Can Apple learn from Microsoft ?

By now most folks will have seen the announcements from Apple® for the capability that will be coming in iOS 5 from earlier in the week.

An example from Mashable

One of the issues around this announcement is about how Apple has taken feature/functions that are currently in 3rd party applications (Camera + from TapTapTap as an example) & put these into the base product.

Nothing like a good idea it seems – the above example is particularly relevant as that app was withdrawn from the iTunes app store for a while because it used the volume button as a shutter button. Apparently Apple is now making this an option.

It will come to pass, and probably caused by European regulators that Apple’s bundling in of capability that is not core to the operating system will come to a stop.

Why is it, dear reader that only Cisco gets to do the base VPN capability for iOS & not others as well ?

We all should remember the unbundling that Microsoft had to do – Internet Explorer – we all now get to state what we want as the default browser – and have the ability to remove IE from the install if we are so inclined.

If Apple is serious about the eco system of apps that surround the iOS platform then it should take a similar approach – that is allow users to replace function that comes with iOS with an alternative

e.g replace the inbuilt camera app, or replace the Safari browser with for example Opera mobile.

That is what IMO I believe Apple can learn from the folks from Microsoft, though it may be a bitter pill to swallow, you need to be willing to free up control, just a little, over the user environment & allow those who have the willingness to do so to choose alternatives that suit.

This will send a clear message to all those app developers that Apple is not going to replace your app with a feature – well not entirely & encourage innovation across the whole eco system.

That, dear reader is the last point I make – small app developers are always going to be far more agile than even Apple (or any big company for that matter) can be – and that will drive innovation that will drive success for everyone.

Thanks for reading

Work is work, life is what you want it to be

In my last post i discussed that I was going to try to work on less things but in greater depth. I was wondering around my garden over the weekend and I now have my second objective for the year

Try not to work on weekends

This may seems to be an unusual thing to say, however by work I mean professional work. I had managed in a vain attempt to get ahead of myself last year developed a habit of sitting down on Sunday afternoon & clearing out my inbox.

This is just taking time away from the things I should be doing as a father & a home owner – you should see, dear reader, what a mess my garden has become over the last couple of years, and I have neglected the upkeep on my house something shocking.

Why ? Why do I do this ? Why is this important? Somewhere along the way working for IBM is not going to be what I do, sometime, eventually, I have to retire from paid work, and if I’m lucky I will have good health, though given that there is no maximum retirement age in Australia (my minimum is 67) I suspect that one of the last things I will want to do is to clear up 25 years of backlog,

But that’s the trivial response.

The real reason is that in the longer term too much work is not good for anyone, not good for me, and not good for my employer. It makes the person one dimensional, some of the best people I know who do the best work, and are great at what they do, are not workaholics, so neither should I be.

The best example I know is John Cohn,, check it out.

Thanks for Reading

Back to business for 2011

After a 3 month self imposed Social Media hiatus I am back – and I hope, dear reader, that I manage to make this, at least weekly.

This week was the first week that I was back for the whole week from Annual leave – I do try to take a good block of time off over the Summer School holiday period, you know recharge, refresh etc. and get a couple of things done around the place.

As always this time I of year I give myself the challenge of picking 3 things thats will be the basis around which I work through the year, work or otherwise. What I have from 2010 was

• Make sure that I tell the people who are important to me why they are important
• Be fitter at 50 than I was at 30 &
• Ensure that my daughter has a great 16th birthday

And for the first year ever I managed to make every last one of the above.

This year I have only 1 so far, which I have to credit IBM Distinguished Engineer (retired) Clive Harris with the initial advice

No one remembers what you haven’t done for them, so do less but do it better

In the IBM that I work in almost every day is a day of Triage, that is deciding on what is the next most important thing for you to put your attention to, things like

• Clearing you inbox just in case there is something more important’
• submitting your expenses
• Reading trade material or doing research, etc

Can all come well down the list of priorities, yet, as a senior technical professional I am expected to be well on top of these sort of things. The issue is, I know, is that I try to spread myself across too may things and as such I half do a number of tasks & activities that really should have been completed.

That will change in 2011, well as much as I can control it it will & I have 4 major areas that I will focus on

1. Remote Access Transformation
2. Supporting India’s growth & consolidation
3. Work in support of IBM’s technical Community &
4. Continue my work on my Daughters High School’s P&C

(for those for you who are IBMers, the internal version of this post will have a bit more detail)

That’s enough to keep me busy I suspect.

 

Thanks for reading

 

Weekly Metrics

I attended 19 meetings & dealt received 245 emails that I needed to do something with.

You can have too much of a good thing

This week I find myself in Bangalore India on business and as such I get to stay at the hotels that I would not do if I was doing this on personal time.

