Met up with some fellow dorks on Tuesday for social wineworking- namely Roo Reynolds, Hugh MacLeod, Alan Wood, Dennis Howlett, Andy Piper, Kyb*update* oops… and Richard Brown. One of the subjects I raised with the Hursley (IBM’s premier UK R&D facility, and perhaps the most beautiful campus in the world) crew was how much I dislike IBM’s to my mind pointless rebranding of MQSeries as WebSphere MQ. But IBM Corporate already knows how I feel about that. We also discussed second life and the usual metaverse gubbins. We’re talking about drinking some Stormhoek at Hursley (more social wineworking, this time a green apple with a slight hint of enterprisey), which would be nice. One mischievous 900lb gorilla marketing idea that bubbled up was for IBM to keep the pressure on Microsoft with an embrace, extend and extinguish cartoon strategy. Microsoft has the Blue Monster campaign, which is nice. But couldn’t a Big Blue monster just swallow a Blue Monster whole? I can see it in second life now… Change The World or get Eaten.
on a final note I just want to thank Hugh for his extremely kind words about me and Dennis. We may not have short head readerships, but we have working business models.
Ric says:
February 23, 2007 at 12:33 pm
How about “on demand or on toast”? (with apologies to Nick)
Dennis H says:
February 23, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Yes James – I forgot to mention that. Hugh was indeed very kind.
andyp says:
February 23, 2007 at 2:44 pm
I thought Gendal was pretty invisible, too 😉
Cote' says:
February 23, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Man am I dumb! I didn’t even realize that the whole blue monster thing is a natural fit for Big Blue itself.
I don’t know if that’s intentional, but it’s certainly there. Blue is clearly IBM’s color…what’s Microsoft’s?
steve clayton says:
February 23, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Cote, traditionally our colours have been Red, Blue, Green and Yellow but the Blue is working for me here 😉 I actually did a Blue Monster mashup image a while back that had 4 monsters in the Windows colours as a “new flag”…decided not to release that though due to potential brand issues!
AIXpi says:
February 23, 2007 at 9:21 pm
I have to agree, the IBM normally is the Big Blue Monster, but I think these days it fits Microsoft better than IBM…