Oracle the Innovator (and Ecosystem Contender)

I just spent two days having my brain annihilated by information overload at Oracle’s Applications Analyst Summit, and, with 21 pages of notes, it’s going to be hard to sort through everything and come up with a concise post on what we learned. But here goes.

The first is that Oracle has been innovating more than it gets credit for, and not just by buying up companies right and left. We saw some excellent examples of innovation in its core applications suites, collectively known as Applications Unlimited, and what the company plans to announce at next months’ Open World conference will make a lot of these customers happy. There’s a lot of value in the Applications Unlimited portfolio that customers can upgrade to, and a lot to be said for Oracle’s claims that they are continuing to add value to their core products.

Also making progress is the uptake for Applications Integration Architecture, or AIA, which is emerging as the linchpin for the company’s competitive position in applications for the next five years. Oracle’s focus on providing innovation through integration – if you’re running eBusiness Suite and want transportation management, advanced retail functionality, or any of the other functions provided by the myriad smaller acquisitions made over the years, you’re going to ideally want to use AIA to tie  it all together – means that AIA needs to be robust and successful.

AIA is not the only way to integrate, in fact most application to application integration in the Oracle stack is done the old-fashioned, peer-to-peer way. But Oracle’s comprehensive vision of a “plug and play” portfolio of innovative best of breed applications rests on AIA’s success. Right now, the actual number of implementations are relatively small, far short of critical mass. But the architecture, data model, and roadmap are looking pretty good, and the strategy appears sound.

What is unknown is how the performance of this “innovation through integration” strategy will be once Oracle’s customers start building out their architectures. Part of the problem will be in ensuring that all the moving parts – and AIA adds a lot of moving parts – work efficiently across all the different platform choices Oracle is providing. This includes support for hybrid on-demand/on-premise systems running Applications Unlimited and CRM On-Demand, Fusion, or any of the third party applications (like SAP) that Oracle wants to support with AIA. The performance issue will be a key one to watch in the battle between the more monolithic SAP approach and Oracle’s much broader platform (and code base.)

Also unknown (or at least unannounced) is how Oracle will manage the increasingly complex upgrade roadmap that its customers must content with. While any individual customer’s choices will be relatively limited, there is going to have to be some serious discussion with customers about how to navigate a complex decision tree that includes whether the customer should upgrade within the Apps Unlimited family, grab some new Fusion Apps functionality when that becomes available, or… frankly, pay attention to competitors’ competing roadmaps. This decision tree isn’t hard to construct, but filling in the relative TCO costs of the options Oracle is presenting to its customers will be an important element in the company’s positioning against SAP and others that are also trying to attack the TCO issue as vigorously as possible.

A final takeaway from the Summit comes in the way of a confirmation from the new head of the whole applications kit and caboodle, Thomas Kurian, who recently took over the full Apps Unlimited and Fusion portfolio in addition to owning the middleware stack. One of the things I’ve noticed lately is a shift in Oracle’s attitude towards building a strong partner ecosystem for its applications business to match its large technology ecosystem. Oracle hasn’t gone out of its way in recent years to cultivate an apps partner ecosystem the way that SAP has, but that appears to be changing, something that Kurian confirmed to me in an early morning meeting prior to day two of the summit. While Oracle isn’t putting out a public ecosystem effort that in any way competes with SAP’s ecosystem effort, Kurian acknowledged that Oracle is focusing more on growing the current 130 plus certified applications ISV partners it currently has.

This focus on ecosystem will make for some interesting competitive issues in coming months and years. With the line of business in many Oracle and SAP customers clamoring for solutions that fill in the white space in their organizations, these big vendors need to either co-opt into their ecosystems the many smaller ISVs that fill these functional voids or lose a significant account “control” opportunity. The LOB buyer is the next frontier in applications growth, and their ability to identify with not just a point solution vendor but the infrastructure vendor that can best slot that point solution in their architecture will be crucial to long-term growth for the Oracles and SAPs of the market. This dual loyalty only comes from a strong ecosystem strategy – aided and abetted by joint sales and marketing activities – and if Oracle can gen up a successful ecosystem partnership program it will give ecosystem leader SAP a run for its money.

