I came across this watch in the Swiss (Air) flight magazine. I am using Swiss again more after the recent easyJet disaster. This watch shows the time in binary format using LEDs and is not a very new idea at all. But I like the design and think it is a head turner. Next to two years of manufacturer’s warranty it comes with a hardened mineral glass and is water-resistant to 3atm (whatever that means). The ad says:

At the heart of every digital watch is a computer that uses the binary system. So why not cut out the middle man and communicate with this great little computer directly?

Of course it will take a little while to get used to and quite frankly it is not very practical at all, but looks cool and has your business counterparts on the other side of the table noticing it and asking you about it. I would call it the “tech business meeting ice breaker 1/0″. Pricing is 215 CHF on Swiss flights.

I have been treated like a piece of sh. today by easyJet at the Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport in Paris at terminal 3, and I think it is worth sharing the story with everybody also tempted to fly with this low-cost and lowest customer service airline.

I arrived at 16:43 on Friday at the check-in counter to get my boarding pass for a flight leaving at 17:25. That is 42 min prior to departure I thought and my watch is fully accurate. Not so with easyJet. They told me that the flight had been closed and that I could not get on board any more. All my attempts to tell them that this must be a mistake because on the BIG sign right above the counter it says “check in 40min prior to departure time” were without any results. In fact they looked away and ignored me, pretending I did not exist. I then walked to the easyJet info booth in the same hall and told them about it. She said I am right and I should go back to the check in number 30 she would call them.

So I walked back again and the lady there picked up the phone and was talking to her. The result was no different though, she said “the flight has been closed and you cannot get on board.” Another try with the info lady resulted in her saying that I had to take the next flight which is on Sunday; then she picked up the phone and pretended to be busy. I had had enough of this and while fuming decided to check out other flight opportunities. I am now sitting in the Swiss business lounge where I could sit after I told them the story with easyJet and they got me a return flight (coming back on June 27), more expensive of course but with a smile on their face and showing enough consideration to allow me to sit here with an Economy ticket.

This is in fact the second time in just a few weeks that I have had such problems with the check-in crew at easyJet in terminal 3 at CDG. The last time they refused to let me board because my passport had expired (my new one I had to give to the Chinese embassy for a visa at the time, but I had an old passport which I used). I told them that it is possible to travel for one more year with an expired passport, which I had checked with the police and the airline prior to my flight. I had to insist that they would call someone who had a clue and after insisting and not moving for about 15min finally they did, and were told that I was actually correct. Then she handed me the passport back without saying a word. I guess you get what you pay for with easyJet and they probably treat their own people no better than they treat customers. I was a customer but have decided not to use this airline any more and allocate a higher budget for our travels.

I used the high-speed train from Zurich to Paris (Gare de l’Est) this week for the first time. The journey was 4 1/2 hours from Zurich main train station to Paris Gare de l’Est (2pm-6:35pm). I took a first-class seat and got pretty much the last available seat since the train was totally booked out – or at least no other seats were available. Overall, the train ride is a nice alternative, even if it is still probably 2-3 hours more total travel time even if you calculate delays to/from the airport. But you can work in the train and power supplies are available as well, so you don’t need an extra laptop battery. Pricing is not very cheap, though. I paid 240 CHF, but I think it is cheaper if you book in advance.

I will fly back, though, as I want to arrive during day time, and also the trip back to Zurich is one hour longer, not sure why but that’s what the timetable showed.

After more than 10 years I am back again in China for a week-long business trip. Our customer reserved a hotel in the so-called French Concession area with a green garden even, which is quite unique here. The city has developed further out from the Bund area, and across the Huangpu river the new Pudong business district has emerged. The last time I was here there was one one tower (The Pearl Tower) but nothing else, not even the new airport. Very interesting was the new train station in the south west of the city. A round airport-like glass and steel construction was built with the train platforms below the building. You have to check in and x-ray your luggage like at the airport (no passport check though). A high speed train now connects Shanghai and Hangzhou in the south west and the 170km journey is done in about one hour. Of course the average transportation even in Shanghai is mostly not that high-tech yet…

The WSJ (subscription required) has a nice write up on the challenges that the German software company SAP faces in its globalization efforts.

