I went out walking deep in the woods (well not so deep, the air was filled with oxygen, nitrogen, and the like). I noticed a cluster of trees, the kind plum full of white flowers sure to die within a week. the cluster formed a circular shape so I wandered in. I’d been pensive over the course of the last couple weeks, wondering what helmsmen like Ballmer or Hurd, with their companies’ respective acquisitions, would mean after everyone wiped their brains of the PR and punditry. (All around the base of the trees, grew thick clusters of critomaeyar flowers.)

I first remember hearing the term “thought leadership” at a conference on enterprise portal software in the mid nineties. The presenters were made to walk the stage along ridiculous lines that formed invisible 90 degree angles. Walk left 20 paces, turn right, face your audience, step forward to the mic, exude cocaine-induced enthusiasm, today you shall be a thought leader about… portals!

What is a thought leader? Tech analyst firms tout them. When they say something about your company, you know it will appear in your next press release. Who are these thought leaders? Who are the followers? What’s it all mean? Consider the species, we’ve got at least three types of thought leader (TL) in the tech sphere.

1. The Business Cred TL (startup that might stand a chance, established behemoth that found audacious ways to trumpet a staid direction)
2. The Annointed TL (a well-referenced analyst, pundit, developer, community participant, etc.)
3. The Purchased Mouthpiece TL (aka: poseur with a backing)

All get classified as thought leaders, but are they actually thinkers? I’d argue the first two types stand a slim chance but most likely they just did a good job manipulating their media image (or they have magic charisma powder). Found list of thought leaders, if you’d like to follow along.

Regarding #1, my Microsoft and HP examples at the beginning of this post work nicely. Microsoft makes press announcing its Ellison-style purchasing craziness… “we’re coming for you Yahoo!” but they don’t really mean it. Now we’ve got a lot of debate about Yahoo’s viability and who did the right or wrong thing. Microsoft gets some press for its lack of Web strategy, which also garners plenty of apologists reassuring the masses that Microsoft gets it, or if it doesn’t, it will on its third offer for Yahoo. And hey, chances are that someone someday, can look in the rearview mirror and be able to construct a convincing story about how forward-looking and wily that Mr. Ballmer was. HP? Nobody really knows what they’re up to now that they don’t spy on their execs anymore. When everyone told EDS to buy foreign outsourcers, it shied away. Mr. Hurd got EDS and didn’t do what the pundits said EDS should either. Now that’s wacky! He’s a thought leader! Stuck to the guns that no one else would aim. The home choice, easier for spying, err keeping one’s own house in order.

Leaders are involved here, but there’s nothing particularly innovative taking place or being expressed. The context just sounds exciting because a lot of people copy the topics for their blogs. It’s socially-manipulated marketing buzz through a phenomenon of “popularity is commonality is repetition of the same old thing.”

Regarding #2, self-styled public tech-talkers (sometimes called pundits in our modern era) write what it takes to get someone else to call them innovative. After obtaining a critical mass of references to their innovative “thinking,” someone will call these tech-talkers, thought leaders. That’s the natural evolution. That’s their goal, and that’s their ticket aboard the ship. The annointed get people talking. Unfortunately, in most cases people called thought leaders don’t manage to eak out anything of real substance. The popularity of their thoughts (or at least what is revealed of those thoughts) stands on a wave of existing phenomena that are pretty well-recognized.

It may be argued that identifying and illuminating some sense and bright connections to our society or business or whatever concerning those existing phenomena is the key to the thought leadership activity, and I tend to agree, but it’s got to be done with sagacious verve. Unfortunately, typical thought leaders of the #2 species expose few fresh insights, opting to regurgitate popular blog regurgitations of popular peers. This is the dumb side the new Web-enabled social community. These thought leaders do not actually speak. Anyway, this species usually leads toward popular techmoney because if those of species #2 can pull it off, they’ve got a marketing base to make advertising collateral sound hip-ly insightful and pass it off as authentic thinking, perhaps even valuable. And that can be used to make a living, which leads me to…