I still have about 15 more pages of notes to sort out from the Summit, but these are the highlights that I’m allowed to discuss publicly. (We were asked to sign an NDA that forbids us from writing about what the NDA is about! Maybe not a first, but it was a delicious, Catch 22-like moment).  The Analyst Summit was, in sum, an impressive, though perhaps overloadingly so, event that highlighted one of Kurian’s other points from our conversation. No company in the apps business has transformed itself in the last five years as much as Oracle has. And, judging from what we saw this week, that transformation promises to continue for some time.

Gmail Back Up: World Did Not End

It’s back, and, as Sandy pointed out in her comment above, the apocalypse did not take place, despite a sense of doom that comes from being disconnected in the 21st century. It will be interesting to see why Gmail went down. It will also be interesting, with this being the latest example of a free service providing a service level commensurate with its cost, whether users with a need for  reliable service with a real-world SLA will start wondering  why they think free is the best way to meet their needs.

Gmail Crashes, Customer Service Springs into High Gear (Not)

Google
	Error

Server Error

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.Please try again in 30 seconds.

The above is what I saw, and continue to see, as I try to access my Gmail account. In case you’re wondering what to do next, the answer is nothing. Gmail’s customer service is unreachable too.  Hence a cautionary piece of advice with respect to your on-demand service provider: keep a phone number handy, because when a Web-only service goes down, so does all the online info about how to contact the service provider about fixing the problem.

FYI: I’ve been trying again, as requested for several minutes. Google’s optimism about a 30-second fix seems to be, well, a little optimistic.

Duet Lives! SAP and Microsoft’s Office Interface Still Alive and Kicking

I spent a lot of analyst capital over the last two years crowing about what I thought, and still think, was a brilliant idea: marrying the Office user experience, primarily Excel and Outlook, to the enterprise software back office. The catalyst for my interest was the myriad conversations with users about how much they hated their enterprise software and how, conversely, comfortable they were using Office (the older, 2003 version, not the 2007 “upgrade.) So when SAP and Microsoft came out with Duet, this incipient marriage looked like the perfect expression of a real market need.

Then things began to change. First, Shai Agassi, Duet’s main proponent, abruptly left SAP in a management power struggle, knocking Duet’s status inside SAP down a few notches. Then Microsoft got its own version of Office religion, and began a separate and, in many ways, competitive effort to ensure that the Office + ERP concept benefited Microsoft the most.

And, while Duet was never actually let out to pasture, the once juggernaut of SAP’s business user focus drifted into near-oblivion: lacking a high-level advocate like Agassi, the scuttlebutt about Duet turned into a funeral dirge. All that seemed to be missing was the headstone.

In the ensuing two-plus years, much has been made of the use of Office as the front-end of choice for many enterprise functions, so much that it has become a point of pride among third party ISVs to office an Excel interface or Outlook tie-in for their enterprise apps. And for good reason: the absolute, top notch, number one competitor to every enterprise application of any size is Excel, hands down. With Outlook a close second, particularly for CRM users. So, with acknowledgment by co-optation being the sincerest form of competitive zeal, the market for tying Office to the back office moved forward, even if Duet seemingly did not.

Now it seems, that reports of Duets death were greatly exaggerated. I just got off a call with the Duet team at SAP – one that I had initiated, meaning that outbound marketing for Duet is still a little stealthy – and heard that indeed the product had a new version release last December, and is going GA later this year. Meanwhile, there’s a concerted effort to spec out new functionality for the next release, which will include a partner development kit intended to grow the third party Duet market.

Meanwhile, Duet now has a Demand Planning scenario, which allows sales, marketing, and other collaborators in the demand planning process to build their forecasts in Excel and then essentially upload an aggregated demand plan to SAP’s supply chain management system. In case you haven’t spent that much time looking at this process, Excel is the main initial starting point for most demand plans, regardless of what planning engine eventually crunches the numbers and spits out the plan.

