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So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?
billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
I think the companies that bought into the Internet era blitz in the 90's, all thought there was a magic bullet that could rocket them to the future. The problem is, that they, like everyone else, were duped into buying hype that was based around nothing more than shallow promises of a better today.
The jargon coming from HP, is to try and market to company types with buying power, to give them a new slogan or saying that could be used to grab onto and use in the office, so that they don't have to do any work.
Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon captures the reality of what's going on today. Executives would rather appear to be working, than actually working, so they invent new descriptions of what they are doing that sound really busy!
I think the best slogan is hard work, but nobody likes hard work, unless someone else is doing it.
From the article: "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
Translation: We know your business operates in something called time. Time is money. We want money, so therefore we will trade you your own time for money. We accomplish this by selling you your own time back, but we change it to something called real-time. Or ideally I have no idea what those geeks in research have come up with and it's not my job to know, so I'll just make something up and hope you bite. Besides, none of the marketing based people will understand what they came up with anyway, so who cares?
HP funds the SCO Roadshow and they are also giving 24/7 support to Linux.
Yes, HP can be confusing sometimes
They're selling plus signs, in fact they're selling a whole bunch of plus signs. They seem to sell them in groups. they can catch criminals and make a guy get home from the moon.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
That said, check out this gem:
He should never have needed to ask that twice. HP's response was clear to anyone who's been struggling to cultivate dynamic convergence in their disintermediate, yet robust, technologies.
I work IT for one of the lower-end Fortune 500 companies (I won't mention any names, but we're the 2nd largest manufacturer of Internet-enabled personal sanitation devices in the U.S.), and we're seriously looking at HP's AE technology for our next round of upgrades. I am so tired of having to re-virtualize all our front-end functionalities every time the boss-man wants to streamline our synergistic e-services. Now, if I simply had a frictionless front-end action-item, right there in my real-time vortal (vertical portal) I'd be made.
Anyway, Slashdotters, don't believe this CNET FUD. I think AE definitely has the potential to recontextualize the debate on revolutionary mindshare schemas.
Sales people don't need to know much about the product. Just have them tell PHB managers that it's enterprise stuff that will make your business "efficient" and "faster", and they'll roll in the commissions.
Ungrateful louts, these managers.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.
This is exactly the kind of marketing power they want. They want those jingles and catch phrases to stick in your head.
MY SECRET DIARIES
On a related note, Dvorak (love him or hate him) has an recent column piece at PCMag where he rants about the poor quality of business press.
He recommends seeking out non-USA articles as he feels they tend to be more critical.
He must have gone to college with this consultant.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The funny thing is that probably all of those 5 are true... :)
The Tlog - a technology blog
That said, I think utility computing is applicable only to a narrow market so far. You need compatability between various applications to host them within a single environment that shares data center resources. When I look around my company (a $1.5 billion worldwide manufacturer), for example, I see dozens of applications on several different operating systems at various versions. How does utility computing address such a heterogeneous environment?
About the only time she made sense was at the very end:
How true...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
So basically adaptive computing is just about managing IT resources. What differentiates it is that HP apparently doesn't have a vested interest in any specific technology (year right). They charge you for the privilege of having them tell you how to manage your IT department. I suppose if you can't find good people than it would be worth it, but in this economy?
HP cyber analyser tool
What are they trying to sell?
Tiny Flying Robots
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: We proudly adapt to the needs of our enterprise: namely, the CEO, the CIO, and our board members. Screw the rest of the employees and the customers. Aside from that, we really have no idea what the heck we're talking about. We need to make up big words in long sententces to justify our existence in the company. This is the same mindset that allowed us to have fantastic ideas like merging with Compaq, laying off thousands of employees, while giving Capellas the goodbye gift that one can only dream about.
Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
A: The special sauce is no different than what you find in Burger King. We sit around all day long whacking off in an effort to come up with this sh--.
Q: Can't you get that by going to any reputable company out there? Sun, IBM--that's what they're about. Am I missing something here?
A: Nope. They're all the same formula. Same sauce. Right down to the last drop.
Why do they let people like this run companies, or even speak? I mean christ, MS APIs are more well-understood than that buzzword soup.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Except they didn't even make it!
.Net or JSEE without bias, she says.
.Net. You've still got to write it. You've still got to implement the business logic. They'll just help you figure out how to layer your hardware and your apps, I suppose. Stuff you probably should have learned in school.
She's talking about selling advice, basicly. They'll recommend stuff, and they're not tied down to any one technology, she says. I'm sure they'll recommend HP hardware, but they'll also recommend
It sounds like a shift towards a consulting/service business model as hardware becomes a commodity. They're trying to package it like it's a Product, but when questioned, they have to say it's a Goal or a Mindset or a Process.
It's advice. It's probably biased. And while it's probably better than what you'd get from a dozen O'reilly books at a tenth of a percent of the cost, it's not a magic box that you plug in so no one has to code anymore. It's not a secret technology that lets you turn a dial from '5 day delay' to '1 minute delay.' It's JSEE or
I swear, this has become almost an urban legend on Slashdot. Ha, ha, .NET is vaporware and doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we get it.
Of course, while I sit here developing both web-based and thick client applications and architecture using the .NET platform, I wonder why there has to be so much confusion about what .NET is. Whenever I get into a discussion about .NET with the Slashbots, I usually find that they have precisely zero exprience with it.
So just remember that while you are chuckling in your parent's basement about not understanding the .NET platform, there are people out here using it to create software (and God forbid, making money too!)
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I know parrots who could explain things better.
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business.
So what is it?
It's a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to their businesses. The secret is when you link the business processes together to your IT gear, then you can automatically roll those changes through and respond.
Do you feel the message is unclear or needs rethinking?
I disagree that it was unclear. Adaptive Enterprise defines an entity where a company will be able to dynamically readjust to changes that affect its business
Is outsourcing part of AE?
Our strategy is to let you become a company that responds in real time to these changes; the secret is linking together the business processes to the resources.
What's required?
You have to have the inherent capability to respond quickly to any change that affects your business.