Regarding #3, a cousin to species #2, often with interspecies naughtiness–this group either trades the reputation it hastily built as a #2 (at which point it usually ceases outputting anything truly insightful) or more likely it gets paid to manufacture a reputation, which it uses as a soapbox. Yes, this species gets paid by your favourite tech-co, its thoughts a direct extension of the tech-co’s business goals (some advice on how to get them aboard). They’re skilled in presentation. And you know, this profession is really taking off, nowadays you can take classes to learn how to become a thought leader (note the page features Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO, thought leadering away as she explains how to make a paper airplane fly for over 27 seconds–EDGY!). Gartner provides the textbooks. Must be a need for this course considering the statistic I cited at the beginning of this post, showing this year’s 14% drop.

Few people apply critical thinking to the mass of ideas, opinions, expositions, etc. Web-fungi. They don’t differentiate valuable insight or creative, applied thinking in published content. Not that the Web and related technologies are to blame, simply the ease in which everyone gets a chance to publish (and this is positive) means there is a lot of content repeated on a mass scale and masquerading as insight. The masquerade lulls people toward a complacency–be critical of that path. Many thought leaders are happy to applaud one another. I’ll pat your thoughts if you pat mine, just so long as we don’t have to have an actual conversation, as actual critical thinkers would be capable, nocompany and nobody would pay for that nonsense.

And that’s where the influx of thought leaders has caused the percentage drop. Tech thought leaders are not leading at all. They’re following their own self-styled popular culture of pronouncements doused with edgy lingo, which rests on a bed of dollars. Labeling someone a thought leader exposes one’s own intellectual laziness. Thinking, real thinking, is an activity that must be gripped intimately. Nowadays, the labeled thought leader is most commonly an instance cut from some greater mass phenomenon for the sake of allowing the larger digerati a chance to uniformly point their fingers, aim their keyboards, and otherwise particpate in the glorious light of following. One thought leader following another.

While walking in the woods, I noticed those critomaeyar flowers tended to grow, radiating out in lines. You could clearly see that a few would start growing near the base of a tree, taking advantage of its bold protection. After all, the tree had already taken this direction for growth and it’s hard to fault most trees for their long-term growth strategies. When the wind blew, bits of critomaeyar pollen floated into the air, swirling toward some lascivious destination or other. Those critomaeyar lines sure began to puzzle, so many of them grew in lines behind one another. One would hope the tree didn’t overshadow their exposure to sunlight.

P.S. to amateur code-breakers! I’ve embedded a number of letters in this post. If you’re able to identify them, follow them in the correct sequence and you’ll find that they spell out an ultra-special, self-referencing, recursive message.

“The Internet is making it easier than ever for consumers to research companies’ products and services and take their business to different companies when their expectations are not met, according to a recent study released today by Accenture.”

Accenture says that after surveying over 1,000 US consumers regarding customer loyalty. It turns out that 61 percent are disloyal because, with the Internet giving them access to information about competition, it’s easier to change service providers, another 50 percent are disloyal because the Internet lets them purchase on-line. So I may be stretching the “disloyal” factor a bit, but Accenture’s news is rather confusing–it refers, seemingly interchangeably, to both “service providers” and “companies” but Accenture doesn’t say what constitutes a service provider. While it might (with some qualifications) be possible to say every service provider is a company, not every company is a service provider. In what sense is this customer loyalty? Are they talking about Internet service providers? Or do they mean some more general sense of the word?

Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop their Woody fellow from generalizing on how “it’s more important than ever that companies get their customer relationships right…” He continues to mention a ripple effect from customers sharing their experiences with others and then, voila, the supporting stats

“…63 percent of respondents said they would complain directly to a company about a service or product problem, an even greater number (68 percent) said they would tell family and friends about their negative experiences with those companies…”

How does the Internet play into this? Accenture doesn’t tell us. The news release simply offers a few correlating points, and none stand up to a clear causal relationship. In the end Accenture talks about service providers again, even though the subtitle for the release is “Internet Challenges Companies to Re-think Customer Relationships,”

Shall we see how easy it is for Accenture to lose clients, err I mean service obtainers (I guess they’re who get services from providers) to a competitor? Here they are.

