on lattes, cabernets, or premium gas for the Porsche. If Oracle wins this battle, thousands of these Californians will also have to cut back on mortgage payments. They will have to load up a decidedly non-Porsche truck and leave. One must note that Ellison himself told the San Francisco Chronicle that Silicon Valley will look like Detroit in a few years, that the age of innovation and growth is over, that a brutal age of consolidation is here to stay. Here's to hoping the man couldn't be more wrong. 5:00:44 PM    comment []

Sunday, September 05, 2004

Asleep On the Show Floor You're familiar with those stories from people who awaken from a sort-of air hypnosis, on a plane somewhere over somewhere, with no idea of where they came from or where they're going. Those stories never pull my heartstrings, as this complaint sounds a lot like someone complaining about their servants or the lack of good titanium bike rentals on Santorini. Count your blessings, get some sleep and try to do some good for the world, I say. That said, it's a rare "warm San Francisca night," and very warm out here in the East Bay suburbs as well, as I face the blank screen and try to remember exactly what trade show it was that I attended at Moscone Center a few weeks ago. Oh, that's right, it was LinuxWorld Expo, and I remember being all excited at seeing a lot of major vendors and a very large crowd by post-com convention standards. Certainly there's been a significant number of well-crafted stories and many interesting story lines have emerged in the ensuing few weeks: SCO battles to save its sinking ship, Steve Ballmer treats Linux like a pinata again (even trotting out the oh-so-1980s FUD Factor specter), Sun gets its dander up over a perceived slight in its Linux-ambivalent positioning. You've read it all. Nothing to add here about Linux's technical abilities, its threat to established operating environments, or what the major players are saying. What I can add is my perception of how Linux was being marketed at LinuxWorld Expo. And this is where my event hypnosis kicks in. What was it I saw? Was I just wandering around in a dream? Who was there and what did I see? Oh yes, it's coming back. HP was there with its new one-note campaign, "Invent." The entire history of a great company, with all its hopes and aspirations for its merged future, summarized in one useful word. "Invent." Great. Thanks. But. What. Does. It. Really. Mean? IBM had big banners featuring what looked like that kid from Sixth Sense, set amidst a variety of pretentious backdrops, with the more obscure backdrops helpfully identified for us Visigoths who might not recognize every Italian Renaissance parlor on display. This unseemly display was accompanied by a studiedly vacuous tagline, and you know, I've forgotten what it was. Wrote it down, but some butthead ran off with my bag (and my notes with it) when I unthinkingly left it in the press room, distracted by the really big cookies in there. I've since scanned IBM's website, but find no hint of this campaign, because of course IBM is not integrating its message or anything like that. At least HP stays consistent. With. Its. Inventiveness. At least no trees have died in the process of publishing my oblique show observations, but even so, it's time to get to the point. LinuxWorld Expo drew a lot of attendees this year. During a bad time when both Comdex and CeBit USA have quit the game (at least for now), LinuxWorld Expo had some bang to it. The show offered a great chance for the major vendors to step up with their "A" games, and blow us away with sharp messages focused on benefits, comparative advantages, and damn it, some rock and roll. Instead I saw squishiness, disconnectedness, almost indifference. Not to be too rough on the afore-named companies--these are the only ones I can remember. Most others made no impression. As a firm believer in Ur-Marketing, integrated marketing communications, and the proper combination of steak and sizzle, I'll be following this story, looking at how the leaders are marketing Linux "moving forward," as we corporate guys like to say. Linux is revolutionary in the way the PC was revolutionary, with all the attendant anarachical disruptiveness built right in. Good going, Linus! Linux has the potential to conquer vast swaths of the world's corporate computing terra electronica. But it will go nowhere if its market leaders continue to give us dream sequences and one-word summaries. Now, let me tell you about that flight I was just on to Orlando...or was it Lisbon? Anyway...   9:57:39 PM    comment []

Friday, August 20, 2004

Condemned The Google IPO was launched just as I was finishing Dot.con, an interesting if understated book about the Internet-driven bubble. The book's 300+ pages provide a wealth of detail about the key events and dates during the late 90s frenzy, with plenty of commentary along the way about how investment bankers, analysts, the Fed, television, and magazines acted hand-in-glove with a ravenous speculatory nation that led inevitably to a crash of historical proportion. The timing of my reading could not have been more ironic. As I scanned the headlines this morning, I saw that Google, a day after its IPO, is now valued more highly than either General Motors or Ford Motor Company. Have we learned nothing from the past few years? Have two of our most popular glib utterings, Warhol's and Santanyana's, morphed into a hybrid universe in which everyone forgets the lessons of history in 15 minutes? To be sure, the morons at CNN were giddy. Of course, their depth of knowledge led them to be prompted by a producer as to what a "googol" was, and even then they had no clue that the company's name is spelled differently than the original word, why this might be the case, etc. But I digress. As my career has been spent in high technology marketing and communications, certainly it's in my interest to approve of any good news in our blightened industry. So I certainly hope that Larry, Sergey, and Eric can execute well, profit mightily, and lead the Valley into a new and prosperous era. But will someone please tell me how a company that sells classified ads around free Internet searches is going to maintain a valuation higher than that of major automotive colossi? Does Google have significant tangible assets? How defensible is its market position? How leading-edge will its technology be over the next five years? Will Google ever make anything or distribute anything? How mature is a management team that didn't have the sense to avoid Playboy magazine, for crying out loud? Well, once again, I guess I don't "get it." I certainly hope that Google either "gets it" soon, thereby nipping another nascent bubble disaster in the bud...or that somehow this New Economy business is real after all.   12:33:58 PM    comment []

