The Top 10 Signs Your Social Media “Expert” Isn’t

1. They refer you to their profile on Friendster.  Where it lists as qualifications:  “Twitter is hot.  I’m a twerp.  Coincidence?  I think not.”
2. Their Twitter profile:  Following 12,782, Followers 6, Tweets 2
3. Their Facebook vanity profile:  http://www.facebook.com/HowDoYouUseThisAnyhow?
4. “LinkedIn is, like, for people with jobs.”
5. They’re under 26.  (Revenge for http://www.valleyprblog.com/social-media/a-rant-why-older-generations-shouldnt-blog/)
6. They’re over 50.  (Other than me, of course.)
7. Their resume’ includes any of these campaigns.  Worse, their resume’ includes all of these campaigns:  http://blog.thoughtpick.com/2009/06/10-social-media-campaigns-that-failed-avoid-their-mistakes.html
8. They utter the phrase “but you have to be a part of the conversation” as the answer to every question.   In fact, be wary if they use that as the answer to any question.
9. “Metrics, shmetrics.  We don’t need no stinking measurement.”
10. They’re unfamiliar with YouTube but they’ve Dugg YouPorn.  Multiple times.  Per hour.

Google’s OS Announcement: Nailed It!!!

It’s nice as an analyst when you make a significant call well ahead of the market that turns out to be spot-on.  I had one of those with my report in February of 2008 entitled “Twitter:  The Most Important Platform You’ve Never Heard Of.”  As you might imagine, a year and a half ago the report generated some amount of scorn, even internally.  Looks pretty good now, eh?  I took great joy when the CEO of my former company actually signed up for his own Twitter account.

Well, nailed another one.    Google announced, via blog post, the Chrome operating system yesterday.  In a research note dated September 6, 2008, at the introduction of the Chrome browser, here’s the beginning of what I had to say.  (AMR clients can read the entire research note here.)

“Google introduced a “product” named Chrome this week.  It is wrong to think of Chrome as a browser.  It is really Google’s omni-client strategy, appearing here as a desktop rich internet application platform (RIAP), to complement Android, Google’s mobile version of the platform.  This is a disruptive maneuver, presaging a serious Google effort to control more of the desktop environment and to strengthen and extend its position in the mobile and online/cloud environment.  Enterprise ISVs and IT organizations have an intriguing platform to evaluate.  In the short-term, however, shortcomings in the browser itself will limit Chrome’s impact.

 There are really three ways to look at Google Chrome, in increasing order of interest:

1. As a browser.
2. As a platform for Google Apps.
3. As Google’s omni-client platform strategy and a replacement for the Windows environment for desktop and mobile applications.”

Now, after the self-congratulatory blather, a few thoughts:

• The market is ready for a fundamental rethink of the notion of an operating system, designed around web-enablement.
• I’m not a big fan of “light” operating systems.  There are reasons why the client operating system should be a rich environment for application developers and users.  That said, designing it from the ground up to be web-aware is the right design criterion.
• Microsoft’s Windows 7 is the latest, and last, iteration of the client-centric operating system.  You can expect Microsoft to talk a lot about Azure in response to this.  How much more than talk they do is still an open question.  Their near-term revenue opportunity is Windows 7 and thus their considerable focus and marketing effort will be on Windows 7.  This gives Google considerable opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership and to deposition Microsoft’s cloud efforts.

The cloud era has officially begun.

The Twitter Generation: Coping with Information Overload

People look at Twitter, Facebook and other social media and often observe “oh great, just what I need.  More distractions.”  Perhaps now more than ever, my learnings of over 20 years as an analyst are broadly useful.  As an analyst, I’ve been trained to look at the world through the lens of input, process and output.  You have to allocate your time among those three and also make sure that each is managed, typically in different fashions.

Input

In the good old days of “information is power,” we had a finite number of inputs, often giving us an incomplete picture of the situation.  Today, we still may have holes in the input but the bigger issue now is information overload, too much input.  Still, we must do two things.  First, make sure that among that choices of inputs that we have that we choose a balanced set of inputs to give the broadest possible picture.  Too many people on Twitter, for instance, follow people “just like them,” giving an echo chamber kind of effect.  Their thinking gets ratified because the only inputs they choose to select are those that confirm their position.  Bad situation in which to find yourself.  At the same time, it’s all too easy to conclude that because of the volume of inputs you’re receiving that you somehow must be seeing everything you need to see.  False.  It’s every bit as critical in this “too much information” world to identify the underlaps in your information flow as if you were in a “too little information” world.  So many post-disaster analyses demonstrate that the information to realize we were making a mistake existed, just that it hadn’t crossed the relevant person’s radar screen.  The old saying still applies:  “if you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know enough.”

