Category: Business

The column went on to say that GM posed a serious threat to America’s future! Obviously, the PR guys over at GM wanted to respond to it. They sent a letter to the Editor of NY Times, who in turn wanted to publish the letter after some serious edits. Finally, the two could not come to an agreement and neither version made it to the press. What makes this interesting is that, the old world behemoth, GM, which not to so far back jumped into the corporate blogging bandwagon, published both their original response and the NY Times edited version on their blog (including the email exchange with the Times editors!)

Ironically, the original piece by Tom Friedman is available only to paid subscribers! (Btw, if you subscribe to SJ Mercury News hard copy, you get to read NY Times columnists’ articles).

To get the low down on this check out the GM blog.

This is clearly a big positive for Corporate blogging. Traditional PR folks strongly believe that blogging can backfire for a company and does more harm than good. For such skeptics, this is a good case for how blogging can actually benefit a company if done right. While one could argue that Tom Friedman’s article has “some” merit (though I think he was stretching it way too much!), GM has clearly come out on top from a PR perspective. As always, in the blogosphere, things happen fast and recovery time is almost non-existent. In this case, what the original article said is almost off the table as a topic of discussion. It has become more about NY Times not giving GM adequate “space” to appropriately defend itself and GM finding its listeners in blogopshere instead! Another example of how bloggers step in when traditional media attempts to exercise excessive control (especially, when bordering on unfairness!).

I am sure left to himself Mr. Friedman might wish to respond (defend himself!) directly to GM’s response. But in the “command and control” world of traditional media this is a definitely “no-no”. The Times is clearly on backfoot on this one and maybe its time for the it to even re-think its Times Select paid service?

Here is a brief summary of the happenings based on sessions I attended.

Shashi Tharoor, Arnie and John Doerr were the big draws of the day.

Shashi Tharoor came across as a charming, British-accented, intelligent, sensible speaker. His fine speech blended UN issues such as terrorism, poverty, hunger, etc with the TiECon themes of entrepreneurship, disruption and convergence. Here are a few interesting quotes from the speech.

• “The Internet revolution has a lot of liberty, some fraternity and absolutely no equality”.
• “You can have Coca Cola without being Coca Colonized”
• “We are like Egyptian Mummies, pressed for time”
• “What you understand is very often based on our assumptions. So we should question our assumptions”
• When asked about the relevance of UN he narrated a story about Adam & Eve. Apparently, Eve was out of sorts and kind of ignoring Adam. In response Adam asked Eve, “Is there someone else?” In other words, if not the UN who else?
• An American agriculture expert once went to Punjab on a special mission to help Indian farmers. He asked the India farmer where his farm ends and the man pointed to him and showed him that the farm ended at the far away fence. In response the American said he had to drive for a couple of hours in his tractor to the south end of his farm, then another 3-4 hours to the other end etc. etc. In response, the Indian farmer said, “I know exactly what you mean, I too had a tractor like that once!”.

John Doerr: The chat between John Doerr and Michael Malone (Virtual Corp fame) was informative.

• John Doerr said that KP is no longer a white boys club has a global face. He showed a picture of the KP’s team with a couple of India and Chinese faces.
• According to him Energy, Clean tech and Green Tech are hot area for investment.
• He also talked about social entrepreneurship. The importance of support people like Muhammed Yunus (Of Grameen Bank) and someone who runs performs Eye operations in India (Sankara Eye Foundation??) (He couldn’t remember the name).
• John is big on the threat of Global warming. He showed pictures of the ice melting in Iceland. What the world would look like if more of that melting continued etc.

Arnold Schwazanegger: Arnie walked into great applause and launched into a standard campaign speech riding on his recent budget surplus wave. Nothing new, just the usual pitch but I thought he did a fine job of the delivery with no notes whatsoever. He didn’t fumble unlike Bush does so often. I think he is going to be really hard to beat for the Demos come Nov given their lack of star power.

