Year: 2008

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You ain’t nothing but a sight-hound?

Our experience with Rufus has been pretty awesome. Outside of his inclination to bring home every tick in Ringwood — Amy thinks it’s because they keep mistaking him for a deer — we don’t really have much to complain about. I’m still afraid to leave him on his own in the house for a day, because I think he’ll get bored and start chewing on furniture, but he doesn’t seem to mind being in his crate while I’m at the office, so that’s alright. He’s been well-behaved on walks, didn’t react when a 1-year-old trundled over and tapped him on the nose this weekend, and has only peed in the house once since his first week with us.

One oddball trait of his, though, is his need to “protect the house.” Sometimes when he’s sleeping or resting in the living room, he’ll react to the sound of car-doors closing, getting up and barking. We think he’s trying to keep us safe, but he may just be jealous of other people getting to ride in cars. Yesterday evening, he did something even stranger.

Rufus was KTFO on his bed while Amy & I were reading. He suddenly got up, sniffed, and began barking to beat the band. This time, he was so agitated that he tried climbing over me onto the loveseat. We don’t let him on the furniture, and he hasn’t tried to get onto any since his first few weeks here. But he pushed and strained to look out the big window in the living room.

He ran down the hall of the house, barking away. Neither of us had heard any noise that would have woken him up, so I decided to take him outside to show him that there was nothing going on. He ran down the stairs and waited at the door, tail wagging.

Outside, he took one sniff and led me around the side of the house. I heard some leaves and branches being stomped, and figured he’d caught wind of a deer. We get ’em all the time out here, so I was surprised that he reacted so strongly. I walked him to the edge of the woods behind our home, listened for the noise and tried to peer through the trees to see his quarry.

And that’s when I saw the bear.

It was gallumphing down the hill, not too rapidly, but he was obviously not happy about hearing Rufus’ barking earlier. For his part, Rufus didn’t make any moves to drag me into the woods, content to stand in the bear-free yard.

“Good dog?” I asked.

Back inside, Amy & I decided that, yes, this constituted “good dog” behavior. Oh, and that we’ll pay very close attention to our boy when we take him out hiking on trails, especially during bear season.

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Bottoms up

Sorry I didn’t post earlier in the day, dear readers. I was just building up my courage for the plunge into our annual Top Companies Report, where I profile the top 20 pharma companies and top 10 biopharmas. I just have to tell myself, “Come July 2, it’ll all be done.” It used to be daunting, but the past few years of awful pipeline progress have made it awfully depressing, too.

This morning, I sat down with Pfizer’s 2007 annual report to run the basic numbers on drug revenues, and realized that two of its drugs that went generic dropped a combined $3.3 billion in revenues, while one of its biggest up-and-coming products just got banned by the FAA (in pilots and air traffic controllers) because of a variety of messed up side effects. The company’s biggest seller (the top-selling drug in history) was flat for the year, now that similar drugs have gone generic. I knew they have a tough slog ahead, but the numbers make it even starker. I thought, “I really should’ve started with another company.”

As it turned out, the next 7 or 8 companies on my list weren’t in great shape, either. The European firms got a little boost on my chart because of the exchange rate (I always put in a disclaimer that shows results in local currency, because I’m all about value), but I have a feeling I’m going to be hard pressed to find good stuff to write about in their profiles.

“Come July 2, it’ll all be done.”

On the positive side, I’m just about done with my review/ramble on the Kindle! I spent a while on it yesterday, realized it was getting way too involved, and stripped it down to a pretty good size and shape. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to finish it today, because I just got a (print) book in from Amazon: Dæmonomania, by John Crowley. It’s the third book in his Ægypt series, and I cæn’t wæit to reæd it!

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What It Is: 5/26/08

What I’m reading: Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad, and vol. 1 of Cromartie High School, an incredibly funny manga.

What I’m listening to: That new Portishead album again.

What I’m watching: Kung Fu Hustle, which remains one of the most entertaining flicks of all time, and The Big Lebowski, which I need to write about.

What I’m drinking: Blue Point Brewing Co.’s Blueberry Ale (a gift from this weekend’s houseguests).

Where I’m going: Maybe out to see Iron Man today, but otherwise, nodarnwhere special this week.

What I’m happy about: Having a nice, long, relatively relaxing weekend. (“Relatively,” because Saturday involved a lot of cleaning and cooking, as we had those aforementioned houseguests. Also, I was a nervous nellie because one of the sets of guests had a 1-year-old child, and I was afraid Rufus would get overstimulated and eat the kid. Everything turned out fine.) Oh, and taking a vacation day on Tuesday, just to get a little extra time before diving into the big Top 20 Pharma and Top 10 Biopharma issue of my magazine.

What I’m sad about: Last night, Rufus appeared to have developed a case of Ringworm in Ringwood. Fortunately, we already had a vet appointment scheduled for tomorrow.

What I’m pondering: Why the Coen Brothers use voiceovers in some of their flicks and not in others. Also, how long the natives will let the new Mars probe transmit.

What I’m updating: Rufus’ status! The vet says that they’re just “mayfly” bites, nothing that requires any treatment! Wanna see all the gories? Glad to oblige!

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Working like a dog

From today’s installment of “Take your Rufus to work day”:

“So you, uh, don’t happen to have any treats in that desk drawer, do you?”