Process

In the “good old days,” we’d actually spend time thinking about or debating things.  In today’s world, process consists of clicking “like” on Facebook or retweeting on Twitter.  Perhaps with the volume of data today, it’s easier to identify trends but then again, extrapolating straight line conditions was never a terribly valuable skill to possess.  In a data-rich world, every bit as much as in a data-poor one, identifying the non-intuitive conclusions is the real value contribution.  I suppose there’s a place in the world for the Scobles and Kawasakis – the broadcast media of social networks – but the real value I’ve found always comes from those who apply selection, judgment and insight to the data, not merely rebroadcast it.  This is one of the values of the Internet OldTimers Foundation network to me; my OT time is usually thought-provoking and insight-focused.  There is very little of the “see this, pass it on” and much more of the “so what does this really mean?”  And perhaps the biggest insight I’ve gathered over the years from focusing on process is to look for proof you’re wrong.  If you look for proof you’re right, you’ll almost always find it…even when everyone else long ago concluded you were wrong.  If on the other hand, you give your search for your errors a true and honest effort, only in the absence of information negating your position might you begin to feel comfortable in your correctness…subject of course to a full range of inputs as outlined above.  This search for wrongness makes me sometimes a difficult person to work (or live) with – I’m the one who, when everyone else is rushing to agree, stops to see what we’re missing.  On the other hand, that makes me a great consultant; I’ll see what those of you too close to the matter (whose inputs are biased in one direction) might miss.

Output

At the end of the day, what you do with your inputs and processes is what really matters.  Mental masturbation is a wonderful game in which to participate but if your inputs and processes don’t lead to substantive behavioral changes, it wasn’t necessarily time well spent.  Don’t spend a lot of time in maintenance of the status quo.  Instead, look for those outputs that call for a behavioral change.  That’s where you get the real return on your investments of time above.

It’s real easy to lose track and get caught up in one of the above steps – the information junkie, the debater or the presenter.  I find great personal value in being aware of these processes and biases and actively managing them.

Advertising 2.0 and Facebook’s Valuation

The news today that Facebook has accepted $200 million from a Russian investment group, valuing the company at $10 billion, has revived the question of what exactly is Facebook worth.  Much of that discussion has focused around the ability, or lack thereof, of Facebook and other social networks to sell advertising and delivering advertising results.  I think this discussion totally misses the point.  The question isn’t how advertising will work on Facebook but rather how Facebook and social networks change advertising.

I’m loathe to introduce yet another 2.0 moniker but if ever an industry needed to be 2.0-ized, it’s advertising.  Almost a century ago, retailer John Wannamaker is purported to have said “half of all advertising works, I just don’t know which half.”  (This quote is often attributed to PR maven David Ogilvy but my quick persual of the Googlesphere seems to show Wannamaker significantly predating Ogilvy.)  Today, that 50% goal may even be wildly optimistic.  On the Internet, clickthrough rates have fallen precipitiously as clutter has replaced clarity.

I think we’re on the verge of a major rethink of the fundamental premises of advertising.  We have long understood that in addition to challenges in measurement (what works), we also have had challenges in credibility.  Consumers typically rate advertising as their least credible information channel.  However, sellers continued to invest in advertising because they could compensate for the lack of credibility through broad distribution and high impact creative.

Today, however, that equation has been shattered.  Word of mouth/peers have consistently been rated the most credible sources of information but, as the name implied, the distribution model was limited.  Those of you old enough may remember the Clairol ad that showed 2 people who told 2 people such that by the end of the commercial, there were 64 faces on screen.  Today, 1,000 people tell 1,000 people and very quickly the message has reached millions of people.  Credibility now has a channel for mass distribution.  If you don’t think that has profound implications for how we “advertise,” you’re just not paying attention.

The mass distribution of credible information sources will transform advertising.  In fact, early indications show that the impact may even be larger in that people are finding “people like them” who they don’t know are as credible as the people they do know.  In other words, if I’m, say, a CIO, I’ll find the opinions of other CIOs whom I’ve never met every bit as credible as the ones I know.  Maybe more so, in that I’m less willing to denigrate the opinions of people I don’t know whereas the people I know…well, I know their shortcomings and inadequacies.

