I was chatting with a colleague here at BZ Media’s New York headquarters office (I’m based near San Francisco, but trek out to NY every few months) about how companies react to negative coverage… and remembered this gem from The SCO Group last summer.

The June 12, 2006, edition of SD Times News on Monday, an e-mail newsletter, carried a “Zeichick’s Take” column entitled “It’s Time for Darl to Go.” I wrote:

In its relentless drive toward ever-bigger losses, The SCO Group passed a milestone with its most recent quarterly earnings: Its losses exceeded the ongoing costs of its famous intellectual-property litigation. That means that even stopping the soap-opera legal proceedings wouldn’t return the company to profitability.

The numbers are grim. For the quarter ending April 30, 2006 (whose numbers were released this week), SCO lost US$4.69 million on sales of $7.13 million. That compares pretty badly with the same quarter in 2005, where SCO lost $1.96 million on sales of $9.25 million.

According to the company’s financial reports, “Legal and other expenses incurred in connection with the Company’s litigation with IBM were $3,762,000 for the second quarter of fiscal year 2006. Because of the unique and unpredictable nature of this litigation, the occurrence and timing of certain expenses is difficult to predict, and will be difficult to predict for the upcoming quarters.”

Further, the company says that the last year it was profitable was in the four quarters ending on Oct. 31, 2003—and that the company’s accumulated deficit has reached $236 million. The company’s piggy bank is getting low, too. SCO reports that cash, cash equivalents and available-for-sale marketable securities now stand at only $18.62 million, down over a million dollars over the past three months.

No matter how you slice it, SCO is crashing and burning.

If you read through the company’s own financial documents, the business is fraught with peril. On June 5, the company released a prospectus for the sale of about 2.1 million shares of common stock by some stockholders (SCO itself wouldn’t see any of the proceeds.) The prospectus admits that “We do not have a history of profitable operation,” among other things, and provides a laundry list of reasons why SCO is, basically, a bad bet. A terrible bet.

The question remains: What are the owners of SCO going to do about this? Are they going to let Darl McBride, their president, CEO and chief champion of this ruinous legal fight, destroy the business? Maybe SCO’s lawsuit has legal merit (I don’t know—I’m not a lawyer), but despite the genuine innovations that SCO’s developers have created, the company is a pariah and a disaster.

It’s time for management changes. The current board of directors consists of McBride, R. Duff Thompson, Ralph J. Yarro III, J. Kent Millington, Omar Leeman, Edward E. Iacobucci, Darcy Mott and Daniel W. Campbell. Gentlemen, it’s time to perform your fiduciary responsibilities to your shareholders—and fire Darl McBride.

SCO’s reaction was swift and hilarious. They didn’t contact me or any of the other editors, but their then-head of corporate communications, Blake Stowell, wrote to one of SD Times’ advertising sales representatives:

I know there is supposed to be a very concrete line between the advertising staffs and editorial staffs of publications, but when SD Times puts out an article like this at the very time that we are looking to possibly do something to market to the developers that subscribe to your publication, it seems EXTREMELY counter-intuitive for us to do ANYTHING at all with SD Times. Any campaign we might do with your readership would fall on deaf ears and be a complete waste of our money after an editorial like this one.

After conferring with me, our sales rep responded to Blake,

One of the reasons SD Times is valuable to readers (and the industry) is because of its independent view and editorial, given much of our coverage is on vendors and their products. An editorial opinion in our email newsletter by no means indicates all our readers agree or disagree. I respectfully submit that your advertising message with SD Times would strengthen your position with our readers and the industry. As you know, all companies face adversity as a part of their progress, but having a continued presence and consistent message will endure in the minds of consumers.

Please do not forgo reaching a readership that can make a difference in your business. Again, I understand your position and your hesitation to proceed with an advertising campaign with us. My hope is that I can communicate to you the integrity we have as a news organization, the value and importance of our product and our audience, and most importantly, how we can help you grow as a company.