Palo Alto

Walldorf

India

DIFFICULT UPGRADE
SAP’s Plan to Globalize
Hits Cultural Barriers

Software Giant’s Shift
Irks German Engineers;

U.S. Star Quits Effort
By PHRED DVORAK and LEILA ABBOUD
May 11, 2007; Page A1

Five years ago, Germany’s largest software company decided it had to become less German.

To get more global, SAP AG hired thousands of programmers in countries such as the U.S. and India. It assigned them to key projects that almost all had been handled from its home base in the small town of Walldorf, Germany. It adopted English for corporate meetings, even in headquarters. SAP recruited hundreds of foreign managers, and non-Germans made up half the company’s top ranks by last year, up from one-third in 2000. The newcomers sought to inject a faster pace and open SAP’s insular culture to more outside influences.

The resulting tensions show how the challenge of globalization goes far beyond navigating different languages and time zones. In Walldorf, longtime employees feared the company was changing too much, too fast. Veteran software developers protested the loss of autonomy and “Americanization” of the company. “We used to be kings here,” says Rainer Hüber, a developer who’s spent his entire 25-year career at SAP in Walldorf.
[Shai Agassi]

But in Silicon Valley, home to many of the newcomers as well as SAP’s biggest rivals, employees worried the company wasn’t changing enough. In March, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Shai Agassi, SAP’s head of product development and most visible agent of change, resigned, frustrated with the internal conflicts. “I became not only an agitator, but a lightning rod for a lot of things,” Mr. Agassi says.

SAP executives tried to assuage both groups — promising German veterans that they would still have jobs while reassuring the newcomers of the commitment to change. In globalizing, “you have to tackle the shift of power,” says SAP Chief Executive Henning Kagermann. “You cannot avoid it.”

SAP’s shift was more dramatic than most, as the company tried to remake itself to cope with the changes the Internet was forcing on its business. Few companies try to globalize from top to bottom. Many companies build extensive sales, service and manufacturing operations abroad, but most keep top posts and important areas like corporate strategy and product development close to headquarters. Microsoft Corp., for instance, continues to set software strategy from Redmond, Wash., even as it hires thousands of programmers in India.

SAP, by contrast, split up its pivotal product-development effort into eight centers around the globe, directed from California by Mr. Agassi. The company hoped to smooth some of the bumps with cultural sensitivity classes for employees and beer outings for new executives in Walldorf.

Its challenge was all the greater because in much of Europe unemployment rates are higher than in the U.S. and there is even more anxiety about losing jobs to emerging economies. So-called “national champions” often have been protected from competition and German companies have only slowly joined the globalization trend.

STRESS TEST

• The Situation: German software giant SAP has been globalizing its programming work force to bring in new ideas.

• The Problem: Conflicts persist between the old and new guard, while results in the marketplace are unclear.

• What’s Next: SAP still must grapple with the tensions, but says it will persevere.

It’s not clear that SAP’s internal revolution is helping its financial results. Software sales grew less than the company and analysts expected in 2006, as big customers slowed purchases and rivals stepped up competition. SAP shares have fallen about 16% in the past year on Germany’s Deutsche Börse and 19% on the New York Stock Exchange, while archrival Oracle Corp.’s have climbed about 32% on the Nasdaq. Revenue has grown, however, to €9.4 billion last year, or about $12.5 billion, from €7.3 billion (then about $8.1 billion) in 2001.

Founded in 1972 by five German IBM engineers, SAP grew into the world’s largest maker of software used by companies to run back-office systems such as accounting and procurement. SAP expanded its sales force globally in the 1980s and 1990s, but nearly all of its software was written in Walldorf, 50 miles south of Frankfurt.

Developers there took a year or more to hone programs, hashing out problems with colleagues at coffee bars that dotted the office hallways. The programs they wrote were complex and expensive, often requiring teams of experts months to install. They didn’t work well with software from other vendors, since SAP assumed it would be a one-stop software shop for customers.

