AMR continues to impress me with their continuous stream of meaningful content. AMR is my favorite analyst firm, mainly because they are topical and everyone I have met is cool – albeit Boston cool, the Red Sox are”Wicked cool” cool and Tom Brady is the best quarterback ever cool (Probably not now, but last week). Each firm brings it’s own style – Forrester – Conceptual and market pulse info. Gartner – Cool gadgets and technical diligence for buyers. ARC – Their apparent ability to publish on topics 6 weeks late and still get paid based on the “spin” into their niche. There are a host of others, but AMR is a “RESEARCH” firm and perhaps that’s why they don’t have blogs but “Newsletters“. But not sure what I get every week is a actually a newsletter, but more blog like, here is Jeremiah’s description, while not a crisp as I would like – it works:
Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but allows questions and comments from the audience.
Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to talk with the marketplace and to join the conversation that existing external bloggers may be having.
AMR has 2 newsletters that get pushed to me weekly Chain Reaction “a biweekly e-newsletter in which AMR Research Chief Strategy Officer Kevin O’Marah examines the business strategies that matter for today’s operations executive” and Bruce Richardson’s First thing Monday, which is a blog if I ever saw one. The only delta to a real blog is comments being readily posted, but they do welcome input and ideas – so it’s transparent-esque. They have a third newsletter, but my subscription doesn’t support it – “Above the Noise, AMR Research CEO and President Tony Friscia discusses AMR Research opinion on the world events and issues affecting today’s operations executive”, so maybe this one isn’t a blog, sounds like one, just can’t confirm or deny.
So why don’t they just have a blog? I’m confident that other upstarts at the firm would like to develop a brand for AMR. Forrester is hip to it, the concept that the next generation of analyst will be blogger-like, more so than full-on statisticians, but they need to know stats, just ask Jeremiah or Charlene Li. So does comments or lack there of may something more researching than bloggy? Not sure, but Bruce’s most recent non-blog post “Ready to Rumble: Microsoft-Yahoo! vs. Google” ( a non-bloggy title) leverages Rolling Stone’s references:
I’d be ecstatic that Steve Ballmer has taken Mick Jagger’s offer and has come to “my emotional rescue.”
And Bruce is hip with cool web 2.0 assets too, just like any good blogger – think social graphing:
When I think of Yahoo!, I think of my portal. In considering the Microsoft-Yahoo! combo, I initially overlooked Zimbra. Yahoo! bought the collaboration software vendor last September for $350M. I first wrote about Zimbra, last April, saying:
“When I first saw it, my reaction was that this is what SAP and Microsoft are trying to do with Duet. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is designed to allow PC users to add or build new capabilities on top of their preferred desktop standard (like Microsoft Outlook or any of its competitors). The company provides a wide range of Zimbra-developed and third-party “zimlets” that allow users to access Google maps, VoIP services, data sources (such as Wikipedia and catalogs), enterprise applications, and third-party services such as travel.”
Zimbra’s software would be ideal for extending—some would argue saving—the Microsoft Live initiative. It certainly sets up an interesting play against Google Apps. Does Microsoft Zimbra escape the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice?
Just keep writing the newsletters, I’ll keep reading – but a conversation would be nice.