The follow-up came from another person with SCO. This person is not named because he’s still at SCO; Blake left a few months ago:

My challenge as director of SCO Marketing is that I’m ready to launch a significant campaign and had the SD Times at the top of our list for an integrated campaign. While the previous coverage is appreciated, what is seared in minds here is the latest message from your magazine and it has made it a VERY hard sell for me to convince executive management to let me use SD Times, even though it is probably the best vehicle for me to use. To have a magazine call for the removal of our CEO makes my job a whole lot harder internally and externally. At this point, I’ve been told to look at several other alternatives.

That was the end of the conversation… and you know, I haven’t seen that “significant campaign” appear anywhere. Maybe they really were planning something big, but my call for Darl’s removal scuttled their entire marketing program. Or maybe these were empty words intended to punish SD Times and attempt to ensure that future opinion essays and editorial coverage would be more positive.

Another day in the life of a publishing company… and I still think that SCO should fire Darl McBride.

As you know, Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the United States was changed by an act of Congress, so that it starts earlier this year. For me personally, it’s been a bigger nuisance than Y2K (which wasn’t a nuisance at all).

Here are three personal anecdotes:

1. On Sunday morning, I used my Garmin StreetPilot c550 to get to a friend’s house. (They live in a maze in Foster City, Calif.) I noted that the time was incorrect on the GPS. Today, on the Garmin Web site, I saw that on March 8 the company posted a firmware patch. So, in addition to the numerous software patches for my Windows and Mac computers, I also need to patch my GPS.

2. On Sunday night, I flew on the red-eye from San Francisco to New York City. All the clocks inside the United airlines lounge at SFO were wrong. Every few minutes, an announcer came over the public address system to remind everyone that the correct time was one hour later than shown on the clocks.

3. This afternoon, I was scheduled to have a conference call with a company at 4:00 pm Eastern time. I called into their bridge line – and was told that the passcode was invalid. I emailed the guy who set up the conference, and he replied saying that the combination of their Exchange Server group calendar and the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace software that schedules their phone bridges messed up. Although Exchange correctly adjusted the meeting times for DST, the MeetingPlace software didn’t sync with those adjustments. Therefore, Exchange knew the meeting was at 4:00 pm, but MeetingPlace set up the phone bridge to activate at 3:00 pm. The solution: He had to delete all future meetings set up with the MeetingPlace phone bridge and re-schedule them, in order for the system to work correctly.

Think about all the productivity wasted, and all the hard and soft costs, of this change to Daylight Savings Time. It’s hard to believe that the potential benefits (in theory, reduced energy consumption), is worth the inconvenience and expense that this has caused.

Please share your DST horror stories, large or small… and whether you see any benefit at all to the DST change, or to DST at all.

In my blog comments about the 2006 ACM A.M. Turing Award, won by Frances E. Allen, I wrote, “It’s a shame that it’s taken 40 years to recognize the first woman for the most prestigious award in computing.”

A reader responded sardonically:

I guess the Lady Admiral who wrote Fortran wasn’t very important… So I won’t bother to even name her. After all, she only worked for the U.S. Government and not a large conglomerate like IBM…

Without detracting from Fran Allen’s justly deserved honor, the reader brings up a valid question. Why wasn’t Adm. Grace Hopper recognized as a Turing Award winner? I’ve asked the ACM, which promises that the Turing Award Committee will have a response to me shortly.

My first thought was that the Turing Award wasn’t given out posthumously, and so there wasn’t time to give her the honor. No, that can’t be it. The A.M. Turing Award was first offered in 1966. Adm. Hopper passed away in January 1992, so, there was plenty of time to give her the Turing Award. In fact, the very first Turing Award went to Alan J. Perlis, who died in February 1990.

It can’t be that the ACM didn’t recognize Adm. Hopper’s contribution. Indeed, since 1971 the ACM has offered the Grace Murray Hopper Award, given out to outstanding young computer professionals. (The first recipient of this award was Donald Knuth, who won the Turing Award three years later.)

I’ll be curious what the Turing Award Committee has to say on this subject.

While we wait, I’ll relate one anecdote about Adm. Hopper, who has long been a personal hero. The expression “computer bug,” or “there’s a bug in the system” dates back to Sept. 1945, when Adm. Hopper “debugged” a Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator by removing a moth stuck between two relay points.

