From The Street...
Thursday, February 28, 2002
George Gilder Speaks...
I am a great fan of Gilder and read and listen to all he says. A new paperback version of his recent classic Telecosm, with revisions, will be out soon. Gilder's website Gilder Publishing, LLC has most of his stuff available.
Here's a link to a RealPlayer video of a one hour interview with him on CSpan last Friday morning.
C-SPAN.org
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
Now....next...and Wow
Spent an interesting weekend at a "technical retreat". One of the breakfast roundtable discussions was led by a fellow from the government. He's been pressing for adaptation of technical specifications of key importance to his work into commercial/public spec development. Things like MPEG, digital RF modulation standards, HDTV and metadata are key to the developments in his work. This is all part of a now more pragmatic approach to government technology requirements: getting commercial products to do what you need, rather than independantly developing specialized boxes. Costs and time are saved, and "progress" achieved by government support is reflected in widespread commercial adoption of the standardized solutions, driving prices down.
Inventing the futureis one of the more formidable tasks with which he is charged. He briefed us on what is being done Now, citing generic nonclassified examples of remote imaging and transmission; and Next - what is being worked on for follow-on systems. Naturally, focus is now on The War, and his group is dedicated to developing tools to ultimately bring back more servicemen alive.
But it was the Wow part that provoked the most talk. What did we see as being the important things in technology five years from now? Comments ran the gamut - One person said a lot of education of the public about what technology can do now is still needed, citing the familiar example of the VCR clock flashing 12:00, awaiting a visit from the son away at college to fix it. "Techies" like us have been resetting digital clocks for 25 years or so, but most people can't , or don't, or won't. Others suggested that technology has a long way to go to be transparent, but advances are coming along nicely; witness the automatic clock setting features of today's computers and VCRs.
Telepresence looks more feasible as bandwidth expands and processors get faster. To eliminate the realization that another person is distant, systems with very wideband links with HD pictures and sound and flat panel displays are being tested. The net effect seems to be that a glass window on the wall shows the distant person or office, and to get attention, you literally go knock on the "glass" and speak out. With deregulation of the last mile, this kind of stuff will advance unhindered.
Several thought that automatic programming would emerge. The big limitation to implementing most application ideas is the time necessary to code the solution, estimated in many man-years by some current editing software companies. Using the plentiful things (processors, bandwidth, storage) to reduce the scarce limited things,(time) is true to the telecosmic paradigm. Waste what you have a lot of. Napster was a first glimpse of how powerful this can be as applied to peer-to-peer networking. More of this is coming for sure. Large massively parallel schemes that self generate programs and learn and adapt will take this approach.
George Gilder - see link in the post above - mentions the "revolutionary" software Lifestream that looks like a candidate for Wow. Yale professor David Gelernter, the inventor, is a brilliant proponent of this. Here's a link to his NYT OpEd piece about the iMac. NYT_OPED_1-11-02.pdf
A very good interview with Gelernter was in a recent issue of American Spectator: Gilder Publishing, LLC
Notes from this roundtable discussion will be distributed shortly, and I'll expand on this later.
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
Subtitles...
When I was in Hong Kong with Ampex, we were distributors for Chyron's products. I got into the Korean written language with customers there and the Engineering VP from Chyron. This was long before Adobe and TrueType fonts were available for most every language. Chyron had just done Arabic - quite a task - but sales were not as good as hoped for, and they were a bit hesitant to make another run at investing in a new non-western script.
The Korean language, Hangul, as proud Koreans will gladly tell you, was a creation of an ancient wise King, and is celebrated with its own annual holiday there. It is somewhat phonetic, in that you can learn and make the sound of each part of a character and then pronounce it without knowing the meaning. The parts of the character represented how your teeth, tongue and lips shoud be when making the sound. Pretty slick.
This is very different from Chinese, where (in general) their characters are ideographs, and usually reflect meaning; you have to know what it means to be able to write it or say it. A dictionary is a real challenge; and I still am not sure how a 411 telephone information service works there: "I'm looking for a number for a Mr. Wong....yeah, I think it's the Wong with the three horizontal stripes and the connecting vertical...like the 'king' Wong, you know?..."
Anyway, Ampex then developed their own character generator named "Alex". We found people in Singapore who owned certain type fonts. Detailed pictures of each character had to be digitally scanned in and cleaned up to work. A minimum of 10,000 characters per font was necessary. (A Chinese newspaper print composer was an amazing piece of work before word processors - as was a Japanese typewriter...) .We did a couple of traditional fonts, a simplified font, and sold some to STAR-TV when they opened up in Hong Kong.