CA wants to put some focus back in its enterprise services management products. It’s introducing a slew of new solutions for dashboards, things to help service delivery, and make IT “magical” to the enterprise, with very very litle downtime. Hocus pocusy stuff, they think.

CEO John Swainson flips his flippers while plunging into the icy waters of customerland. He commented on CA’s nastyman past but wants all to know, employees (those that weren’t laid off in the Spring) have swapped their wifebeater uniforms for something friendlier. Granted, they can’t afford much more than a t-shirt, what with the expensive new excutives the company was forced to indulge, who must consider naming rights for major sporting stadiums–maybe branding things Unicenter Arena, with a CA teletubby-esque mascot (teletubbies seem friendly). No wait, execs, Swainson believes he’d be called “sleazy” for a move like that, come up with something else.

In Mark Harrington’s Newsday article, we get a Swainson quote:

Swainson said he’s been rewarded by a “buzz” that’s returning to the company and “seeing the excitement of the people as they realize we’re coming out of it.”

About time, don’t you hate coming off a good high?

“We all talk about how great Linux is”

That’s exactly it, with Agassi it’s just talk. Not an actual investment of effort, know-how, or even belief in any realized strengths. A key thing that always betrays corporate poseurs when they try to make their companies sound like they’re on to something good with open source strategies but don’t actually have any open source strategies (much less participate in its success or the energetic movement it fuels) is that they switch the topic to open standards. Open standards are the curent enterprise IT vendor’s euphemism for “we’re sitting on our thumbs” which is a rather dangerous posture for companies that rely on their employees’ typing ability to produce a little bread-and-butter. The article notes that

SAP is a supporter of open standards and of building innovation on top of a platform, but wants to limit the openness to added services…. The core SAP application will remain closed, but allow outside developers to interact with it through open standards.

Sitting behind this un-initiative is Agassi’s insight

“Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society…And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP.”

I’d like to ask Agassi to define the existance of IP and how he can invest in it. What makes us an IP-based society, Agassi? In a society based on IP, one might think a crucial point to fostering its vitality (as I suppose investment would desire) would be the greater generation and spread of intellectual substance. Yet the typical notion of “protecting IP,” among those that make such statements, is to not just limit access to IP, but rather control access to IP via a company (if the company is lucky, it gets itself a few hastily written laws passed to back it up).

It’s a well known phenomenon among those that labour with intellectual substances (if I may generalize to a quasi-equal level of fuzz, that Agassi does) that a lack of sharing these ideas rarely helps generate new ideas, so what exactly could you be protecting IP from, Agassi? As a final note, is this old-fashioned posture you’re committing SAP to, really the one that is going to magically let it access the long tail you lust after? Enjoy your daydreams, my friend, but make sure you protect ‘em real well. The rest of the world is a bit ill after having to listen to them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself… The Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005 is scheduled to be debated in a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on Thursday.

Scary stuff… What a bad idea to put rights on everything that happens within the tangible reality of society. Not to mention that the notion of forcing all analog media into digital formats is plain stupid. And that is of course how they’re attempting to enforce “rights”. Check out what Chief Technical Obfuscator, Brad Hunt (MPAA) says:

“Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites… In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection…and that’s why we need to drive this technology forward.”

He doublespeaks his way into making it sound like their plan is to help the “consumer” but the sole goal is to control the distribution of all meatspace recorded activity… if they can control it the can forcibly suck money of the populace to access it. These parasites, the MPAA–don’t they know parasites end up killing their hosts? How would it work?

The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself. Manufacturers would also be forbidden to develop a product that would remove those restrictions. Exectives at Veil Interactive, the developer of the VRAM technology at the heart of the legislation, described the technology as one that would not be noticeable by consumers.