Adm. Hopper’s notebook — with the poor moth taped to the page and the comment, “first actual case of bug being found” — is on display at the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Va., where I worked in the early 1980s as a DoD contractor. Discovering that moth, and her notes, created a wonderfully tangible connection to the early days of computer science.

When was the last time you asked your general contractor if the company had a power-tool standard, and whether it was Makita or DeWalt? Does your auto mechanic use wrenches from Sears or Snap-On?

When I talk to carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other professionals, I’m engaging them to perform a task. I assume that they have the the right tools for the job, and they know how to use them.

It’s not that simple with software development. Yes, our industry has reached a level of maturity. We can safely assume that all the tools are, generally speaking, pretty darned good. You can write great code with Eclipse. You can write great code with NetBeans. You can write great code with Visual Studio. You can write great code with BEA Workshop and CodeGear JBuilder and Apple Xcode and Oracle JDeveloper and the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform and you-name-it.

But having an IDE is not enough. The fact that you’ve bought a development environment that integrates many functions is not nearly enough.

You don’t expect a drill to help ensure that your house meets safety specifications. But you could, and should, expect your software development tools to play an active role in helping build better business applications.

What matters, truly, are platforms and applications. You don’t engage a plumber to use a welder and pipe-cutter; you engage a plumber to stop a leak or install a new bathtub in your home. Similarly, enterprises don’t hire programmers or engage consultants to use Eclipse or NetBeans or Visual Studio. CIOs and CTOs pay these people to develop applications that advance the business.

That’s not to say that tools aren’t important. Carpenters need saws, plumbers need torches, and programmers need IDEs. Picking the right tool for the job is essential. However, the metric shouldn’t be “does the IDE enable the creation of good code.” They all do — just like both Makita and DeWalt drills can make clean holes, and Sears and Snap-On socket wrenches can all remove spark plugs.

Writing good code and fast code is easy for a professional developer. We’ve done that, even before today’s crop of super-sophisticated IDEs. The true test for tools makers is: How does their tool help your enterprise developers solve business problems? Do they support your vertical market or vertical application? Do they enforce security? Do they nurture best practices? Do they support the full application life cycle, or smoothly interoperate with other ALM solutions?

Of course, we don’t expect our cordless drill to interoperate with our welding torch and with our screwdriver set. That’s where software development and plumbing are just a little bit different. Too many writers stretch this analogy too far. We don’t expect Makita to document New York City building codes, but we should expect development tools and platform makers to worry about Sarbanes-Oxley and buffer overflows.

As I return from EclipseCon this week, it’s clear that enterprise programming isn’t just about banging out code. Not any more. It’s about building business applications. Challenge your tools providers to talk about how their products actively facilitate the creation of business applications. Because you already know that they handle the easy stuff: coding.

Please, please, please, please, please. Don’t allow the use of cell phones on airplanes.

I can sympathize completely with the philosophy espoused by Fortune columnist Stanley Bing in a piece in the Mar. 5 issue called “Called to His Reward.” (Oddly, in their online version, it’s called “Great big cell phones in the sky,” and dated Feb. 23.) This essay describes how unbearable life will be if/when the FAA and FCC allow the use of cell phones during commercial flights.

Last week, I was flying to a meeting in the midwest U.S., routing through Denver. The moment the plane landed, a passenger two rows behind me whipped out her phone, and started making calls. She returned voicemails, she phoned her husband, she burbled baby-talk to a young child, she arranged for ground transportation, she gave instructions to her assistant, she rescheduled a meeting, she talked and talked and talked in a very loud voice.

And talked and talked. It turned out that our plane had landed early, and the gate at Denver wasn’t ready yet. So, we sat on the tarmac for about half an hour, while this well-dressed, obviously successful, young executive talked

and talked

and talked

and talked

and talked

and talked.

Everyone within at least six rows of her could hear every word of every call. Toward the end, many of us were chatting, quite audibly, about her and her calls; my seatmate and I had an active running commentary. The young executive was quite oblivious. We were all mostly bemused by her cluelessness and, frankly, self-centered rudeness.

This was bad enough.