I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business.
That's great but what if you opperate in fake time?
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
... 'cause I did, and now suffer from severe buzzword poisoning.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
After reading the linked article, it would appear that this "product" is nothing more than a quick way for HP to place all of its products throughout a company. The Adaptive Computing product itself is nothing but vapourware, a cloud of smoke.
While HP does have some excellent products at their displosal, it just does not seem proper or accountable to create a "product" out of thin air.
Adaptive Computing is obviously a new method of getting HP's foot in the door, which would then lead to every IT component being from HP's stock or products.
Perhaps HP should use a more "Adaptive" name like HP Adaptive Business Solutions.
-
I may lack whatever gene it is that helps to understand this double-think, or it's because I'm a programmer and it's my life to speak clearly and not use little game words like "the secret sauce we bring to the table" or other BS.
Anyway, after reading it over and over, I figured it out -- it came to me in a flash:
HP's business is *not* to help other companies dynamically hoo-ha to the ho-hum of a real-time somethingorother. Or whatever in god's name that robot was saying.
Instead, HP's business is to bilk you out of your money while seducing you with double speak.
Thank you.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
The slashdot article makes it sound pretty bad, and admittedly c|net doesn't make it look great (honestly I thought this was a case of a bad interviewer, not a good one). However, this is not really that bad.
AE is more just a term to associate with a different way of looking at the enterprise. While, it is not terribly different from what went on before, it is an evolutionary change. As the HP VP says, it's not a product or a technology, just a way of looking at using technology in an Enterprise.
I can tell you in the Enterprise space 10 years ago, folks used to get excited about being able to add new products to their IT systems within 6 months (I kid you not). The notion of AE is that it should be measured in days. I'm sure some day it'll be down to hours or even minutes.
Traditional Enterprise systems were increadibly static and rigid, and over time they are evolving to be much more dynamic and malleable. While this is nothing new to tech folks like us, it's a bit of a wake up call to the business folks who are just getting used to implications of how to mix business and IT based on how things were 5 years ago.
Again as the VP says, it's not that you can't work towards AE without HP. You can go to anybody for it. His claims about HP's uniqueness are another story (let's face it, all that can be unique when you're talking about providing expertise to execute on an abstract busines strategy is the brand name, and the trust/confidence associated with it).
So yeah, on one hand it is marketing BS, but on the other hand you need a marketing message in order to communicate to business folks how IT capabilities have evolved and how they can go beyond the existing set of limitations they have come to expect of IT.
sigs are a waste of space
but does it run on Windows?
-... ---
This stuff works. I see it everyday! I'm a consultant for a medium sized firm and the client just simply amazes me. We in the trenches do an exceptional job despite having idiot boss and various other counter productive policies. My boss is a freaking walking talking cliche. He's always saying the stupest stuff you've ever heard but the client loves it and usually just says "Can you get that in before the end of fiscal?" of course he always says we can but we rarely do. They never learn we could tell them cosmic rays are interfering with our server's brains so we'll need new ones and they'd pay up. This is widespread and this is how IBM, HP, MS, and SCO make their money.
Disclaimer: I was recently laid off as my position was outsourced to HP.
First, I don't think that the VP ever really answered the questions that were asked. I think the whole point behind trying to sell the Adaptive Enterprise is that it is not something you can clearly define. I'd hate to actually do contract negotiations with them as I'm sure both parties will have different thoughts on what is covered under HP services.
The whole line about being able to dynamically restructure your IT resources to me means HP can help you figure out how to axe 1/3rd of your workforce and still "adapt" to your business needs. As the interviewer pointed out, aligning IT with your business it nothing new. Hiring outside consultants to help do it is nothing new.
It begs the question, what is new about adaptive enterprise? Answer: Nothing. I don't see any proof that it is anything more than another marketing strategy designed to sell billable hours and support/consulting contracts.
If I say something is unclear, generally, I mean "It is unclear to me." I believe that's true of, oh, everyone, when they say that something is unclear.
So, I feel obliged to ponder: How do YOU disagree with my opinion that something is unclear?
Especially when I'm interviewing you saying, in essence, "What the heck is this about?"
I guess I just hate marketing people.
I don't consider myself a .NET guru, but the team I'm working with have tried to consider all options and constantly question our approach to make sure we're not mis-using the technology. For the most part, it is Microsoft's replacement for Java, with very little real benefit aside from syntactic sugar and programming shortcuts.
A pirate ("Arr, we'll return on yer investment, matey, just hand over the doubloons...")
A Parrot ("Squawk! Polly wants leverage, polly wants synergies leveraged, squawk!"
A dog trainer ("Sit, marketing rep! Now, demonstrate CRM, demonstrate CR- SIT! bad rep! Shame on you!")
Mr. Hainey from Green Acres ( "I bet you'll be wantin' one o' these here market share segments, to go with that product, won'cha?")
Krusty the Clown ("Hey hey!! Now 'does not cause instant bankruptcy' in every box!")
Dr. Evil ("I'll give you ten minutes to amuse me. Begin your presentation....NOW.")
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
PHBs might want to consider the fact that many of HP's people have been laid off and outsourced to India. The new people in India might be very clever, but they started last month and don't know what's going on yet.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
My favorite cliche is 'action item'. Lets have a meeting, set a time table, and come up with a list of 'action items'.
Some people would rather talk than work - that's the only explanation.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
They're trying to sell you yummy steak sauce, duh!
(How the heck was this modded as flamebait?)
The ingredients are listed on the side of the bottle, but the recipe isn't- does this mean it qualifies as open sauce? Would Richard Stallman approve, or should we design our own sauce and post the recipe all over Usenet?
Then again, he mentions something about secret sauce halfway down, but tells us what it is. But not what's in it. Hmmmmmmmm....
