I recall a few days ago being sent an email that was so transparently obviously a virus that I thought “who on earth would click on such an obviously dodgy looking attachment?” It was an email from the FBI (yeah, right, email being the FBI’s most likely form of communication to me) saying that “your IP address had been logged looking at illegal web sites” and then inviting you to click on an attachment of unknown file type asking you to “fill in a form about this activity”. I’m guessing that if the FBI were troubled about my web site browsing they would be more likely to burst through the front door than send an email. At the time I chuckled to myself and deleted it, but apparently millions of people actually did decide to fill in the form about their dubious web browsing, immediately infected their PCs with the “sober” virus.

Against this depressing demonstration of human gullibility was at least the entertainment value of the deadpan statement from the real FBI, which read: “Recipients of this or similar solicitations should know that the FBI does not engage in the practice of sending unsolicited e-mails to the public in this manner.” Quite so.

When a company or organization changes its name, you know that its troubles are big. A few days ago Computer Associates made the radical name change to “CA” (I congratulate the brand naming people for their imagination; I imagine their fee was suitable modest). This follows a series of accounting scandals that has accounted for most of the executive team and has its previous CFO pleading guilty to criminal charges and previous CEO Sanjay Kumar now leaving the company. The name change is in a fine tradition of hoping to cover up the past: in the UK we had a nuclear power station called Windscale which had an unfortunately tendency to leak a bit, and a safety reputation that would have troubled Homer Simpson. A swift bit of PR damage control and voila - Sellafield was born. We all felt much safer that day, I can tell you. Of course some name changes are just good sense e..g Nintendo was previously called Marafuku (I kid you not).

However the big question for CA is whether its rebirth will be superficial or deep-rooted. CA was the body-snatcher of the IT industry, picking up ailing companies that had decent technology and maintenance revenues for a song, stripping out most of the costs and milking the maintenance revenue stream. It does have some strong systems management technologies like Unicenter, and is a very large company, with USD 942 million in revenues last quarter. However its famously antagonistic relationships with its customers have not helped as it has had to weather a series of scandals and management changes. Jim Swainson of IBM is the latest person to have the role of turning the company around in his new role as CEO. I wish him luck, as a company with troubles that deep-seated will not be fixed by a PR blitz and a name change.
I hope he has better fortune than PWC did with “Monday”.