Tag: business

IT Consumerization

“consumerization” was obvious years ago when you would use your private IT resources to get shit done because the lumbering IT department could not.

Few people would disagree that traditional enterprise IT is complicated. And expensive. And unnecessarily complex. Sure, it tries to solve complex problems. But is that always the most effective thing to do? Maybe it would be more rational to first solve the simpler problems in a more cost-effective and user-friendly way. Of course, IT professionals are perfectionists. But they tend to optimize the wrong dimensions. Consumers behave differently, because they are willing to forgo functional perfection in exchange for simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

AWS savings

Depending on my comfort level with EC2’s reliability, we may not even need a failover server as we have now. But just assuming we were comparing apples to apples and we assumed that Mass Events Labs needs 2 servers, the total annual cost is $1752. Today, our annual cost for 2 servers is $8400.

about time, too. there are far too many small, incompetent hosters out there

Craigslist Ambition

dissects the visual cleverness of craigslist (and how it is a yahoo-sized business in the making)

Now Craig’s lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to accurately classify their spam. Into 160 categories. Holy Toledo Jacob Nielsen. You can’t have a pulldown with 160 things in it. 50% of your users wouldn’t get a pulldown with 3 things in it right. Ah, but it’s not a pull-down. 50% of the entire homepage is a giant selector devoted to classifying posts.

Ruthless enough for a startup?

lots of successful startups started with shady practices

There seem to be some dismal lessons in these stories. It appears the ideal startup will give away something that used to cost money for free (preferably copyright material and porn), use other people’s content and resources, appeal to the baser human instincts (especially vanity and sex), and spam massive e-mail lists at launch.

151% productivity

Big Consulting Company calls up Big Oil Company. “Hey, do you guys need help being more productive developing software?”

Big Oil Company says, “Yeah, sure, whatever, we’ll buy anything,” and they buy a $1M software productivity consulting deal.

The consulting company comes on site, measures a bunch of bogus things like Lines of Code Per Developer, or, if they’re really fancy shmancy, Number of Function Points Per Programmer Per Day. Then they tell the oil company, “Gosh, you’re only getting 73.844% productivity. Pay us another $2M and we’ll double your productivity.”

Oil company pays the $2m.

Consulting company comes in, gets all the programmers in a room, tells them all about Function Points and stuff, and how productivity is REALLY IMPORTANT.

Programmers remember that scene from Office Space where Bob and Bob, the consultants, recommended all the people to get fired.

Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big waste of time, prone to bugs, does nothing, but each file you touch adds a function point. W00t!

Consulting company comes back, measures again, and lo and behold, with all the round trips through XML the function point count is up drastically. Consultant announces that Oil Company is now at 151.29% productivity. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

DRM is dead

The major 4 music labels today are “fucked”. Digital music pricing has been a scam where the consumer pays for manufacturing, distribution, and does all the work – and still has to pay more. Labels should outsource everything except finance and licensing. But he’s also optimistic that for almost everyone else – indie labels, musicians, songwriters and budding entrepreneurs – as well as network providers – the future’s going to be pretty bright. The Big 4 know that the DRM era is nearly over – and within 2 or 3 years, “most countries” in the world will have a blanket licensing regime where we exchange music freely, for a couple of quid a month.

insights into the future of music sales

Telepresence

Pretty impressive

2007-11-02: Nice article about the organizational structure at cisco, and how they paid for their collaboration tools by cutting travel budgets

“This will shock you. The other day I started the morning with my top staff in India. Then I went to Japan and a meeting with Fujitsu, then on to Cleveland, then London and a meeting with BT. The whole trip took only 3.5 hours, and I was far more effective in the calls.” The reason: Chambers was traveling, of course, over Cisco’s latest gee-whiz product: telepresence, a high-def, life-sized, Internet-based communications system that is to traditional video-conferencing what the latest big-screen surround-sound plasma extravaganza would be to Grandma’s black-and-white set with rabbit ears. “When I asked the team to design this, I said, ‘Make it like Star Trek. You know, Beam me up, Scotty.'”

2008-05-28: Holy crap indeed.

The ‘Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience’ was an ambitious collaboration between Cisco and Musion Systems. Musion seamlessly integrated their 3D holographic display technology with Cisco’s TelePresence’s system to create the world’s first real time virtual presentation.

2023-03-03: This whole area has not developed as quickly as hoped. Perhaps because regular video is good enough? Or because most people haven’t even tried video pre-pandemic. Anyway, here’s a late 2022 state of Google Starline. The person in charge of this space has since left, pointing to an AR / VR winter to come.