BTW, for anyone in the United Kingdom, clicking on that link and seeing that mockney p***k Jamie Oliver halfway down is roughly on a par with clicking on a Goatse link.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I for one am glad someone brought this issue forward as I believe it accurately represents the current state of the "enterprise" computing industry. I've witnessed first hand (though not necessarily from HP) endless presentations of vague marketing speak - selling ideas rather than actual product. Further digging only reveals more double speak, even from those supposedly providing technical support. In the end, no one knows what it is they're evaluating and what's worse it comes at us from all fronts, not just from one company. It's an excruciating process which no one understands, and it tells me just how far the industry has fallen in the past few years. The investment in product just doesn't appear to be there anymore and the sales teams are left with regurgitating meaningless marketing speak wrapped around some re-branded product "acquired" sometime last year.
www.brownsauce.org
...is HP sauce. Today bacon, tomorrow ebusiness.
Reads like the old Eliza program, except the latter was more adaptive and dynamic.
If HP's best effort, they are doomed.
I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
Forget about .net. Get this guy to interview Darl.
The utility computing aspects of the 'adaptive enterprise' are quite real and you can buy it today in the form of the HP Utility Data Center. In a word, UDC is about infrastructure automation - a data center in which you can rapidly deploy (and redeploy) servers and services with no hands-on work, and not requiring you to have a huge, specialized support staff.
To really have an adaptive enterprise, you need more things layered on top of infrastructure automation, but it is a key building block. Other vendors like Sun and IBM are selling this type of concept, but I think you'll find that HP has more actual products than the competition. HP's marketing does stink though.
Adaptive Enterprise.....as explained by the .NET marketing team!
Basically what HP is trying to sell is grid computing, as best as I can interpret this. Nothing new, just another heavyweight moving in to this 'technology of the future' area.:-P
She says "Whether it's called utility or grid or any of the words that are used, I think the next 10 years will be typified by the linkage of business processes to your IT resources and dynamically reallocating--I like to say it's the automatic supply and demand matching of your computing resources. So they become much more resilient and adaptable." Also, "We're entering a new decade of computing--whatever it is called. All it means is that you will use IT resources in the same way that you use a utility like a light. You take what you use. You don't have a generator at your house; there's a power grid somewhere else and you tap into it."
Essentially that's what she's trying to say, if you cut out all of the jargon.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
It's about time the computer media started holding people's feet to the fire for puking up sylable soup instead of answers. Since I got my first copy of Byte and PC World back in the 80s I've been amazed by how easy the media go on companies:
* They actually buy into stupid products like MS Bob, Lotus Jazz and the internet appliance doomed to failure of the week. Then they lament the product's demise as being ahead of it's time or too powerfull.
* They let executives off the hook way too easy:
Reporter: what does your e-storagewizard.com professional do?
Exec:It enables your information technology team to exploits synergies in your networked digital storage infrastructure leveraging economies of scale to deliver a competitive advantage and superior return on investment.
Reporter: What's your sales outlook for next year?
Product shootouts tested by _______mag labs are always a crock.
Finally, they don't report on things that really would help IT pros. I would love to see an article that actually warned that buying a crappy enterprise software app was bad for your career:
DO NOT BUY ____________
After _________mag labs testing, we have determined that _________, ________'s flagship enterprise package is rife with bugs, security liabilites and flat-out does not work as billed. In fact last year 10 out of 15 CxOs who bought _______ were canned.
One can hope.
-- $G
This is the stuff..
...like hugh load of cum onto your fucked brain...
where books are written but never read...
where speeches are given but never heard...
business speech...
That's right. HP has invested 2.5 billion in R&D of that "Adaptive Enterprise", and all they came up with is a buzzword-spewing VP.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
This looks like it came directly from the Dilbert mission statement generator.
HP: "Blah blah blah"
Cnet:"Look you weenie, we all know you people talk in marketspeak. What are you REALLY saying you pathetic looooooser?"
SWISH! ZOOM! KAPOW! BUY IBM DB2 PRODUCTS!
HP:"Uh, what was that?"
Cnet:"Nothing, you shmuck."
Pay no attention to the IBM flash ads(or, for that matter, that IBM advertises with Slashdot etc.) Wouldn't it be nice if technical journals held to the same standards as newspapers with regards to journalistic integrity? Then again, i suppose it would be nice if people who wrote technical articles were actually journalists, instead of mystery consultants who have no qualifications except that they claim to know something about technology and list "technical writer" on their resume...
Please help metamoderate.
...the guy was trolling...right? Right?
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: Something HP sells that costs lots of money.
That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
HP sells it, and not some other company.
Can't you get that by going to any reputable company out there? Sun, IBM--that's what they're about. Am I missing something here?
Hellooooo....HP sells it - you can't get it from anyone else.
So what is it?
Something HP sells that costs lots of money.
So how is that any different from what system integrators are doing? When an EDS goes into a company, they presumably are meeting the business needs of the client.
Hellllooooo....As I mentioned before, HP sells it, not EDS.
Well, not necessarily. An EDS is as much a system integrator as an outsourcer. The system integration part is what I think I'm hearing from you. That HP will make things work together--the business processes, the technology.
Yes, that's correct, HP sells it, not EDS. EDS also kicks puppies.
There still seems to be confusion surrounding the topic. At the Gartner conference last month, some IT attendees said they still say they didn't understand what Carly Fiorina wanted to convey with HP's Adaptive Enterprise. Do you feel the message is unclear or needs rethinking?
I disagree that it was unclear. To reiterate, HP sells it and it's expensive. It does everything you need.
But aren't Sun and IBM doing that to make that happen? And IBM and Sun are investing a lot of money to make sure their software works with their respective utility computing programs. What are you doing besides saying we'll sit down with you and work on it?
IBM and Sun also kick puppies.
Is outsourcing part of AE?
It can be, if you want it to be, and you pay us alot of money. Otherwise, no.
In the broadest definition it just sounds as if this is another form of services business where you want to make money. You're not selling new hardware or software--it's services.
Whatever.....
But that's still not most people's experience with computing.
That's correct. Lots of people have not been giving us money. We want to fix that.
What's required?
Giving us money.
But again, how does that differ from what's been around?
The money is going to us, and not someone else.
So what's the so-called paradigm shift?
