“I am not a lawyer, but from a developer perspective, the idea of copyrighted APIs does nothing but introduce friction and uncertainty into the very integration efforts the developers use APIs to accomplish,” said Jeffrey Hammond, a vice president at Forrester Research. “Devs will now need to worry about the potential for API lock-in via copyright, as alternative suppliers can’t produce like-for-like substitutions without risk. I don’t see how this is good for developers as it amps up the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about using third-party services.
Posts in "longform"
SysTrack 7.0 continues Lakeside's 'big-data' push in end-user management
My report on Lakeside Software’s new release is up. SysTrack is one of the veteran tools used in the end-user device management space and, if it can start adding in more mobile and tablet functionality, is well setup to profit from the churn in that area helping companies asses and then plan for how to migrate those fleets of aging PCs to new platforms.
Here’s the 451 take:
While end-user device management has been one of the sleepier areas of IT in recent years, the shift to mobile and the rise of non-Microsoft end-user devices looks to be creating enough churn in this space to make it more interesting.
Sun Grid, 2006
They ran it at network.com:
While the Sun Grid has been an interesting alternative for large companies who might want to offload some of their workloads–such as the Monte Carlo analysis used to assess risk in investment portfolios, which doesn’t have any account information in it and is therefore not a big risk for a financial institution to let out on the other side of its firewalls–the Sun Grid is not supposed to be the utility that they use, but rather the utility that is the prototype for the ones that Sun expects its partners to build.
Under Development- new podcast on software development
I have a new podcast up that’s on the ongoing topic of software development, big and small, tools and practices, news and theory, old and new. I’m co-hosting it with Bill Higgins. I’ve talked with Bill Higgins for many years, and occasionally we’ve done a podcast episode together. He was in town a few weeks back, and I thought we should start recording our conversations rather than have them disappear into the ether.
The research reported in this book … shows that in the cases of well-managed firms… . good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.
What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets. This book derives a set of rules, from carefully designed research and analysis of innovative successes and failures in the disk drive and other industries, that managers can use to judge when the widely accepted principles of good management should be followed and when alternative principles are appropriate.
From the intro to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, which remains an incredibly provocative read after all these years. (via chaddickerson)
Indeed! If you’re like me you were reading that thinking, “what new book is this?”
Nice overview of SolidFire
A good overview of what the software-heavy enterprise storage company does, including this assessment on market segment targeting:
SolidFire is very honest about not being built for the mid-market, as it feels that most of the middle of the market is headed toward cloud providers anyhow. Some may consider this a weakness, but I consider it a great strength. It has allowed SolidFire to focus on the pain points of organizations with large storage and storage performance needs, to do so with great scale, and to do so in a way that greatly reduces operational complexity and all the mental friction that usually accompanies that scale.
In the M&A world, you kiss a lot of frogs
I like this post on what filling up the deal-flow pipeline for VCs looks like. For example, a good bozo bit heuristic:
One of the reasons that a meeting doesn’t go well is that the founding team will say they expect $50 million in revenue in 5 years, but they have difficulty articulating how they’ll get to their first $1million.
Having worked on the buy side of the table (when I was in corporate strategy, working on M&A for software and cloud at Dell), there’s a similar story for what the exit looks like.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Yeah, this should definitely be in 3D.”
No, what he said was, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential, and aware of your inexperience. And that’s really tough. There are moments when you’ll have a different point of view because you’re a fresh set of eyes; because you don’t care how it’s been done before; because you’re sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you’re wrong, because you’re 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who’s been around the block.
Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit, Jon Lovett
It’s a good speech, no matter how old you are, for how to cope with working with other people which, we know, is hell.
Press Release Quotes
As an analyst, you often gets asked and paid to provide press release quotes (see some of mine here, though the I haven’t been good at saving all of them). Yes, press releases are still widely done and used. As someone who write-up the tech world happenings, I actually find them handy. Knowing how a vendor talks about themselves is actually important for analyst work, and the good press releases are more like media kits that line up all the relevant facts and links to other sources…and there’s all the bad stuff too, that’s still floating around.
PowerPoint and its infamous bullet points have been so abused in later years that the term “PowerPoint death” has become widespread, to the extent that some voices claim that PowerPoint is making us stupid or threatening our thinking and reasoning.
It’s understandable that as a reaction some very popular books published in the last couple of years about presentations focused on creating minimalist slides, with stunning visuals and little text. These decks might be appropriate for ballroom-style presentations before large audiences expecting to be motivated and/or entertained.
However, the vast majority of presentations in the business world are boardroom-style presentations in which these design guidelines have little application.
El Arte de Presentar’s review of Speaking PowerPoint. Indeed. I love that sentiment and always struggle to explain it to the children of Zen Presentation-think.