Latest Cringely Column

My favoriate on-line columnist, Bob Cringely, is stuck on an anti-IBM rant lately, like for the last three weeks. It's interesting, however, because of the influence IBM has on the high-tech market. "You won't get fired for buying IBM, yada, yada, yada, etc." This week he manages to at least start his column by talking about Google and its vision for universal search. Extrapolating on this at bit, does this make Google the next big ECM player? No, they have no BPM, so it's probably wise that vendors like Documentum, FileNet, and Hyland have worked hard on beefing up their BPM capabilities, but stil,l companies like Open Text and ZyLab were built on searching for unstructured information, and it appears Google could eventually marginalize that technology. So far Google has made all the right moves, maybe they will eventually have something better than SharePoint.

As for IBM, it's interesting that Cringely rips their internal technology, as they are like the largest technology servies provider in the world. "It is possible to manage big organizations, but you have to have good processes and good management systems," Cringely says before ripping into IBM. "Process and management systems?" Does anyone find it ironic that Gartner just rated IBM as the leader in ECM marketshare at 24.1%-ahead of Open Text (17.5%) and Documentum (14.3%). What's that old saying about eating your own dog food, or is IBM's dog food the tainted stuff?

Best regards,
Ralph