Comment: A textbook case of hidebound thinking
Even in these times of corporate caution and retrenchment, there are firms bent on launching harebrained ventures, writes Lem Bingley
Two recent events reminded me of the old saying: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thomson Directories can probably be forgiven for pummelling its particular point home. It thoroughly understands the business of binding paid-for adverts into books to be dumped on the doormats of all and sundry. Its particular skill has been in subdividing the nation into suitable chunks so that the usefulness-per-kilo rating of its product is superior to the heavyweight opposition, the Yellow Pages. It also puts a cat on the cover, which is nice.
Quite how Thomson's skill will help with a guide to the Web is unclear. I doubt that Thomson really knows yet, which is why its upcoming directory of e-commerce sites will be a limited run of 300,000.
The biggest hurdle for Thomson will be to get firms to pay up to be listed. Cold sales calls are going to sound uncomfortably like all those domain name scams or offers in your inbox promising to MAXIMISE YOUR WEB TRAFFIC NOW. I suspect, therefore, that the eventual book will be skewed toward warm sales and the click side of bricks-and-mortar firms that use the Thomson guides already.
And why a book, for Caxton's sake? Doesn't Thomson know that even O'Reilly's The Whole Internet is out of print? And given that the target audience is people with a PC, why not give them a CD-ROM?
The other hammer-wielder I have in mind is Sun. Ten out of 10 for persistence but zero out of infinity for business acumen, it is launching a PC. But, given that this is Sun, it will be a purple PC that incidentally requires a bloody great Solaris server in the datacentre.
The PC will be stuffed with StarOffice, garnished with Java, and have generous dollops of Linux stirred in. Sun thinks this will be a finger-licking recipe for profit at the expense of Microsoft. But it sounds like a dog's dinner to me - warmed over leftovers from thin clients, Java appliances, Sun Rays and other futile attempts at building server-dependent desktops.
Sun's notion, as ever, is that it will find buyers breathless to escape the tyranny of Windows. But will those wanting to jump from Microsoft's frying pan really find Sun's coffee-pot particularly inviting?
Sun will sell purple PCs in batches of 100. Prices are at the finger-in-air stage, but Sun's software chief boldly told News.com that a budget of $300,000 would cover every cost related to the 100-desktop collection for five years, compared with a figure of a million bucks for conventional PCs. Analysts charitably said the figures looked "slightly" iffy.
There may well be a large number of call centres that might benefit from Sun's new blunt instrument, but for most businesses, the cost of incompatibility will weigh too heavily on the balance sheet.
Of course the most persistent applicator of blunt force in the business is Microsoft, which knows only one way to differentiate product A.1 from product A.0, which is to add features. Sadly for most firms, what they really want is stability, not new toys. Unfortunately, a craftsman-like honing of existing products is not the Microsoft way.
Linux desktops will encroach on Windows turf eventually, for that reason alone. But Sun's PC won't matter any more than an ill-advised paper guide to cyberspace.
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