Here’s a thought experiment: If you consider marketing as a function of information technology, and you consequently divide it into software and hardware, then you may draw an interesting analogy to what’s currently happening in the wireless industry. Like the mobile industry, in particular handset phone makers, who experience a shift from hardware towards software, successful marketers ought to start focusing on what I call “marketing software.”

Let me explain. Under marketing hardware I file the static, robust marketing framework long established in theory and practice: brand architecture, trademarks, direct mailing, loyalty programs, trade show booths, traditional print collateral, print ads, billboards, sales brochures, feature lists, etc. — basically any programs and artifacts that operate in campaign cycles targeting a segmented audience.

I suspect that in most marketing organizations the ratio of hardware to software will approximately be 70 to 30. If marketers are serious about their new mantra of adding value for consumers rather than just promoting a product or brand, then they must alter this ratio and shift their investments. Take a critical look at your own organization: What’s your ratio? Do you over-invest in marketing hardware? Are your marketing efforts bogged down by that? Does it compromise your agility? Which marketing software elements do you have in place? Which could you add?

In contrast, marketing software encompasses knowledge, point of views, conversations, social networks, partnerships, entertainment, etc. — in other words, any content and connections flowing through the hardware and filling it with life. Like the PC, marketing hardware is meaningless without software. As with the
iPod or any other mobile device, the primary value of marketing lies in the software and not in the hardware. The flow of information outweighs the channel. The water is more powerful than the rock. While marketing hardware relies on programs, marketing software is all about the programming. While marketing hardware is inert and hard to adjust, marketing software is agile — open-sourced, upgradeable at any time, and highly customizable. While marketing hardware is proprietary and can be owned, marketing software is in constant flux and free for all. It is harder to control and almost impossible to protect and defend. That’s what makes it so valuable. The following chart may further illustrate this paradigm shift:

The M&A attorney made a similar observation.

And if some of the advisory services to institutional investors still want to weigh in on Yahoo’s director nominees, post-Icahn settlement, one act they could take would to be to issue a “withhold” recommendation, noted one source with such a service.

The board was divided with different strategic alternatives in mind…Although (Icahn) was in the minority…he presented a plan and said this is what I want, and this is how I want to achieve it. He got people interested in that plan and eventually gained a majority support on the board.

Carl is very convincing and has passion. He convinced me that we could do it–that we could get the drug going and expand the company. We’ve since hired a competent CEO and the right management…This is a complete turnaround. This board is going in a completely different direction now, than before Carl came aboard.

“The settlement is an admission by Yahoo that they felt they’d lose a few seats in a proxy fight,” Young said.

Nonetheless, the M&A attorney noted that Icahn has had success in winning other directors over to his views and thinking, even in situations where he or his representatives accounted for less than a majority of the seats on a company’s board.

“Yahoo’s recent behavior calls into question some of their activities. Although people have called into question (co-founder David) Filo going to negotiate with Microsoft when he wasn’t even a director, it raises the question of where was the chairman and the corporate governance committee?” said a source with an institutional investor advisory service. “If there is a withhold vote of 30 to 50 percent on directors, it sends a strong message and would give a dissident a strong voice on the board.”

Microsoft may be the biggest winner in the proxy fight settlement between Yahoo and activist investor Carl Icahn, whose peace accord was announced Monday.

“In my opinion, there is a greater chance Microsoft comes back to the table than there was yesterday. Whether it’s more likely a deal gets done is hard to say,” Young said.

Microsoft, in announcing its support for Icahn’s initial proxy slate to run against Yahoo’s current board earlier this month, said it was no longer willing to negotiate a deal with the Internet search pioneer’s current board.

Icahn, during his proxy fight, advocated taking ImClone’s core cancer drug, Erbitux, which is used for combating head and neck cancers, and aggressively expanding trial tests for other uses. The former corporate raider also called for finding a permanent CEO after a lengthy period with an interim CEO and tying executive compensation more tightly with ImClone’s stock price. Sidransky further added:

Wall Street appeared a little skeptical. Yahoo fell nearly 2.67 percent in morning trading to $21.78 a share.

The settlement will alter Yahoo’s current board, but it has yet to be seen how much influence Icahn and two of the members from his former dissident slate will have on the 11-member Yahoo board. To make room for Icahn’s three board seats, Yahoo director Robert Kotick has agreed not to run for re-election at the annual shareholders meeting. That would drop the board down to eight members, but the additional three will bring it up to 11.