But imagine the day when she — and many others — will talk and talk and talk throughout flight, for hours and hours. And there’s just about nothing that you can do about it. If you can’t imagine it, read Stanley Bing’s article.

For the sake of civilized society, please, FAA and FCC, please don’t allow cell phones to be used during flights.

Yesterday was the first day of EclipseCon, and I spent the afternoon in the Annual General Meeting of Eclipse Membership. This is where you hear people like Mike Milinkovich discuss the plans for the Foundation moving forward. New members are also introduced around, there are discussions of marketing, and so-on.

An important part of the meeting was a discussion of the forthcoming Europa “simultaneous release,” scheduled for June 29. According to Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Europa is on track. Milestone 5 came out on Feb. 24, and Milestone 6, which locks down the APIs, is set for Apr. 7. Currently, there are 25 projects set for inclusion in the Europa event; that’s an ever-changing number.

There was a bit of unexpected news: Skip McGaughey, one of the prime movers of the Eclipse movement, will be retiring from the Eclipse Foundation at the end of May. He was given a great T-shirt that said something like, “I helped create a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.”

The Members Meeting often includes interesting talks by outside experts, and yesterday was no exception. There were two this year. Brent C. Williams, a financial analyst, talked about the evolution of the open source business model. James Governor, a principal at analyst firm Redmonk, shared his advice for future directions of the Eclipse community.

After the Members Meeting ended, it was time for the second annual Eclipse Community Awards; as one of the judges, I was asked to participate in the ceremony.

The winners fell into two broad categories: individuals within the Eclipse community; these were chosen by ballot; and products/companies, chosen by outside judges (like me).

The Individual Award Winners this year were:

Top Ambassador: Chris Aniszczyk
Top Contributor: Kimberley Peter and Tom Schindl (tie)
Top Committer: Ed Merks
Top Newcomer Evangelist: Daniel Megert

The Technology Awards went to:

Best Open Source RCP application: PSICAT
Best Commercial RCP application: TIBCO Business Studio
Best Open Source Eclipse-based Developer tool: eclipse-cs Checkstyle Plugin
Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer tool: QNX Momentics IDE
Best Deployment of Eclipse technology in an enterprise: JPMorgan Chase

Congratulations to the winners! I’ll be back down at EclipseCon again today.

The principal techies at software security company Cigital have started an intriguing new blog called Justice League. Gary McGraw, Cigital’s CTO, described the blog to me as “an eclectic collection of opinions about software security and software quality.” That certainly fits the first few postings (the blog started on Tuesday, Feb. 20), which were a combination of discussing Cigital’s security solutions and thoughtful tech-talk about things like Sarbanes-Oxley and Service Oriented Architecture.

The full team of bloggers are Gary (pictured), Pravir Chandra, Scott Matsumoto, Sammy Migues, Craig Miller and John Steven. That’s a pretty solid crop of experts. Gary, in fact, is the keynote speaker at the 4th Software Security Summit, April 16-17 in San Mateo.

No, this isn’t about one of those ubiquitous charities, advertising on the radio that they want you to donate your car, running or not in most cases, in exchange for a potential tax deduction. Instead, this is about sending the entirely wrong message to your happy customers.

My wife received an e-mail this morning from Acura of Serramonte, the dealer in Colma, Calif., where she had purchased a new 2006 Acura TSX sedan last July. (The Acura replaced a 1999 BMW 528i, also known as “the piece of junk that spent all its time in the shop,” but that’s another story.)

The e-mail said:

WE WANT YOUR CAR!

We need nice Acuras for our used car inventory. We”ll pay top dollar for your car – paid for or not.

My wife is incensed. She loves her shiny green TSX, which we took to Santa Barbara last week for a short vacation. It’s stylish, it’s extremely comfortable, it has great fuel efficiency, it’s fun to drive, it has tons of safety features, and it has all the toys. “Why do they want me to sell my new car?” she fumed. “Do they expect that I’m dissatisfied with it already?”

Maybe this is an accepted practice in the used-car business, trying to get people to sell back their just-purchased cars to build up inventory. But what a mean-spirited message for the dealer to send to a very satisfied customer: that she should dump a car that has only 7,200 miles and is half a year old.

