Over on TechRepublic a place I first started gathering little bits of information that helped escalate my career, they guy have been locating and pulling apart all sorts of things. One they recently dug up is a TRS-80 color 2. My very first computer, These little suckers where pretty damn expensive as far as thing went, but they were a lot of fun. Playing games, trying to program and learning BASIC and advanced programming using Peek and Poke. I was a young apprentice for Telecom, what is now Telstra in Australia. I guess the writing was on the wall then for what i might end up doing in the future

Go have a look. http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-10877_11-185376-1.html

See ya round

Peter

Innovative: characterised by, tending to, or introducing innovations

Innovations

1 : the introduction of something new

2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty

Many think that Microsoft is an innovative company, depending on how you read the meaning of innovative, they are probably not, remember nearly all Microsoft’s key products are from somewhere else prior to MS buying them and then enhancing them.

They have become old and slow, not as agile as they were in beating off all OS pretenders in the Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 days, remember Apple had a superior GUI back then and it probably still is.

They then tried to counter opposition companies with add ons to the OS Media Player to kill Real Player, Internet Explorer to kill Netscape. What they ended up with was a very poor product and it was always going to be that way. They could not be everything to everyone, but they sure tried and to some extent they succeeded. That success might now be there undoing. MS Office is big, really big and yes it can do some great things, yet I write both for a living and for study and I think even in my day i barely scratch many of the features it has so really it is bloated, and due to the shoddy design of the application we can get a $50 lite version, although that might be coming.

They were slow to respond to the spam problems that plagued Hotmail for some time, which yes they have fixed meanwhile Yahoo had fiked theirs months before.

Google and then Yahoo started dishing out the space and then Microsoft finally followed, yep innovative

Bill said lets do Microsoft Network the ubiquitous MSN, well that was a raging success and no it wasn’t original, Compuserve and AOL had done it for years before, hell I had a Compuserve account when Windows 1 was but a twinkle in Bills eye.

So if you take off the rose coloured glasses and look a bit harder then you see Microsoft is not in my opinion an innovative company. They have also blundered badly with other products in the marketplace entirely With MSN if I recall correctly Bill said something along the lines of “The Internet? We are not interested in it”, basically turning the corporate back on that, but soon after Windows 95 was out and MSN died becasue people got for free what Bill wanted then to pay for, Microsoft changed directions hastily.

So now to today, somewhere they really lost the plot, probably after the launch of XP which had proved to be a good system in the wash up, I think they started to believe some of there own marketing and thought they truly led the industry so they could tell others where things were at. They missed again and found themselves with there current “dog” called Vista.

I dont have to tell you about Vista, but don’t expect anything very exciting from MS with the next release, as they have to try and claw back from their blunder and Apple and Linux are nipping at their heals. A second failed Windows and MS will have a major problem on their hands as Corporate is already branching out to Linux and Apple, It will only get worse if MS don’t deliver their next one, It will have to be simpler, 7 versions was ridiculous, back to XP 2 versions or maybe three, Light, Standard and Extreme. Light will be fast without add ons, no browser, media player, they are going to have to go back and compete for the business on this one oh and no DRM, it is a dead duck, it just needs someone to finally shoot it and MS can do that by delivering the Light OS without it.Medium can contain a set of tools like browser, Windows live Gizmos, bundled in however not embedded, so if someone wants to uninstall something they can and it uninstalls. This will be a hard pill fro MS to swallow however, they need to reduce the attack surface of their OS and that will help.

Well I have said my piece

Lets see what MS delivers, will it be sinner or saint

See ya round

Peter

I was looking for some information today and was googling along when I came across an article which had a comment attached that mentioned that there was a correlation between the number of pirates and carbon emissions. Yep it tweaked my interest. These guys have done there homework and certainly have a foolproof methodology to show the linkage.

Apparently there is little problem with carbon emissions in Somalia which has one of the highest groupings of pirates anywhere in the world.

Anyway if you are looking at killing some time and want to have a look go to “Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster”

See ya round

Peter

It would seem that Lindsay Tanner is following in the footsteps of many politicians before him and it seems we still have not got a member of parliament that gets IT. Previously we had the program of massive projects which delivered all of the government IT into the hands of overseas companies who had the financial clout to carry the risk. What did it deliver to the taxpayer a number of fiascos and a lot of money went in effect offshore. Then some realisation that the large collective units where hindering the delivery as they were not flexible enough. Now we have a centralised procurement service, that should produce a nice little bottleneck further reducing the capabilities of delivery in Canberra.

Mr Tanner what government needs is a strong CIO’s office which will provide overarching direction for the delivery of IT services, They need to deliver clear guidelines about technologies to utilise and Australian companies should be weighted with a preference. The vendor of supply is of no consequence and each department should now be able to take its own choices. If Mr Tanner your procurement offices purpose is to provide a single vendor for a product such as databases or middleware across the whole of government then you are travelling to failure and you have doomed the Australian IT sector to bit players in the Federal government. The current skills shortage is hampering delivery of IT in Canberra, that will remain for the foreseeable future, however, a centralised office will do little to improve that. A strong CIO’s office should do better.

Good luck Lindsay it sounds like you might need it

See ya round

I had a read of a blog and it made me think that there was a few options that could have been considered in this, for one this is a win lose situation and as Toni rightly points out the position she appeared to take is a win-lose and she lost. This has many ramifications, loss of face in some cultures, loss of respect by fellow employees, in many western companies. I think she got to here from missing some crucial part of the idea that the person proposing the idea was trying to make. She has failed to find the third way, the better idea than either had in the first place.

Some things to consider here are did she go to hard in promoting her idea without adequately understanding the colleagues idea, leaving herself no place but to either win or lose. Was she favouring a solution due to some personal bias, I have never met Toni so I can only surmise as to what she may have been doing. She likely very unconsciously placed herself in the position she found herself in, she like many others never set out to loose the battle, but maybe that was the problem in that she decided she had to battle to win it.

Active listening is a crucial part of identify places to meld the ideas and it is possible that she failed to do more active listening to work towards the win-win which is much better than compromise. With active listening and affirmation of understanding of the other persons position the situation might have been avoided and, not lead to the win-lose that occurred.

Win-win when you are successful will make you very powerful as you will gain a lot of respect in a well thinking organisation, I have seen cases of where this sort of behaviour was considered a threat by managers and, people were gotten rid of as they threatened their positions simply by the managers insecuritry and the success cerated by the well negotiated win-win.

Apologies Toni for picking on you, but your article left a great place to try and write a piece on

See ya round

Peter