Archive for September, 2010

Here’s a look at a modular data center. Wicked.

The “me” decade has fostered many ambitions, and many of them aren’t the right kind for an Enterprise of any size or scale. That’s why I loved this post by Ben.

Here’s how you spot those with the “me” disease:

People who view the world through the me prism might describe a prior company’s failure in an interview as follows: “My last job was my e-commerce play.  I felt that it was important to round out my resume.” Note the use of “my” to personalize the company in a way that it’s unlikely that anyone else at the company would agree with. In fact, the other employees in the company might even be offended by this usage. People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word “play” to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my resume” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal which is separate from the team goal.

On the other hand, people who view the world purely through the team prism will very seldom use the words “I” or “me” even when answering questions about their accomplishments. Even in an interview, they will deflect credit to others on their previous team. They will tend to be far more interested in how your company will win than how they will be compensated or what their career path will be. When asked about a previously failed company, they will generally feel such great responsibility that they will describe in detail their own misjudgments and bad decisions.

Too often people confuse doing what is right for them with what is right for their team and the business. They confuse building a business with building a resume. They confuse the business’ agenda with their agenda. And the result is inevitably negative. As Ben says, while it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea.

We tend to get caught-up in the obvious. Like, Twitter has become a news platform. It was that at birth. Ok, it wasn’t CNN, but it was and always has been “my” news platform.

Now it’s increasingly the news platform. The source for what’s breaking that matters. The source for instantly building and getting your own river of news.

To follow the rugby scores of my favorite teams the Web’s usefulness declines the further I get from my desk. And it’s pretty useless on my desk. That’s because the news channels are audience-centric on a geographical basis – this is partly a result of poor management, but also a result of limiting industry business models.

The future of these organizations is along the lines of Twitter – which is subject and content centric.

As much as I like Chatter, it is best a very rudimentary app. Clearly Salesforce are deploying and then growing the feature set. Looking forward to apps on Android in particular. Great to see Seesmic getting on board.

All apps are now about widgets. The idea of accessing a browser to check a feed or engage in a conversation seems almost antiquated. It’s also cumbersome and slow.

How the world turns. 10 years ago we were rushing to get everything in the browser. Now we rushing to get it into a feed to our Widget with information automagically updated and available as we flick to an active screen on our devices.