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

The Hummer I was listening to a presentation about the Hummer in a marketing seminar the other day, with a focus on the differences in perception and marketing for the original commercial vehicle and the newer H2. The original was truly over the top, borderline legal, sold in very small quantities to very wealthy buyers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and grudgingly admired in the way a Ferrari Testarossa or Lamborghini is when strutting down the boulevard. The H2 is smaller, built on a pedestrian large SUV chassis, priced in the middle five figures rather than early six figures, sold to anonymous suburban and urban-sophisticate strivers, and generally loathed in the way malaria or scabies are when strutting through the population. Why? What is the key differentiator? Why do people make obscene gestures at H2 drivers while all but salute those behind the wheel of an original Hummer? (Full disclosure: my ride is a Nissan but I don't make obscene gestures to anyone but little old ladies who won't get out of my way.) Rationally speaking, the H2 is a more responsible vehicle in terms of gas mileage, potential damage infliction, and general hubris. Yet its vastly larger ownership makes it a vastly more noxious overall presence, and in a time of general nervousness about the global oil situation, this presence makes it the poster child for a certain swinish obliviousness often found on the smug faces of all large-body SUV drivers. Surely there are bigger problems than clueless narcissists getting 12 miles to the gallon rather than the 25 or so expected by the left-leaning anti-H2 crowd, no? Then it hit me. The Hummer and H2 represent the ancient tension between the Platonic ideal and the Aristotelian reality found in Western Civilization. The original Hummer is the Platonic status symbol, the Platonic Zeus ex machina, driven by archetypal successful people, Gods on Earth whom we admire and want to be. The Hummer lives in the Pantheon. The H2, on the other hand, is merely a niche-marketed categorical reality, agnostically designed and sold to members of a hoi polloi admired by no one except themselves. It reflects an unflinching Aristotelian reality that this is what people are all about, this is what they drive, baby, and romance and idealism be damned. The H2 lives in the real world. This tension has caused a psychosis in Western Civilization for millennia. Inject an Abrahamic Judeo-Christianity that has absorbed, integrated, and reflected much classical learning and opinion through Talmudic and Pauline study over the generations while remaining judgemental to its core, and hey, no wonder people start flipping the bird at H2s! The presentation I saw the other day was presented by students from two distinct Asian cultures, and I had to wonder, what are they thinking way down inside about this whole matter? Western minds, whether they know it or not, have the Platonic/Aristotelian tension rooted in their speech patterns, belief systems, and everyday impressions of life. What do the roots of Eastern minds have to offer on this subject? What do these roots imbue Eastern minds with when it comes to buying things? As I continue my search for Ur-Marketing principles, these questions will be on my mind. 10:29:54 PM    comment []

Thursday, July 08, 2004

The Internet Changes Nothing Four years into waiting for Godot, I mean, waiting for the tech recovery, an unorthodox thought creeps into the corners of my enquiring mind. What if the Internet, rather than changing "everything" (as cited and recited in a well-known Silicon Valley quote), in fact changes nothing? There's still plenty of suffering in the world. Plenty of existential angst for those lucky enough not to suffer physically. Traffic still seems pretty bad to me, everywhere. The phone at home still rings too much. In fact, today I'm surrounded by phones that beep, play music, and seemingly gandydance around the clock. Gasoline is too expensive, as is insurance of all kinds, educational standards are going to hell, political discourse is still largely divisive and asinine, wind chills and high humidity remain popular topics of conversation, and my teen-age kids are driving me nuts. The earth still rotates precessionally on its axis, the moon is reliable in its phases, the sun does indeed come up in the east every morning. Ballplayers and entertainers are still way overpaid. There's too much gossip, too many dogs and cats, and maybe too many people. Business scandals pique our outrage. Crime is back up. The government is intruding, again. Fear in the air, tension everywhere. Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration. Aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation. Seems like the same old ball of confusion to me. How has the Internet changed anything? The temptation is to trivialize progress made since the time of that late 60s hit song. Nothing's changed, man. Yet the band plays on, man. Verily I won't go biblical and scare the kids with any new insights under the sun, because I don't have any. The point is to remember that the fundamentals never change. People are people, a relativistic universe means there's no such thing as a sure thing, the walk is the walk and the hype is the hype, and the U.S. remains the only place where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in its founding document. Thank-you, everyone for developing, deploying, and improving the Internet. Thank-you Tim Berners-Lee for realizing its power. But no thanks to everyone who has overemphasized it, paradigmatically hyperbolized it, obtusely not gotten that it doesn't matter if you don't get it, what matters is that it doesn't fundamentally change a thing. All it has really done over the past decade is pumped up a false New Economy then become a victim of its own press releases while hurling millions of dreams onto the cruel and rocky shores of a place known as Brutal Realityland. The Internet is just a tool. Just another addiction to some, just another exploited medium to exploit to others, and a darn fine way to communicate to most. Well, yes, actually it provides a great way to communicate, you know, whether by e-mail, website, or blog. It's an Alexandrine repository of knowledge, and its shopping mall aspect has kept me out of hot water on more than one Mother's Day. Hmm, maybe it could change things if we gave it a try. Maybe it already has. It's effected thinking, strategies, and processes throughout the business world. It's made many governments more transparent to their citizens, and put other governments on notice that the democracy genie is out of the bottle. It's empowering a truly global community to create and share knowledge inexpensively, quickly, and effectively. OK then, maybe the Internet is playing a large role in changing things for the better, and will continue to do so. But no way, no how will it ever "change everything." Let's extinguish vacuous phrases such as that from our public utterings and collective consciousness, please?   12:12:34 AM    comment []

