Josh Kopelman has a great post up about Sales Forecasting, along with a sample model of a “Waterfall Forecast.”
Quest Software has been competing with Mercury Interactive for a number of years. In the past, several of Quest’s strategic moves clearly positioned it as a alternative to Mercury. However, last week, they ended up being similar to Mercury in a way they most likely weren’t happy with and never anticipated. Quest announced that it will have to restate its finances from 2000 to 2005. The stock dropped some, but will likely hang out where it is until this plays out more.
In response, a friend dropped me a note with a new public company option pricing strategy. As we now know, many of these companies went to great (and in some cases illegal) lengths to get the best possible option pricing for their employees – often disproportionately so for their executives. Now that this information is coming to light, the new strategy is:
Hopefully the irony of this won’t be lost on anyone.
We’re at our house in Homer which doesn’t have a TV (by design). Amy loves watching tennis and wanted to watch Wimbledon. Our Tivo at our house in Boulder broke in May and we haven’t bothered to replace it.
The intrepid nerd decided to BitTorrent Wimbledon for his darling bride. Imagine my shock and horror when I basically couldn’t find any Wimbledon BitTorrents. There were plenty of TV shows, as well as lots of porn, but no tennis. I sulked around for a few minutes and then decided to head over to the Wimbledon site to figure out the times / channels to ask Ross to record for me, burn a DVD, and fedex.
Imagine my glee when I found – front and center on the Wimbledon Video page – an all access pass for a mere $12.95 (it’s been reduced to $5.95 now that Wimbledon is over.) Everything, every match, every court – $12.95. I was shocked for a second time in an hour when the DRM worked perfectly and the quarter final match Amy wanted to watch started downloading.
Within a span of 30 minutes my world view (and mood) did a 180. Today, I cancelled my DirecTV subscription and decided not to fix my Tivo. Plus, Amy is very happy with me.
My friend Will Herman is on a blogging tear these days. Today, he wrote a long, excellent post titled “When To Get Rid of the ‘Best’ People That Work For You.” Will has 25 years of technology / entrepreneurial management experience and he knows of what he speaks. In one week, he’s penned two posts – the other being “When Firing Someone, Focus on Those Who Remain” – that should be read by anyone who is an entrepreneur. Nice writing Will.
I usually clobber a book every other day when I’m in Homer. Last week was a slow week because of a family health issue that turned our world upside down for two days (all is ok now) and some friends that visited the past few days.
I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. It was awesome. This is one of the classics that helped start the environment activism movement and imprinted the phrase monkeywrenching in the minds of many people. While it was written in 1975, it doesn’t seem dated at all – in fact, if anything – it was easy to transport myself back to the time when I was 10 and getting hauled around in the back of my parents’ Vista Cruiser station wagon across Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.
While I don’t support the approach to environmental activism suggested by the book, it’s provocative and – if you can get your head back into 1975 – powerfully revealing about how things might (and – in many ways have) unwound over the last 30 years. Abbey’s writing is brilliant (I guess it’s time to read a few more of his books), and stood out in stark contrast to An Inconvenient Truth.
I’ve been watching the backdating option scandal unfold with the same horror that someone watches a slow motion multi-car pile up (or maybe the space shuttle exploding on takeoff.) A few folks have been writing interesting stuff and/or have useful links (such as Paul Kedrosky) and it’s been widely covered in several mainstream publications, most notably the Wall Street Journal.
Mercury Interactive – the company that was the first one to have to deal with an investigation into this issue (the first shoe fell with an 8–K they filed on 11/2/05 announcing the resignation of their CEO, CFO, and General Counsel ) finally filed their restated 2004 10–K this week. While a careful read of it is instructive for anyone following this issue in general, Jack Ciesielski has a fantastic summary of the major issues up on SeekingAlpha in his post titled Mercury Interactive: Less Murky But No More Forgivable.
One of the important facts is that a number of the restatements will ultimately have a cash impact since they result in underreported withholding taxes. Several articles that I’ve read that have been dismissive of this issue have asserted that all the charges will be non-cash so this isn’t really a big deal. I’ve never understood that perspective (I thought we already learned our lessons about cash and non-cash charges in the telecom and dotcom meltdown), but this just guts that argument altogether.
Unfortunately, this car crash is far from over.
I’ve been struggling with what to say about Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth.” I read it a few weeks ago and had very mixed emotions about it.
Fred and JoAnne Wilson saw the movie last night. Fred’s blog post perfectly captured how I felt about the book. I want the science and the facts, not the melodrama and the preaching. At some point as I was reading the book, I told Amy that if I read the phrase “moral imperative” one more time, I’d puke.
The summary – Gore’s substance has impact; Gore’s style is detracting.
Do you remember the Banana Junior 6000? Someone actually built one. “Good Morning, Mr. President. Shall we dust Moscow?” I wonder how many times it needs to restart itself to update the OS? Thanks Will (via Dave) – you made my day.
Brian Kellner has started a blog called Grillin’ in the Storm. The subtitle – thoughts on agile software product management – sets the tone. I’ve known Brian for almost 20 years (we were fraternity brothers – I think I was his pledge trainer but I’ve gotten old enough that I can’t remember any more.) He moved to Colorado about five years ago and has worked at several software companies (including – but not limited to – several that I have been an investor in) before ending up at NewsGator.
I’ve loved working with Brian – he has the rare ability to synthesize user needs into a language that developers can understand. As an MIT grad, he can hold his own technically with basically anyone. And – he can write (boy, can he write.)
If you are involved in developing software for a living, I expect Brian will have plenty of things to say that you’ll find interesting.