Q-End Push

Why does any given quarter always have to go down to the wire? I mean, just once I'd like to get to the week before a Q-close with the number done and the luxury of building backlog, but somehow it never seems to go that way. And let's be clear, this quarter will be no different. Right now (22nd) we are about 35% of the way to the 1Q goal.

That row boat may yet come in handy ....

Le Mans: Looking Good for 2007

I just saw that Adrian Newey (Red Bull Technical Director and generally well-respected F1 designer) is looking to enter the 24 hours at Le Mans this year as a privateer driving a Ferrari 430, so long as they can earn a slot of course. In addition, the field looks set to host Johnny Herbert driving, of all things, the Prodrive Aston Martin, and Jacques Villeneuve who is racing the new Peugeot entry.

With luck, SpeedTV here in the USA will cover it again this year so definitely a date for the armchair racing diary!

Palm up for Grabs?

Rumours abounded yesterday that Palm is up for sale. Not the first time this particular tale has been told, but this time it's all a bit more specific. In addition to the obvious suspects - Motorola and Nokia - it appears that Texas and Silverlake, two private equity firms, are also in the frame. Price is supposed to be around $2 Bn.

I can obviously see the synergies with Nokia and Motorola but find it hard to see how private equity could reallly take Palm in a new direction that would help answer the many questions that still need answering about that business, not the least of which is, "can an independent maker of those kinds of devices really survive in such an incredibly competitive market that's becoming more crowded by the day?" (Apple iPhone anyone?)

Thursday is supposed to be the day this goes public.

Ooops (Part 1)

Saw this on the way home tonight. Just as I got there a third patrol car was pulling away from the hard shoulder. Well, I suppose that if you are going to attract the attention of the Highway Patrol then getting three of them engaged is some kind of indicator that you did a good job of it! On the plus side, at least they got together before the fines doubled ...

Neither vehicle looked badly damaged so not quite sure why the show of force from the Black-and-Whites. Suffice to say, I paid great attention to the metering lights at the end of the entrance ramp, and was also very mindful of all traffic laws around merging onto a freeway!

Ode to a Beer

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

Not sure Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a beer in mind when penning this opening line, but she might have. Whatever, but after a long, tiring - and often tiresome - weekend then that's exactly how I felt about his particular bottle of Michelob. Not withstanding spending from 9 am to 4 pm up on my roof on Saturday, plus another 3 hours on Sunday, painting a chimney stack replaced earlier in the week, I wasted countless hours trying to a) get my NAS disk to be visible again on my home network and b) recovering my wife's laptop from an assault of Spartan ferocity by various Trojan and Spyware viruses. Fixing a) ultimately required me to update the firmware on the Buffalo LinkStation I use, itself a challenge as, in order to do so, you first need network connectivity which, if it was working, would mean I didn't have a problem in the first place. Fixing b) was only accomplished by invoking the nuclear option and reinstalling Windows. This would have been easier if I had the original recovery or install disk, which I didn't, and so instead I had to use a "clean" XP install from a copy I had sitting around the house. Of course, life's never quite that easy in Microsoft land and it was only after about two hours that I again had something that would boot.

To get me through all this, I kept the promise of a nice, cold, frosty beer uppermost in my mind, with access only being granted when I was done. Coupled with that the prospect of drinking it in front of the Australian F1 GP and ... well, you get the picture.

I got there in the end, but it was a hell of a long journey. Still, it was good when I got there, so good in fact I had to drink another just to be sure. Even weekends like that one have an upside.

Cracking Race, Gromit

So, Ferrari are back, and it's like they were never away! Kimi seems to have slotted-in like the Schumacher era never existed and it's back to business-as-usual. Shame we never got to see how he and Massa would have fared head-to-head but there are 16 races left in which to try and answer that question. Of course, the other story was the frankly amazing debut by Lewis Hamilton. Here's a man completely new to Formula One, on a track he's never seen before (and one of the most technically challenging on the calender) and in his first race he drives with more composure, native speed and raw talent than almost any other racer out there, and ends up on the podium. Quite remarkable. The question for him is not if he'll win races, just when, and how many.

