Posted: June 5th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
I noticed today that nearly 200 million shares of Sun Microsystems was traded on NASDAQ today. At around 5 dollars a share, that is close to 1 billion dollars. That is about 1/18 of the total outstanding shares of the company. It was about 9% of the total trading volume of the NASDAQ exchange.
All this happened on no real news. Perhaps the company was executing on its announced buybacks.
For the record, I own SUNW shares and options.
Posted: June 4th, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
I stumbled across this article about shelfware. The Candid CIO blog, written by Will Weider, itself is pretty interesting, and I’d highly recommend adding it to your RSS reader. Will’s analogy about shelfware is a good way of explaining the phenomenon and why it exists.
As a father of two girls I have observed that when they are in a toy store they seem to forget the closet full of Barbies® and accessories back home. The Barbie on the store shelf is always more desirable than the one in their closet. Like those girls, we seem to think that the systems we don’t own are much more appealing than those we already own.
Unlike those Barbies, new systems are not ready to use out of the box. These systems require a great deal of coordination during implementation to ensure they begin useful life without negatively impacting operations. Just as importantly they require a great deal of effort after implementation to ensure that they provide the benefits that were envisioned when they were purchased.
For
CIOs, the economic cost of owning software should include the consulting services needed to implement it. An extreme view would also be that software costs should include the
opportunity cost of licensing a product. Money spent on it could potentially be used on other initiatives and other software.
My question is why in the world would anyone continue to renew their licenses or subscriptions on software that they never used? I have a suspicion that if CIOs did a software inventory, or used an automated Software Management tool, on a yearly basis they would significantly reduce their costs.