October, 2008

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10
Oct 08

Challenge the Strategy, Not the Tactics

It seems that too many people believe what made you successful in the past, with some fine tuning applied, will continue to make you successful in the future. As you know, I emphatically disagree with that premises.

For your latest work assignment in front of you, Seth Godin suggests Thinking bigger:

[...] That’s where the win lies, when you reinvent.

The bigger point is that none of us are doing enough to challenge the assignment. Every day, I spend at least an hour of my time looking at my work and what I’ve chosen to do next and wonder, “is this big enough?”

 

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8
Oct 08

Afraid of a Good Idea

Two thoughts that seem to fit together:

It’s easy to be against something … that you’re afraid of. And it’s easy to be afraid of something that you don’t understand. [via Seth Godin]

and

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. [Daniel Davies via Paul Krugman via Daring Fireball]

Instead of acting on a Good Idea, I find there is often opposition, prejudices and misunderstandings.

Occasionally an idea will be acted on, but only after a protracted waiting period – where the misunderstandings are cleared up, the prejudices are corrected. This can be days, months, and regularly – years. So, like a balanced free market:

The greatest friend of truth is time  -Charles Caleb Colton

But is waiting the only way to get a idea confirmed as good? How do you make the time go faster? Revving up a marketing machine with brochures, power points, and celebrity endorsements doesn’t seem right. How do you accelerate the time between having a good idea and having it recognized and acted on?

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6
Oct 08

Server as a Service

In addition to Sun Microsystem’s MySQL, Oracle is now available through Amazon’s Web Services. One has to wonder why you would ever buy a physical database server again. This takes SaaS to a whole new level: Instead of Software as a Service, this is Server as a Service. One of the listed benefits:

Quickly and easily add computing capacity as your requirements change. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as you need.

I know it’s geeky, and I’ve probably lost most of my readers already (thanks for getting this far!), but doesn’t that sound really really nice?

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4
Oct 08

The Language Problem

Matt at Newsless.org writes:

Call it the 1991 Problem. We’re still stuck with the language of 1991 while discussing the technologies of 2008.

He makes a good argument about how calling Wikipedia only an “encyclopedia” really short changes the site. It is a short, interesting read. I might broaden it beyond language and say it is an experience issue too.

How many good technologies have you seen marginalized simply because the language wasn’t there to describe their value well?

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2
Oct 08

The Present and the Possible

Net Objectives posts:

There is a gap between what is possible and what is present – what is done – in the software industry. How much time and effort is wasted, how much re-inventing and re-discovery is done because we don’t always understand the hard won insights from the past about what is required to create quality, sustainable product? How many companies have not realized the success of process improvements, like Agile, because they have not really understood its principles?

This gap, and the pain and waste it causes, is frustrating. Closing the gap involves a little re-orientation, becoming intentional to learn and try and adjust, to improve continually. To become more professional.

Amen I say.

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