Bayosphere

Oh! That would be a great Christmas present!

I’ve heard that when Apple, IBM and Motorola first got together, the folks at Apple were concerned about the stuffed shirts at IBM. They were very pleasantly surprised to find the IBM folks a lot easier to work with and more laid back than the Moto folks.

My own experience (in my day job) with the IBM Software folks is similar. Some very practical and easy to work with folks. Unlike some of their large s/w competitors here in silicon valley.

A merger doesn’t make sense (but it sure is amusing!) If anything, how about a partnership with IBM for reselling and supporting the Mac, just like HP has done with the iPod?

My question is, would this be a merger or a take over. I wish apple could just stay apple, but let’s face it, Steve Jobs is recovering from Cancer. If I were him I’d be thinking about calling it a day. He single handedly saved the company. Apple’s stock is as high as I’ve seen it in a looooong time.

My only request is, keep the apple brand in tact. I don’t mean the logo, I mean everything the brand means in the strategic direction, maintaining the MAC culture, etc… And by all means, STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS!!!!

Tony

Speaking of blogs, here’s an odd story about a blogger who (1) sold his blog, and (2) is using Ebay to sell himself as a blogger:

Story:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?source=blq/yhoo&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo&guid=%7BD354F4C4%2D3F69%2D4ED4%2D9471%2D1C93CF7A9712%7D

Ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=193&item=5142129647&rd=1

Dan, your book is covered in a viewpoint column in today’s FT (01.12.04). Thought you might like to know.
Here’s a link.

You’re welcome. Thanks for noticing.

Hey Dan, congrats on all the success. I just want to know why you didnt mention your buddy dave’s blog. My feelings are hurt. Just kidding. I am very glad to see the book is such a success, I feel as if we as your regular readers had a great part in making it happen.

Saludos from Costa Rica and In Search of Utopia

100% agree. Things that are just wrong are par for the course these days. Yesterday I wrote about a similar disturbing trend – the apparent acceptance of the proliferation of No-bid contracts, even where lives are at stake.

http://bbenz.typepad.com/softwaresoapbox/2004/11/bad_trends_nobi.html

Dan, you’re usually quite right, but regarding
the folks taking on MS, I fear you were wearing
blinders based on your own feelings about MS.

Mr. Black was a pompous fraud from the beginning.
His money grab flows directly from his previous
actions and character.

Stan

Dan, as Microsoft critic maybe you’re next.

Hey, there are still a few bugs left in CE.

“and it had had no ‘visibility’ where the money would go.”

Well, maybe they can use some of that $10M to fix their security cameras around the office safe…

Can we get a court order that at least 2% of all Microsoft revenue has to be spent on a search for prior art?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/27/2222256

Get a grip, Dan! The man was rewarded by the board of directors of his organization for bringing in almost $20 million in a “settlement” that wasn’t really necessary from Microsoft’s viewpoint. That’s, essentially, $20 million in found money.

If you or I did that for our organizations, we might also expect to be rewarded in some way.

From Knight Ridder? There’d be a lot fewer zeroes…

In another forum, someone corresponded directly with Roach, who said he is more optimistic that this report indicates. He points to this article he wrote:

http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20041115-mon.html

Correct link to the Slate article (modified due to the fact that the hostname has suddenly become “questionable content”):

slateDOTmsnDOTcom/id/2110076/

Bought Sun at 5.04 in April and heroically rode it down and back up. Yay! Now it is 5.20 but I need to get to 5.80 just to break even in Canadian dollars. Doh! Currency risk, they tell me.

At the end of the the Boston Herald article it says:
“there may be an alternative scenario to Roach’s. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today’s consumer debts in real terms.
Inflation of 7 percent a year halves “real” values in a decade.
It may be the only way out of the trap.”

The “deliberate-inflation” solution to oppressive debt was tried once before:
to deal with reparations after World War I in Germany.

The results were not pretty.

Maybe we can take the last few dollars left in the national treasury and put them into a lucky slot machine in Vegas?

“The dollar is in trouble, but it has been in trouble before. Perhaps the past holds the solution everyone seeks.”

See http://www.investorsinsight.com/article.asp?id=jmotb112204

I recommend signing up for John Mauldin’s weekly eletter too.

I’m not sure Dan’s (and Slate’s) doom and gloom scenarios are too valid. Europe doesn’t exactly look like an powerhouse with their house in order. They’ve got some big problems.

“Perhaps the past holds the solution everyone seeks.”

And perhaps winged monkeys will fly out of my butt, bearing bars of gold with which to pay off the national debt.

If you’d actually _read_ Bernstein’s article, instead of just cutting-and-pasting the tiny part you wanted to hear, you would’ve seen that he presents pretty much the same arguments that I have in previous discussions of this subject: that the situation is serious, unsustainable, and being both perpetuated and masked by the “co-dependent” actions of some countries that benefit from keeping their export pipelines open.

You also would have seen that Bernstein believes something like a “Plaza Accord II” is _necessary_ to avert what he believes is to be one of those “doom and gloom scenarios”, but that it’s not likely to happen for a variety of reasons. And he wrote that _before_ Snow told the Europeans to pound sand.

“Europe doesn’t exactly look like an powerhouse with their house in order.”

When it comes to government fiscal responsibility, they’ve certainly got _us_ beat seven ways from Sunday (or from Doomsday…). But what difference does that make, either way? Are you under the illusion that there’s a fixed supply of trouble in the world, and the fact that the EC may have problems somehow means there’s less trouble available for us?

“And perhaps winged monkeys will fly out of my butt, *bearing bars of gold* with which to pay off the national debt.”

