Liberty Egg

This IS next year...

- Listening to games 1-2 on the net from Ireland...exhausting.

- Being up 3-0 in runs and games in the 9th of the 4th and still not being comfortable...psychotic.

- Losing in game sevens your whole life...disheartening.

- Winning OUR first World Series championship since World War I...priceless.

Happy, but not overconfident...

I haven't posted on the Red Sox yet, but even though I will not be fully confident until the 3rd out of the 9th inning of our 4th win...I am pleased with our progress thus far...

"I love it when you call me big Papi..."

Birth of the Polish Web Designer...

A fundamental change in the way we work...

It is early yet for many jobs, but for a bunch of them, things are going to get hairy. I am trying to hire a web designer to support all the new online campaigns we are launching. I put one posting on craigslist and have gotten plenty of applications. I have also received dozens of messages from freelancers that practice their craft from all over...California, New York, Argentina, India, and Poland among others. The Polish one had brilliant design and low fees and was I looking to hire a contract resource I would pursue it...

I have also been reading Andrew Sullivan's excellent book on Google AdWords and it has become clear that an individual anywhere in the world can become expert in these marketplaces and squeeze any profitability out of available search terms, just by matching affiliate programs to available ad inventory in a better way then is being done...and believe me, some people are doing little for their own businesses and these people will pick up on it.

We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what the internet has spawned...

Some people will be worried and will decry the "outsourcing," but this will drive the next truly great spurt in productivity growth in the modern economy. Products and services we can barely dream of now will be available at amazingly reasonable prices because of all of this.

"Workers" will need to be nimble, but consumers will all benefit.

Death of a Salesman...

Every day brings new insights into the secular change our economy is going through. I was talking to a friend who told me that people he knows who have sold enterprise software for years are leaving the business in droves. Commerce One, who had a $20 Billion (with a "B") market cap a fews years back, is out of business. I2, for a long time the poster child of enterprise tech success, is essentially done. Siebel has no new license revenues, just a fading maintenance stream. A coleague of mine who is a senior IT executive at a Billion dollar Financial Services company says they haven't purchased ANY new enterprise software all year...I could go on.

This is not just a cyclical downturn. It is a fundemental restructuring of the way the technology marketplace works today. The confluence of several trends are driving this.

Fred Wilson, the venture captialist and blogger, has sold all his Microsoft stock because of the threat to the old regime from Open Source. Why would big IT shops pay for things they can get that are as good or even better "for free?"

The big tech stories of the year were the Google and Salesforce.com IPOs - both companies that represent the triumph of the new approach - what I have started to call the "PULL" tech economy - over the old approach of high priced tech pushed by outbound sales. What Seth Godin writes about in his books - the death of outbound marketing and the rise to primacy of the Purple Cow approach ("it's the product stupid") is driving this...and not just on a tactical level.

The Interent ultimately made it possible for the buyer to find what he/she needs and "PULL" it to themselves. Users no longer have to be "found" by salespeople, they find the products and services they want to consume. The net also made it possible to reduce the cost structure of putting technology out there for use...Google adwords are far cheaper then feet on the street, and far cheaper than full page ads in print magazines...

All this has contributed to the death of enterprise sales as we knew it...Thank god I'm a marketer.

Saddam Hussein was responsible for Global Warming...

Dick Cheney just said that suicide bombings have decreased in Israel because Saddam Hussein is no longer around to pay $25k bounties for bombers...Wow! I thought I had heard the maximum stretch possible from the VP, but he is really out there...Maybe they voted against the Kyoto accord because they thought Saddam was responsible for global warming and when they got rid of him there would be no need to reduce greenhouse gases...

He forgot Poland...

There is a high degree of humor on the "unintentional comedy scale" in these debates.

Someone very clever had some fun with the President.

See youforgotpoland.com

Strange things afoot at the Circle K...

OK, was it just me?

...or did our President not look and act like that kid in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure who struggles through his presentation to the class and finally exclaims "San Dimas football rules!"...because he can't come up with ANYTHING intelligent to say!!!

I am embarassed to be an American...

Can't the right at least give us candidates who are intelligent and well spoken?

What does it say about our country that our President would NEVER pass the cut in any other country's serious political process?