Think Bigger
I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley checking in with customers and would be clients. The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while. Of course there is a cloud—literal [...]
Talk of the Web
There’s been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook—or FB as the proposed ticker symbol suggests. Part of an email [...]
Here Comes desk.com
Yesterday Salesforce.com unveiled its newest offering, desk.com, a complete rewrite of Assistly, a company and product that Salesforce bought last September. Desk.com completely replaces Assistly in the market and it is designed to be a light weight/light cost customer service solution for the SMB market. The idea has about as many legs as a millipede. [...]
The Facebook IPO
So Facebook is about to do the expected. It filed for an IPO yesterday and the clock is now ticking on what will be one of the largest offerings in history. I don’t know how things will compare but Ford’s IPO in the 1950’s and UPS’s offering a few years ago might be bigger pound [...]
Regulating the Internet
Call it Karma. A week after we celebrated the ignominious back down forced on the congressional supporters of PIPA and SOPA and their corporate feeders, The New York Times ran a story about how even, or especially, on the Internet, some things have not improved since Roman days. Caveat emptor, buyer beware. I call your [...]
In Mild Dissent and Some Agreement
Re: Larry Dignan’s ZDNet Piece “Apple’s supply chain flap: It’s really about us” When he died, the cover of the New Yorker had a cartoon of him checking into heaven and St. Peter looking him up on, what else? An iPad. So began the mythologization of Steve Jobs. There was a lot to like about [...]
IPad, Mercantilism and the Chinese Plantation
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald This is not a post about CRM. If you could apply Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence to a thing or group endeavor—always a dubious [...]
Good On You
My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part complement and part benediction. Good on you. They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like goo-don you. At any rate, good on you. Last week’s smack down of the PIPA [...]
Welcome to Strike Wednesday
When the French have a problem with particularly egregious government regulation or sometimes even when one is proposed, they call a general strike or perhaps just a slow down. Farmers have been known to drive their tractors to Paris to parade them down the Champs Elysees to protest farm policies. I was there nearly a [...]![]()
Improve Selling with Information, Not Data
It’s the beginning of the year, time for sales kickoff meetings and presidents’ clubs at some location within ten degrees of the equator. These signal events will reward those diligent and fortunate enough to have made or exceeded quota while focusing the attention of everyone on this year’s mission. Typically that includes higher quotas and [...]


