Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I was just reading a column (http://70.125.157.216/index.html) written by a friend of mine and his topic hit close to home for me. He was discussing the current dilemma of 'do I upgrade or not' and his advise on the topic. To relieve your already overflowing concern and suspense he is advising against upgrading unless you have some compelling reason.
I've purchased a Dell laptop recently and it's about everything that I could want in a laptop, duo core 2.0 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM. (I know I know it won't use it all YET) Vista came on the laptop and I'm using it. For my job (computer security) I need to understand how the OS works and responds but I haven't been happy with it. It crashes frequently due to driver problems -- mostly from the built in web cam from Logitech. I am pretty happy with the problem advisor, since it keeps track of the issues that I am having and lets me know when there is a new driver or version to apply. I get pretty angry at the power saving feature, I set my laptop to 'do nothing' when the top is closed -- which makes it easy to walk around and collect information on a network -- and for some reason Vista shuts down the video but several of my apps hang and then crash when that happens.
That isn't really the reason that this topic hits close to home for me however. I am working on a major software product release where I work and while the app works, there is a lot of opportunity for it to improve. Seeing it from the inside of the effort my thought is we couldn't make the product any better without releasing it to the general population. Of course with that there's a lot of negative feedback because there are still a lot of rough edges on it.
Guess I'm getting more reasonable in myold age, you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you get what you need.
Thanks.
I've purchased a Dell laptop recently and it's about everything that I could want in a laptop, duo core 2.0 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM. (I know I know it won't use it all YET) Vista came on the laptop and I'm using it. For my job (computer security) I need to understand how the OS works and responds but I haven't been happy with it. It crashes frequently due to driver problems -- mostly from the built in web cam from Logitech. I am pretty happy with the problem advisor, since it keeps track of the issues that I am having and lets me know when there is a new driver or version to apply. I get pretty angry at the power saving feature, I set my laptop to 'do nothing' when the top is closed -- which makes it easy to walk around and collect information on a network -- and for some reason Vista shuts down the video but several of my apps hang and then crash when that happens.
That isn't really the reason that this topic hits close to home for me however. I am working on a major software product release where I work and while the app works, there is a lot of opportunity for it to improve. Seeing it from the inside of the effort my thought is we couldn't make the product any better without releasing it to the general population. Of course with that there's a lot of negative feedback because there are still a lot of rough edges on it.
Guess I'm getting more reasonable in myold age, you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you get what you need.
Thanks.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Good to Great
This is the result of me watching PBS and working in the US. I was watching a show the other day about a book that sprung from examining good companies that had become great companies. These were all companies with great stock market performance and good growth and very stable. The show fascinated me because they were talking about the few things that distinguished these companies from their peers, they even covered a police department that used the principals of the great companies to help focus them on increasing performance.
The collision with my everyday life in the trenches was that in my day to day job I work with a lot of groups that are suffering under changing processes and support models. They are paying in pain today for the savings they gained last year (or last quarter) when they decided to get a 'quick win'. This has become a very popular concept in business today, take drastic action quickly to achieve some near term goal that will make a group of people happy. This could be deploying an instant messenger client with cool new features or hammering out some chunks of budget to make the stock holders happy.
Where is the collision you ask? Well one of the things that made the great companies great was the ability to look at the hard facts when they were making decisions. They didn't focus on the short term or the quick win. They looked at the long term goal, determined what they were going to have to do to get there and then accepted the hard work that it was going to take to get there. I hope that we don't loose site of the long term goals for the forest of quick wins.
The collision with my everyday life in the trenches was that in my day to day job I work with a lot of groups that are suffering under changing processes and support models. They are paying in pain today for the savings they gained last year (or last quarter) when they decided to get a 'quick win'. This has become a very popular concept in business today, take drastic action quickly to achieve some near term goal that will make a group of people happy. This could be deploying an instant messenger client with cool new features or hammering out some chunks of budget to make the stock holders happy.
Where is the collision you ask? Well one of the things that made the great companies great was the ability to look at the hard facts when they were making decisions. They didn't focus on the short term or the quick win. They looked at the long term goal, determined what they were going to have to do to get there and then accepted the hard work that it was going to take to get there. I hope that we don't loose site of the long term goals for the forest of quick wins.
