The Bloor Perspective: Frog kissing, relationship banking and the decline of TVs and papers

After kissing a few frogs with some heavyweight laptops that didn't quite transform into princely sales, Tadpole is hoping for more success with its latest product family, Talin. Tadpole has taken its long-standing relationship with Sun Microsystems a step further, as this family of Linux based laptops is the first to sport a fully supported mobile installation of the Sun Java Desktop System.

The Talin laptops will eventually offer a broad range of portable specifications. The first to be launched is a middle of the range model, Talin 15, offering a Pentium 4 processor running up to 3GHz with a 15-inch high-resolution display and built-in Wi-Fi. This may be Tadpole's first Intel laptop but if the price is right and the hardware quality good, there's no reason these products should not be considered alongside existing portable business workhorses. The real differentiation is the platform software.

The Sun Java Desktop System gives the laptop family a portable enterprise desktop solution with a client environment based on open source components and industry standards. The heart is the Linux operating system and Gnome desktop environment. On top of that, the applications for general office use are Sun's StarOffice productivity suite, the open source Mozilla web browser, Ximian Evolution mail and calendar.

All together this combination makes the Java Desktop System a viable Microsoft Windows alternative, with read and write compatibility to Microsoft file formats. While the specific look and feel may differ slightly from the current generation of Microsoft products, it would not be a steep learning curve for most users.

Whether this will be good enough for Tadpole is not clear. The company has been struggling for a number of years and so needs some strong sales success. It's certainly good news for Sun. Despite a long technology relationship with Tadpole, the previous Solaris/SPARC laptops have only really sold to a narrow audience. Often it was those selling Sun-based software or solutions and needing a portable demo unit.

However the strength of interest in what is now a viable Linux on the desktop, coupled with growing resentment from many businesses to paying a high tax to Microsoft for their standard office tools makes this new offering of broader interest. It may be time to risk kissing a few frogs.

*The tortoise, hare and elephant*

Relationship banking has been around for centuries, with records of it going back to the 1720s. As most of us understand it, relationship banking is the touchy-feely part of banking - where customers and bank managers interact and build up a sort of camaraderie.

The face of relationship banking has changed over the last decade or so as much has happened: internet revolution, introduction of the euro, greater access to international funds, shrinkage in the international corporate loan market alongside growth in cross-border capital markets. These changes have been accompanied by changes in the approach of the banks to relationships and to customers.

There is a famous fable about the hare and tortoise that we have seen quoted by some bankers in articles in describing the banking market as a whole. They have added as another runner to this - the elephant! I thought it was an apt way to describe the market and so we are using it here.

In their opinion, the universal bank is considered to be the elephant. It is big and can offer its customers a full range of services from cash management to exit strategy, such as M&A and flotation. This one stop shop is clearly attractive (it works in retail businesses such as supermarkets very well) but in the banking world the complexity of the transactions and activities means that relationship between the bank and its customers is often complex, as there tend to be multiple relationships as well as infighting among the different divisions - so it is more of a white elephant nowadays.

The hare is lithe, speedy and always wants to win the race - this description fits investments banks. They want to win is the big deal and are not interested in lending but increasingly their customers are forcing them to offer lending as a prerequisite to winning the big deals. But as this is not a core feature of their business, there is a mismatch of expectations. Investment banks should not be coerced into this. It would be wiser to create strategic partnerships with other commercial banks.

Last but not least there is the tortoise, the true old-fashioned relationship bank offering customers a range of products and services via a single point of contact - the relationship manager. It builds long-term relationships and certainly includes lending as well as treasury and financial markets products and services.

So although the banking landscape may have changed, true relationship banking still sits with the tortoise and is unlikely to change in the years to come.

*TV and papers going down; websites going up…*

Against the background of almost continuous consumer confidence in the UK, advertising and the attendant revenue-generating opportunities have, since the beginning of the decade, maintained an important role for owners of most commercial websites.

Internet advertising continues to take two forms. There is niche advertising for products and services for specialist sites, with a community with demonstrable potential interest in the products and services provided by the advertiser. Second, transaction-related advertising continues to grow.

Fulfilment servicing has improved immeasurably over the past four years and there is empirical evidence that advertisers can fulfil high-volume demand. Ironically, weakening exchange rate of the US dollar against the euro has stimulated the growth of purchases by European consumers from US locations through commercial websites. How much of this evades requisite import taxes and duties is a matter of conjecture. How temporary this is will, of course, depend on exchange rate movements between the dollar and euro over the next year to 18 months.

Television and newspaper advertising continue to decline against a background of continuing consumer confidence in the UK. The reasons are primarily domestic. The decline in newspaper circulation continues both amongst the tabloids and broadsheets. There is an increasingly broad choice of news, analysis and commentary from the multiplicity of radio and television stations. Newspapers are no longer the immediate channel to news and commentary for those except the over 60s and it is hard to see such revenues doing more than maintain an imperceptible decline.

As the US economy resumes growth, US corporates should not assume the same is happening elsewhere, particularly in most of Europe, which is suffering from the effects of strong euro and weak US dollar. In Europe and the Middle East the brand ‘USA’ may be starting to suffer growing hostility, through its extra national role in Iraq and deteriorating relations with Europe.