While no one has cracked the code on this yet, I think there are a few things one can point to:

• Facebooks’s Connect and other similar technologies allow people to bring their social map as they traverse the Internet.  If you haven’t thought yet about how you might incorporate the social map into the way you deal with customers and prospects, call me.  This is going to be huge and the opportunities are immediate.
• I’m a big fan of Loomia’s SeenThis Facebook application.  While a Facebook application, I actually “use” it elsewhere.  In particular, on the Wall Street Journal, you’re probably familiar with the boxes that show what stories other Journal readers have read.  This “most read” designation is rarely interesting to me and generally reflects the editorial judgment of the WSJ editors and what stories they promote.  However, I see an additional box, showing me what stories my Facebook friends and groups have read.  This is a much more interesting designation to me and generally I end up clicking through on most or all of those articles as the “recommendation” from my peer group is much more interesting and relevant to me than the recommendations of the general WSJ readership or editorial board.

Some other time I’ll talk about the overlay of location with social, which is going to further transform advertising.  However, for the sake of today’s discussion, I think social networks are going to transform the way companies communicate with consumers and potential consumers in profoundly interesting ways.  As such, questions of Facebook’s valuation are at best mildly amusing to me.  If Facebook indeed is in the vanguard of transforming the way companies reach consumers, $10 billion will some day seem laughably small.  And it’s not a question of whether this will happen.  It’s only a question of when, how and who.  And as for when, it’s already happening.  Consumers are voting with their clicks that social networks matter.  It’s up to the advertising industry to remove its collective head from its collective, um, sandbox and enable and exploit this transformation.

Saving Newspapers? Amazon Introduces a New Kindle

Let’s get this straight right away.  The new Amazon Kindle DX has nothing to do with solving the root causes of the problems of newspapers.   The top 5 reasons the Kindle is not the solution:

1. At a price of $489, this is a niche subset of what remains a niche category.
2. Newspaper subscriptions are only available in areas where the paper editions are not available.  Yes, this is clearly early and is likely to change but that tells you what the papers are thinking about things now.
3. The existing Kindle (cheaper and more broadly available) already offers subscriptions to 37 newspapers at $10/month.  Form factor is not the only reason keeping these versions from being a success.
4. Amazon keeps 70% of the revenue from newspaper subscriptions.  It takes a LOT of subscribers at $3/month to make money.
5. Articles on the Kindle do not display ads.  This too will/must change.

Let me note that the DX may be a revolutionary product for its other market, college textbookss.  I’m not going to cover that here.

I think all the discussion on the future of newspapers has missed a critical point.  Much of the discussion has focused on the broad availability of content from multiple sources and also mention the growth of “citizen journalism,” be it blogs or Twitter.  So what does this discussion miss?  There are two related issues which combine to fundamentally attack the business model, not the product or content.

First, how do people get their news today?  While some of us go directly to newspaper sites on the web or get their electronic summaries in our inbox, news is more commonly found via web portals (e.g., MyYahoo or iGoogle) or via a Google web/news search.   When this happens, the first monetization opportunity comes not to the news source but to the aggregator.  Google and Yahoo have seized the upstream revenue opportunity and have diffused the downstream opportunity by making the “choice” of news source less relevant.  You go not to the source you favor but rather the one that appears highest in the search rankings.  You may even never make it to one of the downstream sources, instead going to your portal’s newswire feed from a source like AP or Reuters.  Ultimately, a considerable portion of the audience never makes it to the newspaper site.  Newspapers, Google is not your friend.

At the same time, the core monetization engine of newspapers — advertising, not subscriptions — is under assault from many angles.  When the obituary of newspapers as we know them is written, the first major illness should be listed as Craigslist-itis.  Category after category of listings has moved on to the web where things are cheaper, more timely and more effective.  And if you think the bad news is over, you’re mistaken.  Another staple of newspapers — legal notices — will find its way to the web sooner or later, probably sooner.  Already some heavily regulated marketplaces (e.g., drug advertising) can use web notices in lieu of print lineage.  It’s only a matter of time before governments realize that web listings, while not universal, are every bit as “available” as print notices and are more “accessible”.  In other words, the affected audiences are more likely to find this information on the web than they are in the newspaper.

