3 Dot Holiday…

…The case for common sense in business… A colleague had this recent e-mail exchange with an outside vendor on setting up a date for a meeting:
Colleague: Please propose some times for a meeting.
Vendor: OK, how about Monday July6 at 10am, or Tue July 7 at 9am?
Colleague: Great, Monday at 10am work great.
Vendor: Not sure what you mean.  Please pick one of the times I suggested.
Colleague: That’s what I did.  Monday 7/6 at 10am.
Vendor: Not sure what you are referring to.  Please let me know what day and time works for you.
(this went on for a couple of other e-mails…)
Colleague: OK.  Please schedule Monday, July 6th at 10am for our meeting.
Vendor: Great.  Thanks and talk to you then.

Reminds me of the recent Liz Becton blow up.  He showed far greater restraint than I think I could’ve mustered… Communication appears to be a lost art…

…So far Blink continues to be a book that simply packages up a group of so-so analogies just to try to prove a point… Nothing earth shattering…

…4th of July holiday in the U.S. this weekend… Go out of your way to thank a veteran… Happy 4th!

3 Dot Friday…

Started reading Blink the other day… Through the first 4 chapters and still waiting for this “eureka”moment to hit… I get it that we can make very accurate decisions without 12 months of analysis… But still waiting for something other than, what to this point, are somewhat weak analogies…  Should I keep reading, or is it more of the same throughout?

“Wow” is all I can say about the Social/Twitter generated campaign intended to get MSFT to change from using Word in Outlook… Prior to the onset of Social media was there any way to get a behemoth like the Redmond giant to react to user’s requests?  Send an e-mail through the “contact us” link… call in to customer service… sign an online petition… Send feedback via the “tell MSFT” button… Let me know that last time any of those options got a response.  Despite MSFT sticking to their guns on Word/Outlook, they responded in a big way… showing the power that Social media can have from a business standpoint…

Bing keeps surprising me… Saw a music documentary the other day on Fuse with some bands at Abbey Road… I didn’t know of the band they were showing but typed some of the lyrics into Bing… Came back with direct links to the band, but also had thumbnails of various videos there… and when you mouse over the videos, they actuall play the song… If Google does this already, it certainly hasn’t been that clear in the past…

This certainly has been the week or two of the “product release” in PLM… Siemens with Teamcenter and Tecnomatix… as well as Oracle and Dassault… with PTC doing so last week… No one is sitting still… Good.

Cloud(y) Skies…

Interesting in that a previous discussion I had on cloud computing availability ties directly to one particular problem with it.  Apparently a lightening strike knocked out Amazon’s cloud services (Elastic Compute Cloud).  The system was down for about 7 hours.  7 hours?  That might seem inconsequential, but to a manufacturer… can you afford to shut down access for 7 hours?  Software providers? Are you OK if you lose access for 7 hours?

Cloud computing is still in its early stages (crawl before walking?).  But with similar outages to google’s gmail and salesforce.com, the vulnerabilities in cloud computing should be very evident at this time.  Coupled with cost of ownership issues, this is not a move anyone should make without extreme due diligence.

Autonomous Driving?

I have hoped that some day, in my lifetime, we will have the ability for cars to “drive themselves”.  We’re getting closer.  VW/Stanford/Sun all collaborating together.

Bing… and its Daily “Views”

Google has always had some fun with its name on various days of importance (Earth Day, Christmas, etc.).  Most  are relevant and amusing.    Bing has taken it a step further.  Images that relate to the actual day.  Today (image of Omaha Beach)… D Day anniversary… of some of the greatest American heroes…  Google on the other hand is celebrating Tetris today with an anniversary logo.

My Decreas… (I mean) Increasing Microsoft Footprint

Going through a couple of old drafts for this blog I noticed one in particular titled “My Decreasing Microsoft Footprint”.  I had to chuckle at that one (from around a year ago) based on my technology footprint today.  One year ago, I was testing Google Docs, listening to my iPod, utilizing Evernote, Google search etc.  Today?  Different story… Google Docs never really hooked me, I transitioned to Zune software a few months ago and bought a Zune 30g player, have become a huge proponent of Microsoft OneNote, and managing multiple project with MS Project.  That is pretty much a 180 from 365 days ago.

Why make the change?  Google Docs never really hooked me.  There were a fair number of nice/unique features, but I just couldn’t make the full switch.  As for the iPod, I won that in some raffle, so I don’t feel too bad about filing that one away to the back of the drawer.  I can’t place my finger on the core reason I never became an iPod fan like the rest of the world.  I do know I disliked the technology restrictions iTunes placed on music files. Maybe a lot of that has changed, but it’s too late now.  Plus iTunes was never a game changer for me either.  I tried the Zune software and it had far better functionality.  A colleague would say that’s the contrarian in me.

Now that Microsoft has rolled out Bing, could Google search be far behind the iPod being “shuffled” to the bottom of my technology stack?  Bing was just made public today, so I’ve only used it a few times.  One search was on a band I’m going to be seeing in a couple of weeks, O.A.R (ofarevolution – great band by the way).  In Bing, 10 of the first 10 results were related to the band.  In Google, 5 of the first 10 were on the band.  Certainly not a scientific analysis, but an intriguing start on perhaps Microsoft’s uptick in Search.

Could an Xbox be far behind in my future?  Nah, we just got the Wii a few months ago.  But, check back in a year, as Natal may have helped us make that change as well.