[A slippery fish, a slippery fish, swimming in the water...]

I've been watching this one for a month, and just can't help jumping in on the latest news.

Hummingbird announced this morning that they're in negotiations with Open Text to sweeten an earlier takeover offer, trading off the Open Text deal against the current bid from Symphony Technology Group.

Pardon me while I chortle uncharitably to myself for a moment...

[The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round...]

Brings me right back to the good ol' days of December 1998, when Open Text first took a run at PC DOCS Group (where I was VP Worldwide Marketing at the time). DOCS and Open Text were direct competitors - crossing swords daily in the field.

We didn't like the cut of their $56-million all stock bid, and hit the road to see if we could scare up better offers. After three nerve-wracking, intense months, and many, many presentations to other suitors, we eventually closed a deal with Hummingbird for something like $192 to $305-million (depending on how you did the numbers) in an all cash "merger".

Candidly: a deal with Hummingbird didn't make an awful lot of sense, on the face of it. The two companies appeared to have almost nothing at all in common. We had to work hard to come up with a meaningful rationale for the deal. I think my positioning materials were almost single-handedly responsible for eroding the original meaning of the word "synergy" in a business context by several strata. (Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa). A combination of PC DOCS and Open Text would, ostensibly, have made a great deal more sense to a lot of people.

Credit where its due, however - the squooging together of DOCS and Hummingbird did indeed produce some really good stuff, and pretty fast. I remember being scowled at and derided in one of the earliest joint management team meetings, for suggesting we should position the deal as an enterprise portal play.

See: Hummingbird had a bunch of connectivity and business intelligence technology; DOCS was in the document and knowledge management space. Their business was structured data management (columns and rows), ours was in the management, indexing, and collaborative creation of unstructured data (documents, emails, and other corporate knowledge).

Put those two together into a single executive-level UI, and whaddya gots? An EIP. Made sense to me, anyway - even if the two CTOs snorted at the idea.

Funnily enough, that's exactly how we did end up spinning and selling the deal. Darn successfully too.

And what's more, we followed through and built the damn thing - in record time. We launched the Hummingbird EIP at my old mate Carl Frappaolo's Delphi Group Conference in December 1999 - only about six months after we completed the formal merger. And it took off like a...um...bird - getting rave reviews and shipping 3,000 seats in the first 50 days.

So now here we are, about seven years later, and the wheel has turned again, with Open Text offering around $485-million to snap up the 'Bird - and all that combined technology and customer goodness in between. Groovy.

[Oh no, it'?s been eaten by a...(dum, dum, duuuuum) great white shark, a great white shark, lurking in the water...]

You know, Tom Jenkins (Open Text's Executive Chairman) has been waiting a heck of a long time to get this deal done. He's a patient man, it seems. The Hummingbird of today is an awful lot different from the PC DOCS of 1998, of course - but it's probably an even better deal now than it ever was before.

For the record: I no longer have any direct affiliation or relationship with either party. I sold the remains of my Hummingbird stock a long, long time ago (dammit). But I think Tom Jenkins, John Shackleton, and the Open Text team could bring a lot of value to Hummingbird - and vice versa. I don't know anything about Symphony Technology Group - the other suitor in the mix, so I can't really offer much of an assessment there. Be interesting to see how this one pans out though.

I've had ocassion twice in the last 24 hours to cite, yet again, the wonderful "Joho Defense" (aka the Weinberger Waiver).

In part: "No, I'm not keeping up with your blog. I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you. But we're now well past the point where any of us can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. Even with an aggregator. I just can't do it any more..."

Strikes me this admirable and entirely reasonable disclaimer deserves to be as enshrined in the canons of neoblogism as the "Twinkie Defense" is in the annals and precedents of U.S. case law.

Have you used your Weinberger Waiver today?

In case you've been struggling to keep up, here's the Commander-in-Chief applying his keen political mind and world-renowned cultural sensitivity to tactfully and succinctly summarize the entire Middle East crisis.

"...is that the big idea? The best hope for US diplomacy?"