Are newspapers doomed?  In their current state, yes.  Period.  How would I reinvent the industry?  Here are a few thoughts:

• Local is not your salvation.  Niche audiences are very hard to monetize.
• Digital paper is important.  When the price point of a newspaper-like device falls under $100, you’ve got a market.
• Look at what’s going on in the netbook space.  Not so much from the point of view of a cheap device — that’s obvious — but rather the emerging discussions with cellular carriers where, much as is the case with today’s cell phones, the carriers will subsidize the price of the device to drive network usage.  I’m not sure what Amazon’s revenue relationship is with Sprint, the network carrier for the Kindle, but there’s clearly money there to be divvied up.
• Two models:  Hulu and The Week.  What these both have in common is aggregation.  Curiously, the best vision in this regard, The Week, is a weekly print publication.  I find it a compelling read as it looks at the top news of the week from the perspective of multiple newspapers.  A single story might give me regional US slants, a European snippet or two and something from an Arabic perspective.  What makes these two sources compelling is their aggregated nature.  From a consumer’s perspective, it’s a single destination where I’m likely to find what I want.  From an advertiser’s perspective, it’s an aggregated audience.  The bigger the audience, clearly the better the monetization opportunity.  If a site can achieve a critical mass (which I’ll leave undefined for the purposes of this discussion), it can broaden its advertising base and achieve some independence from Google or the advertising networks.  Newspapers have largely not done that.  Aggregation may be their only salvation.
• eBay partnership.  eBay has its own challenges.  At some level, Craigslist has delivered an important localization the eBay hasn’t.  When the shipping price of a product is greater than the price of the product, you’ve got a market inefficiency.  By making things local, Craigslist has become the first destination for many products that otherwise would have ended up on eBay.  I know I said “local is not your salvation.”  However, it’s a start to monetization.  Leverage the eBay opportunity and combine it with the aggregated opportunity I talk about into a fundamental redefinition of your revenue model.  Much as bricks-and-mortar retailers have one-upped dedicated web retailers by offering physical pick up and return, so to can newspapers combine the benefits of local with the benefits of global.

 The newspaper is dead.  Long live the newspaper.  Digital paper, aggregation and savvy partnerships.  These three can redefine the newspaper.

The Twitterization of Facebook: Facebook’s Flaw

Facebook is expected to announce today that it is opening up its news feed to third party application developers.  Twitter has benefitted for some time from the unfettered access of application developers to the Tweatstream, and with this move Facebook continues the move to embrace more Twitter-like functionality that began with the recent interface redesign that made status updates much more prominent.

On the one hand, this is the right move for Facebook to make and will only serve to increase the value users derive from the Facebook platform.  I have a folder of over 40 Twitter applications that enhance the core value of the platform.  Without these third party applications, Twitter’s value would be severely compromised and its growth stunted.  However, in this rush to Twitterization, I believe Facebook has fundamentally failed to appreciate the messaging taxonomy in which it operates.  In so doing, they will compromise their value to users, perhaps the first real chink in Facebook’s inexorable growth.  (Yes, there has been the occasional terms of condition firestorm but that was ultimately much ado about nothing, as evidenced by the small voter turnout in the recent terms of condition affair.)

So where’s the confusion?  While many people use third party tools to automatically post their Twitter posts directly to their Facebook status, I think the two play fundamentally different roles.  I use my Facebook status to reflect big picture events or thoughts.  As such, I expect the status to remain relatively static, at least as compared with the Twitter feed.    I may only change my Facebook status a few times a day and on occasion, I leave it the same for several days at a time.  By contrast, my Twitter feed may include multiple updates a minute, reflecting minute changes in what I’m doing, what I’m thinking or what I’m looking for.  The Facebook status is for seeing the forest through the trees; the Twitter feed is the very root system of that forest and those trees.

By confusing those two, Facebook risks devaluing the status feed, increasingly its triviality and decreasing my likelihood of perusing it.  I rarely browse the Twitter feed any more, instead relying on a variety of search and filter mechanisms to make sense of the vast stream from the almost 2,000 people I now follow.  By contrast, even with over 1,000 friends on Facebook, I regularly browse the status updates because their high level information is sufficiently valuable for me to devote that level of effort and attention.

For Facebook to retain its level of value to and attention from me — critical if it hopes to increasingly monetize the platform through advertising — it’s essential that they understand the messaging taxonomy in which they play.  At the lowest level, there’s Twitter.  High up on the hierarchy is the Facebook status update.  In between are some of the other elements of the Facebook feed (posts, events, etc.).  Unless Facebook makes steps to embrace this taxonomy, it is at risk of decreasing its user value, something it can ill afford to do.