That comfortable model was rocked in the late 1990s as businesses increasingly connected with each other and customers via the Internet, often transacting business with people who didn’t use SAP software. Instead of buying complicated, expensive suites of software once every five years, companies often turned to Web-based software sold by monthly subscription — by SAP’s rivals and upstart Internet firms.

Mr. Kagermann, a former physics professor known for his careful, studious approach to management, was skeptical of the Internet business model. He and his co-CEO at the time, Hasso Plattner, moved cautiously. They experimented with online programs, created subsidiaries specializing in Internet business, and bought smaller companies. One 2001 acquisition brought in an Israeli-based company headed by the brash Mr. Agassi, who had founded four companies by age 24.

Mr. Plattner, one of SAP’s founders, was known as a technological visionary with a fiery temperament. He once mooned the crew of Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison’s yacht during a race. He took to Mr. Agassi, who argued back after Mr. Plattner blasted his software during their first meeting.

Mr. Plattner challenged Mr. Agassi with difficult management assignments, placing him in charge of other Web-focused units and hundreds of SAP staffers. Mr. Agassi recalls pitching Mr. Plattner scores of ideas, each one rejected. Mr. Plattner declined to comment for the article.

Toward the end of 2001, one of Mr. Agassi’s ideas caught Mr. Plattner’s attention. “It was the first time he didn’t say it was stupid; he actually put his glasses on,” laughs Mr. Agassi. Under Mr. Plattner’s direction, the idea became SAP NetWeaver, designed from the outset to work with the Internet and software from other vendors. It also could be updated more quickly than traditional SAP programs.
[Outside Influence]

Meanwhile, Messrs. Plattner and Kagermann had concluded that their cautious approach to the Internet had hurt SAP in the U.S. The software business was moving away from SAP’s complex applications to smaller, more flexible programs and they needed more innovation. Competition was heating up, too. In 2003, Oracle began a three-year, $20 billion acquisition spree that swallowed more than 20 software makers, including PeopleSoft Inc. and Siebel Systems Inc. In 2003, SAP revenue fell for the first time in the company’s history.

Mr. Kagermann decided SAP couldn’t respond quickly enough if it controlled everything from Walldorf. “The lesson learned for us was that being the fast follower is not enough,” he says. “We have to be in many places and to get signals earlier.”

Messrs. Plattner and Kagermann loosened Walldorf’s grip, bringing newcomers like Mr. Agassi further into management. In 2002, they promoted Mr. Agassi to the seven-member executive board, and merged the Internet subsidiaries he’d headed into SAP. The next year, they broke up SAP’s product-development teams, a move Mr. Kagermann calls the company’s “first big cultural shift.” They made Mr. Agassi head of technology development and officially put him in charge of NetWeaver, which was released in November 2003.

SAP hired thousands of programmers in India and China. By 2005, it had eight global software labs, with different areas of expertise. The number of software engineers in German labs doubled — but the proportion working elsewhere increased from a quarter of the total to 40% by 2006. Projects were carved up and sent to units around the world. Palo Alto handled the products’ look and feel; India specialized in analytical tools; Walldorf managed hard-core coding.

The moves caused uneasiness in Walldorf. Mr. Hüber, the veteran German developer, says he missed piloting projects from start to finish. Developers of traditional SAP programs, meanwhile, clashed with Mr. Agassi on how to tweak their software to accommodate NetWeaver. “They said, ‘You don’t tell us what to do — we tell you what to build,’ ” recalls Mr. Agassi.

Mr. Agassi complained to Mr. Plattner and asked not to work on projects involving SAP’s traditional software. Instead, Mr. Plattner promoted Mr. Agassi in 2005 to oversee the older programs as well. Mr. Agassi describes the shift as “punishment” and “a challenge.” The move effectively put a non-German in charge of SAP product strategy for the first time. It also gave Mr. Agassi responsibility for most of SAP’s 14,000 developers; 60% of them were still in Walldorf, where he had never been based.

Mr. Agassi hired hundreds of Silicon Valley techies from rivals, many into senior positions. He oversaw a 100-day plan to reorganize how products were developed — then pushed to carry it out in 50 days. He asked deputies to identify German managers who could threaten change. They came up with a list of 24 people to win over.