And Chris Young, director of M&A research for institutional investor advisory service RiskMetrics Group, said the settlement may bring Microsoft back to the negotiating table once again.

Yahoo and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment. Icahn did not return phone calls.

“If a strong director is on a board, even if they are in the minority, that person can add value to the board, because directors want to accommodate reasonable views,” said the M&A attorney.

He noted that without Icahn waging a proxy fight and keeping the pressure on Yahoo leading up to the Internet pioneer’s August 1 shareholders meeting, Microsoft has no reason to delay making another offer for all, or part of Yahoo.

With its ally Icahn and two members of Icahn’s former dissident proxy slate getting three seats on Yahoo’s expanded 11-member board as part of the settlement, Microsoft may find a sympathetic ear on any future buyout or asset acquisition proposals for Yahoo’s search business, said sources. That, as a result, could push Microsoft to make another bid sooner than later, sources said.

“This settlement is a good thing for Microsoft,” said one attorney who specializes in mergers and acquisitions and has been involved in proxy fights before. “It puts people on the board who aren’t interested in more of the same, so it creates new opportunities to get a new perspective on the board.”

Updated 10:45 a.m. PDT, with comments from the M&A director of research at RiskMetrics Group.

Whether advisory services to institutional investors, such as RiskMetrics, Glass Lewis & Co., and Proxy Governance, issue withhold recommendations has yet to be seen.

But one proxy solicitor said any benefit of greater influence on Yahoo’s board that Icahn may receive from a “withhold” vote recommendation will depend on the reason cited by the institutional investor advisory service.

Said the proxy solicitor: “Sometimes dissidents put on a board are piranhas and remain outsiders, and sometimes they integrate very well on the board and are thought leaders.”

In a previous CNET News article on Icahn’s track record with his proxy fights, David Sidransky, an ImClone director who served on the biotechnology company’s board prior to and after Icahn’s arrival, said:

Under the agreement, Icahn will be nominated to Yahoo’s board of directors and the current board will chose two additional directors from among Icahn’s former dissident slate to join Yahoo’s expanded board of 11 members. Icahn will have three of those 11 seats.

But only having a minority of the available board seats didn’t deter Icahn from having an effect on ImClone Systems, a biotechnology company he waged war with two years ago.

“Before, Microsoft was taking advantage of the leverage that Icahn’s proxy fight gave them. But now that leverage is gone,” Young said. “If they truly were interested in a deal, there is no reason to delay to maximize their leverage.”

Whatever the case, the processors are now offered on select consumer systems from HP and Gateway, among other PC vendors. The Q9550 (2.83GHz) and Q9450 (2.66GHz) integrate 12MB of cache (versus 8MB for older Intel quad-core chips) and attach to a 1,333MHz front-side bus. The Q9300 (2.5GHz) has 6MB of cache. All have a thermal envelope of 95W.

The HP Pavilion Ultimate d4999t series–with a Q9550 processor, 3GB of DDR2-800MHz dual-channel SDRAM memory, an Nvidia GeForce 8400 graphics card (256MB), and a 500GB 7200 SATA hard disk drive–is priced at $1,259.

These latest chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel are now populating consumer desktops from Hewlett-Packard and Gateway, among other prominent PC makers. What makes them different? Intel’s are made on a 45-nanometer process, and AMD’s run at a lower power.

Next up, Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9xxx series of 45nm quad-core processors. Although the Q9550, Q9450, and Q9300 CPUs were announced at the beginning of January, they were delayed, pushing back availability in the distribution channel until mid-March.

One reason for the long delay was stated explicitly by Intel CEO Paul Otellini at his company’s first-quarter 2008 earnings conference call earlier this month.

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

HP Pavilion Slimline desktop s3430f uses a low-power AMD quad-core processor

Gateway offers a FX7026 tower system with a Q9300 processor for $1,099 at Best Buy.

The HP s3430f system also packs 4GB of PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM memory, a 500GB (7200 rpm) Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drive, and an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT graphics processor. The system is priced at $999 at Best Buy.

First up: AMD and its new power-sipping quad-core 9100e Phenom. HP is now offering its space-saving Slimline Pavilion desktop with the 9100e, which draws only 65 watts. Typically, quad-core processors draw 95 watts or higher. Intel’s popular Q6600, for example, has a thermal envelope rated at 105 watts.

