This Atlantic article by Jonathan Rauch is over six years old, but it’s one of the only magazine pieces I have read that liberates me from sometimes feeling like a complete misanthrope. Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far
Read More...Vinnie Mirchandani, writing about the cost of storage and how we should reduce email, nails what I’ve been thinking about for the past year: that today’s email is becoming marginalized and relegated to the dark corner of the internet reserved for full-on time-wasters. There’s a reason so many productivity gurus (Marc Andreessen, David Allen, Merlin
Read More...“There is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.” —Author Julian Barnes (Via Signal vs. Noise)
Read More...I’ve read wisps of ‘smart grid’ technology in documents describing upcoming enterprise software functionality (namely, PeopleSoft), but the macro market is clearly shaping up. Cisco – whose networking gear is heavily smattered across the internet infrastructure landscape – sees a $20B/year opportunity to give the aging, analog electrical grid a much-needed digital facelift. Cisco’s move
Read More...For many, the notion of Business Intelligence (BI) is simply means a reporting tool or the ho-hum ability to extract data from a source system. However, with today’s technology having moved way past BI’s introductory stigma, enterprise BI is another animal entirely. Certainly reporting is part of the equation, but there are key differences between
Read More...As many in the PeopleSoft world may or may not know, Oracle is on the verge of releasing PeopleTools 8.5 this year. This release is significant because of some of the advances that have been incorporated into it. Many of the enhancements are going to greatly improve the end-user experience, and rumor has it that
Read More...I keep going back to Robert Scoble’s essay about what businesses can learn from Zappos, especially from management, ethics and culture standpoints. Scoble was lucky enough to spend some time inside the company, including a good discussion with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. This admittedly long post will eventually lead to what gives a company its
Read More...These days, almost all ‘traditional’ advertising equates to voluntary contributions to the ocean of ad noise out there that nobody pays attention to. It’s boring, wordsmithed into the ground, filed so that every possible catchy edge has been worn into dust. It’s been reviewed by legal and boundary-cased so that no possible negative impression can
Read More...Something we discuss all the time when talking to our prospects and clients, as consultants often find themselves facing myriad information: I learned back in the days when I was consulting that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, “What are the two
Read More...You can’t step inside an RSS reader or Twitter today without reading about the Oracle/Sun acquisition, so I’ll assume for a moment that most everyone knows that Oracle plans to buy Sun for $7.4B or $9.50 per share in cash. I’ll also assume that everyone has heard Ellison’s definite (and somewhat foreboding, especially if you’re
Read More...