Wednesday

Wednesday 31/07/2002
Mondays come and Mondays go. In the case of PricewaterhouseCooper Consulting, renamed to Monday less than a couple of months ago, the corporate rebranding has lasted just long enough to get the business cards back from the printers. IBM has come along and bought the lot, pausing for nary a microsecond before relegating Monday back to a mere day of the week. Sensible IBM.

It also paid a very reasonable $3.5bn -- down just a squeak from the $18bn HP almost ponied up two years ago. That makes the PwC staff worth around a hundred grand a head (curiously, almost twice the market value placed on the head of yer average ZDNet employee. Perhaps if we rebranded? Days of the week are out, so perhaps we could be January. Or Rainy Autumn Afternoon. Or Half Past Two In The Morning Waiting For The Nightbus Outside A Dodgy Nightclub In Camden).

But it's not a good time to be a consultant. IBM's consulting arm's felt the pinch, and has been casting around for other ways to extract money from its clients. Outsourcing's been particularly good, but it's not clear how the 30,000 PwC'ers will fit into this model. Doubtless they'll get the consultants in to come up with an ongoing strategy.

I wonder how you become a consultant. Some of my friends are consultants, but you can't tell. They don't like to talk about it -- one particularly smart woman pal is positively apologetic if you find her out. Others, journalists to the bone, became consultants for a while and it's absolutely true, their salaries doubled. But it wasn't enough: they're all back now and they seem happier. I think it's the feeling deep within the soul of every true-born hack that information wants to be free -- or at the most, available for £3.95 a month from WHSmith. Putting together a 64-page report of the blindingly obvious and then charging zillions of quid for it seems wrong, somehow.