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Moore Passionate Agitprop "American culture" is no oxymoron, but rather, is alive and well. I take this view after witnessing the vociferous reaction given to the two recent and splendid works of agitprop otherwise known as The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11. Neither work qualifies as a fair-minded description of events. Neither is easy to sit through. One filmmaker is not even American, and the other sets a large part of his film well outside of the country. But both are improbable box-office successes that prove a.) American audiences are never too jaded to embrace earnest examinations of well-worn topics, b.) there is no such thing as bad publicity, and c.) nothing beats free publicity. Think what you will about the two works in question, but just try to tell me that they don't refute the validity of squeamish, wimpish corporate control of the culture. Not that most people think corporate culture control is a good thing--they don't. But media conglomeration and vertical integration on a very  large scale is scarily in our midst, and these movies are clear illustrations of why this should not be so. Both had initial difficulties in getting serious backing, and both have succeeded despite the best efforts of many powerful people to will them away. The best criticism I've heard of Mel Gibson's Passion was by a Methodist minister whose opinion I respect, who simply pointed out that when considering the story of Jesus "you've got to dig deeper" than simply focus on the gore of the Passion. My question to Mel is whether he thinks that those of us who are not in strict agreement with his religious views are destined for hell, as he has most assuredly been taught. Because if so, why should we enrich him further by viewing his movies? The most cogent criticism I've heard about Fahrenheit so far is how tiring it is to see Michael Moore trudge once again to Flint, Michigan, as if all his filmmaking is verily about him, him, him. My question to Michael is why he used the theme song from The Magnificent Seven during what was clearly a send-up of the opening of Bonanza. Surely someone of his (and my) generation couldn't have made that mistake. Did he have trouble getting the rights to the correct theme song? Were they too expensive? Did he outsource this task to a younger person who simply got it wrong? Or did his proclivity to shade the truth force him to go with what he thought was a more impactful ditty? OK, this may seem a bit asinine, but that is exactly what a lot of Moore's moviemaking techniques are. If he can't get a simple detail right, how do we trust the more complex details? If he's just blowing smoke up our hind-ends, why should we enrich him further by viewing his films? The reason why, in both cases, is because these two people make other people think. They make some people mad enough to burn the masters of these films if they could, or burn their creators at the stake if allowed. They roil our passions, they turn up the heat in our brains and souls, they make us red-faced angry. These two works have been condemned by many, are said to be capable of inciting violence. They are said to be capable of reinfording prejudice, of spreading falsehoods. Attempts to squelch both of them are well-known and diverse. Yet the filmmakers and their backers persevered. They are both highly disingenuous, of course, when they claim that their works are "only movies." Their intention, in my opinion, is to create propagandistic set pieces that have immediate and significant, then long-lasting, impacts on society. And maybe they will. But the irony is that the vast majority of American audiences view these works as "only movies," thus falling in line with the filmmakers' ostensible claim. This should not disappoint. Americans take things seriously and earnestly, and will continue to debate these films for decades to come. We will not, in whole, accept either at face value, yet very large numbers will see and discuss both films. So Mel and Michael win. Or rather, we win. American culture is alive and well.   7:22:38 PM    comment []

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Massive Communications A few entries ago, I promised to focus this blog on mass communications. It might appear as if I got sidetracked a bit with my Comdex missive below, but in fact I believe that major events such as Comdex play an important role in mass communications in society. When I think of mass communications I think of the pervasive stimulatory assault each of us endures on a daily basis. By "us" I mean people in the U.S. One of the primary goals in my research into mass communications is to contrast and compare the exposure to mass communications experienced by citizens of the world. My guess is that the experience is quite similar in most well-developed countries, and surprisingly similar in many less-developed countries. A very large part of mass communications today are directed to get people to buy things. This is hardly a revelatory statement, but to what degree are people in the U.S. truly cognizant of how the multi-sensory consumerist assault on our senses has increased magnitudinally over just the past few decades? Furthermore, how similar is the experience for people in places much less economically developed than the U.S.? Does the man or woman in the street of, say, Kathmandu or Yerevan receive a constant barrage of messages to buy this, that, or the other thing as do people in the U.S.? My guess is that the experience is quite similar although circumstances may seem not to warrant it. As a U.S. citizen and citizen of the world, I will not join the chorus of those who believe that somehow the U.S. brought the attacks of 9/11 upon itself through callous, overweening military and commercial globalization. But I do wonder, how much sheer, existential unhappiness is created by a consumerist culture that unrelievedly harps on mass audiences that they need to look better and have nicer things to be successful, and therefore, happy.   2:53:38 PM    comment []