Also of interest is a workflow approval toolkit, that lets an Outlook email or task be added to any standard SAP workflow, essentially broadening the approval process by letting users already in Outlook participate in the process without exiting to SAP. This function has an added bonus of supporting compliance efforts by automatically accounting for any segregation of duty requirements already built into SAP by its GRC functionality.

Okay, you ask, so Duet lives, but how much? Right now, SAP isn’t talking about current sales and ramp-up efforts except to say that a total of 1 million licenses to 500 customers have been sold in the last two years, and that the current version, which is in pre-GA ramp-up, has 30 customers. That tells us nothing about the last two years of sales, but one can assume that Duet wasn’t exactly lighting a fire under SAP during the time, or else the impact would have been noted, especially in an environment where sales successes are not as easy to come by as they once were.

However, SAP is claiming a good pipeline for the product, and promising more attention to creating buzz for Duet, particularly in the partner community. Microsoft, I suspect, is a little less enthusiastic, particularly as it has finally begun to consider its internal Dynamics product line as much more intrinsic to its success – and the success of projects like Azure – than it did in 2006 when the Duet deal was first brokered.

Most importantly, this is a product – or concept, if you would rather buy a Microsoft branded version of Duet – that continues to ride the growing disconnect between casual users of enterprise software and the vendors and developers of these applications. Casual users don’t like enterprise software, and, though it looks more like the Stockholm Syndrome than genuine love, most of the same users love, or at least tolerate, Microsoft Office. The demand will only grow as casual users are required – forced, in many cases – to do more work inside the enterprise software suite.

So, welcome back Duet. We missed you and every other version of the concept, regardless of which vendor brand it carries. Office isn’t going away, and co-opting it is certainly second best to actually replacing it. Meanwhile, users of world, rejoice in your hidden market power. You have voted for Office, and the market has responded. Who knew democracy was alive and well in the enterprise software market?

SAP Gets Transactional with In-Memory Database: Changing the Game for Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft

SAP has spent the last few years discussing, theorizing, and otherwise showing off numerous versions of the same idea: using in-memory databases to replace the “not getting any younger” relational database model. Last week at a conference hosted by SAP to showcase its research work with the academic community, supervisory chair and permanent SAP visionary Hasso Plattner took the concept to its ultimate conclusion: an open attack on the sacred relational database that powers three of SAP’s major rivals/partners and forms the technology core of every SAP installation on the planet.

Commercialization of the in-memory concept has already begun in the analytics/BI space with SAP’s Explorer, but the real holy grail is moving the in-memory concept into the day-to-day transactional, ERP world of SAP’s Business Suite. That concept moved a step closer to reality at the SAP Academic Conference, where Plattner discussed research efforts aimed at showing that in-memory databases, running on low-cost, multi-core systems, can work as well or better in a transactional environment as they do in an analytics environment.

The results are exactly what have been expected as in-memory, column-based databases have moved into the limelight in recent years. In a nutshell, research at Plattner’s own academic research center in Germany showed that the remarkable advances in throughput – and an equally remarkable reduction in TCO – that have been obtained in the analytics space with in-memory can be replicated when used for transactional systems.

And once this concept – in-memory, column-based databases on low-cost hardware – is applied to the enterprise, all sorts of things change. For starters, much of what we think of in terms of the typical data center design – massive arrays of disk storage backing up huge databases running on top-of-the-line hardware – can largely go away. Turns out much of the traditional data center was created to force-fit the relational model developed by Codd and Date onto an architecture that was ill-suited for optimizing a relational system. Because hardware and storage were relatively slow – especially 20+ years  ago, much less so today – the relational model included an intensive, and excessive, dependence on table structures and indexing to compensate for slow hardware and storage systems.

