It’s been an ugly transition. The company has the core market of multimedia system-on-a-chip products and that has left it at a much lower revenue run rate ($40 million-50 million/year) then it has enjoyed in the past. However, the company has taken steps to dramatically reduce costs, and yet invests a staggering portion of revenue in R&D and has massively increased its capabilities in other areas like higher end multimedia and also new markets like automobiles.

The decline in the National Home Price Index – which covers all nine census divisions – remained in double digits, recording a record 15.4% decline in the second quarter of 2008 versus the second quarter of 2007. This is larger than the decline of 14.2% reported in the first quarter of the year. The 10-City and 20-City Composites also set new records, with annual declines of 17.0% and 15.9%, respectively. However, it should be noted that the acceleration in decline was only moderate in June. The May numbers reported annual declines of 16.9% and 15.8%, respectively.

“Credit quality across many loan classes has begun to deteriorate with declining house prices and slowing economic growth. Although banks have succeeded in raising additional capital, balance sheets are under renewed stress and bank equity prices have fallen sharply,” according to the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report Market Update.

Amid a stumble in the U.S. economy, unprecedented commodity-price pressure and a lender community still skittish after the turmoil seen throughout the credit markets, it may seem logical to prepare an epitaph for corporate debt issuance. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services’ review of various industries and sectors suggests otherwise.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the rapid convergence of the open source software movement with the enterprise software world’s leading suppliers. Sun had already begun to open-source many of its software assets and switch to the subscription accounting that is the primary way of measuring OSS in the market, so in a way this means no change to that opinion.

This is an excerpt from a research note published and send to clients on December 18th:

NetSuite (N) is adding its name to the mix of public companies investors will have to choose from in the software as a service (SaaS) space. NetSuite is attempting to position itself as an integrated ERP solution for small to medium sized businesses [SMB] versus competition that aims more at a specific application area like accounting (Intuit (INTU)), sales (salesforce.com (CRM)), marketing (Vocus (VOCS)) or human resources (Workday).

After backcasting for Oracle’s acquisitions in 2006 and 2007, Research 2.0 estimates that the database/application software market leader grew all types of revenue about 16% in the 12 months ending November 30, 2007 vs. the 12 months ending Nov. 30, 2006. The difference between our estimate and the higher growth rate reported in press releases is due to the fact that the press release does not take into account the timing of such acquisitions as Hyperion, Agile, Stellent, SPL Worldgroup, MetaSolv and others.

Another very different analyst named Richard Yeh was quite young and inexperienced.  But he was smart and hard-working.  As was typical for less-experienced analysts, he was asked to do some research work and present his findings.  We asked him to research Nektar and to look into the whole Exubera idea and process to see how it might play out.

E*Trade was doing what many were doing in the mortgage business. Based on a credit score alone you could easily get a mortgage with no documentation, no appraisal (other than a supposed "drive by") and very low fees.

Beginning in the 1990s, smarter software marketeers than my generation’s figured out it would be much better to deal with a captive audience of already committed customers. Thus IT suppliers began to put the full court press on their own user conferences and the great all-comer IT trade shows faded away.

In the annual Research 2.0 review, I gave Microsoft high marks for understanding that people are people, whether or not they are in their personal or professional roles at one instant in time. The future for IT-enabled service providers is one of a single compute structure that supports us all as our roles change during the day—from looking for directions on the way to work, to our roles at work (be they individual contributor or manager), to paying the bills at home, to looking for entertainment before leaving work, to shopping online (hopefully not while working), and so forth. The principle applies over longer time periods as well. Scratch my favorable analysis.

As we close out the summer with the last weekend of barbeques and beach weather, we note that our anecdotal experience keeps us away from shorting CROX, at least here and now. Without going into details, it’s clear that kids will pick these ugly, holey shoes against all reason. The important point though is that immediately every close friend who doesn’t have Crocs must immediately have them. Watching parent after parent put their credit card down, no matter how unenthusiastically, made it clear that the phenomenon is not yet over.

Lately, however, a number of new listings and price reductions made us realize that at least in the North East we might see additional pressure to unload properties that are especially old and inefficient when it comes to energy use. We’ve seen some listings we might have jumped at two years ago but now won’t even look at them because they would cost a small fortune to heat and power.

Remember, this ruling came down in Utah, where Novell was formed (although it is now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts), where SCO is located (although it was formed in Santa Cruz, California) and where the court still distributes forms in WordPerfect. Also remember today’s SCO is not the 1995 SCO, and today’s Novell is not the 1995 Novell (but that would take too long to explain). These factoids could all become relevant in any appeal process.

Therefore Lawson is one of the best overall ERP market indicators (Lawson does sell a lot of standalone HR but that functionality works in an ERP suite if users want it that way, so we consider Lawson’s revenue to be all ERP).

A little over a year ago, when the Lawson/Intentia merger was formalized I wrote that Lawson was rapidly becoming “the” IBM (IBM) ERP play. I don’t think IBM would appreciate that characterization because IBM itself does not offer an ERP product and partners with multiple partners, other than Lawson, that do. But Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson, hinted at the concept during his presentation August 8, 2007, to financial analysts.

The problem with TimesSelect and similar offerings from other papers is that they are annoying for the readers and subscribers. Some content is free, others require a login. I’m a subscriber but sometimes my computer seems to forget how to login automatically and if the article isn’t that important I’m too busy to go through the whole "retrieve password" exercise.

Of course technology is a tough business and during the past two years we have found more and more utility from Skype. [Skype has some serious problems too but that’s another story/future post.]

We finally bit the bullet and called Vonage to cancel our services. This is the sad part. Of course, like most subscription based services [including your phone company] you can get a lower price buy just calling and asking these days so they immediately offered to take the $24.95/month to $19.95. Then there was a $14.99 option. Still no? How about $9.99? Well we also have a $4.99 plan. Still no?!?

In the afternoon session, we heard more about the Software Plus Service strategy than we had heard in the spring. More important, we heard less about advertising and devices being of equal importance with software and service than we had heard in the morning sessions from Steve Ballmer (comments on the morning session are here).

In the morning Ballmer had talked about the four (software, service, advertising, devices) as if they were the pillars of Corinth (I know, there are only three remaining). But by the time of the Q and A at the end of the day, advertising had returned to being a way to monetize technology, as it is with Google (GOOG), and I didn’t hear a mention of a Microsoft telephone or Microsoft TV.

Back in May we gave a talk at the CA Council for Technical Excellence that focused on the missing "S" in SOA. The large technology vendors continue not to really get it from a business perspective. In fact during our research it became very clear that HP was the poster child for doing things the wrong way and even its OpenView product was going into the tank (CA (CA) was happy to hear this as is IBM I’m sure).