Tom Barclay helps John Juliano in a year-end recollection of changing times
The woman escorted Tom and me to our table at an expense account steakhouse in Redmond Washington. “John was my mentor,” said Tom told her. “But we were only 12 at the time,” I added, the woman laughing politely at the tired old joke.
As the last column of the year, it’s a time for reflection. In North America, as a vendor, this was the year that wasn’t. Very few sales were announced in the press, yet another vendor disappeared and a vendor entering the North American marketplace began to staff down.
Tom Barclay and I hadn’t spoken in 15 years, when he was looking for a large amount of data to demonstrate that a Microsoft SQL Server could in fact manage a terabyte. He explained it’s easy to get it a terabyte of data, and it’s easy to get interesting data, but it’s very difficult to get an entire terabyte of interesting data, or so it was in the late 1990s. He had recently returned from Russia where Microsoft had licensed the rights to Russian satellite data.
At the steakhouse, the conversation wandered briefly to big data. ‘‘Everyone’s talking about big data, but do you know how many petabytes of mapping data Microsoft manages? To manage that data we have,’’ and he paused for a moment, and named an impossibly large number of cores. ‘‘When we run the vehicles, and we’ve run them all over Europe and North America.’’
At the event to honour Tom’s 20 years at Microsoft, the MC asked everyone who was in grade school 20 years ago to come down to the stage… and 85 people joined him on stage. A show of hands – how many people were not yet in grade school 20 years ago? – and 15 hands went up. How many here were not born 20 years ago? One hand went up.
When we were in our 20s, two of our group were under 20. One ended up a Microsoft distinguished engineer, and the other is Bob Pasker. I’ll let you look him up in Bing. The average age our New York office with over 200 people was 24. The parallels between then and now are striking.
And as Tom reflected on all of the people standing on the stage with him, he commented to me, “and you know, I’d already done 20 years at Digital/HP before I joined Microsoft.”
“I didn’t go after this career, I didn’t have a plan. As interesting things came up, I followed them,” he commented. “When I started this, and we had it working, I met with Larry Page (of Google), and you know where he took it. When the US military decided this was something they needed to do, I ended up briefing them on how we do it.”
The subtext of our dinner was that Tom had planned to stop working this past January, as had I; like me, he received an offer to keep working that was difficult to refuse.
We discussed how our careers have taken such divergent paths. He’s been a corporate man who changed corporations once in his entire career, risen in prominence in one of the largest corporations in the world. But within the context of Microsoft, Tom saw his career as not following the tried-and-true path. “I could’ve just stayed in the Death Star across the street. The kids who joined when I came here 20 years ago have followed that path and now they’re vice presidents sitting at a desk.’’
For Tom, it was time to go. We discussed how we’d seen all of this before, it was time for someone younger and newer to take over the same projects that we’ve seen before with a different name.
Throughout all of this, what interested me was what was the effect that our careers and our industry had on our customers.
Both our careers have been as vendors, generally selling infrastructure that some one else will use.
Like Tom, I followed what was interesting and found myself in newspapers, where the infrastructure that I have worked to build has been used to inform our populace, and played an important part in our democracy.
In Seattle, where I spent most of my time, the city is bursting with young people starting their careers working for the high profile vendors headquartered here: Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, Google.
Our industry in North America isn’t full of young people. Senior people aren’t saying, ‘‘I’ve seen this all before.’’ Younger blood is entering our industry because the more senior people are leaving, not having figured out the solution to our industry problems.
The new management, individuals in their 40s, know our industry in turmoil and feel they know how to chart the waters, and the sensible among them are doing quite well. But there isn’t joy here yet.
I attended a Mike Blinder webinar presented by the Inland Press Association recently. He and his team go on ‘four-legged’ sales calls with a newspaper successfully creating a bump in sales. Aside from the indisputable charisma of his personnel, they develop goods and services packages that will sell.
Listening, I was reminded of the famous Rupert Murdoch quote regarding the role of the news in relation to the ads the news surrounds.
More and more newspapers I deal with are taking on the role of an agency, booking ads across medias, their own and others’. Through the eyes of the webinar a seemingly very successful approach has streamlined the newspapers’ role further. Target SMBs, truly become their marketing department: sell or resell services to market that SMB.
The services include building websites for these companies, and social media management (SMM): this means their Facebook page, their tweets, their website and everything else.
Sell them space on the newspaper’s Facebook page as part of a larger package. Interestingly, those newspapers that denoted the advertisers’ posting as sponsored received fewer likes for those sponsored postings than those that did not mark the posting as sponsored (and received more complaints.)
But above all, there was the feeling that these newspapers had come upon something they could sell which was truly useful, truly current and that made their customers objectively more successful.
In the North American newspaper industry, we haven’t seen it all before. In fact we still haven’t figured it out. Newer, younger players continue to take over, first at the smaller companies and now at the major players, such as Jack Griffin at Tribune in Chicago.
The challenge is still here and as yet unmet. The old role that newspapers played is fast disappearing. The successful are developing new roles for themselves. The fanciful deals put together, which had everyone scratching their heads wondering how they were going to make money, have disappeared as those deals failed to make money.
Look around. The flailing has stopped. The moves are conservative, make sense and are happening quietly. The show people have left. As we finish this year, the quiet work of building success will continue into the next. nngx
• Newspaper systems industry veteran John Juliano writes regularly for GXpress Magazine. He is North American vice president of business development at Miles 33. Contact him at john@jjcs.com
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