Biting Vegas Dust The word came through the morning newspaper: there will be no Comdex this year. It has been "postponed" until 2005. I doubt it. Rather, this sounds like the death knell for the one event that described the arc of the personal computer business, from its informal, hippiefied beginnings in Atlantic City in the 70s, through an exuberant decade running from the late 80s through the late 90s, to some alarming wretched excess in 2000, to its swift and apparently fatal downfall in the 21st century. Let me clear about something right up front: Comdex never won any friends. For years it was a must-attend event for the industry, but one that was often dreaded, usually loathed, and tolerable only with solid expense accounts that covered rented drivers, golf, and nights at the Crazy Horse or Olympic Gardens. Remember the 80s? In the 80s, as the show started to gather serious steam, Las Vegas was characterized by a shortage of hotel rooms for a convention this size and a complete lack of decent hotel rooms for an event of any size. The show's organizers took advantage of this situation by controlling hotel bookings, jacking up the prices for less-than-mediocre rooms to appalling levels, then taking a percentage of the excess for themselves. The incredible Vegas hotel construction boom started in the late 80s with the Mirage, and added an additional three to five thousand rooms each year for a decade, obviating the previous shortage and bringing accommodations up to standard. Prices continued to climb, too, with the show organizers continuing to very publicly benefit from what felt, to attendees, like extortionist rates. You Had to Be There But what were ya gonna do about it? You had to be there. Your company had to be there, and in a big way. Never mind that major parts of the main exhibit floor felt like morning in Shinjuku station. Never mind that for many years the exhibits were scattered throughout a dozen major hotels, with some unfortunates banished to the McCarran center all the way downtown. Never mind that taxi lines were 90 minutes long, rental cars almost impossible to get, and good shuttle service non-existent. Comdex was where you had to be. Each year it seemed to get a little bigger, each year major announcements were either made or solidified there, and each year Comdex played an important role in hooking up vendors with dealers, resellers, and the industry media. There was a little dip in enthusiasm during an early-90s tech downturn, but nothing that seriously threatened the show. Most industry veterans will remember that Spring Comdex was a big deal in those days as well, even though it shuttled between Atlanta and Chicago, trying to find its definitive place in the world. Microsoft came to the rescue of this event in this timeframe by working with the producer to cast it as a "Windows World" event, and for awhile, this strategy seemed to be a good one. The show had a clear strategy and drew a very large, but not overwhelming, group of people who were continuing to create an industry. Things Start to Get Ugly Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the show seemed to get fatter and sloppier every year. The company I was with in the glory days, IDG, chartered helicopters two years in a row to ferry top advertisers from The Strip to the Thomas Mack Center (home of the UNLV Runnin' Rebels basketball team), to witness a concert and party for 10,000 of the company's best friends (and employees). I witnessed a scene of a well-known industry pioneer holding center stage and slurping down dozens of oysters while tossing off his, uh, unique opinions about the parentage of other industry pioneers amidst a magazine-sponsored bacchanal at a local watering hole. I witnessed a client of mine making the snap decision to extend a gargantuan party another two hours (at a cost of a mere $20K) when the midnight bell struck one year. No booth could be big enough, no idea weird enough. One company brought in professional boxers to its booth knock the crap out of each other on-site in full view of us gawking, white-collar wimps. I got autographs from Spud Webb, from Nadia Comaneci, from Reggie Jackson, from other various and sundry athletes and "personalities" booked to stump for technology about which I'm sure they had not a clue. Amidst the excess, which admittedly, was a lot of fun, was the dawning, disturbing realization that the show was losing any focus that it ever had. Bill Gates keynotes became rock-star events, with squadrons of just-folks driving their mobile homes across the desert to witness the man live onstage at the Alladdin. Nothing wrong with that, per se,  but in the late 90s and into the year 2000 it was clear that Comdex was becoming something that it had never intended to be. It's certainly easy enough to point fingers at those most culpable. I certainly have my opinions--as a Comdex exhibitor, attendee, speaker, and partier over the years--but rather than single out a lot of individuals, let's just say that the original Comdex management team seem to have a fairly callous attitude toward the people it needed to care the most about, namely, its exhibitors. Comdex was always free to "qualified" attendees, so derived most of its revenue from renting exhibition space, bolstered by ancillary promos at the venue, a show guide, and of course, its notorious cut of the hotel revenue. Show management never had to cater particularly to attendees, and as the years went by, cast an increasingly wide net as to which "qualified" attendees it would solicit to attend the event. Show management's attitude toward attendees was neither particularly helpful nor hostile. Since the large majority of attendees were getting in for free, there was no compelling reason for serious consideration as to how these people were served. A smaller number of attendees, maybe 2%, paid increasingly substantial fees to attend seminars and tutorials at Comdex, and my observation was that these Comdex "sessions" could actually be quite useful. I've always felt that this aspect of the event was underserved and underdeveloped over the years. Failure, in My Opinion But the true failure of Comdex management related to its treatment of exhibitors. It's no secret that a large percentage of show attendance was a function of exhibiting companies. IDG probably sent three or four hundred people every year through its various divisions, and IDG was a relatively modest exhibitor. The major U.S. and Japanese technology companies, most of whom had tremendous presences at the show over the years collectively sent untold thousands of people from every level of their organizations to Las Vegas. And management treated these companies abysmally. Whether exercising no apparent control over attendee quality, profiteering on accommodations, taking the hardest line possible in a boiler-room atmosphere to re-sign exhibitors, or standing aloof from the actual proceedings while preening to global media that attendance figures had set a new record, I saw very little good will being developed over the years. The warning signs were there all along. Apple pulled out sometime relatively early on, then IBM made a loud noise about abandoning the show in the late 90s. The major Japanese vendors seemed to be less aggressive. The buzz within the industry was that maybe Comdex was not really as important as it had been. (The irony being that by the late 90s much of the former inconvenience was gone: the building boom had created tens of thousands of high-quality new rooms, shuttle service was vastly improved, and all the exhibits were mostly located in two spectacular venues, the expanded Las Vegas Convention Center and the new Sands Convention Center, built by the show's original owner.) Then came the technology meltdown. Already in freefall by November 2000, the industry bravely kept its commitments to Comdex that year and produced what was billed as a record-breaking show that is best remembered for the ubiquitous throngs of unfortunate immigrants immediately outside the convention center, slapping sleazy sex-related flyers into unwitting attendees' hands. (The witting attendees, of course, had figured out the finer details of the Vegas demimonde years before.) Comdex would probably have had trouble surviving the meltdown in any case. When hundreds of former exhibitors are simply no longer in business, when others lose two-thirds or more of their market value, and when criminals flying airplanes into buildings deeply chill the travel industry, who can expect a colossus such as Comdex to remain healthy? But I can tell you that very few, if any, tears were shed by executives making the decision to erase the show from their marketing plans. I doubt anyone over the years got any sort of warm feeling when thinking about the crew in charge of the event. Yes, business is business, and you don't go into business to make good friends of everyone. But the best companies serve their customers with a smile, with consideration for their needs, and with a commitment to develop professional relationships that are rewarding and can stand the inevitable stresses that occur when business starts to go bad. Comdex seemed to have zero commitment to its customers, and now the show is paying the ultimate price. How Many Did You Say? There were never 200,000 people there, of course. Friend-of-a-friend estimates have always told me total attendance peaked at somewhere around 60,000. But even that crowd was big enough to give the place a feel of a supremely healthy industry creating a new, improved global society empowered by humankind's marvelous digital machines and the code that made them run. The 200,000 figure, though, remains stuck in my craw. Why did this apparent fiction need to be touted over and over? Why did mindless media reports repeat it without challenge? Why can't we humans tell the truth about such a simple fact as how many people showed up to the party? Now that the party is over, it will be exceedingly difficult for anyone to tell the truth. Say you throw a major technology gig in Las Vegas, or San Francisco or New York, and 25,000 people show up. By this, I mean 25,000 people who should be there, who either buy, create, or report seriously on technology. Would your efforts be lauded? Probably not. Because as long as the false Holy Grail of 200K is held out there, anything less will be considered a disappointment and a sign that technology STILL HASN'T COME BACK. Epitaph I mourn today's announcement. I viewed Comdex as a talented child with bad parents. Despite its parents' attempts to make the event as unpleasant as possible over the years, you know, the show was an absolute killer. It was there at the dawn of the industry, it grew with the industry, it defined the industry. There were a lot of great times at Comdex over the years, and yes, a lot of business got transacted. It was the one time each year that you knew you would run into everyone you knew in the industry, exchange some small talk, some large talk, and see how they were doing. It was the place where you could see which companies were on fire and which were flaming out. Hey, I got to meet Nadia Comaneci at this show. She brought "a perfect 10" into everyday vocabulary, and set a standard for perfection that many still strive to achieve, no matter what their endeavor. Today's management team says not to worry, that the show will be back in 2005. Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?     10:00:01 AM    comment []

