Category: Technology

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Business Technology

Bringing the Change

First of all, congrats to Novell on winning the award. From the looks of it, iPrint is getting some well-needed accolades for the work they have been putting in. I’m looking forward to playing with it soon myself.

When I retweeted that link today the back of my head was screaming PRINTING IS DEAD as loud as it could. I had to ignore it and retweet it anyway because if there is one thing I have learned over the past few years it is that printing might be dying, but it is not dead and printing will still be a vital part of any organization for a while to come.

As people steeped in technology, we might see the end coming and might even be able to get there ahead of others. However, if we want to bring everyone else along for the ride we need to do a few things:

  1. Stop yelling that it is going to happen.
  2. Figure out what problems your current solution is not solving for them.
  3. Solve those problems BETTER than their current solution.

You need to respect the people you are working with first because you’re not going to find out why they are doing what they are doing until they are willing to sit down and open up with you. Then work to solve those problems in a manner better than they are already doing. People aren’t going to give up their solution until it is worse in some way that affects them directly and painfully.

Then everyone is happy!

Categories
Business Life Technology

Eggs and Baskets

My family’s farm has a handful of egg-laying hens so I like the phrase “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. I tend to think it is a pretty good mantra to live by in many facets of life (not all, mind you).

In technology it gets to be interesting because many times we are encouraged to toss in as many “eggs” as possible into a single vendor’s “basket”.

That tweet made me just a little sad because the same sort of tweet could have been tossed around about Microsoft, or IBM before them. The “nobody ever was fired for using [insert platform here]” meme rings almost too true when it comes to technology decisions for many.

Now, I’m just as terrible since I try to stick as close to the Cupertino mothership as I can, but when making IT decisions IĀ spread the wealth around when appropriate. It is a “right tool of the right job” sort of approach which has served me well.

When leveraging a single platform you have so little control over to do so much, you put yourself at extreme risk if that platform owner would decide that they are going to amend the deal you’ve been working on. Think of it like poor Lando when Vader comes to Bespin. You better hope that Leia is there to save your skin in the end.

I know monolithic platforms can provide some benefits, but they also are filled with extreme risk. Google is no different from Apple is no different from Microsoft is no different from IBM. They’re all seeking money to stay alive (and create military robots … sorry). Relying too much on a single platform will, some point in the future, bring you pain.

The question is always: will the pain be worth it?

Categories
Life Technology

Why I Have This Site

Jonathan Poritsky wrote Medium Confusion over at The Candler Blog. It is a good read about Medium and what it might be in the future (or the present or … eh … whatever). Go ahead and read it before going on because I’m going to focus on just a small portion of the entire post because I agree with it entirely.

Here is one of the money quotes for me:

The paid writers bring their clout to Medium, the platform, in order to convince unwitting writers that they should contribute to Medium, the magazine, for free. The paid authors are thus pied pipers of a sort, luring not the readers but theĀ writersĀ out of the web and into Medium.

This has been something I have missed as the web has continued to be splintered into smaller and smaller little fiefdoms. It might be because I have the ability to stand up my own WordPress installation (which you are on) and fool around with programming enough to really hurt myself, but you see it happening more and more by people posting their thoughts to Facebook-only, or Google+-only, or Medium … it is all the same. It locks the information up behind something else. Sure, it might just be a free login, but will it always be that way?

I have this site not because I want fame, but because I want to have my own place to write and “call my own”. I dabbled with Tumblr for a little while, but the idea of being able to control my own content and not need to worry about whether it would meet the standards of someone else is refreshing.

It is also a single place where you can find out what I am doing. If you happen to read something I wrote about Novell you might also find out that I am into Nintendo, or web design, or agriculture, or … you get the idea.

It feels like we are losing that.

Categories
Technology

Misunderstood

Apple released a new ad for Christmas.

http://youtu.be/ImlmVqH_5HM

I really like it. Ben Thompson has thoughts which echo my own (for the most part).

Apple has had some hits and misses recently with their advertising, but most of their recent work has been really understated and I think of very high quality.

For advertising, that is.

Categories
Technology

Good Convergence

The original title for this post was going to be Good Consolidation … but I changed it right before I put the first words down because this entire concept really spans more than just consolidation but also combining anything together. Convergence might be a better term, so I’m running with it.

I carry a small device in my pocket which is the convergence of no less than three different devices into a single device smaller than anything else I carried around. My iPhone is my camera, media player, and cellular phone. It does more than that, but I was carrying around those three devices pretty consistently and now I’m down to one.

In all three ares, the function is enhanced in some way by the device being all-in-one. It is a better camera because I can use the cellular network to send pictures to anyone immediately. It is a better phone because I can store pictures of the people in the contacts list. It is a better media player because I can stream media over the cellular network along with search for new media.

I believe the iPhone is an example of Good Convergence.

In IT we have other areas for good convergence. I’m looking at a DNS server convergence right now by moving three separate DNS systems onto a single server by using Views in Bind 9. This will make it a ton easier because I’ll be able to update one server and all of the different VLANs and subnets we have will get the new addresses. By eliminating extra systems I eliminate maintenance and resource overhead.

Good Convergence.

However, Bad Convergence is damaging. It is trying to fit two things together which have no purpose being so. It is trying to fit too many services onto a single box because then you have fewer boxes to manage …

… but now you have more services to manage on one box and what if they don’t always get along. What if one service needs an update to an underlying library which will break the other services … maybe.

Bringing things together can be a good thing, but you need to make sure that they are meant to be together in the first place. When you do that, you’ve got something special in the works.