See previous response.
But hasn't that always been the goal?
For other companies, not us.
But pardon me, that's been talked about for more than a decade and a half--literally. The other thing is that you talk about overprovisioning--but with the cost of hardware coming down, is that still so much of a big deal? That is, you buy a $10,000 server whereas 10 years ago that would have cost $250,000 apiece?
It's new in the case where people were spending on equipment, and now we needed to find another way to make money.
Is there culpability on the vendors' part because most of the big IT providers were like the proverbial fox guarding the hen house? They had product arms and services arms, and they were the ones pushing the big multimillion-dollar deals.
Ohhhh noooooo, it's clearly the CIO who should be fired. Not the consultants. Especially if they are from HP.
In talking with companies that offer these big-sounding initiatives, it sounds as if there's an assumption that IT is in danger of being overwhelmed and that they don't know how to build flexibility into their systems.
Absolutely, it's time to panic.
So what does that suggest for the role of CIO in deciding upon IT projects?
They should buy something HP sells that costs lots of money.
HP is slowly turning into a marketing company. I just got one of their holiday brochures and, boy, is it pretty.
:)
Aside: Any guesses as to why the press gives them so many free rides? I'd sound off, but it's a very sensitive topic.
The new HP is a joke.
I miss old JetDirect. It would find the printers on your network you can mange them w/o them being tied to central server, etc... It was great technology.
Now you have to install web server on your local machine or server. Its a joke. Web enabled printing is fine. But, so things just worked before. Keep it simple stupid.
thanks to Carly. Her new corporate jets and her new no-product all-buzzword style of management. She is only interested in increasing her own compensation, not what is best for the company and their workers.
Mr Gates? We cannot see past the choices we don't understand. Ergo, can you see past the choice of going to a linux friendly site to spew your hatred for linux?
I'd mod you up if I was a moderator today. Thanks for this post. .NET is the biggest improvement in coding technology since we went OO IMHO. Admittedly, MS has done a poor job of explaining it to the masses, but ANY programmer should realize within a few minutes of using it that it does everything Java was supposed to do, but failed at and a lot more. It is the tits right now. And the 2.0 spec is even better.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
That vice presidents in charge of whatever can't speak intelligently unless they're barfing up quotes from their own full-page ads in InformationWeek? Who the hell didn't already know that?
I listened to the Carly Fiorina webcast on Adaptive Enterprise. Her response to every question about it was like "In the future, everyting will be dynamic and virtual".
Seriously, what the fuck does that mean?
Instead of all of this unintelligble claptrap, HP needs to devote a decent amount of concentration to their Enterprise systems division, and make some hard choices.
HP is no longer saying "bet the company" on Itanium, but currently HP-UX and VMS are totally wagered on Intel's unproven architecture.
The Alpha base has been easy pickings for Solaris and Linux, and the rest of the HP Enterprise customer base is watching as HP "burns the boats" and our systems investments vaporize.
I realize that HP believes it has sound reasons for sending PA-RISC and Alpha to sleep with the fishes, but there is currently no backup for these OS environments if Itanium fails (which looks likely).
You can't bring back the dead, but HP needs to immediately and publicly port HP-UX and VMS to the AMD Opteron, and let the customers determine which architecture will survive.
HP has been willing to engage AMD in the PC market for mostly no good purpose (the margins on these products are razor thin). If HP has braved Intel's wrath for this useless gesture, then HP should take a risk that really counts and let the market decide the fate of Itanium vs. Opteron.
HP, the choice is yours, adapt or die.
I'm not sure if it "links business processes together", but it does get quite sticky if you dont clear it up prompty when it spills.
The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.
While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.
The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.
Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.
If you ask me, it sounds like .Net all over again. What the hell was .Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.
And that's a problem for HP.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I think I am now dumber having read that interview. Nowhere in that whole page did she say anything resembling a real thought. If I read something about "linking your business practices to your IT" again, I think I would have gone totally zombie.
Maybe that's the plan. Subliminal hypnosis. Only explanation for a CTO giving any money to HP for this pile of BS.
Oh, well, back to my own synergistic business initiatives linking IT to the customer base in a proactive fashion.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
That lack of focus explains a lot. No wonder they are having difficulty selling these
Stick Men
Recently at my company we tried to contact HP for more KVM cables for our KVM switch. This is an "older" HP product. Talk about a joke trying to get the product.
Upon contact support, the only number findable on the website I was transfered to parts and spoke with someone thier. After giving the part number to the lady, she said "I don't know if we still make that product." How can the company not know if they make something anything more. It took her almost a half-hour to try and find the product or the replacement product. I finally asked her if this was because of the merger between HP and Compaq. She said yes, that it is a nightmare in the parts department because no one knows when or if they cancel a product.
I don't understand how they can run a business when no one knows what is happening in the parts department
I for one welcome our new adaptive overlords.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
HP will be entering the ERP consulting market. Possibly with their own product, but not neccesarily.
are they selling anything else in the meantime?
You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.
Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.
He's since been fired.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
in today's landscape, being able to work with the latest buzz-compliant languages and solutions is absolutely key to being competitive.
pointy-haired bosses will be wooed by clever commercials to spend money on solutions using the latest woodad.
sure, you can get a job programming foxpro. there's a guy down the hall from me that is a foxpro guru.
but... if you're a contract programmer, you can't sit on ancient tech. otherwise you'll get paid crap and be forced to take lame contracts.
at least working with The Next Big Thing (tm) gives you choices.
m.
Ink.
After reading that interview, I feel it's appropriate to quote Mr. T: "Ain't got TIME fo no JIBBA JABBA!"
Except that the Senior VP from HP in the article is a woman. Of course, C|Net certainly buried that by only putting her name+picture in the non-print version of the article and not using her name anywhere in print(I smell something foul here, but anyway).
Look on the bright side, at least you didn't call -Fiorina- a man(she's probably the best known female executive in the world today aside from maybe Oprah or Martha Stewart. Not that it's a good thing though- she's somewhat regarded as slightly off her rocker after the whole merger thing- talk about fanatical).