But in an era when RAM can be measured in tens of gigabytes and arrays of multi-core processors can provide levels of throughput that were inconceivable at the birth of the relational database back in the 1980s, the force-fitting of the relational model no longer makes sense. This doesn’t mean that thinking – and accessing – corporate data in a relational format is obsolete: SAP’s T-Rex in-memory database, as well most other column-based systems, can still use good old SQL. But all that overcompensation in the form of huge storage systems, armies of DBAs, and mind-numbing overhead costs can largely go away.

It’s rather ironic that the conference where Plattner talked about blending transactional and analytical systems in the same in-memory database took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. SAP’s intentions regarding the relational database will eventually relegate that data stalwart to the status of an historical monument, one that in retrospect will be missed as much as many of the other relics, like the punch card and the CRT tube, whose time has come and gone.

All that remains is to see what Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM will do when the hegemony of their respective relational database offerings is challenged by an in-memory, column-based, alternative. My guess: kick and scream, and then eventually get on the bandwagon. This kind of technical advance will be too hard to fight against.

SAP vs. Oracle in the BI Space: the Line of Business Advantage

IDC  just released its latest compilation of rankings in the rancorous business intelligence market, and while the taxonomy is a little confusing, and broad enough for both Oracle and SAP to claim market dominance, there is one hand’s down winner whose mark on the industry can be seen across the breadth of the IDC data: the line of business buyer. And with the LOB buyer in irrefutable ascendency, it’s a lot easier to see behind the data to the trends that will define the BI market of the next five years.

Overall, the IDC report gives the total market share prize to Oracle, which sits on top of an end-to-end solution set that spans the gamut from data warehouse to performance management and tools. This is a space that  Oracle has dominated for the full three years of data in the IDC report, and, arguably for a number of years prior as well. While SAP’s growth in overall BI has been a point faster in the last two years than Oracle, this growth hasn’t been enough to make a significant dent in Oracle’s top billing.

But if you move to the next level in IDC’s report, focusing specifically on business analytics, SAP suddenly takes the lead, and not because of its Business Objects acquisition (which mostly impacted the BI tool arena, to use IDC’s taxonomy.) Rather, through a combination of internal growth and some smaller acquisitions like Outlooksoft and Pilot, SAP has managed to keep its analytics business growing faster than the market and faster than rival Oracle, thus maintaining its #1 position above Oracle for the three years of data in the IDC report.

Independent of the rivalry between these two vendors is a trend that speaks to the growth rates in analytics that both companies have seen (and that has apparently favored SAP more) and their relevance for the future of this fast-growing market segment. The bottom line with business analytics is that they typically appeal to the line of business user, and this LOB user is also their primary advocate and buyer. This is a significant departure from both the BI tools and data warehouse side of the market, which have always been more the purview of the IT department, which then parceled out data and reports to the line of business in a now infamous cycle characterized by delays on the part of IT and frustration on the part of the line of business.

Importantly, while the IT side has been relatively devastated by the recession — big ticket items like data warehouses are a lot harder to justify in the current economic climate — the line of business has been gobbling up analytics at a rate that is faster than overall IT growth as reported by IDC and others. (Whatever overall IT growth rates really mean.)

This gives us some important insight into the BI front in the SAP vs. Oracle war. Oracle, which has made one-stop-shopping its M&A mantra, has shown that the strategy works in the aggregate very well: by selling one of everything that IDC categorizes under the business intelligence rubric, Oracle has the overall market share leadership to justify its overall strategy.

Meanwhile, SAP has the data to prove that its overall strategy of focusing on the LOB user, also known as the business user in SAP’s parlance, is paying off, in this case with slightly faster growth rates than its one-of-everything rival and market dominance in the category most directly affected by LOB buying.

Where do these two strategies lead their respective vendors in the coming months? It’s important to remember that the IDC data is about a complicated year, which started out as one of the best sales opportunities for both Oracle and SAP in recent memory and ended in the worst economic downturn in recent memory. Which makes these 2008 data a little skewed towards the positive aspects of 2008, and skewed away from the crisis that the industry found itself up against as the year wound down.