So the expected announcement today of the opening of the platform to third party developers is a great thing, but if Facebook fails to embrace the messaging taxonomy outlined above, in a few years we may well view today’s announcement as the day Facebook “jumped the shark.”  To date, Facebook has responded quickly and appropriately to major platform gaffes (e.g., Beacon).  This, however, is a much more subtle and insidious “gaffe.”  Let’s see how quickly Facebook reacts…or whether this is a huge and deleterious mistake.

Qualcomm and Broadcom

First of all, sorry for the hiatus.  This unemployment and rehab thing is exhausting, physically and emotionally.  It’s time to get back into the saddle.  And what better day than today?

Qualcomm and Broadcom announced a settlement of their longstanding and broad-based legal battles.  For many of you, these two are perhaps familiar names at best, more likely evoking questions of “what is it exactly they do?”  However, when you realize that they’re effectively the Intel and AMD of the mobility space, it gives their settlement a new perspective.  Make no mistake about it, both have significant ambitions in an increasingly mobile computing platform, and world.

The two have spent considerable energies, monies and court time in fighting each other.  The net result of all this fighting was ultimately some degree of customer uncertainty.  Not customers as in end-users, who are largely unaware of the role these two play, but instead in the minds of handset and other device manufacturers who were often caught up in this maelstrom.  Now that this longstanding battle is behind them, Qualcomm and Broadcom can now devote increasing focus and attention to emerging market opportunities, which are considerable.

Many will focus on this as a Broadcom “win,” and any settlement where you get paid almost a billion dollars is pretty much a win, but I believe Qualcomm is really the big winner here.  Yes, a billion’s a lot of money but Qualcomm’s licensing business model is really a license to print money.  They can afford it.  Heck, the savings in litigation expenses alone is probably almost a wash.  While this doesn’t mean Qualcomm’s legal staff is now sitting around like the Maytag repairman, there’s a real savings here.  More importantly, Qualcomm management can now focus on market opportunities instead of legal strategies.  That can only sharpen their market focus.  Lastly, and most importantly, Qualcomm is now largely unencumbered in its efforts to pursue new opportunities, drive new licensing opportunities and pursue new relationships.  Qualcomm’s toxicity has largely been removed and real barriers to growth have been shed.

That’s an outcome well worth the billion dollars they’ll pay.

Where Motorola Blew It

I’ve also started guest blogging at BusinessWeek.com and here’s my first posting there.  It even made it to the home page of the web site there. 

Dear Steve: An Open Letter to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer

Dear Steve:

I’ve known you for a little over 21 years now and I’ve only felt strongly enough to comment to you strongly and vocally three timesin those 21 years, our initial meeting regarding LAN Manager, with regards to the IBM OS/2 “divorce” and, more recently, about .Net and your Internet strategy positioning.  This is the fourth, and perhaps most urgent, time.  Those other three were done during a period of Microsoft ascendancy and domination.  (I know you can’t say that word in front of the DOJ, but between us friends…)  While a $4 billion profit in your most recent quarter isn’t shabby, we both know this is an incredibly sensitive time in the company’s, and the technology market’s, history.

Everyone’s asking “what’s up with Yahoo” and asking, again, what you should do about that.  You’ve given me a good year’s worth of newspaper exposure in the ebb-and-flow of the whole thing but it’s time not only to get it done, it’s time to take a more expansive vision of what Microsoft needs to do.  Much as it’s an important war to win, search advertising is the old battle.  There are newer battles emerging and if you continue to lag in those as you have in search, your very relevance will be called into question.

So, what do I think you need to do?

