Earlier today, this tweet showed up in my Twitter timeline. It leads with the text: “Quality to blame for declining news audiences, study suggests” I retweeted it, and then commented, “The increased cost for news content, and the decreasing amount of truly unique content, show why people abandon news outlets.” At first, I thought this applied just to news content. But no, it applies to many things in our life today; however news exemplifies it in a very unique way….
It’s with a fair amount of disappointment (disbelief?) that I read Bruce Ramsey’s article about Initiative 522 (Washington’s GMO labeling proposition) in the Seattle Times. My belief, after reading this piece, is that Mr. Ramsey should generally refrain from writing when his familiarity with the topic at hand leads him to include the disclaimer “I am a novice”, as he did with the statement early in this article, “I am a novice on genetically modified organisms”. There are three modalities…
“Smart”. Many device and appliance manufacturers toss that word around like they know what it means. An app platform on a TV? Voila! It’s a “Smart TV” An LCD screen and/or an app platform on a refrigerator, washer or dryer? Voila! It’s a “Smart Appliance”. You go ahead and keep using that word, manufacturers. Just understand that it doesn’t mean what you think it means. You’re turning it into a meaningless modifier, like “green”, “natural”, or one of my favorites,…
I ran across a piece yesterday discussing one hospital’s lack of success with iPads and BYOD. My curiosity piqued, I examined the piece looking for where the project failed. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, it seemed that it fell apart not on the iPad, and not with their legacy application, but in the symphony (or more realistically the cacaphony) of the two together. I can’t be certain that the hospital’s solution is using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or Remote Desktop (RD,…
This blog post is in response to the TechCrunch piece entitled Get Ready To Lose Your Job. For my entire life, my father was a physician (until he retired). He had to subscribe to medical journals and take courses to keep his skills up to snuff, but medicine, and his specialty, did not evolve to such a form that his career has been replaced. That said, his specialty (gastroenterology) now has some amazing tools at their disposal that can obviate…
When you start a new job, there’s only one you. You don’t get a new identity just because you started at a new company. You have the same Social Security number, you have the same fingerprints, same birthdate, same home town. You get a collection of credentials that give you access to company resources, but you don’t really get a new “identity”. In fact, pretty much the only time you get a completely new identity is if you enter the…
At an annual Microsoft company meeting early in my Microsoft career (likely around 1999), Steve Ballmer interrupted the lively flow of the event to read a few letters that had been sent to him from executives around the world. As I recall, Microsoft technology was not working perfectly for these customers, and they weren’t happy. After he read the letters, Steve broke into a speech about “delighting the customer” – a mantra he adopted for some time, and I continue to use to this…
Over the past six years, as the iPhone, then iPad, and similar devices have caused a ripple within the technology sector, the industry and pundits have struggled to define what these devices are. From the beginning, they were always classified as “content consumption devices”. But this was a misnomer then, and it’s definitely wrong today. Whether we’re talking about Apple’s devices, Android phones or tablets, Blackberry’s new phones, or devices running Windows 8/RT and Windows Phone, calling them content consumption…
In 1992, I got my first Windows PC. For more than 20 years, Microsoft has been a central force in my life, and fundamentally shaped my career. From the time I joined in 1997 until I left in 2004, Microsoft would teach me lessons, frustrate me, make me happy, make me sad – and finally embolden me to leave the nest. Though I left frustrated and bitter as Longhorn was struggling and stumbling – eventually to become the much maligned Windows Vista, I…
One of the most common questions I get asked – by our subscribers, by press, by my friends, by my family… by lots of people, is: “What’s the difference between Office 2013 and Office 365?” This is usually followed by the person meekly (unnecessarily) stating that they feel bad because they don’t get it. Don’t. Don’t feel bad. Though Microsoft is getting better, the branding and packaging isn’t easy for people to digest (complex packaging and licensing is the cellulose…