Quad-core processors boasting lower power and packing more transistors are arriving at mass-market retail.

(Credit:
Maplin)

Don’t trust Marshall Seese? Me neither–the Weather Channel anchor looks a little shifty to me. And I think Jim Cantore’s been left out in the field a little too long. If you’ve lost faith in the Weather Channel, it’s time to take meteorological matters into your own hands with the USB Wireless Weather Forecaster. Plant the wireless sensor unit in your backyard, connect the small LCD touch screen to your PC, and sit back as it tracks the temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, and wind speed.

What doesn’t it do? Well, it doesn’t work with Macs, nor does it show moon phases. And you’ll need to buy it the next time you’re in England, for 80 pounds.

Via Everything USB

Brandon Miniman of PocketNow posted a recap (thanks, Gizmodo) of his trip to Redmond for the Microsoft MVP Summit to check out Windows Mobile 7. He couldn’t get into details, as he had signed an NDA about the event, but hinted that the leaked screenshots earlier this year are pretty close to what you should expect from Windows Mobile 7.

Windows Mobile 7 is expected to be a dramatic improvement over 6.1, shown here, but when will it arrive?

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft just released Windows Mobile 6.1 at the
CTIA show on April 1. The latest version was a pretty incremental improvement to Windows Mobile 6, with a redesigned home screen as the most prominent change. Microsoft’s Robbie Bach spent much of his keynote address to CTIA attendees talking about how Microsoft needs to make Windows Mobile easier for consumers to use and enjoy.

While he honored the terms of his NDA, Miniman said “as icing on the cake, think of your biggest complaint with Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6…it’s likely that in Windows Mobile 7, it’s been fixed.” Most Windows Mobile users in the unofficial smartphone survey I conducted last month complained about a stodgy user interface that looks pedestrian compared to Apple’s
iPhone, so that’s the biggest hint of what might be to come.

But Miniman came away from the summit with two thoughts. One, Microsoft won’t be ready to release Windows Mobile 7 until 2009, and maybe not until the second half of the year. That’s a bit of speculation on his part, but he makes the point that Apple, RIM, Google, and even Palm will probably have released improved operating systems by mid-2009, and Microsoft will just be catching up.

His second suspicion is that Microsoft is going to use the talent it acquired from Danger to build a Microsoft-branded hardware phone. As recently as last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told my colleague Ina Fried that Microsoft wanted Danger’s expertise in delivering applications to handhelds, not the handhelds themselves, when it acquired the company.

But given Microsoft’s success with building the
Xbox hardware division, it’s interesting to ponder whether it would try and turn the mediocre-at-best performance of the Zune group into a phone.

Miniman closes by saying: “Microsoft is working like mad to make Windows Mobile 7 be an OS that we all drool over (both for businesses and consumers), and they’ve listened pretty well to our bitching and complaining over the last few years.” However, he points out that if the company waits too long, it might not matter.

The HA-SX500 will carry a list price of $79.99.

(Credit:
JVC)

You remember those fold-up Sony headphones that you used to take with you to the gym? Well, JVC’s added a new “high-end” version of that type of headphone to its Bi-Metal line of in-ear canal headphones. JVC’s HA-SX500 will be out this month with a list price of $79.99. Oh, and it’s
iPhone-compatible.

Here’s the news release if you want the details:

“The new JVC HA-SX500 achieves high quality sound by employing JVC’s original Bi-Metal structure and a new large 16mm neodymium driver unit, offering greater power handling and sensitivity.

JVC’s Bi-Metal structure is designed to enhance performance across the frequency range by housing the drive unit in a steel base wrapped in a high-specific-gravity brass ring to eliminate vibration and energy loss. The HA-SX500 also offers a vast reduction in friction noise. The headphones feature flexible rubber joints, reducing friction noise while increasing comfort, and use OFC (oxygen-free copper) to minimize transmission loss in the 0.8 meter friction noise reduction cord.

The lightweight HA-SX500 headphones are designed to provide a comfortable and secure fit while delivering superior isolation from external sounds and minimizing sound leakage. The ergonomic silicon rubber earpieces come in three sizes to provide snug, customized sizing, supported by a cushioned metallic foldable headband for a secure fit and hours of comfort.

A number of convenient accessories complete the package, such as a 0.7m extension cord and a handy carrying case. In addition, the HA-SX500 offers a plug that is compatible with Apple’s iPhone.”

All folded up.

