Digging in the Dirt

I love it when people from one vendor, for example, the competitive intelligence folks or product management, leave trails how they are trying to knock, bash, and discredit their competition. Of course, many times, there is hearsay like "I was told that vendor XYZ's product doesn't scale, doesn't perform, has quality issues, is untested, ..." The creativity has no limits. Then there are people that use Google to skim the Internet's bulletin boards, forums, or blogs in their quest for dirt.

My Sitemeter log just monitored a nice example of the described category. A Firefox user on a Mac, working at Oracle is apparently on the lookout for stories about support challenges at MicroStrategy.


What's interesting is not the fact that a vendor would do such a thing. Business is war, right? The funny part is the wording of the search term that the Oracle person used to find something of value about MicroStrategy. Horror stories? As if someone would just write them up nicely for easy consumption.


What gets me is this: With those search words, why does my blog show up in Google's results? The mentioned entry page mentions MicroStragegy alright, but no horror story.

The Upside of Bad Data

Maybe I should stop evangelizing. For years I've been telling clients to take data quality seriously and manage information like a corporate asset. Since Monday I'm thinking "maybe it's a good thing that companies have such a mess in their databases." Think about it, wouldn't it be nice if you couldn't get a speeding ticket, because the address data in the police database is corrupt?

Well, most of the time, it sure is beneficial to have correct, complete, and consistent data that is not duplicate, and so on. Not so today. When I checked into the Marriott Anaheim this week (I'm attending the IBM IOD event here), I was surprised to be treated with more respect, friendliness, benefits, and perks than in any other case when I checked into a hotel. Nothing to complain about, but why the sudden change? I live a large part of my life in hotels, and I have never seen that special treatment. The puzzle was solved quickly when the check-in clerk handed me a piece of fancy cardboard with a personalized welcome note from the Marriott Rewards program (some kinda frequent sleeper program). It had my name on it. It also said I was a Platinum Elite Member, which I'm not. And I was supposed to have (get this!) a balance of 1,912,602 points in my account. Almost two million points? No way. Now, was I going to tell the guy that I rather not have an upgrade to the best available room, a bottle of wine, fruits and nuts in my room, high floor with a nice view from my balcony, access to the concierge lounge with free breakfast, hors d'euvres, drinks, etc? Think again.
No idea where the hotel pulled that data about my account from. Honestly, I don't care either. Cheers!

Being Alanis

Here is a song I'll be working on. It will be my first attempt of generating some music based on fully computer-generated lyrics. I know what you think. Many of the Top 40 hits are probably just that. Want to create your own lyrics that sound like Alanis Morrissette? The Brunching Shuttlecocks gladly generate them for you.

"I Think"

I Think phone calls are really a huge problem
I Think papers are too much on my mind
I Think meetings have got a lot to do with why the world sucks
But what can you do?

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like a Monty Python line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Bettie's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

I Think airplanes are gonna drive us all crazy
And hotel nights make me feel like a child
I Think computers will eventually be the downfall of civilization
But what can you do? I said what can you do?

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like a Monty Python line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Bettie's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like Bettie's smile, cruel and cold
Like Monty Python's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

I blog therefore IP

Just found a fabulous self-check of blogs by Lore Sjöberg, who wrote the ultimate blog post over at Wired.

"Blog" itself is short for "weblog," which is short for "we blog because we weren't very popular in high school and we're trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people."

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it.

So there... brilliant. Those of you who read this blog, thanks for stopping by.

Would you like to become a spammer? Yes - No - Help

There is nothing worse than a non-message. Check this out: A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. A program? What the hell... could the message get any less specific? The window title shows Outlook itself. Does that mean Outlook is the program and it's asking me whether it can access its own addresses? That'd be pretty funny and doesn't make any sense.

So do I want to allow this? Honestly, I have no idea. For sure I don't want any spyware to call home, but why would any spyware/adware/malware access my addresses in the first place, since the potential email receiver is certainly not in my address book. Could I have caught a virus that attempts to use my account to spam everyone I know? Unlikely. So what is that mysterious program and why does it want to mess with my addresses? I have a suspicion that it is the Outlook search engine Lookout, because it just flagged an indexing error and stopped operating until I voted No on the message above.