1. Buy Yahoo.  Not just search but the whole thing.  There are so many assets there that you will need to leverage that you’d be crazy not to take the whole thing.  It’s not just search advertising.  It’s display.  It’s mobile.  It’s cloud.  It’s eyeballs.  Yahoo has a lot of assets beyond search, which you need.
2. Focus on monetizing video.  Even while you still struggle with Zune, you’re once again fighting the last battle.  Surely you remember the first video ever played on MTV.   It was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”  Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Video is where the excitement is today (even while that’s not where the big money is…yet).  The big studios are making progress here, Google is still feeling its way and Apple scares the studios.  Hurry up on this one.
3. An equity investment in Facebook does not a social media strategy make.  I fervently believe that social networks will emerge some day (a few years away yet) as a dominant “advertising” platform.  We trust the opinions of our friends and people like us more than we do brands and companies.  Somewhere we’re going to figure out how to use social media to supplant “traditional” forms of advertising (and I include search advertising as traditional in this context).  I’d tell you how I think that’s going to play out, but that one’s worth of a consulting engagement, not a blog post.  I spent a good portion of the last year helping companies sort through their “Facebook for the enterprise” options.  Why haven’t you made SharePoint the no-brainer solution?  Instead, you’ve left it to a slew of smaller vendors…and increasingly Google.  Social networking is both an infrastructure play and a “user interface” play.  You’re behind in both.
4. If you’re waiting for the inflection point at which time cloud computing becomes a compelling play, the economy has pushed us to that point.  Don’t be so totally large enterprise-focused that you miss the fundamental change that’s already taking place in small-and-medium-sized businesses.  Cloud computing economics are compelling.  Yes, yes, I understand your software-plus-services play, and even embrace it but if you start from a Windows+Office mindset rather than a minimalist cloud infrastructure basis, you risk missing focusing on what the market really wants in the longer term.  Yes, Azure was a good start.  Developers are important and letting them leverage investments will be huge.  But you risk losing relevance when you focus so much already on Windows 7 and let the Office group persist with their embarrassing (non-)approach to cloud computing.  You talked in your earnings announcement about how global economic markets are resetting.  That reset, with lower expectations, is a seminal moment for the adoption of cloud computing.  It’s going to come even faster than you’re now thinking.  This one of all you can’t afford to lose.
5. Lastly, mobility.  This one has to frustrate you.  You had the right idea.  You were early to market.  And what did that earn you?  The right to see Apple and then Google strong-arm the carriers in a way they couldn’t have without your “failure.”  But now that they’ve done so, what are you going to do about it?  I’ve been a Windows Mobile user on phones and PDAs for a long time now and I look with envy at the Apple application marketplace.  Have you tried installing apps on one of your phones ever?  If Steve Jobs were Microsoft CEO, he’d fire the entire team responsible for the Windows Mobile application installation procedure.  Visibly and painfully.  Simply, you need to fix the user experience, galvanize the application developer community, stand up to the carriers and get ahead of the curve, with mobile video and location-based services the two areas I’d focus on.  Maybe go buy Qualcomm while you’re buying things.

I know this is a lot, in a bad economic climate.  However, to fail at any of these puts Microsoft’s future relevance at risk.  To fail at all of them, and a candid assessment would probably say that’s what’s going on…well, that should be a terrifying thought to you.

Good luck.

Jonathan

Who is the Technology Bellwether?

On my news analysis blog, I posited that IBM’s strong earnings announcement this week cements the fact that IBM is no longer the technology bellwether.  On Twitter, someone asked me “if not IBM, then who is the bellwether?”  Interesting question.  To be the bellwether, I think you have to have exposure to a wide range of solutions — consumer vs. enterprise, computing vs. consumer electronics, etc.  These days, almost all of the largest companies have significant platform bets, narrow portfolios or are otherwise unbalanced when it comes to assessing the overall health of the total ecosystem.

I’d rule out Apple,Microsoft and Intelfor just those reasons.  Apple is obviously heavily consumer-focused and is at this point as much or more of a consumer electronics company than it is a “computing” company.  Microsoft has such an unusual set of arrangements, most notably its OEM arrangements with hardware manufacturers, that sometimes make its results an anomaly.  Intel is still so heavily wedded to the PC/Windows world that its results may hide the news of strength in other platforms.

If I had to pick a bellwether, I’m tempted to make the easy choice and say HP.  They have a reasonable mix of all of the above elements and are perhaps most representative of the overall health of the industry.  It’s also significant to note that they’re the largest computer company.  (I’ll bet most people, if asked, would still bet it’s IBM, but HP passed them a few years ago.)  However, let me also posit that a company like SanDisk is a good indicator.  Their storage solutions play across a wide range of devices and sectors.  Yes, they’re underweighted in the enterprise segment but that’s likely to change and, in fact, share gains they have in the enterprise would be a good indicator of a rebound in that sector because of the relative price premium you have to pay for these types of storage solutions in enterprise class.

So those are my two nominations:  HP and SanDisk.  Others?