Short cuts

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT in our special credit-crunch issue.

Published: 01/11/2008 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

VFM CEOs

Executive pay is a hot potato in these straitened, credit-crunch times. Ever keen to contribute to the debate (OK, jump on the bandwagon) Short Cuts presents its cut-out-and-keep Guide to Value For Money CEOs.

Premium range

Photo: Eddie Awad

Our most expensive CEO by quite a distance is Oracle’s Larry Ellison who pocketed a whopping $83 million in Oracle’s last fiscal year, prompting shareholders to propose a ‘say on pay’ motion at this year’s AGM in the hope of curbing the Big Man’s future wages (it failed, but got 29 per cent support). We can see their point, but let’s face it, no-one except Larry really understands how on earth Oracle has kept on making so much money for so long, and it might not be in shareholder’s interests to rattle the Magician’s cage. Wad rating: $ $ $ $ $ Value for money: aaa Verdict: Does anyone really believe Oracle would be that big without Larry fronting it?

Mid-market range

Compared to Ellison, fun-loving Sun Microsystems’ CEO Jonathan Schwartz is cheap as chips at a mere $11 million. However that represents a 44 per cent increase in a year when fourth-quarter sales were 73 per cent down, which hasn’t gone down all that well with employees or shareholders, especially the 1,500 Sun workers facing a 100 per cent drop in their salaries after the company’s latest round of cost-cutting redundancies. Spending $53,000 on a chauffeur didn’t help either. Wad rating: $ $ $ Value for money: a Verdict: Blog less, cycle more and do something about IBM’s lead in the server market – and we don’t mean giving away more servers.

Back to basics range

For sheer no-frills value, no-one comes close to our favourite bargain-basement CEO, Microsoft’s Steve ‘Mad Dog’ Ballmer. He pocketed just $1.3 million last year (barely enough to keep his Hummer refuelled), despite Microsoft’s profits going up by 26 per cent to a staggering $17.7 billion. Of course Steve doesn’t actually need the money, since his personal fortune is estimated at $15 billion. It’s the principle that counts though – and anyway, Larry’s is $25 billion. Wad rating: $ Value for money: aaaaa Verdict: Worth every cent, for the videos alone.

Marriages made in...

Nope - it still doesn't seem right somehow.

The meltdown of the world financial order has forced some unlikely partners together (think Lloyds/HBOS, Iceland/Russia, Brown/Mandleson) but even so we can’t help seeing HP’s takeover of EDS as something of a mismatch. Perhaps we’re just sentimental, but here at Short Cuts ‘Hewlett-Packard’ still means Californian sunshine, the HP3000 mini and life-saving heart monitors, while EDS has, well, slightly darker associations, including Texan tycoon/politician Ross Perot, a ban on staff having beards (to be fair, it applied to both sexes) and, more recently, an unencrypted hard drive with 100,000 soldiers’ personal details going AWOL. HP has, of course, lost some of its own innocence (and its medical instruments division) over the years, but nevertheless it remains to be seen how well the free(-ish) thinkers at Palo Alto will cope with absorbing EDS’s hyper-corporate, button-down culture. If they pull it off we could see even more odd-couple mergers as others follow suit. Here’s Short Cuts’ guide to the ones to watch out for: Free Software Foundation buys Microsoft. “We’re confident they’ll come round to our way of thinking,” say FSF Board. Wikipedia buys CIA. “Most of our content comes from them anyway,” says Wiki spokesperson, “so it makes sense to bring them in-house.” Friends of the Earth buys the Republican Party. “We’ve got some policy harmonisation to do, but basically they’re a great fit.” says FoE spokesman.

PHP Class of the Month

When times are hard every line of code has to earn its keep. Accordingly this issue’s dip into the urn of usefulness that is the PHP class library is a class that actually borders on being useful. Automatic Keyword Generator, by Ver Pangonilo of the Philippines, reads a block of text and generates lists of key words and phrases, thus taking all the hard thinking – and expensive person-hours - out of writing meta tags. It’s easy to implement – just point it at the text and ask it for the keywords. We were slightly worried when the author’s sample text, a piece about RFID tags, didn’t return ‘RFID’ as a keyword, but reducing the $params[‘min_word_length’] value fixed that. The selection algorithm is, however, basic, simply choosing any word or phrase which occurs more than a specified number of times. You can either set it low and get a lot of less-than-key results, or set it high and, for example, miss ‘EDS’ and “Hewlett-Packard” out of the list for our ‘Marriages made in…’ story, which rather defeats the point. Still, it’s free and you’ve got to start somewhere. Sadly no applications are registered as using the class, but you can find one at www.paulspages.co.uk/hardcopy.

Classic Cinema Corner

A scene from the great days of computing

With belts tightening we naturally turn to cost-effective home entertainment, and why rent DVDs when there’s plenty of great free entertainment online? Short Cuts’ current favourite is ‘The Truth About Programmers’, a seven-minute epic made in the classic silent movie format (so also handy for watching in the office – assuming you still have one). The movie tells the story of how the staff at garage-based Two Guys Who Write Software Inc cope with the punishing deadlines imposed on them when they sign a contract to develop ‘Turbo Extended Standard Open Windows Look’ in return for a bazillion dollars (or ‘Half a Larry’, as it’s known in the trade). There are some moving performances (and a couple of stationary ones too) but the real star is the 1980s hardware, including a tiny Mac and a monstrous PC/XT clone which must have sported all of 640K memory (or perhaps 1.5Mb with an EMS card). Meanwhile the finished software is handed over on a 5.25-inch floppy, which had us in tearful nostalgia for the days when compilers produced Real Code and Microsoft shares were rising faster than a Shuttle off the launch pad. Book a back-row seat at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re2Oh4rxN6w.