Skipper Sees Another Year of 'Tough Sledding' for Big Tech

You see it already in the tech industry itself, companies like Microsoft and Dell(DELL - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) investing and putting a world of hurt on their competitors. Some of their customers will start to do the same thing. That'll provide the signal as to what the next big things are going to be.

You're going to move from an environment where people are spending on stuff like security to something else. I mean, companies have solved the supply-chain problem, so maybe they'll spend some of it there. They still haven't solved the customer-relationship management problem. And they have to figure out what those problems really are.

Part of the problem was that companies defined the problems incorrectly. For instance, they thought that the supply-chain problem was solved by B2B Web sites and that customer-relationship management was solved by sticking a gun at the head of your sales guy and saying, "Give me your contacts."

They ignored some really obvious lessons. The thing that made Amazon.com(AMZN - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) so compelling was one-click ordering. How many guys besides Amazon had that, you know? That's customer-relationship management: making the customer happy.

In turns out there are a couple guys who have the equivalent of that. One of the reasons Ameritrade(AMTD - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) has been so successful is that they execute orders a lot faster than their competitors do. Their competitors were sitting there trying to give customers 10,000 pieces of research, Ameritrade figured out that the Internet is the world's largest repository of research. That's not what their customers wanted. They wanted fast execution.

The secret to success in Silicon Valley on the enterprise side has always been about making enterprises more successful through technology. The problem is, we're coming off a period of time where we sold them a bunch of technology that didn't help them. (Laughs.) So they're suspicious of what we offer, and we're not quite sure what we ought to be offering.