This morning I went to breakfast as I would normally do in these circumstances. I use breakfast as a means to sort through my head all the tings that I need to do in the day and this is especially true when I am travelling as there is a greater focus on achievement.

In a room of about 25-30 guests there must have been 15-20 staff seeing to the guests needs. Great !, or is that ? It was an almost constant stream of requests if they could be assistance, do you want to read a paper? , would you like an omelette ? Coffee ? etc.

I admire the desire to please me as a guest, and I encourage it.

It occurred to me that you can get too much service, and that applies to many facts in life not just breakfast. Sometimes we spend too much effort to ensure the customer is happy that we miss the point of the interaction all together – we need to ensure that we satisfy, and respond to the needs & wants, we also need to ensure that the transaction does draw to a close.

Thanks for reading

On chartsmanship – more or less ?

It has been an interesting week where I have been pulled in may directions, which is what I suppose I get paid to do – apply myself where I think is the most important given my environment.

The key idea I have from the week is how important chartsmanship is in making sure you create your own style that reflects the way that you want to present.

Tip #1 The best book I have ever read on the subject is “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds – So good I read it twice in the one trip – on the way to China & on the way back to see how I could have done better with the customer presentations I did whist I was there.

I am a minimalist – I try, as hard as I can to have no more than 1 major thought on the page & no more than 3 major bullets supporting the key thought. I find that this style seems, at times, to run contrary to how my colleagues view this – be it Powerpoint, Symphony, Open Office, or PDF format – the “less is more” vs the “no font size is too small” will always be at some sort of tension.

Where I see the issue arising is that when people create slides they think they need to spend time presenting each slide – but do not want the audience to get bored so if I’m going to spend 2 minutes on the slide I need 2 minutes worth of text on the slide – this is not the case IMO – a great slide should pass the concept to the audience quickly, and if you have some detail you want to go into – bring the audience into the conversation – especially relevant if it is a meeting not a conference.

To do this I know I’m fairly boring – I put a picture, graph, illustration, etc.  on the right hand side & the text on the left – I think it engages more than just the listening part of the brain and as such you can get better engagement of the audience – it also allows the picture/word association kick in some folks..

So this brings me to Tip #2 which I got from Presentation Zen – buy clip art – I use “istockphoto” and yes they can cosy $5 each for the smaller ones, however spending $50 to make a set of slides look great may be the difference between success & failure with the consequent re-working you are going to have to do, etc. – to me it’s an easy investment – one I acknowledge that not everyone can make.

Thanks for reading

From this weeks supermarket visit

Just a short one today – one of the items that we saw at the supermarket as we did our weekly shopping.

Confusing, well it IS obvious what they are suppose to be selling which got me to thinking about the language of selling – or in this case, packaging.

In the western world it seems that a picture of the “serving suggestion” is what is used as much as anything else, yet in my unrepresentative travels to places like China, Japan, etc it seems mandatory to have a lot of words describing the benefits or whatever of the product on the front.

I leave it to you to make suggestions about the reasons for the difference.

Thanks for reading

Innovation is not easy

A reminder that the opinions stated in this blog post are my own.

You may have seen the recent announcement from Google that they have ceased development of “Wave”.

Some have seen this as a failure on behalf of Google, or a bad misstep.

This article from Mashable.com is an example on the lighter side of the commentary.

I see it otherwise.

If a company is to truly innovate then it is bound to go into areas which are high risk – no risk, no reward – and as such the only “failure” will be the failure to learn from any experiments or projects that do not get into production.

I have no issues with Google’s approach as they attempt to innovate, and yes they will sometime do it in the full view of the public (& media) and yes the will sometimes have to call an end to the work. Not every company can afford to do this, but given Google’s current revenue per employee, stock price & profitability, who would want to argue with them about it ?

Google shouldn’t be criticised, they should be congratulated, because they have recognised that Wave is not viable. I expect that Google they will do a lessons learnt, include some good code & function in other projects & move on to spend their innovation $$’s elsewhere.

Thanks for reading

Tweeting a WordPress.com post.

One of the things I have been looking to add to this blog is the ability to Re-tweet a blog entry directly from that entry.

If you have a WordPress.com blog WordPress does not allow the use of plugins such as the whole slew that can be found on the WordPress.org site that can be used if you have your own instance of WordPress on your own hosting.

In my searching around and looking for a “hack” of some sort I discovered that there is a tweetmeme shortcode – though this is not mentioned that I can find on the wordpress site where all the shortcodes are documented. It is, however documented on the tweetmeme site. Please follow the link if your interested.

This will add that little “retweet” at the right at the top of this post with the number of times the number of times it has actually been sent on. As with all shortcodes it is case sensitive.

One issue however – you need to enable tweetmeme access to your twitter account. So the choice is yours. If Techcrunch can do it, why can’t I ?

Thanks for reading.

Queuing – for fun or profit ?

