Since I was very young, I have loved cars. I drive a Porsche in the summer and a four wheel drive Audi in the slick New England winters. I love these two cars -- they make my commuting hours bearable and sometimes fun. I often ponder the question -- If you ripped the Porsche shield off my 911 or the four Audi rings off my A8 and replaced them with a Ford oval, would I still drive the cars? You bet I would. The quality, design, history, feel, and experience would keep me happily in those cars, even if you put a Nash Rambler logo on their front hoods. Which roughly proves a point -- it's not the branding that's the problem with American cars, its the cars. Consumer Reports' research verifies this -- in the organization's five categories of 2008 cars and SUVs, none of the top five vehicles come from a domestic producer.

Why can't American companies build a great car? They are designing and manufacturing day in and day out, so what is preventing them from making something great?

Any book of netiquette should include, "If you're going to give feedback, make it useful." In most settings, there's no enforcement mechanism to make people give useful feedback--nor should there be. In the end, the target of your critique will take you as seriously as you take the critique itself.

That's my feedback to the person who rated "Product Managers Are Working On The Wrong Things" a zero, with no comments explaining the rating. You expended a few ergs entering the rating, but you should have spent a few more typing comments. If a particular piece of research is truly worthless,  please tell us why, so that we can make informed decisions about future research. Otherwise, I have no idea what to do with the rating, other than to scoop it up and drop it in the plastic bag of long-term memory.

IBM announced today that it was spending US$300 million to build out 13 data centers in 10 countries in 2008 - IBM refers to these sites as "Business Resilience service delivery centers". These centers will certainly help IBM deliver more of its traditional IT recovery services but they will also support the next generation of IT continuity services - repeatable, scalable, productize services such as online backup and virtual recovery.  These types of services don't require massive capital investment in an inventory of heterogeneous server and storage platforms, instead the service provider can focus its efforts on building a scalable pool of virtualized servers and shared storage built with industry standard components.

News regarding the economic situation continues to be relatively gloomy and has been reflected in the Q2 results that offline retailers have been reporting. For example JC Penny reported Q2 comp store sales declined 4.3% versus last year, Abercrombie and Fitch Q2 comp store sales were also down by 11% versus last year.

Wal-Mart US (+4.6% w/o fuel increase versus Q2 2007, in contrast to a 1.2% increase for Q2 2007 versus Q2 2006) continues to do well on the strength of its overall low price positioning and those product lines that contain necessities rather than discretionary items. This performance shows a continued trend of consumers trading away from mid-market stores down to off-price sellers.

Online sellers like Amazon (US net revenue +35% versus a year ago); Overstock (over 20% growth in gross bookings) and eBay (WW GMV +8%) continue to post healthy increases supporting the notion that online continues to be strong. However, online sellers are beginning to lower expectations for the second half of the year in spite of their success thus far.

In contrast to the strong online performance by some of the top retailers, the census bureau's Q2 ecommerce sales increase is posted at 9.5% versus Q2 2007 - the smallest increase ever and a 22% increase for Q2 2007 versus 2006.

By Boris Evelson

Ever since our latest BI Wave was published a couple of weeks ago, I keep hearing comments about why we have not included evaluation of Excel as a BI tool. For example, Rajan Chandras, one of the contributing editors to the Intelligent Enterprise, poses really good arguments in his recent blog on why, when and how Excel can and should be used as a BI tool. Excellent question, everyone!

• As I wrote in my very first report when I joined Forrester, Ouch! Get Ready - Spreadsheets Are Here To Stay For Business Intelligence: "Spreadsheets - the most widely used business intelligence (BI) tool - are a permanent fixture in enterprises because no other analytical application outperforms them in flexibility, ease of use, and ubiquity."
• Furthermore, I consider Excel a major component of BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders.
• And last, but not least, we do place a heavy emphasis on Excel as a delivery vehicle or UI for all BI environments in our Wave.