After his speech each of the TiE past President (Suhas, Kanwal, Raj, Sridhar, Kailash) asked a question each. Arnie didn’t produce any great answers but did a fair job but stayed on message at all times. Kanwal (true to his style) asked him a pointed question. “When do you plan to visit Bangalore?” Without being direct or committal, Arnie launched into a long pitch about how India and US relations are important etc . etc.

A couple of Arnie’s humorous quips.

• “I am finally at a place where I am not the only one with an accent”
• Looking at all the TiE Presidents he said, “No women here?”

Web 2.0 Panel: I attended the session on Web 2.0 moderated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame. The panel featured a couple of VCs and founders of “digg“, “Kaboodle” and “Sphere“. The gentleman from Sphere was extremely articulate and his comments were by far the best of the lot. I was disappointed about the lack of concrete discussion on business models. Why are VCs investing? What d they look for? What excited them in this space? It appeared as though there was none. From what I could gather, Web 2.0 has a lot of cool things happening, but is quite speculative at this point from a purely business perspective.

The Complex Sale, Inc.: Rick Page, author and founder of this firm spoke about Sales, Sales strategy etc. The slides were very good but I wasn’t necessarily bowled over by the pitch. Maybe I am just too jaded from all the sales stuff I have heard over the years (hunter, farmer and the works..).

Personally, I think the Internet has changed sales dramatically, especially, when selling a commoditized low cost product, where the Internet is the primary medium for lead generation. In such scenarios, for a large part, the actual sale itself happens via the internet. You make the sales very often without ever meeting the customer. The customer signs up for free asks a few questions (support) during use and then signs up. There is no warm body making the actual sale and coming home with a p.o.

This is very different from conventional sales. I don’t think the sales person who can accomplish this fits into the conventional sales categories. In fact, it is a combination of marketing savvy and sales. There was little or no discussion on this topic at this talk.

I think this market is ripe for growth of consultants! (Seth Godin comes to mind). How do you sell on the net? What’s an effective sales strategy? What does a good sales person who can make this happen look like?

Like Vegas, Dubai is permanently under construction. I had the pleasure of seeing the Burj-al-arab Hotel. What a cool design!

Traffic seems to have become a complete nightmare. The infrastructure needs to keep pace or else this could soon be another Bangalore (based on traffic comparisons).

The summer had not yet set in. So the weather was quiet pleasant.

College education in Dubai has now become an option with several foreign colleges and universities establishing Dubai campuses (BITS Pilani). In the past most people sent their kids to Europe, America or India for their college education.

It is now possible to own land/property in Dubai. There are some cool villas being built on land reclaimed from the seas. The going rate is around $8M and celebrities such as Shahrukh Khan, Tiger Woods and other have apparently signed up to purchase these villas. (this is through the grapevine).

Dubai now has a stock exchange, an in-door Ski slope, cricket ground (Sharjah), the world ICC headquarters, etc.

Slowly but surely, the UAE Shiekhs are putting their money to create the best from around the world in their own backyards. If they don’t plan the infrastructure to keep pace with their growth plans, it could be a nightmare waiting to happen.

AMD is kicking Intel’s butt especially in PCs and servers. A couple of years back most people wouldn’t even entertain the idea of buying an AMD processor based PC. But these days its clearly not the case. AMD opteron based machines are now even available from Sun for pretty attractive prices! It will be a long time before AMD can challenge Intel in big way but certainly the early signs of it are visible. This increases Intel’s dependence on growth from new technologies (Viiv and others) to continue its lead. But these technologies are far from proven and includes many new players vying for the digital living room. I suspect the years ahead are going to be tough and crucial for Intel.

Btw, check out Intel’s new website (a clear overload of flash, the marketing guys are going berserk I suspect?). I hear the look and feel of the Intel front office has also changed dramatically!

Here is a detailed article on Mr. Summers career/life!