February 2005 Archives

Back in early 2002 when Carly Fiorina was pushing a merger with the rival Compaq, many suspected that she may not make it through unscathed. Instead, she persevered and received the slight nod to merge with Compaq, much to the displeasure of Walter Hewlett. Today, with the announcement of her departure as a result of board disenfranchisement, Walter must be in a high spirits, feeling a vindication of sorts.

And while investors seem to be cheering alongside Walter by sending the HP shares up on the news, one can not help wonder whether things just got better or worse at the company. It's not just Fiorina that was the trouble for HP. For the true culprit, HP should look East to Texas, where Michael Dell is commanding his empire and has continued to fortify his position while HP has been grappling with its problems.

Unfortunately HP's computer business is not a cohesive unit as Dell's is. HP carries a number of other entities such a Compaq and Digital Equipment (from a previous Compaq take-over) which have come with some heavy baggages of their own as they were sewn into the HP culture. The Dell culture, on the other hand, is one of growth, focus, and steady vision. And with its present momentum, it's a Herculean task to match, let alone beat.

So as investors rejoice Fiorina's departure news today, they'd better be sure to keep their Aspirin bottles nearby. It's gonna be a long hang-over.

Gmail's claim to fame at its point of inception was the large storage (one Gigabyte) it offered its users. It prompted other major email providers to announce their higher storage services and quit bugging their users to pay money for more room. Remember the old 2-Meg Hotmail limit?

I had blogged about all this previously, and as compelling as the move to Gmail was, once Hotmail came through with their 250-Meg storage, I decided to stay with it, although I utilize my Gmail account occasionally.

But now I am finding that competition between providers has created a real boon for the end-user and so far Gmail is ahead of the pact. One of the greatest features offered by Gmail is the ability to forward incoming emails to another account. This is truly a test of confidence on the part of Gmail, as users could simply forward their emails to Hotmail or Yahoo! if they so choose. The other feature is pop-3 email download. This allows those of us with email clients, such as Outlook, to download incoming emails to our local boxes. It would also allow Hotmail and Yahoo users to pull in the Gmail messages as well, if they choose to do so.

The forwarding and pop-3 features would have never been offered by the other guys as they'd fear users skipping their email sites and read their messages elsewhere. Gmail should be applauded for offering these services so fearlessly, allowing their users to interact with their services on their own terms.

Two other Gmail features that are also useful are Gmail Notifier (the tray icon that notifies user of new messages) and the RSS/XML feed of newly arrived messages. Many people utilize RSS readers today, so the RSS/XML feed comes in real handy.

Gmail has sure made it tough to go with any other provider, not necessarily because of technical advantages, but more due to a better understanding of their user base.

As much as Microsoft would like to tout itself as an innovator, its history is largely a legacy of imitation. That is not in any way a negative trait. Most products in use today are imitations of the originals with incremental improvements. and the search technology seems to have caught Microsoft's fancy as of late.

Microsoft's latest push in the search field is clearly an imitation of what Google has been able to achieve. But in this case, the product is just too similar to Google's offering. Take the new and improved MSN search. The pages are clean, the ads are text-based, and the results are presented in almost the same format as Google does. Then there is the IE toolbar plug-in. It's a copy of google's toolbar with the highlight tool, form auto-fill, and Blog posting. And the MSN Deskbar, again the same striking similarity to Google's Deskbar down to the logo watermark in the search field.

I downloaded the products (the toolbar and deskbar are lumped in one install) and used them for a while. They work fine, but I just can't see a compelling reason to leave Google at this time. Perhaps, given some time, Microsoft will be able to improve these products drastically and surpass Google, but for now I just hope the hard competition continues to deliver better products to the consumer. The race is just heating up.

Microsoft's search-related products can be downloaded here.

Google's offerings are here and here.

Did you vote during the last presidential election? I did, and I realized that registering to vote gives you more than a power to voice your choice. It adds you to a list that can be used by a variety of government agencies for a number of purposes. One of those is for jury duty selection, and I was called for it for the first time ever.

Okay, I realize that jury duty is supposed to be an honor and a civic duty and what not. But really, how many of us really look forward to being called for it? I don't. Yet I wonder how after so many years, my name finally made it in the pool. It had to be the registration to vote. The truth is that until the last presidential election, I had never voted, and therefore never bothered to register. Once I did however, my name went into the list, and jury duty found me.

This is not unlike companies selling their customer lists to others for the purpose of marketing, but at least in this case the government is not secretive about it. I should have done my homework to understand the process better. I'm not sure if knowing this information would have stopped me from voting, but since my chosen candidate didn't make it, it makes this jury duty call even harder to bear.