Bill Gates’ Think Weeks have become legendary. The software smart guy heads off to a secret retreat for a week twice a year and immerses himself in piles of papers submitted by Microsoft’s minions. He emerges having thought great thoughts and if all goes well, comes up with a few ideas to help his company get even stronger.
If this sort of thing is good enough for Bill Gates, I figure it’s good enough for me. Though I can’t get away with doing this for a week, so I settled recently for a Think Day.
Perhaps more like Henry David Thoreau than Gates, I trekked down a rain-soaked nature trail in western Massachusetts last month to sit undisturbed on a log bench and rocky cliff for 8 hours and plow through a pile of white papers, research reports and other matter.
While I’m not sure I came up with any big thoughts or any ideas that will rocket Network World into Microsoft’s stratosphere, I did come across a handful of noteworthy items. Here’s a sampling:
* With the Verizon-Qwest-MCI battle having just wound down, I found no shortage of reports on the drama. One interesting observation from Gartner analyst Will Hahn in a blog on the research firm’s site is that despite the desperation with which U.S. carriers are gobbling up one another, carriers outside the U.S. don’t seem in any particular hurry to consolidate.
He wrote: “Right from the first SBC offer and throughout the Verizon-Qwest bidding war, the other large carriers have seemed to feel the need to do well, nothing. Of the other telecom service providers in the Top 5 globally, neither NTT, Vodafone, nor Deutsche Telecom (DT) has announced any kind of M&A activity (in the latter case, despite being essentially invited to bid by Turkish authorities on the stake in the region’s largest PTO, Turk Telkom). Telecom Italia is bidding on Turk, but nothing new seems to be on the radar for France Telecom, BT or KDDI of Korea.”
* Another take on the merger action, this by Eastern Management Group, centered on Qwest’s unsuitableness for taking over MCI. The consultancy points out that while Qwest chief Dick Notebaert has been lauded for whipping Qwest into better shape through cost cutting, that these efforts can come at a heavy price. During his reign at Ameritech, the old RBOC invested $5 billion less from 1988 to 1999 than its counterparts, a factor that Eastern Management Group suggests was not unrelated to Ameritech’s poor record of customer satisfaction and network reliability during that period. The consultancy points out that all the RBOCs cut capital expenditures significantly between 2001 and 2004 (Notebaert had moved on to Tellabs by then), but Qwest led the way with an 80% reduction. Verizon, by comparison, cut its spending by 24% over that period.
* It can be tough keeping track of the Bells vs. cable company competition, but one faithful tracker is Bruce Leichtman of Leichtman Research Group. His latest report shows that the leaders in DSL and cable modem services have more comfortable leads than I would have thought. Comcast, with nearly 7 million cable modem subscribers, had about a 3 million subscriber lead on runner up Time Warner as of the end of 2004. Comcast added about 1.7 million subscribers last year compared to Time Warner’s 685,000. In DSL, SBC rules with 5.1 million subscribers; Verizon follows with 3.6 million.
* As if phishing scams in which evildoers send you e-mail trying to scam you out of your life savings aren’t scary enough, White Hat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman says in an article on the BetaNews Web site that an even more frightening proposition is that 9 out of 10 Web sites are vulnerable to something called cross-site scripting. New scams enable phishers to convert legitimate Web sites into fake ones, which can be used to swipe user data.
* I took a look at Nucleus Research’s Top Ten Technology Predictions for 2005, which I’m sure they meant to have people read at the start of the year – before we could start critiquing their accuracy. One interesting point: The research firm predicts that vendors such as SAP might be expected to quietly tout the cost and performance benefits of open source offerings such as mySQL, no doubt to the chagrin of the Microsofts and Oracles of the world.
* Here’s something I’d never given much thought to before: printer attacks. But Arbor Networks in a white paper titled “Safe Quarantine: Automated Worm Suppression” describes a worse case scenario in which a Slammer-like worm infects networked laser printers. “Targeting a product with a commanding share of the enterprise printing market, a vulnerability in a print server card would provide a worm with a vulnerable population order of magnitude greater than the Sapphire SQL worm had,” the paper states. The white paper is available via our Web site (some registration is required).
Just to bring things back to Gates, one other thing I read was an interview he did with Business Week. He told an interviewer that he’s readying a Weblog of his own, but is having trouble getting past the writing part. All I could think of was: Bill, welcome to my world.
