Safeway Bushwhacks Its Customers, Laughs It Off
Beware if you’re shopping at a Safeway and attempt to exit with a shopping cart – you may get a severely bruised shin. Or worse, if you’re older with fragile bones. Most likely you can avoid the problem if you don’t patronize the Starbucks counter. (I’m sure Starbucks will be happy to hear that.) Expect [...]
Failing Fast
Lot’s of people are piling on Microsoft following the 6 week lifecycle of the failed Kin mobile handset. Indeed, it opened up Microsoft for a vicious attack from the New York Times (of all places) which wrote, “the Kin debacle is a reflection of Microsoft’s struggle to deliver what the younger generation of technology-obsessed consumers [...]
The IBM/SAP/Oracle/HP Show: ALM and the Struggle for Lower TCO and Better Account Control
Big company battles, like real-world battles between countries, often center around obscure points of friction. The Austro-Prussian war had its Schleswig-Holstein, the Vietnam war had the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and enterprise software has application lifecycle management. ALM today is a relatively obscure point of friction between giants that holds the promise of igniting global [...]
Booz and Kearney & Why service mergers are tough
Image via Wikipedia Booz & Co. and A.T. Kearney, two well-known and long-established management consultancies danced with the idea of merging recently but have apparently called off the deal. In an article in the Wall Street Journal today and in another article by a U.K. publication, details as to the breakup are very limited. The [...]
EMC Big Data Play Continues: Greenplum Acquisition
I wrote recently about VMware’s emerging Data Management play after the announcement the firm was hiring Redis lead developer Salvatore Sanfillipo. While [CEO Paul] Maritz may say VMware isn’t getting into the database business, he means not the relational database market. The fact is application development has been dominated by relational- Oracle on distributed, IBM [...]
The Reverse Auction Conundrum: Despite Benefits, Why Does Adoption Lag?
My British colleague across the pond, Peter Smith, recently penned a succint post highlighting an interview he had with a fellow UK procurement executive that suggests some of the reasons reverse auction usage is not more prevalent. Incidentally, I’m looking forward to seeing Peter next week at a launch party for this new book on [...]
Policy and the cloud
Every time I get into a discussion about security and trust in cloud computing these days, I end up talking about service level agreements. People considering cloud computing rightly worry about whether their data is going to be secure, and private, and accessible when they need it. The umbrella term they use for that is [...]
Cloud One
While Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is already talking up Cloud 2 , many are still stuck at Cloud One
The Gap: Poor data creates CRM snafu
Online service problems at The Gap highlight the connection between back-end IT systems and customer satisfaction.