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Ur-Marketing (continued...) So, continuing to examine Sun Microsystem's "wood in one arrow" campaign, the good news was that Sun either lacked the funds or the gall to run its opaque message more than once. The ad disappeared with very little trace. The irony was the Sun had achieved $1 billion in annual revenue without running a scintilla of advertising, and its initial foray demonstrated why it was wise to forgo the TV Siren during its climb from arrogant little start-up to arrogant major player. Fast forwarding to the late 90s, one once again saw Sun's message on television, although this time the ads were hard to miss. The company had by now morphed up more than a magnitude to $10 billion in annual revenue and rising. It had ridden the dot-com boom by providing a large share of the servers that supported high-traffic websites and by benefitting from a ballooning stock price through media hype of its Java programming language. Java, for which my marketing company had written a modest white paper concerning outlining its original, modest vision as a set-top box operating environment, was suddenly the universal solvent for all technology challenges and opportunities. Java had a simple, appealing name (in contrast to typically arcane-sounding programming languages such as C++ or Modula-3), which led to simplistically appealing coverage of its wonders as the driver of the dot-com age. Mid-level marketing managers associated with it became overnight media superstars and Java was said to be the magic brew fueling the Worldwide Web. All of this resulted in Sun deciding to position itself as "the dot in dot-com." Any Marketing 101 professor will tell you neither to position yourself to narrowly if you don't have to nor to attach yourself to something so new and exciting that its tenability could be suspect. Undaunted, Sun decided that it had latched onto the perfect message, that by "attaching our grappling hook to the dot-com rocket," in McNealy's phrase, it could now tout its success to the masses. One little problem I had with this campaign was that it seemed to kill its customers: the TV campaign featured a bunch of what appeared to be a nice enough, properly diverse group of youngish execs sitting around a standard-issue boardroom table, only to suffer apparently lethal electrical shock as Sun's omnipotent "dot" invaded their space and blew them away. The toothy arrogance of McNealy et alia was alive and well, but again, resulted in a message that was a.) unclear in defining the company's benefits, b.) vacuously uncautious about the underlying message it was communicating. When dot-com became dot-bomb, Sun was shown to have no aplomb. Revenues started to disappear as its narrowly cast message proved worthless to technology buyers looking for value and flexibility rather than glibness and hubris. More to come soon... 9:18:16 AM    comment []

