Movers and shakers

Office moves can be such dramatic events, which is why companies don’t do them that often. In the case of Computerworld and its sister Fairfax Business Media publications, the drama unfolded last Friday. Up until the afternoon, the move had gone smoothly, when all of a sudden a large crowd of over-excited FryUp fans appeared on Lorne Street, milling and thronging in a disturbingly madding fashion.

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- Movers and shakers
- Telstra not in the Clear


Movers and shakers

Office moves can be such dramatic events, which is why companies don’t do them that often. In the case of Computerworld and its sister Fairfax Business Media publications, the drama unfolded last Friday. Up until the afternoon, the move had gone smoothly, when all of a sudden a large crowd of over-excited FryUp fans appeared on Lorne Street, milling and thronging in a disturbingly madding fashion.

Our hero, SuperKarl, was on a mission to shift the company servers to the new premises but found himself caught in the frenzied crowd. Knowing full well that deadlines are only one s short of deadliness, our man quickly realised he had to beat everyone senseless to enable forward-going process.

Unfortunately though, there was only one weapon at hand for SuperKarl: the file server. It went down as a result, not in that way you’re thinking of and not like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer either, but as in not working.

The rest is history and a network outage between Friday and Monday.

- Fairfax Business Media systems back online

Random SETON bashing to go with the above:

“Lotus Notes is far and away the most horrible software on the planet. Sure, people grumble about Microsoft products. But that's nothing compared to how people feel about Notes. People hate Notes. As in, they want to change jobs just so they can stop using it. I'm pretty sure there are shrinks who have built practices around it.”

- Forbes/Daniel Lyons: What’s in a name?

In last week’s FryUp I mentioned that I asked Nigel from Microsoft about whether or not the Redmondians have anything similar to the offline caching coming up for Firefox 3.0, a feature that could allow browser-based applications to run without an active network connection (well, for a while at least).

At the time, Nigel seemed unsure what Microsoft was up to. However, he’s been to Redmond to recharge the implants and got some more info on what Microsoft’s doing in this field. Not being an Open Sourcer, Nigel can’t give too much away, but if the Mozilla stuff becomes a standard, IE will have it too.

- Nigel Parker’s MSDN blog

- WHATWG DOM storage

Then there’s Ana from Spare Room who likes to share the incomprehensible when she’s not posting it on her blog. I like the 1-click Award site a lot. Don’t forget to have the sound turned up and try clicking. It’s good.

- 1-click Award


Telstra not in the Clear

The Smales Farm boys and girls got a tongue-lashing by El Jefe of Telstra, Sol Trujillo this week, after the New Zealand operation turned in dismal numbers for the second half of last year. Do better, Trujillo says, stopping short of adding “or else” to his sternly voiced displeasure with TelstraClear.

Comparing the released figures for financial performance with those mentioned in the leaked email by TelstraClear CEO Alan Freeth to staff before Christmas last year is illuminating. In his message, Freeth wrote:

“And, right now, we are on a trajectory to disaster, with a forecast EBIT (profit) loss of $7 million for this current year - we are being out-marketed, out-smarted and out-gunned in the market place. We are too slow in reacting and we lack the killer instinct.”

“So, before profit comes revenue, and as of last Friday, our overall revenue is behind Plan by around $67 million.”

The report card is in now, and while the figures Freeth mentioned in his email are not directly comparable with the ones for the half-year ending December 31, earnings for TelstraClear fell $14 million. This translates into a $19 million loss for that period whereas Trujillo was told to expect a $14.8 million profit.

An analyst working for a competing telco that I spoke to last year says there is no TelstraClear mentioned in his company’s five-year competitive strategy. This I think is exaggerating, and a bit rich by the analyst’s company that has itself been skating on thin ice business-wise; it’s doing well in NZ by grace of inept regulation.

However, if there’s to be a New Zealand arm of Telstra in five years time, it’ll have to be a very different company from today’s lame duck outfit. Dropping “Clear” from the name and bringing in the BigPond brand from Australia will do precious little to save Smales Farm. Only more customers and better service will see to that.

Incidentally, one of Freeth’s first moves when taking the helm at TelstraClear was to axe porn programming like the Chilli channel on moral grounds. Far be it for the FryUp to suggest a return to raunch but the smut apparently made TelstraClear around half a million a month which would’ve softened the blow of the latest results considerably.

It’d be interesting too to know if TelstraClear’s refusal to peer for national traffic is costing the provider dearly by forcing the provider to pay more for data now going via international circuits instead.

- Revenue drop and $19 million loss ends TelstraClear’s 2006

- NZ results disappoint Telstra

- Techsploder: The most important 'tech moments' in 2006?

- TelstraClear 'not bluffing' on 3G