Please help metamoderate.
"In the future, everything will change and won't really exist".
HTH, HAND,
--
*Art
I have given up on getting any info out of marketting people.
"Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak" would make sense to anybody. It might even make sense to a learned-by-doing marketer. However if the person has an MBA and has worked in an industry for a few years their ability to produce a non-fluffy reply disappears.
I think the inherent problem is that these people feel insecure about saying what they they actually think or how they feel on a subject. Years of making things look pretty and downplaying any flaws make them unable to give an opinion about anything half-way important.
I'm taking some business courses as an option to my CSC degree. It's quite frustrating. Everytime I ask a marketing person a direct question(about anything), they avoid it. They all give me a bunch of fluf and top it up with a salesman's smile. It's bloody annoying and it doesn't even seem that they do it to me on purpose.
I said this two years ago when I first heard about the HP Compaq merger. HP has strengths that Compaq could not make better (calculators, printing, medical and engineering diagnostic tools come to mind).
These companies also had severe weaknesses (desktop PCs and x86 servers) that the merger only made worse. Can anyone point to a product or service from either company that became stronger/better with the merger?
Instead of spewing buzzwords, this VP should step aside and let engineers run HP the way it was run in the past. Carly and Co. are so fixated on the boring low-margin businesses (PC based stuff) that they are ruining the company. It happened to SGI and now it's happening to HPQ. Stay away from this company while Carly and Co. are running it. They can't beat Dell or IBM.
> I can tell you in the Enterprise space 10 years > ago, folks used to get excited about being able to > add new products to their IT systems within 6 > months (I kid you not). The notion of AE is that > it should be measured in days. I'm sure some day > it'll be down to hours or even minutes. apt-get install new-program
Calling the emporer naked... that's got to be a high risk career strategy for a "mainstream" tech journalist. Big up your chest mate!
Regrettably when yyou actually want to convert that to cash terms, the result is zero, hense the dot bomb economy. Fiorina should stick to selling ink.
See my journal, I write things there
That post was just a bunch of PHB marketing-speak. Microsoft is behind it.
I hate to spring to the defense of Big Corporations, but it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively:
:)
"I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
My translation: AE is (an expensive product which helps companies setup) a business strategy under which trends trigger actions. The use of 'business strategy' sounds meaningless, but it's actually two words which imply two paragraphs. 'Strategy' in this case is an overloaded term referring to a collection of tools, policies, and proceedures.
The use of 'real time' in business means something very different from its meaning in computer science. It means 'today' instead of 'eventually'. I work for a large media company with an animal for a mascot, and it takes us years to respond to changes in the marketplace. Most of our innertia is rooted in size, conservative management, and fear of risk. However, if we had a system of automation which identified potentially interesting changes in the marketplace, especially in merchandising, it could save us a lot of money.
For example, how much should we invest in online sales, and how much in more traditional sales? We make money from both, now, so it's a very serious question. A missed sale is a lost sale, but there's no point in trying to extract blood from a turnip. We have people who try to figure out where the tastiest blood is, but they are limited by their tools and proceedures. This AE might actually be just the thing they need.
I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms, l33t, tech talk and other not-quite-english that we use. "We aggregate packet-based transactions, over-selling a large pipe to small nodes who could collectively saturate that pipe, but in practice don't" would mean nothing to a marketing type, but to an ISP sysadmin it's her raison d'etre.
If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people. Their protocols may be bad, but it works for them, and marketing types don't have firmware upgrades, so we need to learn to speak their protocols if we hope to route any traffic through them, or to comandeer them for our noble purposes.
It was Timothy this time, but it did sound like one of Michael's stupid comments in there.
Is there some gang moderation abuse going on here or what?
Their Adaptive Enterprise technology is certainly impressive.
..."proven TCO and ROI," a phrase designed for the acronymically inept. You can perhaps prove return on investment (if something repeatedly tends to pay for itself), but isn't total cost of ownership irrelevant without a quantifier? "Low TCO," or "TCO $5000 for lifetime of five years," are actual worthwhile data.
Breakfast served all day!
...to questions like "What is SAA?" "what is digital_nervous_system?" "What is (Wang's) Office 2000?" "What is Microsoft Back Office?" "What is .NET?" etc. etc. is always the name of some particular almost-upper-level manager who just got put in charge of some substantial chunk of the organization. In addition to being able to brag about how many thousand people he/she now has "working for him," he/she gets to pick some spiffy name for the grab-bag of projects that he/she now "owns."
What the grab-bag has in common is not any well-defined set of technical characteristics, but the fact that a single person is managing them.
Therefore, the grab-bag of projects is said to be directed at whatever set of goals that person thinks are now relevant or will sell well.
What the reporter should have asked is: what's the name of the person that is in charge of "Adaptive Enterprise?"
If the grab-bag of stuff does well, the person in charge will stay in charge and terminology will remain stable. If it doesn't do all that well, the person will change, the name will change, and the color scheme and typography of the brochures describing it will change.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
He's since been fired
The PHB, or that guy who actually did something useful?
Funny you should mention bullshit generators...
In carefully thinking my options through with regard to the most well known operating systems that a home "power user" might choose to work with, I've formulated the following axiom regarding usability:
Linux is to Windows as Windows is to Mac OS (Pre OS X).
What this means is left to the reader to determine and will obviously vary depending on which OS you prefer. Example:
A Mac user would see it this way:
Hardest is to Hard as Hard is to Easy
A Linux user would see it this way:
Least obfuscated is to Obfuscated as Obfuscated is to Most Obfuscated
A Windows user would see it this way:
"What was the question? Oooooh shiny!"
Let the flamefest begin!
Bingo! And just to be fair. They could make the effort to understand the geek perspective. After all it's easy to be an island in the stream. It's harder to build bridges. Anyway one has to wonder if geeks inability to "swing the lingo" is tied to poor social skills? Remember part of social skills is empathy. Being able to parallel to a degree what's going on in the other persons head. A necessary trait when one is gauging both what to do, when to do it, and how effective it is. It's also part of both the GUI and documentation process.
