Many things so far.

Personally, it appears that Men can multi-task.  I was on a 1:1 with my GM at the same time I was on the hook for another briefing, while chasing down a personal need for an analyst, all with little time to spare before heading to a Steve Mills 1:1 I had to be at.  This was all in a 20 minute time period.

Professionally, Steve Mills is one of the best IBM interviews.  Talk about gets why things are successful or not in the industry, here is a snip.  Why should customers or partners choose IBM, because of certainty of outcome.   Why does IBM do what it does, it is in response to customers needs, otherwise we wouldn’t exist.

What is the most important thing customers are looking for from us?   Portability, making sure that our software works on whatever platform the customer needs.  We are driven by the ecosystem.

Being on East coast time, I of course woke up early, to be greeted by the European analysts who had been up since 2 AM…already having done a full day’s work before the conference.

After having an nice discussion on everything from Microsoft to terrorists with Steve White, we were able to scheudule a rare 1:1 with Steve Mills for later in the day.

So as it goes, we will be doing the usual conference dance with the Press/Analysts/Executives and partners.

Here is a picture of the Press team scheming all things press for the day.

Well, more like Sam Palmisano, who will be the keynote speaker at BPLC on May 1. It’s always interesting to he knows more about where and what IBM is doing than anyone. He hasn’t updated me on the content yet from our weekly 1:1 meeting…..right.

Recently, I’ve updated my sidebar with a few decorations. Why, something to do I suppose.

You will now see my recent twitter tweets, support for Denmark against terrorists, a donation button to paypal (gratuitous in the first degree.

Today I added the OR code for my blog which you can see. To get your own secret decoder OR code, go to the code generator site.

What we used to know as PartnerWorld is now the Business Partner Leadership Conference or BPLC.  It is roughly half the show as TPTB are concentrating on the relationships that we can mutually nurture at a conference event.  On the side, PW turned out to be a week long extraction from work that took huge chunks of time to plan for on both the partner and IBM side, so file this in the realm of more reasonable.

Why this year is important is that Sam Palmisano will be there to keynote.  It doesn’t happen every year and it is always interesting to hear what he has to say.  We haven’t had our weekly 1:1 update for him to give me his speaking points so I can’t blog them yet.  I’ll be giving him my usual advice on running the company when we meet over coffee as always.

What is happening ?  First the housekeeping:

The tag is IBMbplc08

The Twitter hashtag is #IBMbplc08

Next, the order of events.  Today is the Express Advantage analyst call.  Thursday is the BPLC announcement call for analysts.  You should have received an invite for both.

There has been an unusual amount of interest in Live blogging the Keynote events, so I’ll be doing that.

The event starts on the 29th mid-day, running through the 2nd of May at Lunch.  The emphasis will be the executives meeting with the partners rather than a trade show atmosphere.  Get business done!

So look for updates as I blog and twitter my way through the show.

According to the WSJ,

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.

Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner.

Not only are they willing and able to take care of themselves, they take care of others more it appears:

That response is not evidence that gun owners only care about themselves, however. In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn’t reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would “endure all things” for the one they loved (45% to 37%).

It amazes me how often politicians get the demographics wrong about the real America.  We are not bitter, and don’t have to cling to G_d, we do it because we want to, not a crutch.

Last round of elections they trashed NASCAR also, bad move there.

I’m happy, glad to be able to take care of myself, and if you want to see some of my guns, break into my house at night….I’ll give you a good view of the front end of one of them.

I guess someone has to keep it.  Here is the ongoing list of blog rankings by Wikio of the influential bloggers.

Most are either technical or political.

H/T to Pamela at Atlas Shrugs, who is higher on the list than I’ll ever be.

Play the age game to see.

I went to a Black Belt promotion and demonstration on Friday night and saw some amazing physical feats, all by women.

The first was a 12 cement block break by Kathy Olevsky.  Click on the video.

Next, and even more impressive was Mindy Dupont who walked on broken glass while performing breaks.  Here is the video to see this amazing feat.

These are not staged, nor are they fake.

I’ve speculated that Microsoft is following the path of IBM in a number of ways.  Larry Dignan and Jason Perlow now write that multiple customized versions of Vista might be requried for desktops.

Some reasons why Microsoft is going to have a hard time, or how MS is the old IBM :

It’s:

A company that became hugely successful based on a model.

A company that is locked into that model, but the industry is dyanamic and changes, in this case delivery of software, competing technologies and the decline of packaged applications and OS.

Growth to a big company through success and acquisitions bogs down decisions and development, especially when you are beat to death by meetings and committee’s.

Hampered by the rise of alternative technology like Ubuntu, Open Source and Mac’s, both of which are being accepted and liked both for the consumer and businesses.

Suffers the disdain of being Microsoft on a number of levels.  Some for arrogance, some for bad technology (I got a blue screen of death on XP just this week), lack of innovation (DOS code still in Windows) and the general issue of everybody hates and shoots at number one.  Believe me, IBM has had to defend against this for eons.

SaaS, the meteoric rise of Google, direct aim at Microsoft by Oracle, SAP and other companies who want a share of capitalism also contribute to this.

Some reasons it could be OK still:

More money in the bank than a lot of countries.

Pinning the SaaS label on some products even though it doesn’t fit the definition, but heck, I’m a pepper, he’s a pepper, she’s a pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a SaaS too?  Perception is reality for some.

Legacy.  Even IBM has old mainframes and SNA in a lot of places, so it exists, if it walks like a duck…..

How to get out of the conundrum

Re-invent yourself.  I’m not Ballmer so it’s his job.  IBM went from tabluators to computers, from mainframes to services, expanded the high margin software business, and most of all….hired Lou Gerstner to save the company.

To be fair, I’ll give Microsoft some credit, they are trying the gaming model which leads to entertainment control and the mobile market, but how much is this contributing to the bottom line?  How much mind share does Ballmer give it?

What is Microsoft going to do?  If I had that crystal ball, I’d have retired rich by now.  My guess is muddle along and try to save the windows model as it’s market share erodes away.  If this happens, it will be a top 5 firm for a while.  The existing model is time limited.  I point to the rise of Palm devices who were supplanted by blackberries, SNA which lost to IP, Wireless taking over from cabling.

Change is the only thing that stays the same.

Microsoft, your move…..or not.