Which browser do YOU use? In a completely non-scientific study, the chances are that you use Firefox. You’re probably also using Windows.

I was examining the FeedBurner stats for this blog, which arguably is read by a technically savvy subset of the computer-using world. Specifically, the subset that is aware that you can choose which browser you use, and are not locked into the one which shipped with your operating system, or which your operating system manufacturer urged you to install. Further, this is a subset that knows how to evaluate a browser.

FeedBurner told me that we had the following usage for Friday, Feb. 23 (a day which had heavier-than-usual traffic):

Firefox 2.0.x: 39%
Firefox 1.5.x: 13%
All Firefox: 52%

Internet Explorer 7.x: 20%
Internet Explorer 6.x: 11%
All IE: 31%

Safari: 5%
Mozilla: 5%
Others: 7%

Among other things, FeedBurner also logs the operating system from the browser request.

Windows XP: 52%
Windows 2000: 4%
Windows Vista: 1%
Other Windows: 3%
All Windows: 60%

Mac OS X (Intel): 17%
Mac OS X (PowerPC): 6%
All Mac OS X: 23%

Linux: 16%
Others: 1%

Please consider this to be just one data point – but it is an interesting one.

As I just told a time-wasting caller from a public relations agency in San Francisco, “Any PR professional who would pitch an editor based on information in Bacon’s MediaMap is not a PR professional.”

Bacon’s and MediaMap are always-out-of-date directories that lazy PR professionals use to learn about upcoming feature articles in trade publications like SD Times or Software Test & Performance. (MediaMap merged with Bacon’s in 2003.) These and other “PR aggregation” services were useful 10+ years ago, when trade publications only offered printed editorial calendars, which the media directories conveniently amalgamated together.

However, today, nearly all trade publications place their editorial calendars on the Web, and include the appropriate contact information.

PR professionals should use the up-to-date information provided by these publications (as a service to the PR community) instead of using the out-of-date information provided by the media directories to pitch the wrong editors at key publications about the wrong stories.

Best case: PR professionals should know their top-tier media targets, and read them regularly. For upcoming stories, work directly from each publication’s Web-based editorial calendar. To find the right reporter, look at the online beat list and check the bylines on recent, relevant coverage. This will yield the best, most timely, most accurate, most complete results.

Almost as good: Prospecting using Bacon’s MediaMap or another media directory, but then verifying the information using the publications’ Web-based editorial calendars before picking up the phone. Of course, you’ll miss stories that aren’t listed in Bacon’s MediaMap, but that’s what happens when you’re lazy.

Not good: Making pitch calls or sending e-mails based on Bacon’s MediaMap or another media directory, and thereby wasting your time and annoying editors who haven’t been the appropriate contact for years, or asking questions about stories that nobody’s ever heard of. If your excuse is that you don’t read my publication, even on the Web, then, I have no sympathy whatsoever.

>> Update 2:40 pm Pacific: I’ve had some nice private comments about this post — mainly from tech journalists who share this frustration, but also one from a senior PR professional who said, essentially, “Hey, Alan, what do you expect?” I’ve also stumbled across three interesting blog postings from early 2006 that discuss Bacon’s MediaMap, from Steve Rubel, Sherri and Karen Sams.

I can’t be the only person envisioning the chest-worn combadges from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A new product from Ekahau Inc., which bills itself as “the leading provider of Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems,” has just announced a wearable two-way communications device based on 802.11 wireless networks.

The T301-B badge, according to the company, is designed for hospitals and enterprise campuses, where it’s important to be able to both locate and communicate with individuals, leveraging the WiFi network instead of using an outside paging service or a private paging system.

It’s not quite Star Trek yet. There’s no voice capability or point-to-point communciations, but there is text messaging, colored lights and buttons. To quote from the company’s news,

The T301-B tag is the industry’s first tag that combines location capabilities with a display, which supports wireless text messaging and enables users to acknowledge messages by using the tag’s two integrated call buttons. By incorporating this functionality into the tags, enterprises are able to use their own Wi-Fi networks for tracking applications and two-way communications, rather than managing and paying for separate paging services.