"If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people."
The same could be said for Lawyers, Politicians, as well as Managment.
And, *NO*, PDAs or PocketPCs are not adequate substitutes.
And were Carly Fiorina and Edie Falco separated at birth?
--- Ban humanity.
After about 20 minutes I caught on. "So you're introducing an application server then?"
"Umm, yes" I don't think he would have said the words "application server" once if I hadn't asked.
Companies do this more and more these days. I think it may be that they don't want to backslide into a commodity market.
Dammit! Just when I thought I'd finally achieved maximum penetration, it seems someone hasn't read my comic strip yet. (See below.)
Breakfast served all day!
"He's since been fired."
:-)
God... I loved that part... you must work in heaven...
Its too good... one more time:
"He's since been fired."
yeah
I only take pleasure in your comment because it is assured that w/ your attitude you will never be successful.
HP has been pretty aggressive in building up their consulting arm. Actually our group, a desktop management department of a few hundred people, are in the works to be bought out by HP. I won't name anything but the software we use was actually acquired by IBM and therefore a major competitor to HP. Kind of ironic that way.
"at least working with The Next Big Thing (tm) gives you choices."
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We'll be programming using donut holes. And if that fails on can always end up working at a coffee shop.
***
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I'll have to listen to some "Wet Onion" music to calm myself now (as soon as I wipe the spittle off my all-black clothing).
It strikes me that this is more about branding than anything. What sets any big-name real world product apart from its identical counterpart? The brand name.
.Net bandwagon. Just as with physical products, corporations know that it's not about the quality of the product, or the list of features. It's about brand saturation and recognition. If someone sees a billboard for product A 100X more often than product B, some gullible part of his mind believes that product A is better. Who cares what it does?
Imagine an interviewer with a Nike exec, asking why consumers should pay more for their products than a functionally equivalent (maybe even better-built) shoe. I doubt the suit would even acknowledge such a question as being valid. It is not a question companies feel obligated to answer.
It seems that software companies are behind the game with respect to their peers in tangible goods in this aspect, but expect to see a lot more of this stuff. It sounds to me like HP is really just beginning to construct their own
You drank my drink, you drunk!
The cowardly overrating moderation abuse gang might get hold of you.
We've spent $2.5 billion in Adaptive Enterprise...
And earlier on:It's a business strategy for customers...
So basically, if I understand it correctly, HP has spent 2.5 billion dollars on a business strategy. Just like the dot-coms, they spend a load of cash and don't have anything tangible to show for it.
But it gets worse. Here's another quote:
You pay for what you use. You get to dynamically redeploy assets to something that's more important than what they're on right now.
This is virtually plagiarized from an IBM whitepaper for their S/390 and z/OS series mainframes. The big selling point of the mainframe was that you didn't have to buy more capacity than you actually needed; the system would prioritize processes so that you got the most out of your IT dollar.
So, I think HP's headed for the toilet. The merger with Compaq killed off the business ethics of the former HP. Kind of sad, too, because they used to make really good machines (their laserjet printers come to mind).
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The internal codename for what became .NET was NGWS, standing for Next Generation Windows Services. Apparently one reason this codename was picked was that it was such a horrible name that it would force people to think of something better! Anyway, nothing better was found until literally the Friday before the Monday release - so .NET was chosen in rather a hurry overnight. I don't think anyone inside Microsoft (I was an intern there at the time) was particularly happy with it, but it was the best they could come up with.
You misunderstand what I mean by new products. I'm not talking about new software. I'm talking about whatever widget/service the company sells.
sigs are a waste of space
This is a new way of saying BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION. "It used to take 5 days to report a credit card stolen! Now it only takes 1 minute!".
Obviously before that Target was mailing (or maybe faxing--ooh cutting edge) stolen card reports to all relevant departments so that they can update their databases. Now the person taking the report pushes a button and all of the databases are automagically updated.
Big freaking deal. An MCSE fresh out of college could solve that problem.
HP just came up with a purposefully vague, impressive sounding INNOVATIVE BUSINESS STRATEGY that they could apply to any business problem: Step 1: tell us about the problem, Step 2: give us the money, Step 3: maybe we solve the problem!!!!!
REVOLUTIONARY!
Isn't it sad that reporting on business is in such a state that one modestly antagonistic interview gets such attention? Granted that it's nice to see someone do more than just publish the newswire feed as given to them, but it would be better if that were the norm.
Steve.
...the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements...
Right about now, the marketing wankers at HP are on the phone with their advertising agency. Immediately following will be a phone call from the ad agency to the sales department at CNet and that will be the last time this reporter dares to ask tough quesitons. He must be new.
It might be interesting, though, to see if this story actually stays up on the website.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Carly's just an Enron-ian dinosaur. She comes from the school of "who needs a product" (or honesty) in order to sell stuff. Reading this brought back painful memories when I would sit at HP and listen to her talk about how great everything was... and afterwards we'd ask the question, "So what exactly is E-speak?" Nobody knew. Carly (and the management she's henpecked) have a core-honesty issue. Be vague, but speak confidently, and you can always back out of whatever direction you want to take things. I used to think I just didn't get it. Then again I never understood how Enron could claim to make money, or how Sun could just give away hardware (to be the dot in the dotcom) and make money. Turns out none of them were... Further, HP has a terrible reputation for picking bad standards that go nowhere fast. So if you do go with AE you'll probably be cursing yourself a year or two after you write them the check, because you're stuck with obsolete and unsupported hardware/software solutions. Go with AE if you like, but consider that if this is how they talk about it, how will they talk to you when it comes to delivering a product that you actually need in "real-time". (as opposed to all that copious fake-time)
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Recognizing that you have experience I do not (no, I don't have an MBA), what sociological or psychological message are they sending? When MBAs talk to these folks, what do they understand that I, with my Electrical Engineering background, just don't get?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I consulted at HP for a while. Co-workers were being told things like they would only get funding for a project if the agreed only to hire H-1b worders from India (no Russians or Chinese need apply).
