Sorry - can't less this pass. I've got it wrong a few times. The ones that embarrass me the most:
a) MacDonalds opening in Germany. Germany has a long history of family-friendly eateries, mostly Italian-themed, but many Greek etc., mostly offering quite high quality food at very reasonable prices. I though MacDonalds' garbage would stand no chance - but they went for the kids. b) GSM text messaging. I got a Nokia 1011 within days of GSM going live in Europe. 160 byte messages sent clumsily by multiple key depressions? Get outa here! And an estimated 43,000,000,000 were sent this last New Year's Eve alone. Yup - all those noughts belong there - forty-three US billion. (Spread over the whole day, that's 50,000 a second. Just under half passing through one message centre. You thought your mainframe had throughput?) The great thing about Gartner is they believe everything. It doesn't matter what strategy you espouse, you will find a Gartner Research Service that will back you up. And such a company cannot be wrong, can it? I've had several recruitment run-ins with Gartner. I know several of the mainframe guys quite well. Why not? In the first place, they work them far too hard. At my time of life, the schedule is quite punishing. Secondly, the sales content of even a lead analyst job is very high - they spend around 60% of their time selling. A Gartner analyst who visits you and leaves without an additional signature will get ROASTED back at the office. And - thirdly - you have to support the 'corporate view'. This is bizarrely influenced, and every time I've come up against it I've found it impossible. And the last hurdle is that you effectively have to be 'voted in' by the incumbent team. Somehow, that never happened. Giggle. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
