Month: August 2011

Music to hide behind the sofa to

The return of the UK’s favourite time-traveller, Doctor Who, to our screens this weekend, is likely to remind people from my generation of their childhood, afternoons spent hiding behind the sofa while the Doctor takes on the Cybermen or the Daleks.

We usually didn’t even have to wait for the inevitable confrontation between our hero and his enemy before hiding behind cushions. Usually, all we needed to hear was this music…

 

This bit of 1960’s musical electronica, written by composer Ron Grainer, arranged and realised by BBC Radiophonic Workshop genius Delia Derbyshire, is probably responsible for striking fear and trepidation into the hearts of many under 11s over the years. Probably more so than the wobbly sets and dodgy low-budget special effects ever were.

But some may not know that making kids hide behind the sofa seemed to be, maybe unwittingly, a speciality of Grainer and his TV theme work.

The other thing to hide behind the sofa to back in 1979 was another Grainer composition, this…

 

A series of short stories with twists, Tales of the Unexpected was staple programming in the Sunday ITV schedule in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Hearing this theme music was either a sign that you had probably stayed up too late, your cue to go and have a bath, or go to your room and do something else altogether more happy and childlike.

It seemed to be designed to strike fear into the hearts of innocents, from Grainer’s gently teasing theme tune, to the title sequence with the silhouetted dancing woman, flames, guns, tarot cards and voodoo mask shit, and Roald Dahl’s creepy fireside intro to the story sat in that leather high-backed chair. Even Anglia’s gallant knight on horseback seemed positively sinister, heralding the entry into the bizzare, scary and (frequently) low-budget world of Tales of the Unexpected.

Today it seems almost irrational that these pieces of music should have had such power at the time, but maybe that’s the skill in someone like Ron Grainer, who died 20 years ago this month, to set the tone and create such powerful assciations in our minds.

Even now, both pieces of music make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and bring back vivid childhood memories, and it’s not just me, right? What TV music were you apprehensive, scared or downright terrified of?

Brocade in a stitch over Exit Strategy?

A couple of days ago, on 18th August, storage and ethernet vendor Brocade released their Q3 2011 results (their Year End is in October).

It roughly followed what was outlined in their Preliminary Q3 numbers (flat revenue year-on-year) released on 5th August, and their shares taking their biggest hit since IPO, back in the ’99 boom time. Despite showing earlier signs of rallying, their stock is still trading around the $3.40 mark as I write.

It’s no secret that Brocade has been looking for a buyer for a couple of years, since completing the Foundry Networks integration to add ethernet to their existing storage focus. However, in the buyout beauty contest, likely suitor Dell has just passed Brocade up in favour of fluttering it’s eyelashes at Force10 Networks, which abandoned it’s own plans to IPO in favour of the Dell acquisition.

Interestingly, it’s not as though Foundry ended up being an indigestable meal for Brocade, as some might have predicted. It seems quite the opposite. The growth in their ethernet business is somewhat offsetting a slowdown in their SAN equipment sales, though it’s unclear if some element of this is “ethernet fabric” displacement in what would be classic fibre-channel space.

So, might Brocade be finding themselves in a stitch over their investors getting their money out? Their Exit Strategy, which seemed to be concentrated on selling on to a large storage/server builder at a profit, doesn’t look like it’s getting much traction anymore. Are there many potential buyers left? What happens if the answer is “no”? How do you keep going?

Here I think lies part of the problem: It seems that the common investor Exit Strategy becomes focused around “doing stuff to make money”, rather than “doing stuff that makes money”.

That has been the achilles heel I’ve long suspected exists in technology investing: While there might be a good solid idea at the foundation, one often gets the impression that more corporate priority can be given over to ensuring there’s an Exit Strategy for the investors, and following that road, rather than a sound development strategy to ensure the product or service itself drives the success of the company, and not how you sell it. The two find themselves at juxtaposition and can be a source of unwanted friction, as well.

In Brocade’s case, I think the current marketing style isn’t doing them any favours. Look at brocade.com. Videos of talking heads, trotting out technobabble, or grinning product managers waxing lyrical while stroking their hardware. “Video data sheet” – now what the hell is that all about? Yet, everyone’s up to it. Animated banners on pages where you actually just want the dry data and cold hard facts. It’s almost like they don’t want you to find the information you’re really looking for. Please can I just have a boring old data sheet?

Maybe in cases like this it’s time to go back to basics: Making something you’re proud of, something you can be happy putting your name to, which is how many great products and brands developed in the past. Question is, have tech companies remembered how, and do investors have the longer-term stomachs for it?

Broadband to your Barn

…or, “a different kind of social networking”

There’s been some good reporting recently on the B4RN (Broadband For the Rural North) initiative, which aims to deploy a fibre broadband infrastructure to over 1300 properties in a rural area of my native Lancashire, which would otherwise almost certainly fall into the 10% of fast broadband have-nots by 2017.

If the build was left to a commercial entity which needed to pay dividends to it’s investors, it would be very difficult for the plan to pass the litmus test, because of the high overheads involved in a large company, and the need to make profit.

So, how does B4RN differ from initiatives such as Yorkshire’s Digital Region, or Connecting Devon and Somerset?

Well, for one thing, it’s a smaller project. The second one is that it seems to be less reliant on public funding.

Continue reading “Broadband to your Barn”