Can you remember what
your home page looked like back in 1996?
Maybe you think that's not
important right now. Like global warming, you know there could be some problems
accumulating somewhere because of all this web stuff, but it's only when your
house gets flooded, you really start to believe in it.
Back to
your home page circa 1996... If you really did need to reproduce it for
publicity purposes, maybe to commemorate your company's 10th anniversiversary as
a dotcom (sometime in 2006) you would find the task nearly impossible for 2
reasons.
- first, because chances are that no-one has got a copy of those original
files anymore, and
- second, even if they did have a copy, then it will still be difficult to
recreate a faithful facsimile, because a whole lot of technical things have
changed since then, including.... monitor sizes back then were only 640 pixels,
so the screen will look different, oh yes, and can you still lay your hands on a
1996 version of Netscape? IE was only a gleam in Bill Gate's eyes back then. By
the way can you remember the default fonts and sizes? Because that was what
determined your page look and feel, before "designers" started using
fancy fonts and graphics a few years later.
Looking to the future
problems of recreating today's home page in 5 years time, the technical problems
will be so enormous that you'd better forget it.
Having the source
code for your home page won't be enough, because chances are that it uses other
technologies, and fires up all kinds of external code to run banners, extract
images and text from an online database. So the only way you're going to solve
that problem is to do a screen grab of your home page, and save it as a JPEG
image. JPEG, originally created for photographs, and used as the output format
of all digital cameras is a sufficiently durable standard, so that no matter
what the web browser actually does in 2006, you'll still be able to publish a
picture which looks like your home page today.
Phew! That's a lot
simpler than messing about with the other options.
But you're a busy
person and probably won't even be working in your present company in 5 years'
time, so why should you care?
Here's another reason. You've got
a marketing program in your company to recruit another 100 resellers. As part of
the lead generation efforts, your advertising manager last month ran 5 million
impressions of various banner ads on a bunch of leading portals. How are you
going to prove it? Apart from showing prospective VARs copies of the invoices
for the ads... "We spent XXX thousand dollars on XX leading portals"...
that's going to create a big yawn. But it was an expensive campaign, and
you might have to wait another 3 months before you do something on a similar
scale again.
In a traditional print ad campaign, or mailshot, you'd
keep sample copies of the magazine or mailer to send out with your VAR
information or the digital equivalent in Powerpoint. Your electronic ad campaign
ended last week, and it would be nice to have visuals. On a couple of days some
of those portals were even running news items about your company... and when
your banner appeared on the same page, it was VERY impressive.
If you
didn't make screen dumps at the time, then sure, your graphics department can
mock up those web sites, but they won't be convincing. The home page on a good
portal changes every day, sometimes many times a day. All the other information
will look wrong. The VARs will know that it's a fix, and your credibility will
be low.
So here's what you need to do. Once or twice a month do
a screen grab and JPEG conversion of your company's own home page, and whenever
your advertising department runs an ad, ask them to make a copy of your ad
running on the targeted portal. Then, next time you want to include some of
these collaterals in a future article or partner presentation your life will be
a lot easier. You should also include screen grabs of the datasheets for your
most significant products, because most products nowadays don't have any paper
collaterals. So, if in 10 years time a publisher wants to run an article on the
history of similar products, then they'll have to give yours a miss (even if it
was the first, or
the fastest, or the one which changed everything that followed.)
I
have to confess that in my own case, it's easy to find an image of our
publication way back in 1992, because it was hard copy and we can photograph any
of the bits we like the look of. But there's no record whatsover of our home
pages for the first 5 1/2 years as a dotcom. So we'll just have to feature shots
of the mice and our changing logos in any future retrospectives.
You
have been warned! | |
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Stories on goblinsearch.com - by
Zsolt Kerekes
- Alexander
Woyte and the Goblins
In which the young Alexander is
kidnapped by minions of the goblin king and we rediscover Jane Austen's long
lost (and best) novel.
...And, in the end, when the Hunt comes to the rescue, we learn the
important difference between Tolkien's orcs and Wessex goblins. Length:- 5,300
words.
