Archive for October, 2009

Steve Schuckenbrock – President of Dell Large Enterprise, on Microsoft and Windows 7… (is also my boss..). I’ve been using Win 7 and Office 10 for over a month and love them both…

I was asked the other day about my view of making career choices. It’s simple, collect the best experiences and knowledge you can. That’s how you grow as a person and professionally. And the more you grow, the more you can give. And the more you can give, the more you get. Go where you can learn the most – the rest follows.

This, in many ways, parallels Mark’s comment on Facebook:

Just as people go to McKinsey & Co. because they want to go into business, or IBM Corp. to learn sales, or play for the University of Southern California if they want to go to the NFL, Zuckerberg said he wants Facebook to be the best place to learn how to build an Internet business.

“If you want to learn how to build really good products and really good practices at a company that builds stuff really quickly and have a big impact, I’d argue there’s no better place than Facebook to do that now,” Zuckerberg said.

I also like Zappos’ view from the same story:

“We now provide mentorship and training so employees can join at the entry level and over a period of five to seven years have the opportunity and training to become senior leaders in the company,” Hsieh said. “Constant growth is what will keep them in the company for a very long time.”

Zappos also does other things to keep employees satisfied, such as giving smaller promotions more often. For example, it may give three promotions over six months that add up to the equivalent of one promotion at 18 months.

Facebook doesn’t want to keep people forever. Zappos values longevity.

I use GR at least 5-6 times a day. I hate the speed and hate the folder hierarchy even more… is way to slow to delete feeds, move feeds and structure information. Scoble hits on all the other reasons not to like it. Still don’t have an alternative though.

Interesting recap of an event we spoke at earlier in the week… I agree with his observation that:

I found the discussion interesting, especially as an indication that the IT conversation is changing. This was the second huge IT-focused company that I’ve heard speak in the last few weeks about server consolidation and portfolio management.  (Mark Hurd of HP talked about it at Gartner last week.)

For a long time, IT seemed to be about ever more servers and more applications. We now seem to be instead focused on how to get the most benefit out of a smaller amount of both hardware and software. That certainly makes sense in a time of financial uncertainty. But all the speakers agreed that an efficient IT infrastructure is important not just for saving money, but also for freeing resources, so IT can create new applications that will drive strategic growth in the future.