That means that, looking forward into the rest of this year and on to the next, the big question is whether the one-of-everything strategy or the business user strategy will carry their respective proponents into next year’s #1 spot in the IDC sweepstakes. I think, as things stand now, the big-ticket sales that Oracle needs in order to make its 2009 look like 2008 are going to hard to come by: big deals, driven by IT, that acquire the breadth of technology that Oracle has to offer, are hard to close and will continue to be hard to close for some time. This will make it hard for Oracle to keep that lead, and while a couple big deals can really swing the pendulum, the overall spot in BI will be harder to maintain, and I would expect overall growth for all vendors in that category to decline.

For SAP, the focus on the business user will continue to provide the kind of growth that it has enjoyed in that segment as these buyers continue to obtain budgetary approval for highly focused, well-verticalized analytics that can have a quick, measurable ROI. Because these are much smaller deals, SAP will need to keep the pipeline very active, and will have to make volume, not size, the measure of success. Oracle can play here too, and its Siebel analytics can and do take on SAP in certain market segments. But more important than product breadth is sales focus, and Oracle will need to move its field away from one-of-everything and emphasize LOB sales in order to combat SAP’s success in this regard.

This battleground for customer spend — big ticket, IT focused vs. smaller volume sales to the LOB — will continue to be a major metric of success as we (hopefully) dig through the recession. Right now, when it comes to BI, I think SAP has the lead in product to sell to the LOB, and Oracle in product to sell to IT, and the IDC numbers show the results. Oracle could definitely catch up: there’s still a lot of LOB analytics companies to buy, and it wouldn’t take more than a handful to push Oracle’s numbers back over the top. Similarly, SAP is starting to push its data warehouse killer, based on an in-memory database, and will one day soon make this a strategic threat to Oracle’s one-of-everything strategy.

With both of these strategic next steps very much a possibility between now and next year’s IDC report, it’s safe to say that the current report is hardly the last word on Oracle vs. SAP in the BI space. Far from it.

Managing The Supply Chain: A New, Noteworthy Blog

I spoke recently to a supply chain exec as part of a project I am working on, and found him to be one of the more insightful and interesting members of the supply chain brotherhood I’ve run across in quite a while. His name is Anupam Singh, and he’s a member of the supply chain team at furniture retailer Roomstore, and a seasoned veteran of the supply chain wars.   He claims our conversation inspired him to start a blog, and, if this first post is any indication, Anupam’s blog will be one you’ll want to keep an eye one. His discussion of what constitutes true demand in the supply chain is an important addition to the perennial discussion of why real demand — demand that you can count on for planning purposes — is more elusive than we would like it to be. Welcome to the blogosphere, Anupam.

Glory Days Still to Come for IT, Depending on How You Define IT (Or the Perils of Sector Analysis and Listening to Tom Siebel)

Randall Stross tried to write an interested column in the Sunday New York Times about a real problem — the declining growth of IT spending — but missed an important point. Two, really. The first is that he makes the common, business page mistake of lumping ALL spending related to technology and business into a single bucket called IT spending — that is hardware, software, services, PCs, mainframes, blade servers, and whatever else there may be in the IT kitchen sink. The result is an overbroad analytical brush that obscures some important truths about IT spending and growth. The second is that, in the process of making his shaky argument, Stross takes CRM-pioneer Tom Siebel’s suddenly humble word for it when Tom claims that the glory days of IT spending are past.

Beyond proving that two wrongs don’t make a right, Stross’s first sin is one he shares with the entire financial community, the New York Times among them. There is nothing sillier to see than the sector charts that papers like the NYT put out, which lump semiconductor companies, consumer software companies, Google and IBM in the same sector. This is, unfortunately, the IT market that Stross (and Siebel) seem to be claiming is in fatal decline: a sector so broad and complex that any statement about its performance as a whole would be, well, largely absurd.

