HP Self Destruction Fully Implemented
This is a devastating expose on the dysfunctional upper echelon at HP: “The company is coming apart at the seams,” said one person familiar with H.P.’s operations. “Because they may or may not be selling the PC business, the enterprise side is completely frozen. The business customers who buy tens of thousands of these machines [...]
Lunarr Is Going Dark . . .
Like Tom, I am also a big fan of the team at Lunarr and over the last year and a half have become good friends with Hideshi Hamaguchi, who is one of the most interesting and generous of heart people you will have the good fortune of meeting. I’m a big fan of the team [...]
Relationship Management for Restaurants
Great idea, I still think they should have named it “RuhRoh”. To do this, he has enlisted the help of a Mountain View startup called BooRah, which is launching a new “reputation management” service for restaurant owners. The 2-year-old company, which started as a restaurant search site, is expanding to create summaries of everything that’s [...]
MS on Vista’s “Challenges”
At this point I doubt there is any new information available that would dissuade people from the notion that Vista was one very screwed up launch, so I guess Microsoft’s PR strategy momentarily shifted to stating the obvious. The answers we got during this mid-June background conversation were brutally honest: Our source, a high-ranking Windows [...]
YellowBot – Local Search that Works
Over the years I have been thoroughly unimpressed with Yellowpages.com for local search, yet in a display of cognitive dissonance I keep using them when I need to find a local business. Almost every time I give up and Google, which itself is okay but not great for local search. The yellowpages.com categories are confusing, [...]
Piling on the VMW Mess Today
Lot’s of commentary today about VMware missing their number and CEO Greene out of the top job. For the record, when I was at SAP Ventures we looked at this deal but passed because of the husband/wife team (generally a big red flag for venture deals). It worked out for Diane and Mendel, and it [...]
Dayak – The Recruiting Marketplace
Dayak is one of the most interesting companies I saw at the Launch Silicon Valley event yesterday. What I liked about it is that they don’t seek to disintermediate the recruiting market, they attempt to optimize the existing marketplace dynamics by enhancing the opportunity to recruiters (the intermediaries) to make more money through the ability [...]
Icahn’s Rat Pack
Kedrosky is right, this is by far the most humorous take on Icahn’s proposed slate of directors: Sake Oil – aka Mark Cuban: a An entrepreneur with a history of creating companies that he then sells for far more than they are worth to sucker corporations. Cuban sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn at the [...]
HP/EDS Makes Sense
Dennis nicely captured the 3 people that I’ve read on the HP/EDS deal: Tom Foremski, Larry Dignan, and Vinnie Mirchandani: My take is skewed by experiences I’ve seen in Europe where EDS has been removed or had its contractual relationships significantly cut back as projects have either failed, been ‘botched’ or it’s been forced to [...]
Yahoo, Dead Man Walking
I had a meeting at Yahoo on Friday afternoon. It was like the other 1,835 meetings I’ve had there over the years, it also won’t produce anything meaningful. What struck me about the meeting was how little energy there is on that campus, it’s a dreadful place to be, even if just briefly. The other [...]
-
About
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. I am the VP of Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction and I write about a range of topics that interest me, including public policy, technology, entrepreneurship, finance, and global issues.
-
Links
-
Feeds