HP isn't the same company it used to be-the only parts of the company that make money is are the printer and server divisions. The respect for the engineering staff from the old days is gone. When the public figures out what HP has become, this company will go down the tubes.
Eventually both. That team I was on was replaced by much more expensive ABAPers.... seems the new manager wasn't so bright either.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
Personally, "A program that does general ledger and billing." and "A server-monitoring tool." Sounds much better than: "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive you business into the 21st century and beyond." and "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
Maybe I'm cocky, but those who may actually be interested in the products probably like the original naming convention better as well. I think the only people impressed by the "flashy" second descriptions are pointy haired managerial types.
That said, the descriptions given by the VP, which are similar to your flashy examples, appear as nothing but lame PR/Marketing that distort the hell out of something I might have had interest in. If I could first figure out what the hell it is. I think HP needs to burn a few brain cells and think about who might actually want to buy their products and services and speak to them in their own language (English works pretty good for me) instead of expecting them to decipher this bunk. Using skewed PR/Marketing fluff may work wonders if your in Fiorina's inner circle, but here in the Real World (TM), it sounds ridiculous.
Beware blue cats moving at
Love it when the fire the management types. Usually they just move them around laterally or allow them to resign and collect a large severence package. When the higher ups start talking meaningless marketing speak nonsense, I start to wonder where all the work us engineers have done is heading, and what kind of crap they are getting us into. I talk with my CEO somewhere on the order of an hour a month. These conversations are somewhat limited, she would rather see engineers clocking billable hours on boring/pointless/mismanaged client projects than doing R&D do improve our software or discussing business/technology strategy, which we all know is the job of the CIOs, not the developers/engineers.
TallGreen CMS hosting
That's what I'd mod you if I had points today...
I think all this clamor over the way Nora has presented HP's AE exposes the void between management and IT people. The people that have the potential and desire (not to mention the need) to understand what a system like "Adaptive Enterprise" actually is are not the people in charge of whether or not a company is going to adopt that system.
While HP has made mistakes, they are by no means a stupid company. They pay people a lot of money to tell them what they need to say to make anything sound good. And they know that by using this vague and seemingly cutting-edge vocabulary in their speeches that its going to appeal to those who make the decisions about what sort of system they need to use (IE not engineers working in the IT dept).
This interview is unique in that a top-ranking VP from HP was forced to answer some technical questions about the way her product works. She probably has no idea how AE works, and you couldn't explain it to her in terms she understands because like many others have said she doesn't understand "tech talk". What she does understand is what to tell the people in charge to get them to buy into her idea. That's her job. When they get a company interested and go to close the sale, they probably send a few techies along with some salespeople to explain to some managers IT pet that their product really is worth it.
I personally think this interview was unfair. It would be like interviewing a programmer at microsoft about what he see's for the future of the company, what directions they are taking, etc... He'd probably be just as dumbfounded. Before the interview, it even says "CNET News.com recently met with Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP's Adaptive Enterprise, to find out what she sees on the IT horizon from the computing giant's perspective." I dont recall anything in the interview regarding the future of HP and where they want to go, but instead trying to bleed technical details out of a marketing rep.
The article should have been titled "Investigation into the details of HP's new Adaptive Enterprise Solutions" and then maybe HP would have been given a fair chance to represent themselves.
she would rather see engineers clocking billable hours on boring/pointless/mismanaged client projects than doing R&D do improve our software or discussing business/technology strategy, which we all know is the job of the CIOs, not the developers/engineers
I've seen more of that in my career than I'd care to mention too. On that SMTP project, we could have beat the deadline and come in WAY under budget. After all, the cisco "system" was nothing more than software. What do these companies think developers are paid to do? If written in house, there are no middlemen in the form of salesmen and project managers, nor is there any markup to keep someone elses building's lights on.
I hope someone else has a different experience, but the developer role in corporations seems to lean closer and closer to that of system support.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
W00t! My 'bullshit bingo' card just filled up! Must be management in the room somewhere...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
This sounds like an action-packed episode of BOFH
Well, I think it all comes down to the new 'services' model. Software companies that have moved away from exorbitant licencing fees are attempting to make all money on consulting services and support. The core of the company is still it's software, regardless of what the taglines say about it's services. Even though the actual revenue comes from consulting services, the core of the consulting services is still the software. (can't have one without the other) Complex software needs constant improvement. If the R&D does not continue, software becomes stagnant and falls behind the needs of the user. Especially in open source software, 'vitality' is is one of the top concerns for evaluators. I think the people who are looking at the numbers (upper management) are seeing the services as the only real source of revenue, R&D is just an expense. There only answer to getting 'positive BVA' 'this quarter' is to move more R&D people into services. Working in services puts you closer to the corporate machine where you are expected to dress a certain way, speak a certian way, work more hours and get less done, track every minute of the day, be predictable, etc..
TallGreen CMS hosting
"As soon as *we* find out, we'll let you know"
Hmm. So they'll let you pay them to tell you what HP products to buy.
Don't their salesmen already do this for free?
[Das walks into HP lunch counter]
Dasmb: Hi, I'm hungry.
Lunch: You should buy a turkey sub.
Dasmb: OK, that sounds good.
Lunch: Alright, that'll be $130
Dasmb: [gurgling noise]
Lunch: Well, one hour minimum of sandwich consulting at $125 per hour, $5 for the sandwich.
Dasmb: I shall take my business to McDonalds!
Lunch: Whatever man. They'll just tie you into Big Macs. Our sandwiches are agile, they move at the speed of hunger. Either way, you still owe us $125.
Then again, I once had a mechanic try to charge me $55 for saying my tires needed air. He does pretty good business because everybody assumes a guy with dirty hands would never lie about car parts.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
1) Teach your employees Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and other keyboard shortcuts
2) Make sure the refresh rate is set to max on all displays, all mice have long cords and there is enough space on every desk
3) Check that all computers are fast and responsive, anti-virus software doesn't slow PCs down, network is fast
4) Get a easy to organise e-mail program, like Opera M2
5) Install an easy information organising tool, like Treepad
Voila! The first item alone can easily provide 1000% return on investment. Seriously, I don't understand why would anyone start with the hard and expensive solution, when teaching people to use Alt-Tab to switch from a word-process to a spreadsheet would probably make bigger difference.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
She's talking about selling advice, basicaly.