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Random House’s Salute To Fireworks

I’ve goofed on my history of (incredibly) small press publishing for years. While there are plenty of specific reasons why I was a failure, there are also some pretty enormous structural problems with the business of book publishing. I think most of those problems can be traced back to bookstore returnability, but it’s a complex argument that I don’t feel like making right now.

What brings me to this topic is the news that Bertelsmann, a privately held German media conglomerate, looks ready to announce a new president for Random House, one of the largest publishing companies in the world. Perturbed that Random hasn’t had any blockbuster hits in the last year and revenues have slipped, ownership (and new CEO Hartmut Ostrowski) decided to promote from within. Of course, when you’re a major conglomerate like Bertelsmann, “within” can be a pretty broad term.

In this case, Random House’s new president, Markus Dohle, comes from Bertelsmann’s Arvato Print unit. What’s Arvato? Why, I’ll let the WSJ explain:

While Arvato is so unglamorous a business it was once referred to inside Bertelsmann as “Siberia,” it has served as a major growth engine for Bertelsmann in recent years. Arvato has been plunging into far-ranging businesses such as repairing mobile telephones, storing pharmaceuticals and running call centers and billing systems. Last year it booked almost [$7.8 billion] in revenue, or about a quarter of Bertelsmann’s turnover.

I’m sure Mr. Dohle’s a fine executive, and I’m sure Mr. Ostrowski (another Arvato Print alumni) has some big ideas for how Bertelsmann can make book publishing a major contributor to its bottom line (it’s currently at 10% of company revenues), but this sort of pedigree sounds a lot like the appointment of Jack Donaghy to the role of Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming.

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MesS

As a Mac convert, my interest in the decline/irrelevance of Microsoft is more observational and less practical. Every so often, I look at prices for Windows laptops, just ’cause, and then think, “There’s nothing I’d need one of these machines for.” But I’m fascinated by the sight of MS in this state of disarray, and not just because of my adoration of failure. Their inability to adapt to the new world isn’t simply a failing on the part of their executives; rather it looks like a big-ol’ example of the sclerotic nature of empires.

There are plenty of sites devoted to this issue, but a few articles on the topic of MS’s problems ended up in my RSS feed in the past week, so I thought I’d share them with you. It began with a BusinessWeek cover article about the company’s failed bid to acquire Yahoo (a bid that may develop into some sort of partnership/buy-in option, according to this weekend’s reports). The piece discusses MS’s rationales for the deal and its online ad strategy to battle Google, but a red flag went up for me after this passage:

“Microsoft’s biggest fear is that once you start putting Google [software programs on the Internet], then the price Microsoft can charge for its software will erode markedly,” says David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Just the threat means that Microsoft has to be able to offer advertising as a choice.”

Mull that one over: Is Yoffie saying that, because the internet is making MS’s core business — operating systems and office software — irrelevant, MS needs to, um, spend $45 billion to buy an also-ran in the business of selling ads on the internet? Doesn’t that seem like a non sequitur? Just because selling ads online is Google’s core business, why would it mean that MS has to go whole-hog after that market?

  • MS core competencies: building & selling operating systems and office applications
  • Google core competencies: building search engine & selling text ads

I think Yoffie’s argument would make more sense as, “MS’s lead business is eroding in the long term, so the company is looking for new business opportunities.” But trying to justify this enormous acquisition in terms of “sticking it to Google” looks like folly to me.

(Oh, and another key point of the article is that MS is trying to undercut the foundation of Google’s ad revenues by arguing that ads from search results aren’t as valuable as ads that are served up on regular web pages, tailored to individual users by tracking their movements on the web. That is, MS can serve advertisers better by following them around and snooping in on their web usage.)

This article by Chris Seibold approaches the MS dilemma from another angle. He contends that MS’s big problem is that it got away from its old practice of bullying smaller companies and stealing technologies, and tried to become a “me too” business. Seibold sees the XBox, the Zune, and online advertising as dilutions of MS’s mission, which is building software.

I’m not sure how viable that strategy is, or whether it’s simply a way of consigning MS to a slow death. In the pharma industry, which I’ve observed for almost a decade, the “me too” business plays a necessary role. And at least these “me too” therapies fit into the basic business of pharma companies. MS’s decisions to get into a gaming platform war with Sony, or compete with the iPod and the iTunes store, are markedly different than a pharma company devoting R&D dollars to go after a promising field a few years behind a competitor’s project.

In the NYTimes this weekend, Randall Stross reports on the Single-Era Conjecture, “the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras.” He points out that MS had years to prepare for a transition into the internet age, but failed to make the leap in any meaningful way.

Stross also makes the point that MS’s online business was profitable just a few years ago, but that’s because it was centered on users paying MS for dialup access. Once the broadband infrastructure grew out far enough, the online unit began posting a loss, tied as it was to an obsolescing business model. This one really gets at my question of whether MS is just too big to keep up.

But the article that really sums out the trouble MS is having turns out to be another BW one on the phenomenon of major corporations choosing not to upgrade to MS’s new Vista operating system.

That’s that core competency I was talking about: building and selling an OS. Vista reached the market years late, has memory-hogging features that appear designed to get users to buy new hardware, and still manages to have compatibility and driver issues. Acquiring Yahoo (or just its search-ad biz, as is rumored) isn’t going to convince people to start upgrading their computers & OS.

Any of my geekier or more business-oriented readers have thoughts on this?