Ctrl – Alt – Social
In the tech world in which everything is recycled, retooled, and spit out like un-digestible gristle, one often comes across the phrases such as groupware is “dead” or “email is dead.” Oddly enough these are euphemisms or perhaps more correctly the opposite: dysphemisms – the substitution of a disagreeable word…
Europe Sets Course for Cloud
There’s a perception that cloud computing has become a “mature” technology, a perception shared by few but anticipated by most everyone else with the exception of those trying to preserve their self-interests. I don’t blame them – each person inherently protects self-interests. They’re wrong though. Cloud is not mature. It is evolving. The paradox is […]
Number 9 Dreamforce
For a Beatles’ fan and a fan particularly of John Lennon, the number 9 has an important meaning. It has enough meaning Lennon wrote a few songs referencing it, including Number 9 Dream. Perhaps I like Number 9 Dream because it seems to be, quite literally, calling my name on the background vocal track. But […]
Cezanne’s Apple
Cezanne wrote once “With an Apple, I will astonish Paris.” Cezanne at the time was a notoriously sophisticated and gifted walking set of contradictions. He loved everything he hated and hated everything he loved. He approached painting with scalpel-like precision but with a scalpel to canvas nonetheless. He wanted the world to bleed – and […]
Organized Robbery
We’re at a time of rebellion against maintenance fees, which now include the elements of insurance, extortion, declining systems, and of course refactoring all of which add to the costs of any implementation. Add that into the actual implementation itself, and one is left with whopping fees and eventually ineffective…
Dreamforce: Decade of Inspiration
I was at the first Dreamforce. It was in a hotel at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco and it attracted 500 people and perhaps another 200 employees — roughly 2/3 of the entire company. The big announcements were related to sales force automation, but the company also announced custom tabs and some nifty […]
Does Twitter (Really) Make you Smarter?
When 95 percent of college students use social media tools, perhaps excessively, it seems almost impossible to isolate a study that tries to answer the question “does social media make you smarter.” This is an awkward and irrelevant question to ask and anyone who has been born since the industrial revolution but before Facebook was […]
Software is Roadkill
The fastest way to become roadkill to venture capitalists is to become a software company. Software may not be inherently evil (it has created wealth for many people that is in proportion to the pain it has provided to many customers). Software and specifically on-premise enterprise software, however, is clearly…
A debate with the Doctor of Failure
Failure happens. There are many issues and stakeholders in any technology implementation process and any of them adds complexity that can lead to failure. The question is how much technology, the DNA of the technology vendor, and other stakeholders contributes to the failure. Is it always a project management issue…
Why? Why? Facebook Mail
#FacebookMail? The basic childhood question is Why? Parents patiently answer with well thought-out questions only to be met with another "why?" Finally they give up and say Why Not? This of course haunts the parents for the rest of their lives. So when Facebook launches its email and people freak…
Are Analysts the New Media?
Technology media was further disrupted this morning when a seemingly minor announcement rocked the media world. The minor part is this – a new analyst firm was launched today. The disruptive part is that the assemblage of key influencers into one organization that is not advertiser driven. The new firm…
Clouds and my Coffee
Sydney is an amazing city, much like most Western large cities in many ways and much different too. The CloudBlog team decided to check on how Sydney perceives cloud computing – extremely well it seems. Within a half dozen meetings and one keynote from CloudBlogger Peter Coffee it…
From Microsoft Monolith to Monopoly to Monocellular – as in Brand
Just two weeks ago when Microsoft’s brand had at least some value, the company launched its renewed efforts into mobile computing, namely Windows Mobile 7. No – wait, I think it’s just Windows Phone 7. Microsoft dropped “Mobile” in more ways than one, though I’m sure the irony is lost on them. I don’t know, […]
Augmented Reality. Will it ever become a part of the marketing technology mix?
There was a lot of buzz about new visualization techniques back in 2009. About a year ago, Mashable posted on an Apple patent called Apple ID: [it] recognizes an object based on visuals (through the iPhone’s camera), a RFID reader or through GPS, and then fetches the data from related databases. I like to imagine […]