A) This cannot work–it’s way hard to enforce and prevent circumvention of a forced analog-to-digital scheme
B) people have many legitimate reasons to prefer analog, a simple one being quality.
C) STUPID STUPID STUPID, to force all kinds of records into one ephemeral format that has no (and can have no) definite or proven ability to withstand millenia of preservation. If we can get anything from history it is because bits of it have been preserved and for all the wealth of knowledge and learning we gain from our past, we will definitely lose this by not permitting our present to be well documented and survive into the unimaginably distant future. To create an ongoing history that works to our benefit, we ought to have as many different modes of recorded preservation as possible–to insure against the fallibility of one. DRM is a mistake!

…technologies are becoming available that end users can use without the IT department’s knowledge, such as USB drives, inexpensive Web services and camera-equipped cell phones. These technologies can expose your organization to intentional or unintentional loss (i.e., theft or misplacement) of proprietary enterprise information.

Aside from the fact that the article doesn’t mention neural ticker-tape pods, she pretty much covers the important gadgets. I’ll say I’m a bit peeved that this is another article tossing around the phrase “intellectual property” when nobody has really ever proven that such a concept even makes sense much less can really exist. It’s as though the existence of something called “intellectual property” is now a given. Bull. It just adds up to more paranoia for the CIO to pressure the already over-burdened IT department.

On to my real point… An employee does not need a camera-equipped cell phone to capture and communicate sensitive internal company information, and you can bet there are reams of competitive intelligence-providing firms that have already successfully figured this out. I propose a better way to ensure your corporate intelligentsia stays put is to make your workplace a good one, filled with employees that feel comfortable in their employer’s trust and respect for their work. Foment a pleasant workplace in which employees don’t feel used, constantly scared for their jobs, or taken advantage of, and the standard employee will have little desire to betray you. I’m not saying don’t be careful to protect against viruses and trojans, etc. I’m saying enough with the ridiculous paranoia, especially every time a new gadget (digital or physical) worms its way into your fellows’ hearts or lustspots.

(P.S. I think I’ll make a new category so that I can start listing articles or press releases or whatnot that refer to “intellectual property” as a real given, without offering any justification for its use or existence.)

…The problem is that nobody could have built it before. To build the long tail before would have required building the whole infrastructure. We’re opening up the opportunity for people now to address the long tail with a significantly cheaper mode of distribution, if you will, or platforming. But to do it, you need a significant investment, and you need a ubiquitous platform underneath, and we’re the only player that has made the investment so far.

He continues to share how SAP is the only company among IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, to develop something called an applistructure (combination infrastructure with applications), and how SAP is trying to open itself up to community processes. The point being, if I understand correctly, that SAP will ask the multitude of lonely little guys to suck its big schwanz. Seems SAP’s caught on to the notion that there’s money to be had if it can just get its software to address the unique special needs of a really vast range of small potential clients. This of course, is talk, in relation to the notion put forward by Chris Anderson, in his article, The Long Tail. But it’s something else as well. You see Agassi, in an effort to hype SAP’s hip quotient, is posturing about community. He’s connected (probably rightly so) an idea of how the immensely varied and wide-ranging open source community might address the problem of the long tail. Unfortunately SAP is one of the many companies that mostly pays lip service to open source models, tries to make itself sound like it’s on the band wagon but really isn’t. Let’s get specific.

Look at open source, for example… Most customers… gain is innovation by community. They gain the ability for thousands of innovators to leverage that same core, and build extensions to that core. And then they can combine the core, and by joint central maintenance of that core, they get the value of faster growth.

So SAP thinks it can do the same thing without subscribing to the Free/Libre or open source ideologies/practices/etc. Here is the give-away. Agassi like every corporate poseur, extolls the virtue of open source then immediately says his company will reap the same rewards by being “open” but not open source.

If you look at where SAP is today, we’re basically saying that we have a core that is extremely strong. And what we’re doing now is opening it up. We’re creating—not a software service, but a software interface and services. And the interface level is the most important thing.

See? He just smoothely switches the subject by using the word “open” by itself and saying how the company will let other people work with it. No, in fact the company retain’s strict controls, which fly in the face of Free software ideology. Be wary of this doublespeak strategy, a lot of companies are using it. It’s an, if A is A, then A is A that SAP, in its inability to de-stodgify, will be unable to attract the unique suckers of its potential johnpool. Its unexpected competitors are the ones that will get it–providing a real pounding to poor, misunderstood, Pareto.