Friday, May 28, 2004

Ur-Marketing I dunno, maybe I'm just stupid. But I simply "don't get it" when it comes to much of the past and current advertising and related marketing efforts by technology companies. (I don't fully understand a lot of other companies' advertising and marketing either, but I'll stay focused on technology companies for now.) Let's take Sun Microsystems as an example. I've done a lot of consulting work for Sun over the years, once was publisher of a magazine focused on Sun technology, started Sun-centric trade shows in the U.S. and Japan, and facilitated the major deal that launched the company's fabulous JavaOne trade show. High-level Sun execs still return my e-mail inquiries occasionally, and I'm currently evaluating the company's technology for a project. None of this makes me the expert-of-all-experts on Sun, but I have had more than a nodding acquaintance with the company throughout its 20-year history. Sun grew from start-up mode to $1 billion in annual sales without spending one cent on advertsing its products. It established early on a reputation for good performance, good pricing, and the latest in a software environment that appealed to technically oriented users who were writing software, designing bridges, and taking over Wall Street with what was then a new category of "technical workstations." The tall, sage figure of company co-founder and software genius Bill Joy was ubiquitous at relevant trade shows during the early days, giving a human face to this upstart company that eventually drove numerous larger firms out of this part of the business. Sun leveraged this success into larger systems that served networks of workstations, in increasingly sophisticated and complex applications. It spread its influence into all the major vertical markets, whether government, manufacturing, telecommunications, or retail. It became a legitimate competitor to industry behemoths IBM and Hewlett Packard. Sun finally became large enough to force its fiscally conservative CEO Scott McNealy to start advertising. So it did. Some of its campaigns were direct and successful, others less so. Its initial efforts were in a pre-Web age, so it concentrated on focused, print advertising campaigns. It avoided expensive, diffuse TV advertising. The one day, sometime during the 90s, Sun seemingly discovered television and Microsoft all at once. McNealy started railing against "the evil empire from Redmond." While railing against the "mainframe hairballs" presumably developed by its traditional competitors, he saved his most vitriolic and personal attacks for Microsoft and its chairman Bill Gates, once even noting that he was "sure that my child is better looking than his." A stated libertarian, he most likely was terrifically offended by what he perceived as Microsoft's monopolistic market manipulation. Microsoft broke a compact, in McNealy's view it seems, by flouting the anti-trust codes of a federal government that he felt shouldn't be empowered to intervene among fair-minded competitors. But with McNealy seemingly believing that Microsoft was acting less than fair-minded, he became a proponent of federal action to mitigate what Bill and company were doing. But McNealy's Microsoft-bashing didn't end there. He also seemed to believe that Sun's systems were legitimate competitors in the consumer marketplace to personal computers running Microsoft Windows. Sun was superior to Microsoft in every way, ran this view. No one should ever run a system based on Windows. To this day, Sun employees are strongly encouraged to avoid all Microsoft products and forbidden to run some of them, according to a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle. What does all this have to do with "Ur-Marketing," the title of this particular column? Nothing and everything. On the one hand, it is merely a digression about one CEO's seeming obsession with another CEO. On the other, it strkes to the heart of the matter of why I get so confused by a lot of technology advertising and marketing. McNealy's Microsoft obsession (still in evidence despite a recent tete-a-tete between Sun and Microsoft) badly skews the message his company should be sending to its customers and prospects. This is not the only instance of this phenomenon. When Sun ran its first TV ad in the 90s, it featured an arrow flying through space in a circuitous route toward a target, finding the bull's-eye at the end of the commercial. "All the wood behind one arrow" was its theme. Sun employees and vendors knew what this meant, but did anyone else? We knew that Scott was fond of using this analogy to describe how Sun would focus all of its efforts on a single, integrated hardware and software platform that was allegedly more powerful and effective than anything on the market. Don't get distracted with multiple systems approaches (as IBM and HP had in those days), but keep all the wood behind one arrow. I am sure that at least 99.9 percent of the viewing audience had no idea of why this analogy was used and what it was supposed to mean. (continued...) 12:30:53 PM    comment []

It's Time to Marshall Our Resources Widespread consciousness of the field of "mass communications" dates to the work, primarily in the 1960s, of famous Canadian Marshall McLuhan. Phrases such as "cool medium," "the medium is the message," and "global village" entered mainstream speech and thought, and the world, as they say, changed forever. Far be it from this writer to pontificate about McLuhan, lest I be compared to the professorial windbag from Annie Hall who gets his comeuppance from the man himself. I've personally found McLuhan's writing difficult to penetrate, and I'll leave it to others to interpret it well. What's interesting to me is that the field of mass communications has had no other entrants to its pantheon (which I guess means it's not officially a pantheon). Marshall McLuhan died in 1980, and since that time we've had sea changes the technologies and products associated with mass communications. Cell phones arrived and conquered; the Internet begat the World Wide Web and became a consumer must-have; high-speed computer connections became the norm; cable channels proliferated; and digital video techniques changed forever the concept of what is real and what is not in our newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news. Cyberage novelists and commentators have proferred their views of how the technology is leading us into futuristic domains. Hosts of business consultants have told us how to deal with live on Internet Time. Programs in mass media, TV, and mass communications have multiplied in universities throughout the world, and the study of mass communications has achieved academic legitimacy as a social science and interdisciplinary study. Yet the original insights of McLuhan remain the touchstone, despite his reputation on the one hand as a lightweight academician and on the other as a ponderous popular commentator. It is time for new McLuhan's to emerge. Mass communications is a critically important area for all the peoples of the world today, given the ubiquity of mass communications technology and the battle by governments, busienss, and individuals to master it and use it to their personal and insitutional advantage. It behooves us, therefore, to consider mass communications seriously. My plans to contribute encompass a.) to focus this blog, whether portentous, pretentious, or asinine, on mass communications, b.) to do the same with all of my writing, c.) to leverage my experience as an editor and publisher to start a thoughtful publication (initially on the Web, of course!) devoted to the study of and commentary about mass communications.   8:53:21 AM    comment []

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Canadians and Hockey   With all due respect to hockey-mad Canadian fans going bonkers over having Calgary in the Stanley Cup Finals, I think that a blind allegiance to the Flames on the part of Canadian citizens vastly misses the entire point of the NHL's recent growth.   This is not an Olympics, World Cup, or similar type of event in which each nation puts its best and bravest lads out there to defend the national honor. It is an international professional league that has prospered mightily by the infusion of U.S. investment, both by owners and fans, over the past 15 years. And within this context, Calgary is no more Canadian than any other team.   In fact, the Tampa Bay Lightning (Calgary's final-round opponent) has 17 Canadian players on its active roster, more than Calgary's 15. The San Jose Sharks (Calgary's Western Conference final opponent) have 16, making them more Canadian than the Flames as well.   So our friends up north can be as provincial as they want to be during the finals and root for the "Canadian" team if they enjoy doing so. Sportswriters and other commentators can go ahead and get all soft and think that this is a good thing for the beleaguered tundra-dwellers.   Certainly the hockey fans in Calgary are more numerous, knowledgeable, and passionate about the game than those of many U.S. teams, in fact all U.S. teams outside of the Original Four in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston. And certainly they should go absolutely crazy during the finals.   But for the Prime Minister of Canada to make a fool of himself through some misplaced, puffed-up national pride shows how badly he and many others read this situation. The true glory for Canada is that their sport has become truly international and has been highly successful in importing itself into the big U.S. market south of its border.   All hockey fans should welcome the prospect of what should be a fast-paced, well-played final series. But having Calgary in the finals is not a victory for Canada, eh? Having Tampa Bay in there, heavily stocked with Canadian players, is. 10:10:38 AM    comment []