Up to then, all film/video subtitling in Hong Kong was done "manually" - the words were written on little rolodex-like cards and then flipped in front of a small camera and keyed in when triggered by time code cues as the film was transferred to tape. Painful but necessary - the huge Shaw Brothers film library, with all audio in Cantonese, represented a large market opportunity throughout Taiwan and Mainland China, where most everyone did not understand Cantonese. All Chinese understand and use essentially the same written language, but the languages spoken regionally differ considerably. The common written language has helped to keep them culturally unified.
Advances in computer graphics have moved this business along considerably. I'm now looking at a company in Los Angeles that has a "family" of subtitling products for PC's. They've done well in the US/South American market (HBO, CNN, DirecTV, and various Hispanic television networks) and are looking to expand into Asia and Europe. I'll post more about them as I learn more.
Hollywood Post Alliance
Planning to attend the Technology Retreat later this week in Palm Springs. Lots of interesting people and ideas there.
44 - 2002 Technology Retreat - Hollywood Post Alliance
Thursday, February 14, 2002
Mergers II
From the moment a merger is announced, salespeople from both companies start serious dancing; both sides assuring their (sometimes mutual) customers that their products and their organization and people will survive and prevail. Customers are naturally nervous. Most like both companies' products and people, and hesitate to complete deals until the smoke clears. Obviously, speed is of the essence. In the "silent period" mandated by the SEC from the date of announcement of intent to deal completion, customers and business both slow down, and neither side can appropriately respond to nasty rumors sometimes initiated by their newly adopted brothers. It is only after the two magic words are issued (Wire Transfer) that the process can proceed. Implementing plans to "leverage synergistic assets" and to kill off the people and products and other duplicate costs that were the reason for the get-together in the first place is not as easily done as it was to put the plan bullets onto PowerPoint frames. Shooting the bullets is tougher than indenting them....
When companies "merge", sometimes the people in the acquired company get to cash out their shares and options. This leaves many in a position with more cash in hand than they've ever had if their lives. They could take the money and walk as an early retirement, but most don't. Those who come out of a deal with several hundred K or more are sometimes branded by that good fortune as risks "going forward". The Sales Manager's dream is to have a fellow with several kids and a hefty mortgage as a motivator, rather than a newly-moneyed fellow who can survive very nicely doing the minimum, while he looks around.
Deciding which people to keep, and how to do that, is a real challenge. Of course there is the temptation for the long knives to come out, but usually more rational and cooler heads prevail. One strategy is to keep all the salesmen and to concentrate real hard on increasing revenues for the first six months or so. Duplications of costs that produce revenue can be scaled down once things get back on keel. There's lots to recommend that.
McKinsey has a paper on how they think the whole process is best done.
The people problem in mergers
Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Branding...
From an Australian colleague:
You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone
number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed."That's Telemarketing.
You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of
your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, "He's fantastic in
bed." That's Advertising.
You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your
tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her,
pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her a ride, and then say, "By the
way, I'm fantastic in bed."That's Public Relations.
You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I'm fantastic
in bed."That's Direct Marketing.
You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says, "I
hear you're fantastic in bed."
That's Brand Recognition!
Mergers -
It's generally accepted wisdom, based on historical results, the mergers between large companies rarely work out well. Why do they do it? Because they can? Because they must?
Here's one take from McKinsey.
McKinsey Quarterly: Learning from high-tech deals
Economy...
I see a lot of newsletters and articles about the general state of the economy. Despite the "general belief" that things are getting better, I'm inclined to believe the bears: Most all economic data is still bad, the worst is still to come, and deflation continues. My favorites are Bill Bonner of The Daily Blast (EMail Subscription Maintenance); John Mauldin's wave2000 (Welcome to Millennium Wave Online!); and Porter Stansberry's the Pirate Investor. (pirateinvestor.com)
Monday, February 11, 2002
Leitch buys Agilevision...
Leitch deal to acquire AgileVision, long discussed and on the street, is now final: AgileVision is a Leitch brand. Will the folks at Leitch "allow" the brand to continue, leveraging the years of evangelizing those AGV folks have done? Or, like Thomson did to Philips Broadcast, "integrate" it into their own marketing/branding scheme? Thomson was smart enough to leave the RCA brand on their TVs here in the USA.
Lucy Fjeldstadt considered that when she took control of Tektronix VND, when they owned GVG. She thought the Tek brand might properly replace the GVG one. After a very expensive study by an all-too-happy-to-take-her-money agency, she discovered that GVG had powerful brand equity and amazing customer loyalty. Not unlike Ampex still had, years after abandoning their traditional customers' markets. Maybe a similar expensive exercise by Thomson will be necessary to provide cover for taking action if/when the GVG/Thomson deal goes through.
