Daily Archives: February 6, 2010

How The Mighty Have Fallen

The past decade has been rough on many companies, but technology companies appear to have bore the brunt of it. Check out Fortune’s biggest losers over the past decade over on CNNMoney.com. Eight are technology companies, and all make Ariba’s Market Cap Loss of 46 B [as chronicled in James Kwak’s The Myth of Ariba and discussed in my post on Will Private Equity Players Offer You Better Value Than Public Equity Players] look like pocket change! (Ariba Peak: 47 B, Recent: 1 B, approx.)

Company	Loss	Peak Market Cap	Recent Market Cap
Cisco Systems	425 B	557 B	132 B
General Electric	423 B	601 B	178 B
Intel	400 B	509 B	109 B
Microsoft	390 B	642 B	252 B
Nortel	283 B	283 B	0 B (bankrupt)
Lucent Technologies	274 B	285 B	11 B
America Online	219 B	222 B	3 B
WorldCom	186 B	186 B	0 B (bankrupt)

Lesson learned? Besides the fact that market valuation should never exceed a reasonable multiple of revenue (10X might be okay in extreme situations for true up-and-comers, but 100X is ridiculous), I’d have to say that this also teaches us that Software and Hardware is not worth more than the value you are able to extract from it.

Every blogger needs a cat!

They make great editors!

Every Blogger Needs to Have a Cat

To the tune of Everybody Wants to be a Cat from Disney’s The Aristocats.

Every blogger needs to have a cat,
because a cat’s the only cat
who knows where it’s at!

Everybody’s pickin’ up on that feline beat,
’cause everything else is obsolete.

Now a square on the keys,
can make your eyelids squeeze,
ever’time he writes;
and with a square in the act,
he can set writing back
to the caveman days.

I’ve heard some corny birds who tried to write,
but a cat’s the only cat
who can get it right.
Who wants to be fleeced
by a long-winded piece
or stuff like that?
When Every blogger needs to have a cat.

Now a square on the keys,
can make your eyelids squeeze,
ever’time he writes;
and with a square in the act,
he can set writing back
to the caveman days.

Every blogger needs to have a cat,
because a cat’s the only cat
who knows where it’s at.

While writin’ jazz you always has a Welcome mat,
’cause everybody digs editor cat.
Everybody digs editor cat.

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Twitter Will Make a Twit Out Of You!

As highlighted in this CNet video which asks “does Twitter make you stoopid” (at the 2:35/4:15 mark), “students [are] failing because of Twitter, texting” (Canoe.ca). The University of Waterloo in Ontario, which has world renowned programs in mathematics, computer science, and engineering (among other disciplines), requires all students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third are failing. “Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level“, a failure rate that has increased five percentage points in the past few years. Poor grammar is the major reason students fail. “Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, and cuz are some of the writing horrors being handed in”. “Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors”.

According to the news release, experts in the field are saying that “cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills. And since Twitter is both, I think it’s finally safe to say that Twitter will make a twit out of you, and that’s not a good thing. After all, the proper definition of twit is an ignorant or bothersome person. Do you really want to be uninformed (dumb) and annoying? I don’t! (And while those of you who know me might say I already am, Twitter takes ignorance and annoyance to a whole new level. Let’s not go there. After all, now that it’s been demonstrated that when a twit speaks in the Twittersphere, no one hears, there’s just no point. )