Until 8 months ago, I don’t think I’d ever heard the term “bot” or “bots” used in any context other than search engine crawlers or FrontPage technology <shudder/>. But beginning three boot camps ago, someone asked me, “how do we license bots?” – and I’ve been asked this question at both boot camps since, and 3 more times in addition during that timeframe. Outside of licensing Office for use in a server application (step 1: don’t do that!), this is…
Stop for a second and think about everything you subscribe to. These are things that you pay monthly or annually for, that if you didn’t pay for, some service would discontinue. The list probably includes everything from utilities to reading material, and most likely a streaming or media service like Netflix or Hulu, or a subscription to Amazon Prime, Xbox Live or iTunes Match. I’ve been noticing a tendency for seemingly everything to move towards subscriptions. Frankly, it irritates me…
A few weeks ago on Twitter, I said something about Apple, and someone replied back something akin to, “Apple is only one release away from irrelevance.” Ah, but you see… we all are. In terms of sustainability, if you believe “we get this version released, and we win”, you lose. Whether you have competitors today, or you have a market that is principally yours, if there is enough opportunity for you, there’s enough appeal for someone else to enter it…
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….
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…
Few phrases would strike fear into the hearts of my co-workers in Austin faster than “when I worked at Microsoft”. I’ve since learned to keep my stories to myself a bit more. But recently I’ve been contemplating not what I learned at Microsoft, but instead what I’ve learned since. At Microsoft, I was a horrible writer. I’ll be honest. I hated writing specs. Considering I was a Program Manager (PM), I think that was a bad thing (in hindsight). But…