Usually proposed foreign takeovers/acquisitions of a US company are run through the SEC to see if they are "anticompetitive." This time the DOJ is doing it on the THMM/GVG deal; calling customers to ask if this is a good thing for this business. Customers appear wary of possible changes at GVG, and as was learned by Philips Broadcast during their "transition period", the longer it drags out, the worse the effects on sales and customer relations. Salesman overlap? Product phase outs? Plans are in place to go ahead and work these things out quickly, but not much can be done - by law - until the deal is finalized.
Some of us believe the USA would be better off if business decisions were left to the people involved, and that the government should keep on looking for bad guys elsewhere. But sometimes the possibility of perceived political gain of "oversight" can't be resisted: witness Enron.
As customers consolidate (central casting, expanded network station ownership, etc.), so must suppliers. It's not clear that a $200M-dollar revenue company can develop, sell and support products worldwide in this market, in the traditional manner, and make money.
Probably more of these coming....
(email comments to: jmw8888@aol.com)
Sunday, February 10, 2002
Mamoo Speaks...
I still use sayings my Mother - Mamoo in the family - used to say. Like the commercial "Momisms", they are remarkably true and apropos...mebbe because I'm half her genes.
I'm Glad I'm Not Living Now, is my favorite; uttered in a resigned disgust when confronted with new horriblly different "alternate cultural behaviors". No way to either change it ot confront it - or accept it.
Her father, my maternal grandfather K.K. Bell, was VP of Sales for Calumet Baking company - and I still have programs from the sales meetings he held in Chicago, complete with lyrics for the rah-rah songs they used. He died from the stock market crash of '29. Secret family rumors have it that he committed suicide; a heart attack is the accepted version. I've always "made my numbers" or figuratively "died trying" in my various territories; taking the sales responsibility as a sacred trust of sorts - "The company is depending on you to deliver this amount of money so that they can stay in business and keep all those folks employed" is the theme I drilled into my underlings. I'm proud that all those guys/my guys continued to do well long after I left their life.
So now I am reminded every day of the cliches she left behind, all ringing true:
Nothing Hotter Than Hot Cheese.
Good is Good.
You Can't Tell Anybody Anything.
and of course, the ultimate truth: Blame Is Useless...
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Curious that this shows up today, Jim. Your ears were maybe itching as we discussed you and the French at lunch on the deck overlooking Pittwater yesterday. Chamberlains, Betts and Benecke/Koyich.
Blog more later.......
French...
French...
Last week I visited a Headhunter in SFO. We played "old times" - who you know, where are they now; comparing "evaluations" of folks in the business. It's always reassuring to find someone to agree with you on your bad opinions of jerks still doing well, and good guys struggling.
No matter who you are, you're probably somebody's "asshole"; hopefully the number of folks who think so are outnumbered/outgunned by those who think you're ok, or even swell.
I had a brief adventure working for Thomson last year. It didn't work out for either of us...but since, it's amazing how many sympathetic ears and contributing voices I find - in and out of the business - who can say terribly clever, mean , biting but generally true things about the French. (Ed Bramson at Ampex used to say cliches are used because they're generally true.) Several colleagues whose companies have been/are being taken over by French companies; who've done consulting work for them; and some who have sold their companies to French grooups: all use terms like arrogance, elite-ist, hubris, and other more vulgar scatological descriptors. And deep blue shirts.
(Great article in the American Spectator, just received and devoured, about words and how much their meaning changes. To paraphrase, "prejudice" now means to hate. It used to mean to have a judgement based on previous experience. George Orwell in an appendix to 1984 explained some of that...frightening. )
So I now enjoy the French jokes re Afghanistan (the French contribution to the War Effort: dropping 50,000 salad forks) and the this-is -not-a jokes: The French government is sending a leading philosopher over ("the thinking woman's favorite') to ascertain the needs and feelings and thoughts of The Afghan People. All while trading frantically with , and attacking the embargo against, Iraq. Lots and lots of anti-semetic feelings remain there, it seems; indeed all across of Europe. Geeze, some amis never learn...
In Asia, where I spent many years, everybody thinks they're It...If you're not a (Korean/Japanese/Chinese etc.) you're shit. But that doesn't stand in the way of commercial intercourse. Smart folks from all those places, way down on the local economic totem poles, wait in lines for hours at our embassies to get into the USA. and when they arrive, they , by necessity or language or food or culture or family support, all hang out together in "neighborhoods" Duh. Happy Brooklyn, Chicago eighty years ago.
Blogging...wow...
A place to hear and tell what folks/customers are saying in this business...or at least what I hear and my take on it...