The T301-B tag will incorporate audible alarm signals, multicolored LEDs and a screen to provide messaging capabilities. As a result, the Ekahau system can provide audible, visual and text-based alerts or work-flow messages to individuals carrying or using the T301-B tags, much like traditional paging or text messaging services.

The T301-B badges are expected to begin shipping in the second half of 2007. The future gets closer every day. Energize!

>> Update 7:42am PT: Swapped out the Star Trek combadge graphic with a picture of the T301-B, kindly provided by Ekahau.

Here’s a petition I can wholeheartedly support: Ian Skerrett, director of marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, is urging Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, to send his NetBeans Girls to the EclipseCon conference again this year.

Please join me in signing onto the Committee To Have the NetBeans Girls Return to EclipseCon.

(Photo credit: Don Smith)

Of all the major commercial versions of Unix, HP-UX is the one that I’ve spent the least time with. Other than exploring it on a couple of PA-RISC boxes, and then on an HP Integrity Itanium 2-based server, I have little feel for the unique characteristics and features of this venerable operating system, compared to, say, Solaris, AIX or UnixWare.

However, I was please to see last week that HP continues to invest in HP-UX 11i, and still supports both the PA-RISC and Itanium 2 processors. In conversations with PA-RISC users, they’re fanatical in their devotion to that chip, and singularly unenthusiastic about migrating to the Itanium processor. (However, change is inevitable. HP has stated that the current shipping version of the processor, the PA-8900, will be the last, so migration is inevitable.)

What’s new in HP-UX 11i v3? According to HP, the focus of this release has been on performance tuning (with claimed improvements of up to 30 percent) and on better support of virtualization:

HP-UX 11i v3 delivers enhancements in virtualization and performance that prepare customers for today’s and tomorrow’s most demanding workloads and data explosion.

HP-UX 11i v3 expands its mission-critical virtualization leadership with:

* OS performance accelerated through kernel optimization, an increase of 30% on average compared to version 2 running on the same hardware;

* Scalability expanded to almost unlimited storage capacity while simplifying storage management;

* Availability and manageability increased through hot swap for hardware components and self-healing I/O.

* Flexible capacity enhanced, with uncompromising uptime, with the ability to dynamically move memory among vPars. (vPars is available on mid-range and high-end servers).

I welcome your comments regarding HP-UX 11i, the PA-RISC 8900 processor, and the HP 9000 (PA RISC) and HP Integrity (Itanium 2) server families.

Remember Ingres? That’s a name with a long and proud history in the software development world, originating as a database project at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1970s.

Ingres was purchased by Computer Associates in 1994; for a long time, the database software thrived, but then its popularity flagged in the early part of this decade. In 2004, CA released the Ingres database as open-source software, and then everything went quiet.

That wasn’t the end of the story. In November 2005, CA and Garnett & Helfrich Capital, a private-equity group, reincarnated Ingres Corp., with the now-open-source database as its primary intellectual property asset. Little was heard about innovation at the new Ingres, however, after the formation of the new company. Most of the news they announced focused on partner programs or executive appointments, with next to nothing about new technology.

And then last week, out of the blue, we heard about a new Ingres software bundle for Eclipse developers. The offering is pretty interesting. The company describes it as:

As part of the bundle, developers will receive:

* Working system of Eclipse Framework with Ingres Eclipse Data Tools Project (DTP) plug-in
* “How to Get Started” with Ingres DTP including screenshots and step-by-step instructions
* Source code for a feature-rich demonstration that developers will find useful in getting started with Eclipse and Ingres

The Ingres DTP plug-in extends the Eclipse DTP by providing functionality specific to Ingres including:

* Ingres Connectivity
* Ingres Schema Support
* Ingres Database Procedure Support
* Ingres SQL Syntax (SQL Editor, Stored Procedure Editor, Trigger Editor)

If you do database work with Eclipse, it’s worth checking the bundle out.

The laugh of the day came from the official Microsoft Statement in Response to Speculation on Next Version of Windows. Kevin Kutz, director of the Windows Client, told the world:

We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we’re working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates.

Thanks for clarifying that, Kevin.