simondelliott

Get out of Enterprise Google!

If you combine the modern Californian way of talking and a bit of old school religion you get Googles moto

Dont Be Evil

Here are things you need to know about them

#1

What we see of google on the out side is just the tip of the ice burg. For every idea that gets turned into product they make a 1000 that stay on the inside … this is the innovation methodology

#2

The google Microsoft story is the same as the Microsoft IBM story, to find out what happens to google next read a book.

#3

Google are forcing telcos to behave as a dumb pipe but the Telco’s are not going down without a fight, their response  is IMS.
Both outcomes are anti consumer !

#4

Google are kicking arse in the enterprise space
Google Search appliances are flying off the shelves to the big companies,
For the Small companies the rate of signup to google apps is astonishing
In the education sector they will soon be standard ! especially in higher education. Google K2 is free for this sector and in UK market schools are switching from RM so fast that RM cannot keep up with demand to turn off their services.
The hand that rocks the cradle …

From my  perspective …

Googles applications are great,
how they run their company is great
their attitude to embracing odd balls and weirdos is great.

I just cant help thinking that Its a pathetic that they choose to waste their dreams, talent and creativity on such a pathetic goal as taking down Microsoft

Google if you are listening, another way of saying Don’t be evil, is to say love everyone, and that includes the small state run telcos in little socialist european countries, the developers who want to make a living selling software and microsoft.

Sort it out … you can do so much better that.

Top 10 companies that I would like to buy

Over the past year I have been keeping tabs companies that I have come across that I feel are really going places.
Here is my top ten list. To get on the list the company has to have a neat way of working or a great product. The company has to have a buisness model that will do well from the downturn and be in a position to benefit from acquisition or investment.

1. Sulake – the inventors of Habbo Hotel, and in my mind a great example of how to commercialize virtual worlds
2. emoderation – simply put … a great service. This company will police your online brand and protect it from damaging comments, contributors and content. This is precicly the kind of service that will grow and grow.
3. Intuit – a really simple online CRM system. This is the future of CRM within companies.
4. splash up – Faux Labs – this is to photoshop what google doc is to word. It is a great product and it works pretty well
5. ravelry – These guys are genius. They have jumped on to the expanding Knitting market and really made an awsome community product. There is alot that can be learned from how they have managed to scheive such a great product.
6. zoho – AdventNet – an online suite of applications including databases, CRM and many more standard corporate tools.
7. Madgex – awsome stuff on identity
8. Animoto – a leading innovation based company that is making some crazy little applications. Again its not their product that is as important as how they managed to make it.
9. Playfish – It took along time for me to decide to put this one into my top ten, It was only when I found myself and my son playing one of their games that I realized the power of their business model.
10. DimDim – a straight forward web conferencing solution

A rainy day for cloud puns

You IT and Computer professionals out there better watch out, your land is about to be invaded … by the amazonians.

On Tuesday I went to the Amazon Web Services startup event in the wonderful British Museum, for a five hour cloud computing pun festival. Here are some of the shocking attempts at humor that I recorded, more out of a perverse curiosity rather than recording the humor for posterity
Where do you go after the Planet … the Cloud
The Sky is the limit
You’ve got Clouded vision
Flying through the Clouds

The event was excellent, well run, great content and good bunch to network with. And because there was no alcohol I didn’t make a complete chump of myself. What I think Amazon have done that truly amazes me is how they have hooked up everything you need to make a media product with the existing amazon market place and sales tools needed to derive a revenue from it. Whats more they have codified all the processed necessary to make it happen.

There was an interesting audience make up of around 1000 in total, I counted down my row and worked out these percentages.

• 20% Suits
• 20% Business casual
• 10% Casual
• 2% Female
• 3% Bald
• 5% Flamboyant media types

Whenever I try and make, or launch something I dread the endless conversations with the operational team (Luddites more resistive to change than a glacier) to persuade them to commission a new box or worse still … change an old one. Well amazon have really thought about this, and have provided both a web UI and an API to do it. This means that I can get development code into production faster, and If I can do that … it means that I can either demonstrate that an innovation fails or derive revenue from it with a smaller expense (my precious time).

I do have a concern that this inevitable migration to large cloud providers will ultimately create an even larger dependency on a shrinking set of suppliers. In the end this is anti consumer, maybe its time for a state run or even UN owned cloud?

Note:
For those of you who are into sustainability, when someone asked the question “Will Amazon be using renewable energy sources for its servers” there was a big laugh and a stumped speaker.

order vs chaos & who will win the recession

Imagine two hypothetical companies,

Spick & Span
This company is organized to the maximum efficiency
Their data is in the most normalized form (no one piece of data is repeated)
Their process are perfectly efficient and no task is ever repeated.
They do have redundancy in their system but this again is perfectly sized.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

Splat&O’Messy
This company is not organized in any way nothing is written down
There are no job titles, roles and responsibilities or appraisals.
Their data is literally strewn around the office.
Loads of tasks are repeated, there are teams that are entire duplicates.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

If you place these two companies in a stable environment then Spick and Span will naturally be the most profitable where as Splat and O’Messy could make loads more profit if they were organized, but they are all so busy they never get round to it.
Now imagine moving these two companies into an unstable environment. Suddenly Splat and O’Messy comes into its own, its own instability allows it to react faster than Spick and Span, also because information and resource is strewn around the whole company, vast parts can be cut off or become inaccessible and it can still function.