- My Pact with
the Goblin Queen
This is a horror story based in modern day
Brighton. But this is not a tale about the bright city lights or the Sussex sea
shore. The story takes place in the early hours of Sunday morning in the foggy
lane winding up from the London Road past the Withdean stadium. Unlike the
other stories on this web site, this one is autobiographical. In fact the author
claimed in a radio interview that nearly every word was true. Length - 7,800
words
- Princess
Laura and the Unsuitable Dragon Suitors
Unlike the traditional
doormat formula in silly princess stories. This one doesn't include goblins -
but does include a dragon.
At the age of 18 Princess Laura is told she
must choose a husband from one of the princes from the four neigbouring
countries. Their manly deeds and interests all make an impression, but not what
was intended. Length:- 12,200 words.
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Napier is a full
service media relations
and marketing communications agency
that
offers a true pan-European approach. | |
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STORAGEsearch
Reveals the Pivotal Shift in the Storage Market 2005
Editor:-
November 22, 2005 - at this time of year
analysts, editors,
manufacturers and
ISVs are busy
digesting what's happened in the storage market and what will come.
Here,
at
STORAGEsearch, we do this kind of
analysis throughout the whole year and there are rarely any surprises by the
time we hit the holiday season. It's still too early to do my end of year review
- but here's one question, which I think, it's safe to answer.
In the
context of the storage market - what do you think is the single most
important thing that happened in 2005? What's the single biggest change
that analysts will track back to 2005 in future years and say "this was
the pivotal moment?"
Well it's not the
Sun /
StorageTek merger.
Yes, it was the single most popular news headline when it was
announced back in June
2005. But if we look back at the equally gargantuan and much noisier merger
of HP and
Compaq (completed in May
2002) we can see from this perspective that it didn't change the storage
market one jot.
Yes, some vice presidents lost their jobs, and a lot
of employees too. Some VARs got shuffled and some products got renamed, and some
suppliers lost out in the new deal. But nothing of any significance changed. No
new technologies got developed any faster than they would have done without the
merger. And the same will be true of the Sun / StorageTek merger too. It will
shift some points in market share and extend the shelf life of Sun - which may
affect a few points of market share in the server market. But the overall
impact on storage will be minimal compared to the
300+ other storage
mergers we have noted before.
Looking again at the burning question of "what
was the most important BIG thing in 2005". Am I saying it was technology
then?
We're getting warmer there, but the long anticipated gestation
(4 years) of Serial
Attached SCSI into a technology that users could actually buy isn't the
event either. Nor was the fact that
InfiniBand (which
had many near death experiences along the way) finally emerged looking as
though it had found a healthy niche. As for
iSCSI... (lagging
years behind where IDC
originally said it would be) ...that other graveyard for aspiring
venture capital backed
technology startups was finally nudging towards a billion dollar market.
What
about the many demonstrations of holographic and other prototype technologies -
which in the words of their developers would "wipe out" and replace
hard disks,
DVDs or
tape?
2005 was
an interesting year for long promised technologies to take up a bit more space
in catalogs and newer technologies to be seen at
events - but none of
these new technologies was the big thing either. I'd better tell you, because
we're running out of space here, and the list of things which weren't
the pivotal changes in the storage market in 2005 is very long.
The
answer is... that 2005 was the year that semiconductor storage overtook all
other technologies (including disk) to become the biggest segment (more than
50%) of the storage market.
In 2005 solid state storage accounted for
$45 billion of revenue. That was made up of
RAM ($25 billion) and
flash ($20 billion).
It's the first time in the history of the computer market that solid state
storage (with no moving parts) was worth about the same (or more) than all the
other types of storage media added together (hard disk drives, tape and optical
storage media).
That's a fundamental shift in the landscape which is
not going to change. And as the solid state storage market grows and becomes
more sophisticated - it will make big changes to the way that computers are
designed and maintained.
Why is the change so important? We now have
a storage usage landscape which has all the new interconnection technologies
in place to sustain entirely new species of storage products. We're going to
see Darwinian changes take place at catalyst speeds. I'll be talking more
about that, as usual, in these pages later. Happy Holiday. | | |