I use the freebie, third-party Haloscan plug-in for comments on this blog. Always have done. It's simple, easy, and blissfully spam-free. As I don't have a paid account, it purges old comments after a few months. Understandable, but a real pain - I've had some great conversation threads in the comments over the years. Still - you get what you pay for.

When I first moved this blog to its own domain, away from the original home on a Blogspot-hosted page, I left the old blog intact as a kind of deep archive and place to do template tinkering and stuff.

About five months ago, I switched on Blogger's in-built comment system over at the old place, just as an experiment. Five months later, I'm rather glad I didn't choose to switch away from Haloscan for the main blog.

There have been no new posts and precious little traffic to the old site since I last updated the redirection link in November 2005. The comment spammers, however, have been just piling on the love.

The single post over there (simply serving to redirect people to this site) has pulled in 106 comments, all of the "Hey Fellow, you have a great blog here!" scumbag spammer variety.

Ack. Thbbbt!! as Bill the Cat would say.

Cruising through all 106 pointless, link-whoring spam comments, I think my all-time favourite has to be this frequently-occurring little gem:

"The good thing about your blog is, its natural."(sic)

Lovely, thanks. Strange to see four consecutive commenters all posting exactly the same "natural" remark :-)

Just back from a couple of days in Cottage Country heaven - sun-burnt and slightly achey from many hours spent snorkelling. Blissed out and ready to dive back into the rather huge workload waiting for me back here in the real world.

Had to pause a moment or two to post about this. The tireless and brilliant Constantin Basturea has created a Digg-like resource "... for PR and Comm news — top stories, debates, interviews, blog postings, podcasts, research, etc"

Constantin's initial post on the project is here. You'll find the actual site at: New PR Crispynews

Excellent stuff - for anyone who follows the PR and professional communications world, it's great to have an aggregated resource like this. Helps to surface both the egregious and the estimable. Great work, Constantin!

This is genuinely superb. The British Library has scanned and used a Flash-based viewer to put some of its most treasured manuscripts online. Check out the original Alice - hand written and illustrated by Lewis Carroll, or the stunning calligraphy of Baybars' Magnificent Qur'an.

Outstanding stuff.

A fit of the giggles is a great way to end a seemingly deadlocked argument.

It is awfully hard to maintain one's calm, patient-but-stern fatherly composure, when one's 7 year-old daughter is sitting on the bathroom floor, thumping the tiles with both hands, and shrieking at the top of her lungs:

Well that's it then. Another one bites the dust. We should hang our heads in shame.

The Western Black Rhino, which once proliferated across the central and west African savannah, is now, it would seem, extinct.



From the BBC News report:

A mission to their last known habitat in northern Cameroon failed to find any rhinos or signs of their existence...

"They mounted 48 field missions, patrolling for 2,500km, working block by block," said Richard Emslie, scientific officer with the African rhino group in IUCN's Species Survival Commission. "...they didn't find anything to indicate a continued presence in the area... They did, however, come across lots of evidence of poaching."

Congratulations.

If this bothers you as much as it does me, you can visit the International Rhino Foundation website and contribute, or even adopt your own rhino. Perhaps we'll still be able to save the last four Northern White rhinos left before they too disappear forever.

Well well well, who would ever have thunk it. To set John Calvin spinning in his tomb, it seems the torture of a bad conscience is indeed the Dell of a living soul.

So many bad puns, so little time. In truth, though, I'm encouraged to see Dell at least attempting to launch itself into the blogosphere. Now if only they could actually use their new blog for something other than crass self-promotion and employee-generated mini infomercials, they might even garner some real respect from their many detractors. (Full disclosure, btw - the machine I'm blogging this on happens to be a Dell notebook, and I should note that I've been very happy with it to date.)

And yes, I know I've been absent too long. Again. But I'll spare you the usual apologies, excuses, and promises to be more regular in my bloggage in future. Back. For now. Who knows how long I'll keep it up, but I know I do miss the darn thing when I'm not here.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a blurb to write...