management
March 9, 2010 6:43:15.767
Apparently, I've been living in the future since 1993: That's when I started woking out of my home office, using the net to stay in contact with the rest of the company. Back then it was dialup and email (pretty much only email) - now it's irc, various IM systems, and social networks. Either way though, I've been in the "virtual office" for a long time. Video chat one on one is now feasible (along with screen sharing) with tools like skype and iChat; I suspect that having multiple people on a video call will start being feasible without the expensive hookups soon.
What made me think about this? Dvorak writing about what print publishers should have done (and should still do):
With a single layer of editorial control, establish a virtual office environment with telecommuting, teleconferencing, and a VPN ring for the employees who can work from anywhere in the world.
That pretty much applies to anyone who's not doing collective manual labor, I think. More and more, work is going to get distributed. Management theory will have to do a lot of catching up.
posted by James Robertson
management
February 10, 2010 19:04:33.011
This is why I was never all that worried about Microsoft as a "dangerous monoploy":
Getting back to Dick Brass's criticism of Microsoft, I find it fascinating that top Microsoft executives were aware almost immediately of the threat the iTunes Music Store posed to the whole Windows Media ecosystem, but Microsoft was still unable to stop it. This matches what I've seen time and time again in my last 10 years following the company.
The problem is simple: companies as big and diverse as Microsoft tend to generate self destructive internal politics - and that eventually brings them to a near standstill. It happened to IBM back in the 80's, and now MS has hit the same wall. I expect that MS will be healthier and nimbler in a few years - but it'll be painful for them to get from here to there.
Technorati Tags:
microsoft, apple
posted by James Robertson
management
January 30, 2010 11:40:29.541
Is MacMillan engaged in some kind of hardball with online vendors? Venture Beat noticed that they've disappeared from Amazon's catalog:
Go to Amazon.com. Search for any publication by Macmillan, one of the world's largest publishing firms. The Prince of Silicon Valley, perhaps, or Sarah's Key. Or last year's huge #1 bestseller The Gathering Storm.
No details, and everyone seems to be staying quiet - sounds like one of those periodic royalty rate battles to me...
Technorati Tags:
books
posted by James Robertson
management
January 25, 2010 22:30:46.536
Jonathan "We'll Make it Up in Volume" Schwartz, one of the dumbest CEOs ever to darken the stage of a major company (and I say that after seeing Bill Lyons close up), is finally resigning. Sadly for Sun employees, it's happening a decade or so before he should have left the company. Yes, he's only been CEO since 2006 - but the only thing he seems to have been good at is lining his own pockets. I pity the next outfit he lands in, and recommend a strong course of shorting....
Technorati Tags:
stupidity
posted by James Robertson
management
January 9, 2010 8:29:28.829
Google is learning that selling a product directly brings with it some obligations: support:
But Google is selling the phone directly to end-users. That means many users are turning to it first, and the search giant doesn't have the kind of customer support that mobile-phone users are accustomed to. Google appears to be only accepting e-mail customer queries, to which it pledges to reply in one to two days -- far too long, say most people who are complaining online.
This all reminds me of something that happened in the Smalltalk space years ago. There was an enterprise solution for a particular niche that was being sold as a "consulting solution" - meaning, when you bought the software, you bought a few consultants (at cost) to install it, tweak it, and get it running in your environment. It was a small but lucrative business, and one of the larger consulting outfits decided that they wanted to jump into the space - so they bought the software. They didn't buy the smaller firm outright though, so they got none of the expertise. They decided that they wanted to just "put the software in a box" and sell it as a regular product.
That's when they learned that vendors have things like support staffs, 800 call in lines, dedicated email support (this was long before online forums popped up). I recall a bunch of us at ParcPlace (that's how long ago this was) snickering at all of this, because, working for a vendor, this was all pretty obvious to us.
Fast forward to today, and Google is having the same lesson pounded into it. They want to get by with the level of email support they've been offering for things like Google Reader. The services they've offered to the public in the past have been free, so having slow turn around email has been sufficient. When you start selling a real product, for real money, that people wll naturally need some level of support on - the rules all change.
I wonder how Google will deal with this: they can either stop selling direct, or they can add a real support group. It should be fun to watch...
Technorati Tags:
sales model, customer support
posted by James Robertson
management
January 7, 2010 10:27:00.785
I completely agree with the rant David Meerman Scott let loose here on ROI and social media/web marketing. A lot of people ask for that, but honestly: what's the ROI on things like a print ad, or a TV ad, or a radio spot? There's no good way to track that, and there never has been - but since these methods are well known, they are comfortable.
I have no idea what the ROI is of the Smalltalk channels I've set up on YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook - but I know that they generate interest from people who wouldn't necessarily have found Smalltalk if all we had was our own website.
All you can do is plug away, put out material your target audience will think is interesting, and give it time to work. Expecting a spreadsheet number under ROI is just fooling yourself.
Technorati Tags:
marketing, pr
posted by James Robertson
management
January 5, 2010 14:19:21.159
I think Tim Bray hits this one on the head, talking about the difference between typical small shop/open source efforts and their enterprise cousins:
It's like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years. Same for each subsequent release cycle. Teams are small. Progress is iterative. No oceans are boiled, no monster requirements documents written.
I've seen this up close with website launches. I watched a project take over 2 years to go from initial concept to deployment once. Ten days ago, I decided to launch this blog and just did it. Now, this blog is hardly akin to an enterprise system, but, take it back to when I launched my Cincom blog in 2002 - that was 4 classes sitting on an underpowered server. The output was pretty ugly, and it didn't scale worth a darn, but - and here's the crucial point - it was live.
I didn't ask for (or get) permission, I just went ahead and ran. Over time, I had to make changes, but I did those iteratively as they were needed. I'm still doing that; I patched a bug in this blog and the corporate one just this morning. The key, I think, is to take the Nike line seriously: just do it.
Technorati Tags:
enterprisey, productivity
posted by James Robertson
management
January 2, 2010 14:22:30.316
Now that I'm running with a VPS setup, I'm wondering: why should a company run its own servers? Unless you're in the hosting business, there's really no point. Look at the prices for services like Slicehost or ArpNetworks, for instance - there's no way that running your own hardware is cheaper than that, when you count in all of the costs (labor, machine acquisition, backups, etc). Just point your domain at the VPS level of service you need and go - over the next few years, the companies that do that are going to save a ton of money compared to the ones that don't.
If you're running your own data center now, and you aren't in the hosting business, you're probably wasting money...
Technorati Tags:
data center, vps, hosting
posted by James Robertson