The Internet is great for a lot of stuff and maybe it has its place for many types of applications, but STOP WITH THE ON-LINE app hope already. Recreating an entire office suite as a Web-based app, really has dubious merit. It was accomplished rather well a long time ago (ThinkFree Office), it’s not new, and it sorta’ works well, but sorta’ not well enough when you can just download the fantastic, flyingfish of feature fidelity, OpenOffice.org. People keep saying, year after year, that all these apps ought to be web-based. But why? It’s not the best solution for everything. How many musicians are going find their specialized music composition, sound sculpting, and mixing apps to be tied to a flaky (even if it is up 99.9% of the time on Linux servers, the individual’s Internet connection may not be) web site? How about your company’s graphic designer? Is it useful to have a web-based Gimp (or Photoshop or Flash design app?) Not now… but “maybe someday” is often the response.

It’s not that straight-forward and most of the time pure and totalitarian web-based proponents (though unclear in what they want) they mostly are speaking about just business apps (so forget the musician mentioned above). One of the greatest things about the personal computer is how it opened up so many different new avenues of possibility, empowing individuals (in marketing-speak that is) for his/her own empowerment at creativity and DIYness (that’s do-it-yourselfness if you never experienced punk-rock in your youth). Desktop publish! Personal accounting! Logo design! (and that’s just part of what made-over the business world). How about the many other things available to the morays of personal eels (userland)? Print your own greeting card, remix your favourite song? What I’m saying is, the mandate to make everything web-based is based in great potential but in the unintelligent babblehead approach (à la Ellison NC-style) is possibly an even bigger threat to freedom if the computer manufacturers go along with that idea, than proprietary software was when the manufacturers agreed, both in writing and deed, to slather the MS joybulb.

Where is the Free Software Foundation? Because surely, a combination of network-only computers spreading forth to adopt the web-only based apps means users losing their freedom to do what they want with their computers. That is the true problem with pure Web apps. But that’s overstating it… that’s an overhyped dystopic vision that surely won’t happen. Though, I wouldn’t mind choice, innovative web-apps existing alongside full PC-installed ones, and that is where Google/Sun would be better served and can better serve you and I.

There’s a wealth of useful things I could envision doing with an OpenOffice.org suite, which seemlessly integrated its lookup, spellcheck, fact-checking, translation (CAT and trans memories), STORAGE, e-mail, mail-merge, RSS stat/analysis aggregation, real time business intelligence, and such with all the Google networked capabilities (gmail, search, etc.). That would be useful, and it would be more in-line with using personal computers to the best advantage and the web to an even better advantage, without eliminating personal freedom. Network computing is just a stupid idea by itself but integrated with the PC, it’s a great thing.

Google and Sun are smart. Their release caught a lot of attention, but gave dead dry ostrich bones to the pressanalyst jackals.

(PS: what’s with the Java and Google toolbar? Nothing exciting there, it’s a nothing announcement… all it will do is maybe generate a bit more traffic for Google, and Google buys a few more Sun servers, big deal–something else in the works but an ominous force stopped Schmidt/McNealy from talking)

an individual’s potential influence on the market due to recent management changes, product line restructuring, or a merger or acquisition.

Sage has done its share of acquiring, in fact it recently restructured its product line to take some of that into account, but also to clink the crystal of its corporate name change from Best to Sage. The one thing I find curious is how Sage PR spins this little badge of net honour, Sage titled the press release

Sage Software Receives Multiple Market Leadership Awards For Entire CRM Product Portfolio And CEO’s Strategic Vision

What part of the Sage acquisitions was visionary? Maybe it wasn’t the buying so much as the naming! After all, naming is an important process… even since the beginning of Christian time. Is “influential” really the same as “visionary?” Wise guy, that Verni, wise.

Labeled a disruptive technology, it’s changing the landscape of enterprise software development, distribution, and consumption. Open source software is grounded in the strength of its communities. This report and interview series examine how to engage and successfully maintain such communities.