A million $ question - how good is HP at giving advice if their VP can't even explain what their doing and be understood? It's like hiring a press-secretary with speech impediment.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The Boston Globe has a section in the Business Part of the Sunday paper that tracks the hot business buzzwords for the week. The mere existence of such a chart speaks volumes about the actual "importance" of such buzzwords, as opposed to their popularity among the MBA set.
This smells like the dot com bubble is getting bigger again. Will this time also burst?
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
I couldn't agree more. What burns me is this...
XYZ services salesman sells ABC company a "system" that "allows forward thinking businesses autonomous connections to all their systems"
PHB buys the system for tons of money
PHB talks to his own IT staff about it, and they discover it will mean extra work for them anyway
They also realize they could have done the same thing easily through web services/xml for a fraction of the cost
XYZ company's "system" turns out to be a java developer who will require most of the analysis on ABC company's requirements to be done by the ABC company's IT staff while XYZ is billing
The "system" goes over budget and time, and the deliverable is nothing more than trading of flat files between current systems
XYZ gets lots of money, and ABC's IT staff get's additional work in supporting the "system"
I've seen it happen many times over the last 12 years. Each year they come in with a new buzzword or catchphrase for the same old crap. I've threatened to walk into someones office with a competing system for SAP for a fraction of the cost.
"In this one box, I have a system that will handle every piece of business your company does, all in one repository. All it will require is for you to hire some of our developers for too much money, and have them write some custom code to shape it into your business needs. It's called DB2 (or SQL Server, or Oracle, or...)."
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
And here I was thinking that an "Enterprise" desktop was about being a Star Trek fan!
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
I work for a big company that was previously support by DEC, Compaq, Tandem, HP services, IBM Global services, Sun, and EDS, Since the HP round of mergers (DEC,CPQ,TANDEM, and HP) HAVE GONE DOWN HILL IN ALL MANNERS. Their new equipment fails out of the box OFTEN, their support structure is AWFUL, they can't delevier hardware ontime, with the correct components, their service managers blame everyone from santa claus, the jerk actually blamed christmass demand on why we couldn't get 5312 raid controller ?!?! bet lots of people asked for that one for christmas, to CE showing up with obviously incorrect parts on service calls and blaming logistics. HP is in a sad state of affairs and not likely to get better. Their own service personell hate the place. Carly the Hatchet (secretly employed by IBM) has done her job well. The most successful case of industrail espionage ever :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I agree.
I really don't see a problem with the idea that HP is selling a service that is defined differently for each customer according to thier needs and thier already existing assets. Any company that tells you that thier product is going to "revolutionize your business" is full of crap.
And that brings us to the interviewer, who was the first and only party in that article that violated the universal bullshit detector that I mention in the title of this post.
Read, L
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: I define AE as a business strategy vis-a-vis customers who concordantly want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business, ergo they buy...
Sony ha
Was/isn't marketing supposed to "fill that gap" between producers and consumers? And we got advertising, we've ended up with info/com/mercials and corporate bullshit as in this latest example from HP. You write: Why, I ask, why the fsk should we have to interpret what corporations say? It's what we get with marketing. Your solution (I could misinterpret) seems to be improving communication with marketing people.
I say to hell with marketing people and shame on all of us for the utter mess we've created. My bet would be to improve direct communication and cooperation with the people we do business with. Weinberger, Locke, Searls, et al., discuss these matters over at Cluetrain.org. Check it out. (The gist: marketing obfuscate and obstruct real conversation, and advertising is a piss-poor substitute for knowledge creation.)
What I feel open source (and even more so FSF - GNU) is doing, is fundamentally blur the dividing line between "producer" and "consumer". But even more importantly, the free software (and to some extent, open source) movement(s) spell out, in blazing capitals, very real alternatives to marketing drones, legalese, and commercials. It's called communication, enabled by freedom. To choose, to change, to get to the source, to understand, to create. Source, in this context, is much more than 'just' code.
Oh so many corporations know not the first goddammed thing about how to communicate with people. They often seem to take *pride* (something like 'we're very excited about our new ad campaign
668.5
for saying in one sentence what I tried/failed to say in several paragraphs, earlier in this thread.
Must be something to that rhetowhatchamacallit I've been hearing about.
668.5
I ge the screaming heebie-jeebies thinking about a technology that allows "the business" to implement the first thing that comes into their head.
I don't see that things would change *that* much from how they are now. When a CEO makes a decision on something, he will generally stick to it until completion (or take a job somewhere else), if for no other reason than he/she would lose credibility otherwise. All the important events about whether to go forward with a decision occur *before* the decision is made.
Now, that being the case, I think one of the reasons why businesses make bad decisions is that they have limited information, and the impact of their decisions have significant delays. You see people move up the ranks by making a splashy "initiative", and then they get promoted or take a higher paying job somewhere and some other sucker has to clean up the mess they left behind.
The first problem would almost certain be addressed by the same technologies that allow the business to be so flexible in the first place. The same technologies would allow you to quickly and accurately asses the impact and risks of a decision. This would provide "the business" with a far more rational basis to make a decision.
As to the other problem, I suspect the more responsive a business is to those changes, the faster the feedback. This would probably mean that idiots would have "career changes" sooner, and the rest would learn much more quickly how to make good decisions.
But I agree that the whole thing could have downsides. Rarely is technology anything but a double edged sword.
sigs are a waste of space
FWIW, I can think of a lot of ads from MS that basically used .Net as a catchphrase to mean anything they wanted to sell to big business. Which seems to be what HP is doing here.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I once asked a women in a bar what she did. She said that she worked at DEC in marketing and that she did, "programmatic development that was educative."
I almost fell off my barstool laughing.