Yum? Someone just ate the database

I'm always amused when I connect to a website of an established company or other organization and instead of seeing a well designed, intuitive, nicely rendered HTML page, I am looking at an error message of some software that apparently has failed. From my memory, the leader in this space (granted, nothing to be proud of) is probably MySQL. I have seen countless websites blow up with nothing much than a MySQL error. Not good, particularly since those guys claim to be enterprise-ready and suitable for mission-critical applications.

Now, you could argue that the website of my football team shouldn't be considered mission-critical, but it's embarassing nevertheless. So, instead of knowing scores of the teams, I'm looking at garbled techno-babble.

Warning:
mysql_connect(): Too many connections
in /www/www.eintracht.de/documents/yum/_php/database.php on line 401

399 function connect() {
400 $this->deconstruct_location();
401 $this->db = mysql_connect($this->host, $this->user, $this->password)
402 or die("Verbindungsaufbau zum SQL-Server ist fehlgeschlagen.");

@ >/yum/_php/database.php:401 -- mysql_connect(...)
@ >/yum/_php/database.php:385 -- database->connect()
@ >/yum/_php/database.php:321 -- database->select_db()
@ >/yum/_php/onlineusers.php:110 -- database->query(...)
@ >/yum/_php/onlineusers.php:47 -- communityonlineusers->refresh()
@ >/yum/_modules/community/onlineusers.php:62 -- onlineusers::onlineusers(...)
@ >/yum/_modules/community/handler.php:103 -- communityonlineusers->communityonlineusers(...)
@ >/yum/_php/module.php:44 -- communityhandler->communityhandler(...)

What's with the yummies? Someone nibbling at the SQL statements? Ugh.

Liveplasma

I always enjoy finding some clever tools or technology that inspires me. Liveplasma is the latest one and it is particularly useful for mashups of all kinds. The examples given are mapping an initial search of a piece of music, an artist, a movie with similar or related topics. Here is an example of a search by musicians. Chuck Loeb is one of my favorite guitarists, and the mapping of similar music by other artists is actually very accurate and pretty much reflects my CD collection. (Yes, I still have lots of CDs).

Now consider Liveplasma as a navigation tool for, let's pick my own industry, research documents, topics, analysts, vendors. Wouldn't it be cool to jump from vendor X to topic Y to analyst Z and back to another vendor? Or think about a vendors web site about products (e.g., printers or software): search by product name, and get an instant mapping of related drivers, updates, ink cartridges, distributors, user's guides. The options are endless, for example, CNET has used it to map its news.

flickr update: A night in Dublin

So the Armadgeddon folks apparently like my photographs. At least it's a start, but I don't think they really armadgettit. Because I'm not bitter. And so the valued AR people can see more than the virtual itinerary images, I'll start showcasing a few samples here every once in a while.


www.flickr.com

Vendor advertising

There I am this morning, sitting in the kitchen with my coffee and my laptop, checking on the news after an (almost) all-nighter, and the Klassikradio station broadcasts a little radio ad that makes me almost spill my coffee. Now, I'd agree that the target audience for classical music (or what they consider "classical" as they play a lot of movie soundtracks, too) does not consist of school kids, but rather white-collar people 30, 40 and up. So I can only assume that this is what SAP had in mind when they launched the radio campaign where a guy announces in the jingle that working with the same data would be a benefit to companies. Duh. Anyway, I can't help it but think "who wants to go and buy enterprise software after listening to a 15 second radio commercial"? Well, the ad was about Business One, so maybe I shouldn't consider it enterprise software to begin with, but it appears to me to be a huge waste of money, as filtering by age group is not particularly effective for business applications. If I was to target German buyers of software such as ERP or CRM packages, I'd always recommend finding business people that are confined as a group (e.g. in specialized events, or in an airplane) rather than some shotgun approach. My favorite media for that kind of advertising was always the Handelsblatt am Abend, a free 8-page news update, distributed to Lufthansa business class fliers, every afternoon and evening. There you have mostly business people that try to kill an hour going home or to their next destination and everybody reads those few pages cover to cover. That's where I would place ads. In my next life, I'll go into marketing ... no wait, I wanted to become a rock guitarist.

