Keeping in touch

Remember Netscape? The browser launched the Internet boom when it went public in 1995. Today, the company survives as a division of AOL which bought it out a few years ago. When Microsoft decided to give the Internet Explorer (another Internet browser) away, Netscape had to match the price. In Accounting 101, revenue is equal to price times quantity. Zero price times quantity is zero revenue. Zero revenue means high losses despite a great product and brand name.

However, Netscape has been making a comeback. Since the worms and viruses that came out in the last two years, I have been using Netscape Navigator to browse the Internet. Apparently, most of the worms have been designed to hit Microsoft’s Outlook products.

I was recently curious about the tab on the left called "Buddy List." The Buddy System is AOL’s system for instant messaging or more commonly known as "chatting." In fact, it was called Instant Messenger before AOL bought it a few years ago and integrated it into the Netscape browser. Instant messaging is for people who want to get instant feedback. IM or the Buddy List tells you that your buddy is online and that you can send him/her an instant message. (What did we do before this? E-mail. Even in late 1995, I was talking about how life was great with the fax. Funny how even e-mail is not good enough anymore.)

I have a friend in London and a friend in California (both of whom work for AOL Time Warner) who are now on the buddy list. But the buddy does not work if the other guy is not online. I tried it a few times but my buddies do not seem to turn it on as a matter of standard procedure. (Must be the men-being-from-Mars thing because my wife is always on ICQ with her friends.)

A more popular chat product is ICQ (or I seek you). It is also an instant messaging system but not tied to a browser. When you start up the computer, the ICQ batch file puts the ICQ icon on your system and turns on when one or more of your ICQ friends get online. (I have used a crowbar to pry my wife off it when she is on with her NY/NJ friends but to no avail.)

My Two Cents: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won’t bother you for weeks." — quote from an e-mail newsletter.

Enron and Argentina

Enron and Argentina have both declared bankruptcy in recent months.

Enron, at its peak, was the high-flier stock with a market cap in excess of US$60 billion. Enron was an energy company that became a trading company making markets for both energy units as well as bandwidth. It was in the same trading business as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch but without the proper capital and compliance disciplines of a Wall Street house. At the end of the day, it was their leaders’ lack of transparent reporting with the use of off-balance sheet partnerships. According to the business journals, it is alleged that the use of these partnerships produced consistently growing earnings. Once this was made public, the market started losing confidence in the firm as a counter party and avoided it in trading. No trading, no business.

Argentina, a South American nation with 36 million citizens, had external debts in excess of $132 billion. It had the best economic minds working for it in the last 12 months. However, I was talking to my Argentinean friend and he said most of the pain could be attributed to the privatization efforts started since President Menem’s days when the government sold off everything. The big problem is that a big slice of the proceeds from the sale was not reinvested in the country but siphoned off to someone’s pocket.

My Two Cents: Both of these entities can attribute a big chunk of their failure to leadership, a lack thereof. Their leaders were corrupt and not transparent. It is very easy to see parallels to the Philippines as we go through our own debt problems and privatization programs. Let’s just make sure the Philippines does not fall into the same trap.

Follow-up: HP-Compaq tie-up

The heirs of Messrs. Hewlett and Packard, the founders of this original garage startup, have opposed this merger. Also, in a recent article, Fortune magazine said Dell has increased its market share by at least three percentage points for the third quarter compared to the previous year. (Note that this market share gain was before the HP-Compaq deal. Can you imagine what their market share points look like after?) HP continues to have this merger hanging over its head subject to shareholders’ vote in March 2002. As I predicted, the senior management of both firms will have gotten their eye off the ball, creating an environment where good managers leave, Dell continues to focus and which is a recipe for HP to lose more business.

My Two Cents: The merger is hard enough to execute with two behemoths being integrated into one. Now we find out it has not even started and the founders’ heirs (who control around 19 percent) have not been brought into the loop. My take is this deal is going to die and Carly will be in need of an outplacement firm soon.