Thursday, June 19, 2003

Mergers and Acquisitions and Takeovers - Oh My!   OK, I can see SCO stirring up trouble in the *NIX world in hopes that a giant will buy them out to resolve the mess.  Makes sense in a way but is also very likely to backfire.   It also makes sense for Palm to buy Handspring.  The 2 head honchos of Handspring (Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky) were the key players at Palm after all.  It never made sense for them to split and fight against each other instead of focusing on the Pocket PC threat from Redmond.   But it really gets crazy in the app vendor market.  PeopleSoft was going to merge with J.D. Edwards.  OK.  Then Oracle steps in and announces an unsolicited, unwelcome attempt to buy PeopleSoft.   This could be a way for Larry Ellison, the world’s 6th or 7th richest person, to either A) Kill a competitor by acquiring them or B) Hurt the competitor by causing uncertainty enough for PeopleSoft customers to postpone buying decisions.  Or both.   J.D. Edwards has now filed suit against Oracle for $1.7 billion.  Heck, Larry can whip out his checkbook and write a check for that amount. 2:31:40 PM    comment []

Prodigy - 1992 It was 11 years ago (1992) this week that Prodigy became the first major online service provider to grant access to the Internet.  That was pretty revolutionary at the time.   Back then services like CompuServe had a huge installed base of users and fantastic forums of information.  In fact the moderated forums on CompuServe still have no match on the Internet.  Sure you have newsgroups but there is so much junk there that it’s hardly worth the effort.   I always give my “back in my day” speech to newbies who think the online world started with Netscape in 1995.  I was on-line (albeit in text mode and a snail-like 300bps) in 1983 and the community, though small, was outstanding.   Using the FIDO and other networks we could communicate with others around the globe and somehow we managed without the GUI and hyperlinks that the web brought us.   Prodigy failed a few years after because it gave the users a subset of the Internet - the proprietary Prodigy version - and users discovered providers and browsers that gave them the entire Internet.  All except for AOL users who STILL don’t get it.   2:19:35 PM    comment []