Take just the software side of this IT market that Stross and Siebel think is in decline. The Thomson Reuter people who build the charts for the NYT define the software sector as “companies engaged in developing and marketing system and application software. The industry includes developers of operating systems, word processors, spreadsheet applications, CAD and database engines. The Software industry excludes applications customized for specific tasks requiring continuous support from developers.

Got that? CAD, wordprocessors and spreadsheets, and, by the way, enterprise software. TR’s list of companies that fit this bill runs into the 100s, too many to list here but enough to show that their over-broad definitions of software alone make software sector analysis a non-starter. And when you include the rest of IT into this analysis — in addition to semi-conductors, you can add office equipment and telecommunications equipment as well — you now have a potpourri of “stuff” that has, for the most part, has little in common other than the requirement for an electrical current in order to useful.

This makes for some rather ill-informed analysis about what is actually happening in the real world about what products are selling and who is buying. Clearly, anyone who says “IT spending” is going one way or the other, based on this over-large bucket o’ technology, is making a statement that lacks any useful precision. If we use the Thomson Reuters hierarchy — and apply a little rationality to the criteria for analysis — you need to drill three layers deep in order to start to say something meaningul. You can’t really talk about IT as a single class of company, nor can you, using the TR hierarchy, talk about software either. The analysis has to be much more fine-grained than these broad sectors define: enterprise software, CAD software, PLM software: those are categories that bear the kind of analysis that Stross and Siebel are trying to make. Talking about IT without specifying enterprise software or CAD software or semiconductor manufacturing or spreadsheet software makes any discussion of IT a little silly.

So, one point against Stross, who generally gets kudos from me for his insights. Sorry.

Stross loses point #2 when he takes so much of what Tom Siebel tells him about Siebel’s history in the software industry at face value. First, he characterizes Siebel as “self-deprecating” and “modest”. Anyone who knows Siebel or ever interacted with him or his eponymous company would question whether Stross was even talking to the real Tom Siebel, or some well-medicated stand-in. The real Siebel was, well, anything but self-deprecating and modest, to put it very mildly.

More importantly, Stross allows Siebel to claim that, because “the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized”, IT spending only grew by a rate of 3 percent since 2000. The statement is as ludicrous as the “end of history” assertions that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, something that we all know in the 9/11 era was a pretty dumb idea. Anyone, even Tom Siebel and Randall Stross could do it, could walk into any company in the world and find what I call the proverbial innovation opportunity:  a bunch of men and women working out a business problem using white boards, spreadsheets, speakerphones, and sneakernet. As someone who works extensively with start-ups and early stage companies, these “white space” opportunities are the crucible for a seemingly endless incentive for innovation. The promise of post-industrial society is still a long way from being realized. That fatal error — the end of innovation — was controversial enough to give Nick Carr a career he otherwise might not have had, but that doesn’t make it true, neither today nor for the foreseeable future.

To Stross’ credit, he quotes several other pundits, including Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford, who makes pretty much the same points about innovation that I made above. And the conclusion of the column is that Siebel’s premise may be wrong, though Stross continues to base his analysis on the same falacious assumption that IT spending is a granular-enough data point for serious trend analysis.

In the end, perhaps the biggest sin was listening to Tom Siebel in the first place. By the time he bailed out of his eponymous company by selling it to arch-rival Oracle, he had clearly lost his visionary cred: Siebel missed the SaaS market, losing it to Salesforce.com, and he missed multiple opportunities to broaden his strategic footprint and present a more comprehensive market solution than just CRM software. And, perhaps even more important, this isnt’ the first time Siebel has opined that tech investing is a dead letter: he did that in June in the San Jose Mercury News. My guess is that, in addition to promoting clean tech as a replacement for high tech, Siebel is actively shorting the tech market. That would be more consistent with the Tom Siebel I crossed swords with in the day. The newly self-deprecating and modest Tom Siebel — and his arguments against the glory days of IT — just don’t make sense.

