Category: Business

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Business Technology

IT as a Partnership

During last night’s NUGeeks meeting, the topic of IT as a partnership came up again. Even though it is disheartening to hear how often IT workers (and whole departments) are seen as nothing more than a cost center for an organization, I still hold out for the day when IT is seen as a valuable part of the business as a whole and a partner in moving things ahead in the organization.

There is a wealth of information stored up in your IT department and most of the people who are there would be more than willing to sit in and give you advice and feedback on how technology might be better leveraged to help you achieve whatever goals you are aiming for. This could be something that is seen as mundane, but helps keep data more consistent and useful or it could be something as large as a huge technology overhaul that the person has been thinking about for a long time.

The people who are in your organization are a valuable asset that should be used as much as possible. While there is a lot to be gained from outside perspective, those who are working closely with the data and the people of your organization have a perspective that no outside vendor or expert will ever have. Why not use that?

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Business Technology

Billion Dollar Red Hat

Red Hat released its quarterly earnings and earnings for the prior fiscal year and it is all good news.

Congrats to Red Hat on passing the $1,000,000,000 per year revenue threshold. I wish I would have invested when the market bottomed-out.

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Business Technology

The Real Foxconn

Take it for what you want, but Tim Culpan of Bloomberg wrote Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn? and I think he nails my main point about the whole Daisey affair with this paragraph (but please go read the whole thing, he’s been covering Foxconn for a decade or more):

The problem with Mike Daisey’s lies is that they’ve painted a picture of the Evil Empire, a place devoid of any happiness or humanity. A dark, Dickensian scene of horror and tears. They also make anyone who tries to tell a fuller, more balanced account look like an Apple or Foxconn apologist because your mind is already full of the “knowledge” of how bad it is there.

Any person who defends Mike Daisey usually comes back to some sort of “he was trying to raise awareness about a real issue”. The hard part about that is that his lies now make the job of trying to bring substantive change and have meaningful conversations that much harder.

That’s a net loss, a HUGE net loss.

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Business Technology

Just. Not. Getting. It.

Trevor Gilbert wrote The Midwest Mentality for Pando Daily and is, to put it bluntly, a terrible closed-minded look at Chicago specifically and “The Midwest” in general. It is probably the most disappointing piece of “journalism” I’ve read on the internet for quite some time (I don’t include most things about Apple here because it is almost systematically terrible).

Matt Moog has written a rebuttal of sorts over at Built in Chicago, so make sure you read that retort.

Here are some choice quotes:

Instead of working on a startup 24/7, employees take the weekend off and don’t work through the night. It doesn’t help in the creation of amazing technical feats, but it does allow people to have lives.

Yup, not burning your staff out is definitely something that should be avoided. Also, don’t forget that good stuff only happens to those who sacrifice themselves to a startup.

Not high school marriages, but rather the idea of getting married at age 21 is no big deal. That’s fine, but it also means that the ecosystem can’t rely on the insane work hours of the independent, no responsibilities generation. Instead, you have a number of people who would normally be able to work into the night, but instead need to go home at 7 or 8 to spend time with their kids and families.

Once again, let’s kill ourselves when we’re young so that we can get married later! Spending time with family is a bad thing because you are not worshipping at the alter of the startup and burning yourself out!

Yes, many people see this as a plus. “You work too much” is something I hear all too often from my non-startup inclined family members. That is a valid argument, but it also is the type of argument that holds an entire ecosystem back.

Riiiiiiight. Not burning yourself out is definitely going to hold the ecosystem back. Isn’t it just as likely that an ecosystem is being held back because its members work themselves to the point of being incapable of doing any good, real, meaningful work after a short time?

I can’t believe this article. Truly meaningless tripe.

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Business

The Money Will Follow

In the latest issue of Minnesota Business Magazine they have a profile on My Wonderful Life, a website for helping people plan funerals. It’s a quick look at the founders and focuses on their recent appearance on Shark Tank.

There is a quote that just bugs me to no end. Sue Kruskopf, one of the founders, is talking about the increase in traffic to their site after the airing of the Shark Tank episode.

Which proves we have an idea that people are looking for. Now the money will follow.

REALLY!?

NOW the money will follow? That way of thinking terrifies me. They have traffic, they have a site, yet they are not making money right now and it doesn’t sound like they have any idea what they are going to do to try and make money either. It is the same “get eyeballs first” mentality that plagues many of the Silicon Valley startups.

I was very disappointed after reading the whole thing.