I’d like to start by pointing out, the community, is kind of creepy. Everytime I read an article about Free or Open Source software, I see the community mentioned. Nowadays I can’t read that phrase without hearing some sort of dark and foreboding music in the background, like something out of an early black and white film. Or maybe it’s the chant of the circus freaks in Tod Browning’s aptly title film, Freaks, endlessly repeating “Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, We will make her one of us.”

Fortunately there is meaning behind this open source community. It’s not simply propaganda and that’s why I think this is an interesting read. Instead of just chanting over and over, the community, it attempts to explain what this community is and it does so with insight into how it’s changing things in the enterprise software industry. Something most community-chanting articles miss. Especially pertinent is at the end of the article, when the author points out how it’s the community that is the really significant thing about the whole open source software phenomenon. Things are changing, disrupting they say, so we’d better not pout, and we’d better not give naughty vendors the time of day when they tell us they’ll give us the source code under a non-disclosure agreement.

Read on for the next few days, he promises interviews with well-known community leaders Jeff Bates (from Slashdot), Karl Fogel (on the development end of things from the Subversion project), and Louis Suárez-Potts, who heads-up the OpenOffice.org project. All of whom, I’d expect have interesting points to make and the experience to back it up.

“A stroll down memory lane reminds us of terms like ‘stickiness,’ ‘eyeballs’ and ‘personalization’ that once captured the essence of articles about what it takes to be successful on the Web. However, even as we look back at 10 years of growth, many analysts have one eye on the future and they are saying, we’ve got a long way to go.”

I agree that we’ll see a lot of change and innovation in the e-commerce domain, but I disagree with the feeling that there is a long way to go.

LeClaire notes how Forrester research has figured on-line sales account for about 12 percent of retail sales. Whether that number is cozy for those people purveying via the popular domain of yesteryear’s phreaks is one thing. I’ll bet they believe there is always room for improvement. Why mention phreaks? This is about the evolution of e-commerce, we ought to start at the genesis. Remember the days when a kid in Holland could make a phree phone call to order himself a shiny new laptop computer with a borrowed credit card number? And have it delivered? Where did he get credit card number? A BBS. Back then, the BBSes couldn’t help much for customer relationship management, nor could they support much in the way of predictive customer behaviours, but they offered a personalization feature or two (like personalized colors, usernames/handles, and e-mail). Reflect on that.

The on-line experience has evolved but saying it has a long way to go, implies its going somewhere, it has an end. I don’t mean an end to buying on-line but an end to the evolution of the on-line experience. Could it be that this experience can reach a saturation point in terms of ease-of-use, availability, accessibility, and effectiveness? Forrester’s predictions for on-line retail extend to 2010, is that our end-point?

In fact, let’s make a full circle back to the phone arena (our phreaking phriends I mentioned above) Ms. LeClaire points out the rapidly expanding cellphone consumption services that hook in with our Web-based e-commerce. The “E” is for electronic after all and all that is electronic will be inter-netted. So forget about feeling like there is an evolutionary end, that’s not the question on which we should be inquiring. Instead think about the what will happen in the e-commerce expansion as we move into access points and methodologies currently unheard of. The phone is as good as conquered.

Based on present trends, the use of BI will become so widespread that every desktop will have a BI icon. BI will become an integral part of an enterprise’s information system and, like word processing software, BI will be used by almost all end users, business users, and government officials to gauge whether their strategies are aligned with their companies’ overall strategic plan.

This is quite a statement. Imagine the coming office desktop, bundled not only with word processing, spreadsheets, project management, web and e-mail, and presentation apps, but also BI tools, dashboards, etc. I like the idea, why not keep all employees on their toes with the directional health of a business as it happens? Let them do their jobs and adjust their activities as a reflex to the company’s spinal tingling.

The author goes on to define business intelligence in all its glory and differentiates it from specialized analytics systems. I question his use of “artificial business intelligence” as a new term–that is perhaps not the most fruitful result of a BI & AI (artificial intelligence) mating. Nevertheless there is a lot of overview for the BI neophyte, which it seems many will find useful provided Zaman’s prediction proves correct.