BrandToBeDetermined

Houston negotiated a wifi deal that was too good to be true and....

Houston went through an elaborate process of bidding and approvals for a city-wide wifi deal that is now dead. Earthlink found it cheaper to pay The 5M contract penalty than to build the network. First the facts, and then I'll move on to why this is the city's fault and we got what we deserved. (thanks for the heads up Katie)

Houston's Wi-Fi deal with EarthLink fades

With little fanfare, the City of Houston's wireless network deal with EarthLink Inc. has gone dead.

The Atlanta Internet service provider last week said it was not making any future investments in its $40-million municipal wireless business.

In August, when EarthLink (NASDAQ: ELNK) announced it would cut 900 jobs, Houston city officials said the citywide Wi-Fi network was still in the works despite already being behind schedule by about three months due to infrastructure planning.

Houston city officials were unavailable for comment.

So what went wrong? Well, Earthlink, a COMPANY, couldn't make money on the deal. The balance sheet said "the negotiators were using bad numbers and the city hood winked us." So they backed out. Which if you were an Earthlink shareholder is exactly what you would want them to do. So that part is a no brainer.

How did we get here? The bidding process was intense and lengthy.

Writely and Numsum, web based word processor and spreadsheet

This is Thanksgiving in the US.  I had family over.  And I have some great clients and some of my family asked if "we had an Apple Pie like the one we had last year".  The answer is no.  Technically I replied with a story, and the story goes like this. 

A client of ours used Excel to create a spreadsheet to manage their holiday gift lists.  You know the type, who gets a card, who gets a pie, who gets coal and who is on the short list to turn over to the ninja hit squad.  I am honestly not sure where we were on the list last year, but we received a wonderful applie pie. 

We did NOT receive a pie this year, and based on a conversation last spring I think I know why.  They created a spreadsheet of who gets the pies.  Hid the rows for everyone who does NOT get a pie and emailed a spreadsheet from Excel that showed 50 or so names.  The company that received it uses an old PC with Microsoft Words.  MS Works does not apparently support hidden rows so they sent pies to 300 odd people, basically EVERYONE on the list.

In the spirit of "prevent that problem from happening" I recommend two more must check out products for social collaboration.

1) Writely - web based word processing using just a browser with collaboration functionality.

2) Numsum - web based spreadsheet application.

Check them out.  Both writely and numsum are potentially significant threats to Microsoft even with the new release of Office coming out.