Trends in BI

Disclaimer: Sometimes you gotta do a little self-serving advertising.

I've just been on ComputerwocheTV and talked to its Editor-in-Chief, Christoph Witte, about what's going on in the Business Intelligence market. So if you're interested in some quick market trend snapshot, here's what happened in the last 24 months, condensed into 5 minutes. Talk about efficiency...

Oh, but you better understand German :-)

Why is everybody leading?

Really just a random thought about vendors describing themselves. How on earth can everybody be leading? By running a quick Google search on "the leading provider of", it's showing almost 7M (in words: seven million!) hits. No way, José.

I mean, if the mega-vendors or any multi-billion dollar company claims leadership of some sort, I would at least acknowledge that due to their size, they may be leading a few particular market spaces. But even they are not leading in every market. Moreover, if small company PR reads "XYZ, the leading provider of such-and-such software ..." I can't help it but think "That's a bunch of BS." Of course, nobody will say "we are the trailing provider...", but I'd say in any market hardly anybody is truly leading. Maybe growing, up-and-coming, global, whatever provider of something, but not leading.

How many leader positions can one market have? Is it possible that those companies below, typically fiercely competing, are all leading? All quotes direct pick-up off the Web.

• Business Objects is the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions
• Cognos is the world leader in performance planning and business intelligence
• Hyperion, the leading provider of Business Performance Management solutions
• Information Builders is the leader in Web Business Intelligence
• MicroStrategy is the leading provider of business intelligence software
• SAS as the leading provider of business intelligence

and then there are those "leaders"

• Celequest is the leading provider of operational business intelligence (BI) solutions
• Informa Telecoms & Media is the leading provider of business intelligence
• HP is the leading provider of BI infrastructure and solutions
• TARGIT A/S, the leading provider of business intelligence solutions
  

Either I have hardly heard of those companies, or (as in HP's case, I heard of them, they sell ink) I didn't even consider them as a provider of BI of any sort, let alone leading anything. I guess those PR folks are trying to play spin doctor here in order to find some leader's attribute. How about "Joe Bloggs Inc, the leading provider of business intelligence solutions for dental labs in the greater Milwaukee area, with 3 but no more than 7 employees, of which 2 have recently gotten married and nobody wears glasses." A true leader just needs to find its niche to lead.

Too Much Data Quality

When I do presentations about data quality (or rather the lack thereof), I keep telling the same story about those companies and their e-commerce websites, where a potential customer is supposed to enter the shipping or billing address. In countless cases, the customer is not able to enter the correct address, because North American companies (in many cases the developer of the e-commerce software) have not heard of addressing standards outside of the 50 states and a handful of Canadian provinces. In many parts of the world, people don't care about middle initials, so why is there a special field? I have even two middle initials. Which one am I supposed to use? Even worse, the thing with states. The German Bundesland is never part of the address, and it's definitely not abbreviated with two characters. Although BW is often short for Baden-Württemberg, the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen is always NRW. Fit this in two spaces! Anyway, the real crazy things happen when programmers try to be smart and match cities with states and zip codes. That's when I get annoyed because the system keeps telling me that the entered combination of city, state and zip is invalid, although it is 100% correct. I know where I live and I know my address. But the application apparently knows better.

I always thought that this is an issue particularly in the US. Not so. Just a few minutes ago I tried to order something from Deutsche Telekom, and they should sure know my address (hey, they send me a bill every month) and its correct spelling. When I attempted to close the transaction after filling the shopping cart, the app asked for the shipping address. Ideally I would have thought they default it to the billing address. Nooo. I have to fill out all address fields again. So I do and press Enter. The system reports an error claiming that my zip code and city is wrong? What the §&*#}%$ ??? It's identical with the billing address, absolutely correct, but some loony programmer messes things up. I wonder what they were "testing" in the address. Too much data quality. I ordered nothing, because I couldn't. Ugh.