Companies are made up of lots of different types of people, during stability the organizers (project manager types) bubble up and start to run the company. On your P&L this will look great, but you must be aware that every process they implement or orgchart they publish is a nail in the coffin of your agility. You must balance this type of person with the type of person who is not well rounded, and who sometimes goes against the flow.

In short, a little mess is a good thing,

PONG is more than just a game … its a way of life

Have you ever wanted to learn a new programming language?
Have you ever had to introduce a student to programming?
Have you ever had to teach a team how to code for a new platform?

Well if you have you will know that all these are difficult jobs, most seasoned professionals will have done them many many times.

Its difficult to learn these things straight from books, infact to get the real experience you neeed to professionally make software quickly when you dont have the skills inplace its downright impossible.

I have a standard approach … and too keep it all fun it involves pong
.

When Im setting up a team using a programming language that they dont know, I ask them to make pong, without using copy and paste.
Pong is a simplistic game that involves very few computing tricks. However it is also very challenging for the platform. You dont need a functional spec before you start codeing as everyone knows pong.

The ball has to travel quite quickly.
The bats have move slowly enough to make it a challenge
The AI of the computer opponent can not be too good.

If they can make a good imitation of the game on the platform then you know that have a good grasp of the programming language. It teaches them how to structure the code, the repository, the build procedure and also how to get the most from the platform. You would be surprised just how many platforms Ive worked on that simply cannot run a good pong game.

If you love pong / programming and working in a team then join my Facebook pong group

Your not playing solitaire on your own

During 2008 humankind spent 9 billion man hours playing windows solitaire, or you could think of this as 5 panama canals. But, solitaire is not just a toy, way back it was instrumental in teaching us how to use a mouse, and to welcome windows into our businesses and homes, a job that it is still doing today.

Modern innovative companies are using this pattern to not only educate their customers but to directly generate value.
The movement is called serious games and uses the internet to bring players together either in an application as simple as google image labeler or in a MMORG such as Americas Army.

To be successful in 21st century organizations not only have to open their eyes to the possibilities that gameing offers to their bottom line but they will also need to open their firewalls and actively create a culture where games, crowdsourcing and virtual collaboration.

If you want to find out more …
David Edery and Ethan Mollick from Microsoft and MIT have written a new book Channing the game its a good read and there is a good audio interview with them here changing the game.

How a media company is organised

Ive had a pop at describing how the management structure of a media company works. Its a fairly accurate description of an ideally functioning company.

This is really important ….
Its not a hierarchy

read the full article here

I’m hoping that you will look at this and think, ah ha !!! thats how my company works. or even Ah ha thats what they do !!!

Should I invest in my Next Generation Network?

As more and more entertainment is offered over the internet, the importance that the consumer places on the TV offering will diminish. The primary decision will be on bandwidth; how much, what price, is it capped, what reputation does the telco have. The global recession will mean that in the short term it is likely that infrastructure investment will be cut and will only happen where cost can be recovered from operational expenditure. Longer term investment must primarily focus on providing higher bandwidth, rather than complex telephony or TV features.

What happend whilst you were Whilst your on the golf course.

Ive just read this article and …. this point of view is totally out of date

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/silicon/news/20/~3/398719685/0,39024673,39289155,00.htm

The author of this article says that there are only three successful collaboration technologies that penetrate the boardroom Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and the BlackBerry.

He has omitted the Internet, the penetration of which is so complete that it is easy to overlook it. If you include it, you will see that it shows the results of many millions of different collaborations using tools like wordpress, joomla, svn and good old notepad.

The generation of people who make the 99% of this content not only reject playing golf as a way to communicate, but they also reject the notion of a boardroom.

The exclusive and location static nature of the “boardroom and golf” means of communication is in comparison to the “basecamp and msn” form of communication, far slower, which all things being equal places the boardroom style of business at a commercial disadvantage.

If the author of this article is looking to the future of business, then he (Im guessing he is a he) should be looking to the technologies that are going to replace the boardroom not those that are going to get past its security coded doors for the short time that it still exists.

I do enjoy golf

Using a Wiki to create a bid responce

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems.

When you read some ITT response documents you can see the joins,
i.e. you can see the writing style change when you look at the deferent sections

This is because the bid manager breaks up the response into chunks and allocates a team member to each chunk. The team member then works independently on the chunk. And if you are traveling fast then sometimes its last minuet … the cracks never get pasted over.

I am looking for a better way to create a response document and I think a wiki could be it.

Instead of breaking it up into chunks the bid manager creates a frame work in a wiki, all the team members have visibility of the whole response all the time, they can make changes to any part of the doc.

Bada bing – you have your response doc at the end of the process. It then goes to a graphic designer so that the copy can be typeset.

This is better because

1 Ditch the baton method
Or the “you do your bit” method, which creates a culture of “ive done my bit” rather than “what’s next to-do?”

2 Visibility of everyone  else’s style
When working on the doc you will be able to see what has gone before, this is the first step on the road to getting the writing style in sync.

3 Abstraction of content from presentation

This is the biggest problem with the old word and powerpoint  tool set. Loads of effort is spent mucking round with tables, merging documents, getting the bullet formats right. Content authors should not be concerned with this, they should just say … here is bullet points … here is a diagram. The formatting should be done by the professional type setter, if the content is designed using a wiki then you can export to word/pdf etc and then apply formatting.

4 collaboration with the customer
If you have the response as a wiki, why not share it with your customer? They can make comments directly, they could even be involved in the design and editing process.

5 vitalizing the team

This style of collaboration tool is awesome when you have a virtual team, it will give you a real advantage over your competitors, you can bring people in and out of the fast, and you can get the most from them when they are there.