What soccer team would your company be?
Martin Veitch, Editor of CIO.co.uk
If your football club (soccer team) were a software company, which would it be? Martin Veitch, editor in chief of CIO.co.uk, has written two wonderfully insightful (and painful, depending on which team you follow) analyses of which football clubs lost their software twins at birth. See here and here.
Among my favorites:
Google would be Arsenal: Fancy footwork, nice location in central London, clever ideas, and easy on the eye. The players are all young but a lot of the time all the good work goes nowhere. Best players have recently ended up demanding transfers. (OUCH!)
IBM would be Manchester United: Old money and great tradition. Everybody ends up going there in the end, even if they don't like them.
Oracle would be Real Madrid: Forceful leader reeking of money, fine wine, and cigars. The strategy is to buy anything that moves. It usually works in the end.
Red Hat would be Manchester City: Started out with odds and ends donated by local community but somehow ended up with loads of money flooding in.
Adobe would be Everton: Dogged and outperforming but they only have one plan and they live in the shadow of a bigger and better bunch just down the road.
Novell would be Leeds United: They used to be huge when I were a lad.
There are many more, and they're funniest when comparing to the more obscure teams, in my opinion (i.e., you really have to know the game to get the joke), but very funny and dead-on more often than not.
Try coming up with some for other sports.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Best,
Martin
"No one likes us, we don't care"
(for the joke-impaired, think about it for a minute...)
Microsoft has to be Juventus. Won big in their home league, did not perform too well outside, and their last winnings were stained by judiciary convictions.
whatever dude. Linux is more like some small unkown team playing in the 2 or third division in China
Soccer is for *******.
First they show a 10 minute ad for an miracle exercise machine, then some fatsos looking at the scoreboard for 5 minutes, then again 10 minutes for a fruit blender machine ad, then 5 minutes of a short fat guy talking into an earpiece...
Google would be Barca rather than Arsenal, I think. Top of the world right now, but Microsoft (Real Madrid) is in the rearview mirror.
IBM would be a Liverpool, glorious history but been second best lately.
Microsoft would be United - ruthless, a bully, rich but prefer to develop talent rather than acquire expensive players.
Apple: has to be Barca, glamorous team playing attractive football. The current European champions
Google: Chelsky new money, powerful and yet doomed to failure in the long term
M$: Real, the big beast, won more than anybody else - the ability to overspend anyone in the business
Adobe: Milan, strong powerful, stylish always there when the chips are down. Second best record in football
Dell: Man U, they won something and yet they're full of crap, big mouths and all
HP: Juventus, old tradition living on glory days, still a force to be reckoned with
Sony: Arsenal who? one-nillers
Toshiba: Bayern, solid no frill hard to beat
Ubuntu: Ajax, young and full of optimism gave the football world some great footballers, won less than they deserved
Soccer: A gentleman's game played by louts.
Rugby: A lout's game played by gentlemen.
it used to be true until recently, nowadays with eye gouging, ear biting incidents rugby has lowered its standard. Anyway the original aphorism was:
"Football a gentleman's game played by ruffians, whilst rugby is a ruffian game played by gentlemen"
That's because americans call football to another sport, that is not played mainly with the feet, and that is played almost exclusively in the USA.
to Matt Asay:
I didn't know that most readers on CNET are from the US, do you have data to backup that claim, or you're just guessing?
- by usfutbolr July 6, 2009 6:56 AM PDT
- Nortel = Toronto Blizzard of the defunct NASL. Oh SNAP!
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