Oh, and thanks to DC for providing our first "lunge of the week" spot. Nice one! (Though parking ones car on the front of your opponent was over-egging the pudding somewhat!) Personally, I had Takuma Sato marked out for that one but there you go. He was content besting the number one Honda team, and judging by the pre-race interview having lots of fun doing so!

Good, too, to see Briatore back on fine form, lambasting Kovalainen's performance. "I don't need to protect anyone. It was rubbish", he's quoted as saying. I think this is one to chalk down to the racing equivalent of a "bad hair day", but the pressure on Heikki in race 2 will be enormous. Can't wait!

Cisco buys WebEx for $3.2 bn

The news on this buy became public today but was very well guarded up until then. Cisco has recently been making a number of smaller purchases at the outer-edges of the mainline business but this is a much more significant move into the applications rather than infrastructure marketplace.

I assume the logic is something like "as the network and networking equipment markets becomes increasingly commoditised and growth is hard to find, what high-value services will themselves be network driven and hence important for Cisco to be directly engaged in?"

Not hard to see that WebEx's leadership in the remote meeting space sits well with that thinking, and it doesn't take a crystal ball to see that the market for video conferencing, where the WebEx brand should have a strong play, is finally starting to become legitimised as $/megabit prices continue to fall.

We do indeed live in interesting times!

Spring Arrives In Silicon Valley

Coming back from Europe, it was very pleasant to find that temperatures here, even in San Francisco, were in the upper 70s and low 80s- definitely not bad for early March! We're therefore facing an early end to the rainy season, but for those whose homes are served by the public water main then summer supplies should be fine, it seems, despite the reservoirs only being at 60% capacity. (Our house is served by a ground well but even then we should be OK this year after the extended rains of last season). Yesterday saw record temperatures in the South Bay and the coming weekend is set to be a little hotter still. Hmm, I somehow think there's wood smoke and sizzling meat in my future!

There, got through an entire paragraph on unusual weather readings and didn't mention global warming even once.

Spring also seems to be arriving in the IPO and M&A markets out here. The newspapers are again starting to run stories on Microsoft and Cisco coming back to the table to buy key technologies (Tellme is the rumoured target in the case of Microsoft) and other smaller deals are starting to happen as well. And that's all a jolly good thing, so long as some of that lurve spreads our way!

Aston Martin in Formula 1

So now the game plan is starting to shape-up, it's never too early to put 1 + 1 together to make 3, especially in the world of F1 where rumour and intrigue generate more press pages than do race results.

David Richards already has a slot booked in the F1 championship entry list for the 2008 season labelled "Prodrive". He, with a consortium of backers, now has ownership of Aston Martin, a company he helped take racing again both here in the USA (ALMS) and in Europe (Le Mans etc.)

Rather than promoting the somewhat consumer-unfriendly Prodrive brand, known only really to Subaru cognoscenti in the UK, why wouldn't he now scratch out Prodrive on Bernie's list and pencil-in "Aston Martin" instead?

You heard it here first, folks, Aston Martin are going into Formula One!

Classic Silicon Valley - Kind of ...

Interesting post on Jalopnik stating that BMW has figured out why it makes sense to have owners be able to e-mail Google map co-ordinates to their vehicles that can then be imported into the car's GPS system. Finally. No more sitting there poking at buttons - while stationary, of course - trying to recreate something you already looked up before leaving home.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/bmw-sends-google-maps-street-addresses-to-cars-gps-system-243458.php

So why in the world isn't this being figured out by Ford and GM first? How much of an unfair advantage do you need? Mind you, take a look at the car park outside the Google campus and the answer probably becomes a bit clearer! Local BMW dealers here are very fancy operations.