Twitter was an interesting phenomenon last week - an amazing number of blog posts, news stories, and mashups. Curiosity got the best of me; I tried it myself - and I still don't get what the attraction or the applicability is ... Instant Messaging for your Every Move Simply put, Twitter lets you broadcast IMs to anyone who cares to listen. Since the messages are short, the content is often amazingly trite - like the typical IM exchange, a bit…
Open Source Insights on Enterprise Software Business Models
A recent Slashdot posting pointed to a presentation from EclipseCon earlier this month, given by Brent Williams, an equity research analyst who used to be in the software business. A few things really caught my eye … Take some time to flip through the original presentation; there are some interesting insights about the nature of the enterprise software industry (the SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft crowd). Three of the lightbulbs that went off in my mind ... (Slide 10) [By folding…
Continuing Education Pareto Principle (50/30/20)
(okay, I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, just wanted to expound on the idea ...) Everyone's heard of Pareto's wonderful 80/20 rule. I've identified a variant of that rule that applies to all sorts of "continuing education" - like presentations at a trade conference, or skills training for new software packages. It really struck me when I was in grad school, slogging through Accounting and Business Law and marvelling at the range of difficulty in the two subjects.…
Open Source as bargaining chip – driving business value of IT
I had a fun time this week proposing an open source alternative for an aging component of our EAI infrastructure. The reaction was so classic - the instant some IT folks saw the words "open source" in large type on the piece of paper, they smiled, crossed their arms, and tut-tutted the idea away. Oh, I heard all the classic shoot-down arguments ... "... critical piece of our day to day business transactions ..." "... I rarely need to call,…
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry
(attrib) I was in a meeting yesterday - first time with this particular group of folks, all at same time, on this topic, although I had already established a working relationship with all. Anyway, subject matter was one that most of them had talked about at length over the past few weeks, but I was a new addition to the mix. Suffice it to say, I didn't have too much to add to the conversation, not until the very end…