Archive for September, 2009

Thinking About Outsourcing?

After hundreds of conversations with CIOs, CFOs and CEOs I noticed a few common threads when discussing outsourcing.  The first commonality across companies was that rarely was everything in good shape in regards to IT. Because after all, if IT was in good shape all of those C-Level executives would be focusing their attention elsewhere.  The oft-quoted story that [...]

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Observations on Language Learning

No one will ever accuse me of being a polyglot, but I’ve dabbled with quite a few languages: French, Latin, German, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, a little Russian and most recently Chinese, both spoken and written with the goal of becoming fluent enough to conduct business and read a newspaper entirely in Mandarin. Putting Latin aside, since it [...]

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iPod Ruminations

What’s next for Apple? The venerable iPod is almost 8 years old, but it wasn’t always the market maker it is today. For the first three years iPod sales were less than stellar because those first iPods only worked with Apple computers, this at a time when Apple had only 4% of the computer market. Sales reflected that limping along [...]

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AT&T’s Missed Opportunity

iPhone, iPhone, iPhone – some days that’s all I seem to hear. But underneath all the chatter I also hear this ongoing thread: “I wish Verizon had the iPhone because AT&T’s network is just plain awful”  or “I want an iPhone but not with AT&T” or in a boon for Blackberry “I wanted an iPhone but AT&T’s network [...]

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It’s About the Business Not About the Technology

Recently an informative and interesting technical event on virtualization provided confirmation for a truism about technology and business. First and foremost technology is only a means to an end - not an end in itself.   Of course this observation isn’t limited to my technical colleagues because business people can become just as enamored with the “technology du jour” as [...]

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