Mr. Agassi devised a number of projects, some of which led to real products, to show the engineers the new faster pace. In one project dubbed “Hercules,” Mr. Agassi gave a group of 10 developers 12 weeks to create 100 programs to analyze data, such as defects in car parts. At SAP’s normal pace, one such application would take several months.
[Henning Kagermann]

The developers tried to talk Mr. Agassi into lowering the goal to 30. He refused. They ultimately met the target by creating a clever program that created other programs. Under Mr. Agassi’s direction, SAP created 26 new products last year — versus one or two in previous years.

Some veterans worried that the pace would damage quality. “The fear is that you can’t sustain the momentum over time,” says Eberhard Schick, a Walldorf developer who took part in Hercules. It’s not “good, old German engineering.” Programmers griped that Walldorf had lost control over product strategy. “The power went to Palo Alto,” says Mr. Schick.

The concerns crystallized at breakfasts in Walldorf in early 2005 set up to introduce Mr. Agassi to the rank and file. Developers grilled him about why he was hiring so many Americans and whether he planned to abandon SAP’s proprietary computer language in favor of languages more widely used in Internet applications.

In August 2005, a German employee complained to a local newspaper that Mr. Agassi’s “boys come in at very high levels, without even being seen by the staff here.” Five months later, Germany’s national Handelsblatt newspaper published an article headlined “SAP and Globalization — March of the Americans.” One German manager was quoted saying, “It’s clear Agassi would like to get as many functions as possible to the U.S.” Mr. Agassi says his mission was “to bring the best talent we could find anywhere into SAP, regardless of location.”

In April 2006, SAP executives hosted a town-hall meeting in Walldorf on the “Americanization of SAP,” where workers aired concerns over the increasing use of English and the hiring of engineers overseas. A few months later, a handful of SAP workers, including Mr. Schick, won enough support to start a workers’ council, roughly equivalent to a labor union.

Their fears were fanned by SAP’s moves to transfer some jobs out of Germany. Much software maintenance — updating and fixing older systems — is now done in India; some human-resource work went to Prague. “The job of the workers’ council is to help the German staff manage the consequences of this globalization” by helping workers find other jobs at SAP, says Mr. Schick.

Mr. Kagermann was unyielding. “There cannot be even a minute where you debate” globalization, he says. But executives reassured engineers that SAP wasn’t cutting employment in Germany, and reassigned those whose jobs were transferred. Executive-board member and personnel director Klaus Heinrich says Walldorf’s engineering staff has been growing and no workers have been laid off.

Mr. Heinrich advised the new foreign executives how to get along with German engineers — work hard, and impress them with content. SAP sponsored cultural-sensitivity classes that taught, for example, that Indian developers like frequent attention while Germans prefer to be left alone. Another tip: Americans might say “excellent” when a German would say “good.”
[Hasso Plattner]

Meanwhile, Mr. Agassi’s developers were cranking out more programs, but some of the new offerings didn’t sell well and prompted grumbling inside SAP. “It’s nice to create a prototype,” Mr. Schick says of one new product. “But I question whether the program is really being used by customers.”

Mr. Agassi complained that the new programs didn’t get enough marketing and service support, people familiar with Mr. Agassi’s thinking say. He clashed with other executives — particularly sales chief Leo Apotheker — over the complaint and SAP’s long-term strategy, insiders say. “When you produce 26 new products in one year, the [company's] gearboxes start to crack,” Mr. Agassi said in an interview in late 2006.

Mr. Plattner had told Mr. Agassi that he had a shot at being CEO someday. But when SAP in February extended Mr. Kagermann’s contract until 2009, Mr. Agassi calculated it would be several more years before he would get the chance. The “passion-to-cost equation” was no longer high enough, he says, and he decided to leave.

These days, Messrs. Kagermann and Plattner are working hard to convince SAP’s Palo Alto developers that the company won’t return to its Walldorf-centric days. “What we’re doing to globalize R&D is the right thing and we will continue,” Mr. Kagermann said in a conference call with reporters on the day Mr. Agassi’s departure was announced. He added, “It’s not easy to manage.”

Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com and Leila Abboud at leila.abboud@wsj.com

Today I found this solar energy house that has already been in use for more than 10 years. The house has a solar energy plant mounted on its roof which produces 5-6 times more electrical energy than it uses itself. The house is built around a central beam which allows it to be turned towards or away from the sun depending on the inside temperature. A range of other technologies is used and details can be read on the architect’s - Rolf Disch - website.

Real time is 4:30pm…

The Aero show is Europe’s largest general aviation trade show held in Friedrichshafen, a town in Southern Germany beautifully situated on Lake Constance.

This weekend general aviation enthusiasts and business people can see new developments and watch - as usual at such events - an aerobatics show.

When I looked that their website this morning I found a very nice visualization of the fairground that allows you to look inside each of the halls and change the rotation directions of the camera, zoom in and out, move the camera up and down and jump between different camera locations placed across the tradeshow. Only thing they forgot was the possibility to stop the camera moving. Overall this is a very nice way of visualizing things prior to the show. Not sure when they made the shots but must have been during a quiet time, maybe in the early morning since not many people are seen - which is of course also what they intended.

I am back this week in California (lived and worked here until end of 2000). Last time I came to the US (Boston) they gave me a hard time at the immigration asking all kinds of super smart questions. Now I decided to be a tourist visiting friends which seemed to have helped the immigration officer also, reducing his questions to “What are you doing in the US?”, and “How long are you staying here?” This time he even wished me a nice stay and good day, wow, what a change from former times, when you got the feeling they preferred you stay out of the country. Marketing is not only important for companies but equally for countries, especially if you depend on trade and highly qualified “alien residents” (what a name) to keep the high-tech industry a leader.

The weather is now gorgeous here and nearly “boringly” the same with no rain but blue sky every day until September/October. Nature shows itself right now in great colors and the trees and grass are still in their best colors, which will of course soon change as the grass hills turn brown - or “golden” as the people say here of their “Golden State”. It is a all a matter of how you view things - especially here! The following picture is of Half MoonBay.

As we reported yesterday, IBM has opened its own “Innovation Factory,” to generate ideas and new products and services for telecom customers. But it’s not exactly a new idea – either for the high-tech world or for IBM.

In his 1985 classic Harvard Business Review article, The Discipline of Innovation, management guru Peter Drucker argued innovation was one-third innovation and two-thirds disciplined hard work that should be planned and managed systematically in companies. The life sciences started using the name “innovation factory” in 1999. After another Harvard Business Review article in 2001, Building an Innovation Factory describing how to spread innovation collaboration between partners, it started to catch on more widely.

IBM was already a member of the Rhode Island-based “Business Innovation Factory”, taking over management of the Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Pilot Project in the fall of 2005. They are presumably leveraging this experience – e.g. piloting social networking tools – in the new venture.

The wider need in the telecoms industry was shown in IBM’s worldwide survey of high-tech CEOs. The majority of the 700-plus CEOs said depended mostly on generating new business models to gain a business lead. Telecoms CEOs put the emphasis instead on product and service innovation. IBM found this a paradox, because in their view business model innovation generates faster-than-average margin growth, and technology differences are often slim. In comparison with other CEOs, telecoms CEOs also downplayed their role in spearheading innovation. IBM put this down to the urgent need for telecoms businesses to monetize their high capital investment in next-generation services over IP. The survey concludes they are not collaborating externally nearly as much as they need to - a need that the CEOs actually acknowledge.

The survey looks like a top-class piece of market research, giving IBM reason to expect a good takeup, with clear business benefits: product time-to-market and business model innovation through participation of top level management. Mike Hill, IBM’s Telecommunications Industry general manager, says in the PR:

“Our telecom clients are facing a host of competitive pressures that demand the ability to drive new revenue streams, test new business models, and accelerate the pace of innovation”.

I’m sure it was only coincidence, but the PR came out just a day after the US’s slip from first to seventh place in

WEF’s “networked readiness index” - measuring national ICT resources and preparedness (behind Singapore, most of Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland). A good time to get some positive press!