Category: Business

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Business Technology

The Gutting of Apple Retail

Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop recently posted Apple boss tries to gut retail operation and I would recommend that you head over and read the entire piece.

Having worked in Apple Retail in the past, I was a little upset by the piece. The Apple Store is one of the greatest assets Apple has and the idea of trying to slim down the operation is beyond ridiculous, the only thing I can hope for is that Tim Cook will fire their recent SVP of Retail, John Browett, and get someone in there who can actually do the job … maybe Ron Johnson would be interested in coming back.

Even while I was there, staffing was an issue and the idea of having less staff around while iOS and Mac devices are still being sold at breakneck speed is not just mind-bogglingly stupid, it’s mind-boggingly dangerous for Apple as a whole.

The Apple Stores allow the rest of the company to have a personal relationship with the actual users of devices to an extent that no other electronics company can, which allows them to react to problems faster, deal with user issues faster, and gain information faster than their competitors. Treating it like some sort of plain cost center that must be cut is just dumb.

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Business Technology

Yahoo! Hope?

Sriram Krishnan has some unsolicited advice advice for Marissa Mayer.

I agree with much of what he wrote, but I think the main thing that Yahoo! needs (now I’ll just type Yahoo) is some excitement and some direction. Who really cares about Yahoo right now? When the most exciting thing that has happened for Yahoo is the hiring of another CEO, you know you are in trouble.

Flickr might be a good place to start, but I think #9 on the above list is my favorite:

Institute a policy that Yahoo will use off-the-shelf/popular open source tools and technologies whenever possible. When those don’t meet Yahoo’s needs, teams will fork them and contribute back changes. No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you.

This is going to open up some engineering talent to work on products, which is where Yahoo needs to really work. It also opens up candidates to work for the company because there are many people with experience using those technologies.

Is it going to happen? Who knows. The board will need to buy into whatever Ms. Mayer is bringing to the table, so there will be push-back on almost every turn …

… but for Yahoo’s sake I hope that they do.

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Business Technology

Marissa Mayer in as CEO of Yahoo!

The exclamation mark isn’t there for emphasis.

As reported all over the internet yesterday, long-time Google employee and VP Marissa Mayer has moved over to Yahoo! as their CEO (hat-tip to The Verge).

I hold out hope that maybe she can turn that place around and provide a credible competitor to Google in many ways. She is, by far, the best candidate that Yahoo! has been able to grab and I eagerly wait to see what changes she might bring to the company.

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Business Technology

A Change of Mind

Nate Beran over at posted Cloudy Future over at his blog and I invite you to go and read it.

With the continual move to “Cloud Computing” in many facets of IT, there is a mindset change that is needed in order to understand how things now work. No longer is your vital service housed in a small closet in the basement, but now it is in a number of huge data centers across the country or globe and being run by an outside vendor so there are going to be unplanned outages along with other issues (ISP having issues? No work done today!) that are outside of the control of your internal IT department.

Sadly, it seems like when a person hears “try again later, there really isn’t anything I can do” they often here “I hate you and I’m not going to do anything”.

That needs to change.

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Business Life Technology

Double Dev

So I’ve been running off of a single MacBook Pro for over a year now but there are two problems with that setup.

Using a single machine requires me to carry the MacBook Pro between home and work every day. Not a huge problem, but if I am going to walk as often as I would like to, it could get more than a little annoying to continually haul a backpack with all of the trimmings up Center Street Hill. If I can eliminate the laptop, I can probably carry a smaller bag.

I also need to spend upwards of 10 to 15 minutes on each end getting the machine setup properly so that I can work. Once again, not a huge deal, but an annoyance. The constant plugging and unplugging on cables is a hassle I wish I did not have.

To try and work around this I spent the evening setting up a new user on my wife’s 2009 MacBook. The idea is to try using this machine as my dev machine while at home an keep the MacBook Pro at work during the main part of the week. The issue will be how well it works for recording our weekly episodes of This One Podcast (shameless self promotion there).

The good part is that web development doesn’t require a ton of computing power outside or compiling dependencies. So far, the MacBook hasn’t burst into flame, so I take that as a good sign.