Friday, May 07, 2004

The Beginning of My Great Silicon Valley Novel Does it entertain or does it suck? The Meeting   The meeting started promptly at 10am. It was a typically beautiful Bay Area morning of indeterminate seasonality, could have been March, maybe September or November. Present were Rich Tempura, the company’s Director of Channel Marketing; Anil Subravishnumarapathutrum, the new bizdev guy; Corrie “Hard Core” Hardwick, the feared EVP/COO; and Keith.   “Allright, Keith, show us what ya got,” directed Rich in his typically breezy, faux-casual manner. “We need to get on-message, and quickly.”   The morning sun was a dusky orange as it attempted to blaze through the pimp-grey windows found throughout the offices of Bukakiowa’s new, semi-sprawling Santa Clara campus.   The company, founded by the remarkable pairing of an intense Japanese theology student from Kyoto and a laconic white American kid from Cedar Rapids who had met at the Gates of Hell (in the Rodin Garden) at Stanford, was riding the coattails of the greatest boom this boom-driven industry had ever witnessed.Growing 46 percent per year through the 90s, it was now generating almost a billion a month in sales, throwing off cash at ridiculous levels, and sporting a market cap approaching $200 billion.   Yet all was not precisely well in Bukakiowa-land. Similar growth was been enjoyed by the company’s main competitors as well as by a shitbasket-ful of newcomers from all over the world who had all just waltzed right in and sold iron and solutions to a base of corporate customers that seemed to have endless budgets and “imperatives to retain competitive advantage.”   Bukakiowa had actually lost market share in three out of four of its main hardware classes, and looked at another way, in most of its verticals as well. Only among the geeks did it remain the number one choice, and only in financial services did it maintain a grip on dominance. Add to that the fact that the co-founders’ new handpicked CEO, “Rip” Leighton, seemed bent on getting ripped and bent….   4:09:27 PM    comment []

Saturday, March 20, 2004

Whither the creative mind and the grand gesture? Technology companies seem to have rid themselves of all true creativity during the debacle that's commonly known as the dot-bomb era. Now that the freefall has stopped, with the Nasdaq showing incipient signs of recovery, one seeks to find creativity in the Valley. Yet all I've seen is one company's, HP's, efforts to remake itself into a consumer-centric company, apparently epitomized by glamorizing rich kids with poor guitar-playing skills. I never include Apple in my general observations of technology marketing, because Steve and his Cuptertino minions have always differentiated themselves from the rest of the Valley by being truly kick-butt marketers. Apple has always led the market with its technology but never tried to geek its way to success, but rather markets its products with as much cool factor as can be achieved by humans. Whether developing the first user-friendly personal computer, successfully invoking 1984, or getting to us to like the iPod because it knows how to dance, Apple is the exception that proves the rule. (All is forgiven for the Apple III, the Lisa, and the Newton.) The rest of this industry is right now producing...what? Single-minded, leads-driven, automated marketing models that spark no fires, fire no imaginations, imagine no breakthroughs. I'm not looking for companies to create the spoiled-brat, conspicuous cigar-smoking rooftop parties of old, but a return of at least a scintalla of  the Friday beer-bust culture would be a welcome site. Marketing people today seem to be on automatic pilot, valuing process and tight HR management above all else. I've been developing grand marketing vehicles for companies for more than a decade, and participated in many of the grand moments of the industry prior to that, but have never seen an age as devoid of character, humor, and creativity as today. It seems that all the good folks have been fired, and the drones are running the asylum. Time to put the inmates back in charge.   9:25:52 PM    comment []

Sunday, March 14, 2004

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Sunday, March 07, 2004

The mostly arrogant, largely charmless quotes in the March 7 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle from various Silicon Valley CEOs regarding the new offshoring phenomenon may be in part framing the question of offshoring as either a completely good thing or a completely bad thing.   In fact, most of the current offshoring is not offshoring at all, but rather simply international hiring. True offshoring, seen widely in the clothing industry as an example,  entails sub-contracting to legions of local companies who may or may not pay good wages, may or may not provide humane working conditions, may or may not exploit child labor, etc.   Silicon Valley companies seem to be more enlightened in that they are creating real company jobs with good wages and benefits by local standards. So, a Cisco employee in India, for example, may make far less than his or her fellow employee in San Jose, but as I read it, is still a true Cisco employee nonetheless.   If this is not the case, then shame on me for being duped and shame on companies who are, in fact, exploiters.   Beyond that distinction, though, it is difficult to appreciate CEO-level comments that are focused merely on price and shareholder value. The slightly ungrammatical common wisdom, "you get what you pay for," will no doubt win out in the long run. Today's glib statement that "getting great talent at 20 percent of the costs...is about doing what's right to have a good company" may well turn into tomorrow's sorrowful lesson that doing what's right for the company usually means doing what's right in pursuing the best of the great talent, even if that talent comes at a premium.   I also find it hard to believe that management at today's Silicon Valley companies, which often seem fixated on an almost mindless command-and-control, "stay on message" mentality, will find it easy or profitable to manage a workforce that is halfway around the globe in countries far different from the U.S.   International hiring in the past was usually focused on serving local customers in regions outside the U.S. But the vision behind today's offshoring is not that of setting up international offices to handle business in those localities. Rather, its odd insistence is that core operations, once reserved for headquarters, will now somehow magically be improved dramatically with a Mephistophelian trade-off between wages and location.   The idea of creating great employment opportunities in countries that are trying to hop on the economic up-escalator is appealing to the libertarian, globalization mindset common to Silicon Valley. OK, I'm in agreement with that. But, I would encourage top management to think things through thoroughly, examine all the parameters before fully embracing the offshoring fad, and remember that their companies were hardly built by them alone, but by the highly skilled, hard-driving workforce that has made Silicon Valley, not Bangalore or Shenzhen, the world's technology leader.   Pursue a mass movement of jobs to other countries to aggressively, too coldly, too unwittingly unconscious of what made your company great in the first place, and you may find that CEO jobs are fungible, too!   8:34:32 PM    comment []