Twitter Hacked, World Comes to End, No One Notices

I was going to write a smarmy post about Twitter being hacked out of existence yesterday, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bad Reporter summed it up so well I’ll just replicate it here:

In case you’re reading this on your iPhone, here’s what the text says:

Millions of Users Unable to Tweet Live About Being Unable to Use Twitter

Twitter Owners Promise Backup System So Tweeters Can Tweet About Not Being Able to Tweet.

Is the damage already done?

The caption under the picture of the boy in front of the computer reads:

Boy tweeting; not tweeting during standstill

My point? Or, should I say, Don Asmussen’s point? Unless you’re trying (unsuccessfully) to crowdsource the Iranian revolution (a worthy cause, to be sure) or figure out where the best roach coach in LA is now parked, the Twitter outage was, IMO, a major non-event. Though you have to wonder how the Twitters-in-chief left themselves so open to a denial of service attack. And you have to feel sorry for all the people who were left with so much time on their hands, or thumbs, that they were forced to do something useful instead of tweeting. I also wonder if you could measure the net gain (or loss, if that’s possible) to the GDP of having Twitter down for a day. My guess is that if you could measure it, the impact of a day without Twitter would be a rounding error in all of our lives. Which is what I think a day with Twitter is all about too.

Gotta run, someone just texted me…..

Women Snubbed in Social Media List: If You’re Shocked, You’ve Not Been Paying Attention

Maggie Fox, one of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, raised the issue of sexism in the social media world in a post that rightly takes a speaker’s bureau to task for promoting an all-male list of top social media speakers. As Maggie, as well as friend and colleague Susan Scrupski are two of the more competent social media mavens to be excluded from the list, the point that sexism has mashed up with the social media world is well taken.

But, and this is a big one, if you’re shocked by this fact, or the overt and covert expressions of racism (if you’re Black, other people of color do relatively well in tech), homophobia (can anyone name an openly gay high-tech executive?), or certain “taboo” disabilities, like bi-polar syndrome, then you’re living in a PR bubble that desperately needs to be burst.

Here goes my burst: high-tech is not high-moral, high-ethics, or high-social consciousness. Never has been, never will be. Our industry does, at times, believe it holds the moral high-ground, but that’s an allusion that comes from believing that the images of young and hip and cool that permeate our industry have anything to do with what is practiced behind closed doors. Take Apple, for example: I can’t begin to expound on the company’s lack of moral leadership, noted only in part by the New York Times in a recent article on Apple’s obsession with secrecy. When I was a journalist covering Apple in the 1980’s, I was always amazed at the vast gulf between what Apple looked like from the inside (secretive, controlling, scary) and what it looked like from the outside:  the proverbial young and hip and cool. The stories I can’t tell about Apple are even more amazing: suffice to say that this company ain’t what most might think.

The shocking truth is that high-tech, and the business world in general, isn’t a democracy. If you follow the money, as in the VC community (always a good idea: as one of my poli sci profs said in college, everything on page one started life in the business section), you can see what high-tech is really made of, and it has nothing to do with moral or ethical leadership.  At best high-tech is a meritocracy ruled by an oligarchy that is, by and large, male, white, straight (or purporting to be), and not particularly interested in changing the game. There are a few companies like Oracle, with a Black and a woman sharing the top spot under Larry Ellison, and numerous Hispanic and Asian execs in upper and middle management, that have managed to find and promote a relatively diverse group of people to leadership positions. But most of the industry looks pretty much like the rest of the industry, and that’s the way it has always been.

Should we do something about it? Putting aside any moral or ethical considerations for a moment (which allows us to explore the question a little before responding yes), there is a simple economic value in expanded opportunity that should be at play here. I think without a doubt we could do even better as an industry if we were more inclusive, and more open to proactively recruiting women and other minorities to the top of the heap, and more open to thinking about why we as an industry need the street-cred of being more “of and for the people” than we currently are.

It’s not even that hard. As Maggie rightly points out, she and other women are there to step up the challenge.  And she’s hardly alone. But high-tech has to step up too, and so far, that’s been much harder than many could have ever imagined.