(c) iStockPhoto

I seem to spend a bit more time than I use to in queue’s these days.

Sure the bank I use is making it easier to be in a queue, however, this does not actually make the queue any shorter. Getting a “ticket” number, sitting down, waiting for the electronic voice to announce your number, & which teller to go to, rather than standing up, shuffling forward makes the experience a bit more pleasant, does it make it shorter or more time efficient ?

The reason I ask, dear reader, is because whenever I do my banking – about midday every Friday there seems to be only 2 or 3 tellers on duty yet a bank full of customers staring at the monitors waiting for their number to come up.

Maybe this is another situation where the main beneficiary of the system introduced is not the customer but the bank itself – they now have the ability to ensure that just the minimum number of tellers are actually on duty to meet the minimum service requirements that they have set in terms of waiting times etc. And sure this, I suppose means that these reduced costs are passed onto me, their customer, in lower fees & interest rates, & the shareholders in terms of bigger profits, which is, after all why they exist.

The bank opposite in the shopping “plaza” has not introduced a similar system, folk still get to queue the old fashioned way – normal banking in this queue, merchant banking in that one, and a service desk for inquiries & the such like. It will be interesting how this works out as time progresses, the sitting vs. the standing queue.

As a marketing tool ?

The real topic that I want to mention is that the Queuing has now become a marketing tool. I remember when Windows 95 was released there was a whole mass of folks standing outside the Auburn Harvey Norman waiting to buy it, generating hype, headlines & free publicity for Microsoft.

That however, was amateur city compared to Apple these days. It seems that Apple with the co-operation of the media marks every new product availability with a whole bunch of folks standing outside a store waiting for the magic moment when they get to file inside and stand in another queue whist the new product is made available (maximum 2 per customer).

The iPhone 4 was just released in Australia overnight and it seems odd that whist there was queuing at many a Telstra outlet at midnight, there was no online store availability, nor was there an ability to pre-order like there was with the iPad. So the ONLY place you can get one is via a retail outlet – thus pushing up the “queue factor”.

What am I talking about ? the music industry has been using queuing for as long as there has been a business in music – how often do we see folks waiting overnight to get their tickets for a concert ?

Apple, Microsoft & my bank are going to have to wait in line & learn a thing or 2 from concert promoters !

Thanks for reading

NSWsphere – my thoughts

Hello There

Last Friday (September 4th 2009) I attended NSW Sphere hosted by Penny Sharpe MLC, This was about “Government 2.0″.

First and foremost a thank you for Penny, her staff & all the contributors on the day & beforehand.

If you follow the link above to the agenda you will see the main themes of the day. Government services is not, necessarily where you would anticipate innovation and leading edge use of technology. This is just not the case – at least in the situations I saw on the day.

A couple of highlights

• Mylee Joseph – showing how the NSW State Library is assisting librarians across NSW via eLearning
• Lynda Summers & “the Squawk” – assisting rural communities
• And, my favourite -Paul McLeay MP, Member for Heathcote on how he is directly asking his constituency on how he should distribute the NSW stimulus grants for his electorate.

The day was spent around the interface between government and the citizens – about how government could make it’s information available for others to consume, to this point the NSW Premier Mr Nathan Rees announced Apps 4 NSW a competition to create applications that uses the data that the NSW government makes available.

All good stuff, as the presentations are made available from the link at the top of the page I encourage the reader to take a look at them, there will also be a wiki where the draft will be made available.

However I do believe that something was missing.

For the data to be made available it is necessary for all the data to be organised so it can be presented. The day did not address the issue about the internal IT systems within each government department and how once the information is captured how it is used WITHIN the department.

Here is an example – my daughter was fortunate enough to be accepted into a selective high school. I have provided the same information to the department of education 5 times

• When I enrolled my daughter in Primary School
• When I applied to sit for the Selective High School test
• When I enrolled my daughter in Selective High School – the selective schools unit information form
• When I enrolled my daughter in Selective High School – the high school enrollment form
• When I enrolled my daughter in Selective High School – the “backup” card that is used if the computer system is down.

You will note that the last 3 of these I did at the same time – and it was the same information – is this not shared between the high school my daughter attends and the selective high schools unit ?

So, dear reader, my premise is that until the IT systems within Government are in some order so that information is asked for once, and shared as needed we are always going to have a situation where any applications being developed will have to reach and retrieve data from many disparate sources.

Every Government, if they are even semi serious about making their data available to the public via applications that Apps 4 NSW is trying to generate then they will need to look inwards and ensure they have their data organised internally as well. I suspect that to be able to do that there will need to be some significant investment in the internal IT systems.

Unfortunately the “opening” of an IT system is never going to attract much by way of press coverage and therefore is not going to get the attention it deserves.

Government 2.0, to me is about all the IT of a government, not just the IT around the government / citizen interface.

Thanks for reading.