Uh, really bad visuals on the day after a Thanksgiving feast, but I appreciate your taking this one for all of America.

Give me your paypal address and I’ll email you enough for some salve.

Well, as both a PeopleSoft and an Oracle customer, I can assure you that this is a deal that PeopleSoft’s customers do NOT want to see happen. Whenever CA buys a company, we immediately drop the software we were considering and plan to migrate from whatever we are using. Oracle’s not that bad, but we don’t want any more of their stuff than we already have. They are a horrible company to deal with.

This is definitely bad news, of course. How did they pull if off? It only goes to show that investors in public companies are not investors in the full sense of the world. The stock system is flawed; the only way to get a return on investment in stock is to sell it at a higher price. Unfortunately, the price depends directly on public perception of the company and stock market dynamics, not really the performance per se.

This isn’t an issue that is as black and white as you present it, Dan. If the only responsibility a board shares is for fiduciary gain on behalf of its stockholders, then the company owes no debt to the public good or its customers. I doubt that’s where you’re headed with this.

I work for a major research university in the Bay Area. We have just completed an implementation of a suite of PeopleSoft’s products.

Projects like the one we’ve just completed occur only once or twice in a person’s career. Why? Because the cost of such a venture requires that we determine that the project and the benefits it promises to deliver are sound. In the end, major software implementations are undertaken to create capacity and manage risk. We derive no other ROI or tax benefit from such a venture.

I know what it took for our institution to make the decision. Such a decision wasn’t taken lightly; nor was it made with any haste. The cost of failure in a public institution is simply too high.

My institution licenses some Oracle products. We do so based on internal standards and risk management. However those licenses come from Oracle’s database products. Database products have been and remain Oracles core competency. The company’s current stock value certainly doesn’t reflect its skill as an applications vendor…

Ellison’s desire to acquire PeopleSoft continues a move his company has taken away from its core competencies. It is a move that is motivated not by the good of his customers or the good of PeopleSoft’s customers. From my perspective, it is merely a byproduct of greed and avarice.

I do not trust Oracle. I have done business with them too much to ever have faith in their sales teams or the Ellison lieutenants who push their sales staff into business tactics that are at best uncomfortable for the customer, and at worst of questionable ethics.

As a PeopleSoft customer, I feel that the board is the only group looking out for the customer base. From your perspective, PeopleSoft’s board is mocking its shareholders. From mine, they are currently acting as the sole voice of the customer base.

To my knowledge, Larry Ellison has never been hailed as a champion of his customers. For public sector customers like us, this deal remains a bitter black cloud.

I don’t disupte that this will be bad for PeopleSoft customers. But the shareholders own the company, not the customers. As corporate law works today, the board has far, far more obligation to the shareholders than any other constituency. I’d like to change that, but it’s reality.

To potentially avoid situations like this in the future, it would seem that companies should consider purchasing stock of the companies they buy product from (at least the big investments). That way, they at least would have some say (depending on how much stock was owned) in the future direction of the company. If you’re making a $5-10 milllion investment in a company’s product, what’s another 250k one way or the other over time?

Jojo, if you don’t own enough of the stock you don’t have any control over the company

Yes, I know that. What I was thinking was that if all the companies that brought the product also brought stock, together, they might have enough to have some influence, if not complete control.

The influenza vaccine issue is clearly an inexcusable disaster. Heads should roll.

The Vioxx thing is a bit more complicated and the reporting on the subject is sorely lacking. There is a missing piece of information from all the news reports that I’ve seen about Vioxx and it is the critical thing in determining if the FDA is right or wrong and if Merck is right or wrong: What were the results of the ISS?

What’s an ISS? In the drug development/approval process, all the data from human clinical trials on a drug is periodically pooled and the safety data is analyzed. This analysis is called an Integrated Safety Summary (ISS). It is an FDA regulatory requirement and the results are sent to the FDA for review. All that pooled data (sometimes from thousands of patients) makes it more likely that any safety issues with a drug will be found since the large population involved gives more statistical significance to the analysis. This process also continues for years in post-marketing. In any case, rare adverse drug events (side effects) that are linked to the drug may not show up until the drug has been tested in thousands of people or even tens of thousands (once the drug is on the market). If, in the past, an ISS never indicated a problem until this latest study and then the drug was pulled from the market, Merck and the FDA should be in the clear. If, on the other hand, the FDA and/or Merck did see problems from this pooled ISS data analysis from previous studies and didn’t act, then somebody has some serious explaining to do.

What I find really scary is that Accenture is now managing new drug trials, under contracts where they don’t get paid unless the project meets success metrics. This is dangerous–there’s tremendous pressure to fudge the data. Should a drug manufacturer cook the data, they’d be out of business, so they have a strong incentive to put in and respect controls. But for Accenture, this is only one minor line of business among many, and if it blows up it’s just a blip on the bottom line.

(Accenture’s role in drug testing is discussed in the last third of this article):

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_46/b3908085_mz063.htm

“That led Accenture to create scorecards that hold Wyeth scientists accountable for meeting research objectives. The consulting firm also took over the process of managing clinical trial data — the first time a drugmaker has entered into such a deal. The result? Wyeth is now moving 12 drugs into development every year, up from three in the past. The results have “really been phenomenal,” says Robert R. Ruffolo Jr., Wyeth’s research president.”

This is scary. With the kind of “Book Cooking” that has gone on in recent years by some of the big accounting/consulting companies I shudder to think about them managing clinical trial data analysis for new drug applications. I only hope that the success metrics are based on the data being processed, not the outcome of the clinical research.