Saturday, March 06, 2004

Old, In the Way, and Blogging Those of us who typed our college termpapers would often mock our parents for not being "with it," for not understanding the unique pressures and anger felt by the Baby Boom generation. The Generation Gap was as real as the Mekong Delta and Woodstock Nation. Fast forward, no, blast forward into the early 21st century and a generation stands stunned, disbelieving that today's 40-year-olds were born after the Kennedy assassination (the first one), grappling with the indecipherable music, appalling dress, and loose morals of their own kids, yet desperately seeking to remain hip, to keep an open mind, and most of all, to ensure that the terrible mutual misunderstandings common with them and their parents are not repeated this time around. Boomers took early leadership of the personal computing age. They crafted a seamless transition in geek leadership from the white-shirted electrical engineers who invented computers to the more casually dressed computer jockeys with names like Gates and Allan, Wozniak and Jobs, and of course, Danny Bricklin. Yet most Boomers are not truly comfortable with computers, certainly not in the way their kids are. And with the Web only a decade old, most adults still do not wholly comprehend the power inherent in a vast, linked cyberuniverse with millions of electronic inhabitants. Now comes blogging. Another invention credited at least ni part to hip Boomers, blogging is something that many Boomer unhipsters can't quite grock. "Most blogs I've seen are vapid crapola," opined a long-time associate of mine. "So what?" is all I can say about that. It doesn't matter. Most creative efforts in any medium through the millennia are vapid crap in a lot of people's eyes. That doesn't sully the medium, be it painting, music, the bildungsroman, or the blog. What is a blog? You tell me, please. Is it a collection of quick takes heavily populatd with links? A collection of off-the-cuff reporters' notes? A rant? A rave? A flame? A capitalist/politico tool? Just as e-mail was bringing back the lost art of letter writing before it became subsumed in an ocean of incoherent corporate directives and spam, blogging could encourage a new generation of newspaper-style columnists (think Ivins, Sowell, Will, Ellen Goodman et al, except imagine the new ones coming from some place other than the Boston-Washington corridor and having views other than orthodox American liberal or conservative) and episodic novelists (think Dickens, Twain, and more recently, Armisted Maupin). I guess...seems like this could be the case. Another recent Web phenomenon, chat rooms, seem to encourage the basest expression and worst spelling imaginable (mostly due to its promise of anonymity), blogging seems to encourage better manners, better writing, and hey, with luck, might enable the Internet to perform something useful to society for a change!     8:56:12 PM    comment []

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Daily Discipline Mark Twain evinced disdain for most everyone he encountered in The Innocents Abroad. Peoples, places, and traditions are all subject to his withering commentary, as he takes a 19th-century trip to Europe and the Holy Land, offering descriptions that reflect a 19th century sensibility. Yet no group comes up as more repellent to him than those of his own fellow travelers foolish enough to inform the American legend that they, like him, were maintaining daily logs. Samuel Clemens knew well the psychological torments that accompany the serious writer along his or her way to finding a voice then acting on it. He knew the iron discipline of writing something every day was a fundamental, if wretched, task inherent to a writer's life. He knew that very few folks were up to it. Witness The Innocents Abroad... "...some twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps and for two or three hours wrote diligently in their journals," Twain writes in Chapter 4. "Alas that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did!" He continues, "...only those rare creatures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous and enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat." There's more, and well worth reading. Blogging appears to be the natural medium for all who aspire to Twainhood. My guess is that he would be uproariously amused by the phenomenon. Blogging's powerful combination of writer-friendly, budget-conscious software and the theoretical ability to syndicate blogs to the far corners of the world manifestly gives it the potential to inflict shameful defeat on us all. 6:39:40 PM    comment []

Start With My Bio Roger Stephen Strukhoff has spent the last quarter-century as a writer, publisher, and entrepreneur in the information technology business. He is now semi-retired, serves as an advisor and columnist with SYS-CON Media, and is more or less free to take on writing and consulting jobs that fuel his passion. He's based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked as an editor at Miller Freeman, as an executive at IDG, then co-founded and recently sold a custom publishing business. He's done work for the top companies in the business. He's launched magazines, websites, trade shows, and serious corporate communications initiatives. He speaks English well and six other languages very badly. He's now grappling with Turkish and Urdu. Roger plays the piano and trumpet well enough to impress his relatives and friends, and golf well enough to impress nobody. He's traveled on business to many of the greyest, dullest cities in the world, as always carrying a passport that reveals he was born in Iowa. (He was raised in Illinois.) Roger can be counted on to discuss webcentric computing, "classical" music, career arcs, most sports, authors he has read, and public transportation with a modicum of intelligence, a hint of unbridled opinion, and a sense of humor that many people enjoy and others do not. He can be reached at strukhoff@yahoo.com         10:26:21 AM    comment []