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IDC has made a new report avail­able on Slideshare: Sell­ing in 2009: 10 Ways to find, Win and Keep the Money (embed­ded below). It takes a long hard look at the year ahead and what it means for IT com­pa­nies want­ing to sur­vive and thrive in the year ahead. It is pre­dom­i­nantly US-based but many of the rec­om­men­da­tions are just as valid in Europe (though the tim­ing may be out by six months or so).

While it gives a slightly mixed pic­ture of just what tech com­pa­nies are up against, there are some clear take-outs for sales and mar­ket­ing peo­ple. It makes some pretty plau­si­ble, pretty harsh pre­dic­tions, includ­ing:

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ChangeThis has been invit­ing peo­ple to nom­i­nate their top busi­ness books, (the ones that actu­ally made a dif­fer­ence rather than the ones you picked up in an air­port and didn’t get past chap­ter four). Now, in a delight­fully post-modern twist, there’s going to be a book about the books – The 100 Best Busi­ness Books of All Time. You can see the list of those that made it here.

Are these the best busi­ness books of all time?

All the usual sus­pects are there Good to Great, In Search of Excel­lence, Tip­ping Point, Get­ting Things Done (which I own and have never fin­ished to my wife’s con­stant amuse­ment). It’s a good list.

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OK, so I’m prob­a­bly one of the few peo­ple in the world not to see the whole she­bang live but read­ing the tran­script in the paper today I was awestruck by the writ­ing. It man­aged to be grand with­out being too grandiose. It felt fresh but still hit the right tone for a world-stage occasion.

There were some beau­ti­ful phrases:

To those who cling to power through cor­rup­tion and deceit and the silenc­ing of dis­sent, know that you are on the wrong side of his­tory; but that we will extend a hand if you are will­ing to unclench your fist.

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NOTCOT points to a pre­sen­ta­tion by designer Chip Kidd who is respon­si­ble for, among other things, some of the loveli­est book jacket designs I’ve ever seen.

In the talk at Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, Chip takes the audi­ence through a num­ber of his designs. He talks about the reac­tions they received from his clients (both good and bad), the com­pro­mises and the end results.

As an insight into the cre­ative busi­ness, it’s price­less with some laugh out loud moments.

The pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able free for down­load via iTunes (sadly not on YouTube so I can’t embed it).

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Like many peo­ple, I’ve owned and used a suc­ces­sion of lap­tops over the years – not to men­tion sell­ing them on behalf of a vari­ety of clients. Over that time the screens have got big­ger (and bet­ter) as have the hard dri­ves and per­for­mance for most tasks is com­pa­ra­ble to a desktop.

Of course the price we pay for this is that the orig­i­nal computer-on-the-move idea behind lap­tops has been largely lost from many mod­els. They are increas­ingly designed to be taken from room to room not coun­try to coun­try. Many are full-on media cen­tres able to store all your DVDs, CDs and pho­tos. Up to a point it seemed that this trend was unstop­pable.

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