Nov
20
Crunch Time for Novell
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Novell’s moment of truth came in the form of an aggressive direct marketing campaign Microsoft launched against the company in 2001. By then, Novell was a wounded lizard in the marketplace, losing market share to Microsoft almost on a daily basis while the press and the industry questioned the company’s relevance in a server world [...]
Nov
19
Slow Decline of Novell
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Most people have always had a sneaking love for those cheesy Japanese movies in which vast areas of Tokyo were always being subjected to large-scale urban renewal via the efforts of a huge, irradiated prehistoric creature with a bad attitude.
The undisputed king of the Japanese movie monsters was always Godzilla. Anyone who messed with this [...]
Nov
19
Bad, Bad Genes
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The first problem with Digital DNA was that Motorola never deigned to pay anyone to stick the Digital DNA logo, a sticker that read “Digital DNA from Motorola,” on their hardware. This alone was enough to doom the program. Motorola didn’t want to pay out MDF because of the expense but was missing the point. [...]
Nov
19
Memories of a Crushing Blow
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Motorola has envied Intel its marketing prowess since the companies first clashed in the early 1980s during the rollout of their respective 16-bit microprocessors. Motorola had the better chip, but Intel had “Crush,” a prototypical kill-the-competition campaign put together by William H. Davidow. Described in Davidow’s book, Marketing High Technology, Crush integrated PR, marketing communications, [...]
Nov
19
The Loneliness of Being Hardware
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A recent example of this principal in action occurred with the release of Palm, Inc.’s m130 handheld computer. Before it released its latest personal digital assistant (PDA) in March 2002, Palm bragged that the device’s 16-bit screen could display more than 64,000 different colors, but it turned out the m130 could actually show far fewer. [...]
Nov
19
It’s a hard fact of life for the hardware guys and gals of high tech that it’s usually the software geeks who get most of the glory. When software people code a software failure, they usually look like their reach exceeded their grasp; when hardware types build a flop, they look like dorks. With software, [...]
Nov
19
The Bunnies Hop to It
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It didn’t have to happen this way. But Intel had embarked on a corporate branding program aimed at consumers without understanding the ramifications of its actions. The company had spent millions of dollars promising people that having an Intel inside their computers would make their machines, and by extension their lives, better. Once publicity and [...]
Nov
19
The Dark Bunny Dream of Andy Grove
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At this juncture, rumors began to spread that members of Intel’s PR and marketing groups, perhaps even Andy Grove himself, were suffering from a recurrent dream, a terrible nightmare that some began calling “The Dark Bunny Dream of Andy Grove.” They described it like this:
“In the dream I am always Andy Grove and the dream [...]
Nov
19
The Rabbits Fail Math
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The problem was with the Pentium’s floating-point unit (FPU). An FPU speeds up the operations of software that does extensive calculations involving decimal-point math. Unlike previous Intel microprocessors, all new 58 … er … Pentiums integrated an FPU directly into the chip itself. Prior to this, if you wanted to obtain the benefits of an [...]
Nov
19
Invasion of the Bunny People
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The second and far more visible aspect of Intel Inside is a massive media campaign consisting of a series of ads and commercials featuring all sorts of jiggly jiving critters. The first generation of Intel media pitchmen were known as the “Bunny People”: dancing “technicians” who leaped around in the “clean suits” worn by the [...]