(Credit:
JVC)

I left my Kindle on a flight into SFO on Monday night, and unfortunately it doesn’t appear that I’ll be getting it back. After a two-hour delay to my flight, I think I was a bit brain-dead by the time we touched down, causing me to leave it sitting in my seat.

Feel free to contribute to the “Give a Blogger a Kindle” fund. Just hit “refresh” on this page 1,000,000 times today and my check from CNET should cover a new Kindle.

Seriously, I’m really bummed. It was proving to be such an excellent device. I was going to be giving this one to my parents in Argentina to help keep my mom up-to-date on her books, but the thought of buying another one grates on me. I wish Amazon created a “self-destruct” feature in the device so that I could ensure whoever picked it up gets no enjoyment from it.

If you haven’t bought one but have been considering it, I’d encourage you to give it a try. I was skeptical at first but quickly grew to love the device. It feels almost perfect in the hand and the screen is wonderful.

(Credit:
Google)

Adobe Systems is getting all of the attention today in the digital photo world with the launch of Photoshop Express. Google, meanwhile, continues to add features to Picasa, Adobe’s main online rival.

Google has released a new application programming interface (API) for Picasa that makes it easier to transfer pictures from Picasa to other applications, both online and offline.

Developers can use the Picasa Button API to make custom buttons that can open image files in local applications and upload selected image files to the Web via Google’s Picasa Web Uploader service.

“Using the web uploader, you can make user interfaces that feel more like sending an email and less like ‘Wait an hour to upload…’,” Michael Herf of Google’s Photos Team wrote in a blog posting Wednesday.

One undeniable result of Super Tuesday is that there will be full employment for pundits over the next nine months. For those of you political junkies who are tired of watching the same old talking heads stretch their speeches to fill yet another hour of programming, the Intrade Prediction Market provides a novel moving indicator of conventional wisdom. Site users buy and sell contracts whose price reflects the probablility that a candidate will receive their party’s nomination.

Snapshot of the Democratic primary race, from Intrade.com

Intrade calls itself a political futures market, others call it betting, but it has enough credibility to attract coverage by The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Intrade is based in Ireland and says that the company “can’t be sure” if the activity is legal in specific locations.

But whether or not we are allowed to make trades, it is interesting to watch the price fluctuations that reflect collective public opinion about what is likely to happen.

Now that Mitt Romney has dropped out of the race, his shares dropped to almost zero, and John McCain’s are selling for 93.8, reflecting a 93.8 percent chance that he will be his party’s nominee.

On the Democratic side, the results are a lot more psychologically interesting, given that Obama and Clinton ran to a dead heat in the Super Tuesday elections. Nonetheless, Clinton’s shares took a dip on February 5, then a spike up on February 6 (to about 63), then closed down today at 42.8, perhaps fueled by perceptions of who beat expectations on Tuesday, or news that Clinton had loaned her campaign funds. Obama took a slight tick up on February 5, a dip back to recent baseline (about 39) on February 6, then a sharp jump up today to 57.8.

Intrade has markets for current events like Grammy winners, to financial occurrences like a recession, to climate and weather. And yes, it has a market for the eventual winner of the November Presidential election, with McCain and Obama tied with current bid prices of 35.2, and Clinton in third at 28.5. For political horse-race fans, Intrade could become the index to watch.

I’ve seen a lot of noise over the past year about which presidential candidate would be best for open source, most recently this blog post in TechRepublic suggesting that Barack Obama would be better for open source.

I don’t mean to burst anyone’s bubble, but anyone looking to the U.S. presidency to make any material difference for open source needs to pass the bong around one more time. It’s not going to happen.

Yes, there are things that a president can do to create an atmosphere accommodating to open source, or other technology choices like Net neutrality. But let’s be clear: there are far bigger issues in front of the U.S. president than whether the government adopts open source (and, regardless, the U.S. government is already adopting open source at a rapid pace, so who needs a presidential preference for open source?).

I personally could not possibly care less whether John McCain or Obama use Linux. It has never entered my mind. I’m much more concerned with their policies on domestic and international issues, like health care, Iraq, etc.–you know, things that have the potential to help or hurt lots of people.

If a U.S. president has limited impact on the economy–you and I impact the economy more than a presidential speech because we’re the ones working, saving, and starting new businesses–then why would we expect them to make much of a dent on technology policy? Would I like McCain and Obama to use open source? Sure. I’m just not going to think about that when I vote.