It's 705 to 181 for white papers less than a year old

Of all the high-tech companies that have published white papers since October 2005, I counted 181 that have posted white papers to BitPipe in the 705 topics the site lists as most popular. BitPipe is the aggregator of IT thought leadership owned by TechTarget. It describes itself as "the Web's leading online information source for IT professionals who need technology white papers ...."

You can find these companies and topics under "Market Intelligence" on the BitPipe sitemap. I have listed them in a single table on my own website.

The table was compiled the second week of October by inspecting the titles and authors appearing in each of the 705 topics. The information is freely available to anyone looking at the BitPipe website.

Compared to the universe of IT firms, 181 is a small number. In fact, it is only about one-quarter the size of the number of "most popular" topics (a subset of all BitPipe topics). Nor does this fraction reflect the lopsided contribution of a handful of companies whose papers appear over and over again under multiple topics and sub-topics. If you took out the top 10 companies (in terms of number of white paper listings) you would reduce the number of companies by less than 6%. But you would reduce the number of recent white paper listings by over two-thirds.

It's not just the names of companies that repeat; many of the same titles repeat under different subtopics, and many of the same subtopics repeat under several different topics. The result is a "perceptual multiplier effect" that makes 181 feel big. Compounding the effect is the high degree of granularity in the choice of topics and subtopics -- many of which BitPipe differentiates by merely adding qualifiers like "system," "software," and "service" to the same root.

This maze makes white papers hard to find -- which may help explain why more companies are not represented. You don't know what all the choices are until you drill down into all potentially relevant silos and when you do drill down in one it's easy to forget what choices you had in others. At least as an alternative, why not provide a simple list of all companies and all topics? Also, why not allow for compound searches by right clicking on multiple companies and topics in drop down menus? Finally, why not make topics less granular? Serious researchers will still look at both "system" and "software" versions of a topic anyway just to make sure they have covered all the bases. Why put users through all that work?

One other observation: when BitPipe says that there are no documents in a topic, there usually are documents -- which you will miss if you do not click on the topic anyway.

No doubt more companies would write white papers if they felt they could get more of an audience -- and a return on their investment. Making white papers easier to find would help.

Only one-third write white papers. Over half do neither case studies nor white papers.

My survey of high-tech company websites this week reveals that:

• 31% have white papers
• 36% have case studies
• 56% have neither cases nor white papers

The survey looked at the websites of 100 companies randomly selected from all U.S. firms with 50-999 employees in the CorpTech database in the following categories: computer hardware, computer software, telecommunications and Internet. The sampling error is plus or minus 9%. I actually sampled 120 and threw out 20 that were not appropriate -- for example, the firms might have gone out of business or CorpTech had mislabeled their industries.

(Attention marketers: there were 7007 firms in this particular CorpTech download -- so if you extrapolate that out, i.e., 20 bad names for every 100 good ones, it comes to 5600 firms, or significantly fewer than what you might have expected.)

I wasn't completely surprised by the survey's results. I did a similar survey of tech companies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire about five years ago and found that only about 40% did case histories.

This obviously raises a lot of questions about why tech companies don't showcase either their successes or their thinking more than they do. One thing is clear -- the market for writing services should be a lot more efficient. Many companies are not getting served because of barriers either real or perceived.

"Only a Duraflow distributor can give customers total performance."

Unlike iPods, wastewater filtering is not very sexy. That probably helps if you're looking for companies with the essential DNA to thrive in the climate change bought on by the tech bubble collapse. With a company like Duraflow Corporation, there's no glitter to distract you from seeing the raw fundamentals.

Ten years ago the people at Duraflow had a good business -- it was (and still is) called Compliance and Recycling Corp. (CARI). It focused on building plants that remove the waste in water used to make circuit boards and other electrical components. Based in Tewksbury, Mass, the company flourished serving the needs of computer and electronics manufacturers in the U.S. and especially New England. Today, of course, those kinds of plants are typically built in China -- somewhat removed from the typical CARI service call to, say, Springfield, Mass. or Salem, New Hampshire.

But instead of just becoming extinct like a lot of old-line New England companies, CARI gave birth to Duraflow, which has become the largest U.S. supplier of wastewater treatment technology providing total system solutions to Chinese manufacturers. That includes the latest technology (crossflow microfiltration modules), the chemicals that work with those modules, and the know-how to build and operate systems incorporating those modules.

How is that possible? There are lots of reasons, but probably the biggest was the founders' insight that China needed a scalable solution to its wastewater treatment problem (just as Duraflow needed a scalable solution to its problem of how to reach profitable, but distant, markets).

That solution was the Duraflow business model -- to equip and train Chinese distributors to provide everything a customer would need to comply with strict new Chinese environmental regulations. In other words, Duraflow's "real" business would be to create lots of CARIs, each one locally owed and operated, and each one selling a total solution, not just pieces of it. Getting all three pieces from a single source -- know-how, modules, and chemicals -- is less expensive for the buyer and more profitable for the distributor. There is, in fact, sufficient revenue to support the gold standard of compliance Chinese authorities want.

The result is a virtuous cycle of profitable distributors, happier officials, cleaner rivers, and more efficient manufacturers. The fact that Duraflow is helping transfer environmental technology to Chinese nationals, and helping locals build successful companies is their own right doesn't hurt either.

(A website transformation reflects the corporate transformation -- compare the Duraflow and CARI websites. The new site was designed by Schenkel/Stegman Communications Design. I wrote the text.)

The failures of the tech bubble have received attention disproportionate to the value of the lessons learned.

Is there a difference between CEOs who lived through the collapse of the tech bubble and those who did not have to face that challenge? Asking this question is like looking at the DNA of people infected in an epidemic to see why some got sick but recovered, some died, and some never had symptoms to begin with. Scientists do that kind of research all the time to see what it is that protects some people -- as well as to see, whatever that agent might be, whether it can be transferred to others so as to protect them as well.

I suggest that we may have a new class of super CEOs among us. These are CEOs who have -- for lack of a better word -- genes that are different from those of the general CEO population. These are CEOs who know how to recover -- or how not to get "sick" in the first place. For all its pain, something good that may have come out of the tech collapse was that -- by its very scope -- it provided a large sample of CEOs who were able to do something most high-tech CEOs (and probably most CEOs period) could not.

I would suggest that the failures of the tech bubble have received attention disproportionate to the value of the lessons learned. Bubbles come and go. They're pretty predictable. And the causes are well understood. What's gone relatively under-reported and under-researched are the thousands of "everyday" success stories that seem to fly in the face of these cycles. These stories are different from the relatively small number of celebrity cases, like Apple Computer, that are constantly getting coverage -- but which most CEOs (or would-be CEOs) would find virtually impossible to emulate.

Two qualities distinguish this new class of super CEOs from the celebrities: there are many more of them and their lessons are more transferable. So their impact should be much greater.