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What If Yoda Ran IBM?
Esther Schindler writes to mention that one IT leader who came from big business found himself in quite another world when he transitioned into a smaller business, specifically with respect to the amount of attention from their vendors. He presents an amusing approach with a familiar twist. "Not only are the IBMs of the world leaving money on the table, they're also risking future sales. The IT leaders at small organizations will in many cases be employed by larger organizations someday. Why alienate them? Vendors could engage IT leaders in small organizations now and build brand loyalty. How could they make such a business model work? Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do if he were running a large consultancy."
Which might be a Good Thing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Every quarter, each publicly traded corporation must feed JabbaTheStockAnalysts, who will deem them more, or less capitalized by their whimsy, the weather, and other important factors.
Yoda doesn't have a chance.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I was always wondering what's the name of that guy with the big ears, making the computers run..
Tag: stillsuckitwould :-)
These build a healthy industry in which you can play. Complete dominance of an industry is unhealthy (look at Old IBM or M$). Having competition gives you feedback which is vital for the long term success of a company. Trying to be all things to all people dilutes your business strategy too. Far better to leave some opportunites unexploited.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
All Yoda would have to do is look at any company and just say: "No, too old"
Some of the companies would then get really bent out of shape and turn evil later, while other ones would just annoy Yoda until he gave up and threw them a support contract he never has to fulfill since he dies!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Well, let's see. If Yoda ran IBM of the 1980's like he ran the Jedi Counsel, he'd probably remain fixed in his devotion to the old ways, overlook some growing threat and then watch helplessly as the order he watched over was overcome and twisted into an empire of unimaginable might.
Wow. Thank goodness that didn't happen.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do
Don't bring George Lucas into this. You'll end up with a lanky, obnoxious rastafarian running the place.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Run IBM I do.
Feel the force...force of Cell processor.
Conference not with a phone, but with the force.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
The company would be called Machines Business International, Yes.
The CEO would be Steve Ballmer, the company would be run out of Redmond, WA, and it would market the dominant desktop OS in the world. But Yoda would think he was still in control running things out of Yarmonk.
On the other hand, their servers would run quite well in damp conditions.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Yoda would use the force. Maybe instill do what you say you will and force it into the system. No exaggerated promises, caveats or missed deadlines. Perhaps be honest with the customer and not be so much on the dark side.
Not just an IBM issue, goes for 90% of the service providing companies out there. The force only grows while the dark side is not present in greater numbers than the purist side.
Does that make Microsoft Jar-Jar?
They're always in your face and they both can annoy people merely by existing.
IBM's #1 advantage is they are on every government and big corporate preferred vendor list, because they have entrenched sales forces who are excellent at pitching to upper management. They are great with the mainframes too.
Other than that, what's good about them?
Servers:
IBM xSeries are junk
IBM iSeries are treading water and relegated to vertical markets
IBM pSeries makes Sun look cheap.
Software:
Tivoli - Sucks
DB2 - Ok
Lotus - Sucks
Rational - Double Sucks
Consulting services are the same as any big vendor. If you're the CIO of a small company, you're simply insane to expect IBM to give you the time of day -- why would they? They make more money collecting maintenance on shelfware from a big bank than they would providing actual service to you!
IBM has some really smart people tucked away somewhere. But to an IBM customer, dealing with IBM is like dealing with the IRS.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
"During my first year at Sequoia I concentrated on improving the processes that affect operational excellence." ... I annoyed the F*&%( out of the people who did the real work.
"With these processes largely working, I must now spend my time providing a technological vision" .. when they started ignoring me, I came up with lots of useless documents, to pretend that I was actually worth the ridiculous sum I was paid.
But once our mighty Vista of Death is completed ... no one will be able to stand up against
Emperor Gates ...
We will find and finally destroy iRebels!
Recalling just what part Yoda played in the first 3 episodes, I'd say he's already running IBM's consulting. That's why small businesses don't get any attention.
I have a good chance, compared to most people my age, of being a CxO of a large company in the next 10 years. Probably somewhere around 50%.
However - in this company (of 100k) there are about 100 people like me. What are vendors supposed to do, lavish money on all of us just in case:
- They can identify who we are.
- Some of us make it.
- We feel obligated to them.
- We ignore our fiduciary duty to shareholders.
- Technology or requirements don't rule them out as vendors.
- Internal process doesn't require independent vets of major procurement.
- The company is organised enough to consolidate procurement decisions.
Much better to be good at your business (eg - delivering projects to enterprises) and attempt to win on merit. Personal relationships can fuck up performance inside companies, the last thing you want is to let them be used against you when going outside.
What if Darth Vader was the President? Oh wait..
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
*Hand Wave*
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
I have been saying this same thing for years with regards to IBM's AS/400 platform. Anybody who has every worked with one of these machines will tell you that they are absolutely, hands-down, the greatest database box available today.
But.
The only people running Os/400 are huge financial institutions who's annual I.T. budget ranges in the Millions of dollars. I can't get a copy of OS/400 to play with. Just can't do it. Not unless i want to spend a month's salary on it. Even then, i can't really DO anything with it (maybe have one connection to the database at a time).
Now take linux/mysql. I use this combo ALL OVER THE PLACE. Any time i need to throw a database down, its a linux box with Mysql. Every. Single. Time.
Why?
Because i grew up playing around in redhat, suse, mandrake, and gentoo boxes and I feel like i know linux inside and out (although i'm sure i don't). I have complete confidence in myself to order some hardware, install a distro on it, and have a database up and crunching within a day.
I have NEVER tried this with an IBM product because i simply CAN'T! I can't risk that significant of a portion of my budget for a toy that I may or may not be able to get working in time.
I guess it works the same as what happened to my beloved coke machine today. They upped the price to $1.25. Nobody drinks coke anymore except the people who are REALLY addicted to it.
Bastards.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
...consult his share holders we must.
become a real JEDI you will.. when u use Lotus Notes for 6 months.
The iRebels and their X11-Wing starfighters will destroy the Vista of Death. Take THAT, Emperor Gates.
A wise man once said, "Where is my other quotation mark?
...over Sam Palmisano. He's been an absolute disaster for the company. The company (services especially) has been in complete disarray for years. There's no investment internally for improving processes, tools, or technology; everything is about cutting, cutting, cutting. We've lost huge numbers of good technical people that we won't ever get back, we've outsourced our own capabilities to the point where our internal proficiency has withered away, and we're selling huge chunks of the business left and right (witness the transition of Network Services to AT&T).
All IBM adds to a solution is a "single throat to choke" and overhead.
Did you ever notice that Yoda is the Jewish word for god with an "a" added to the end? Just sayin... (not that Yoda reminds me of an old Rabbi in sound or shape...)
Yod is a Jewish letter. Now, it's the first letter in the proper name of God (AKA the Tetragrammatron), but it's not the Divine Name itself. I don't know if it's used as a shorthand (because pious Jews even go so far as to write G-d instead of God), but I haven't seen it used that way.
He'd dual Bill Gates with a lightsaber?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I have worked at a number of companies over the years. The smaller the company's purchasing level, the less interest any sales person has in that company. There is a certain annual dollar figure that is needed to get any vendor interested in your buisness. A visit by a sales person typically may have a direct cost from $500 to $1000 per visit, and an opportunity cost that results from not visiting someone else. Assuming a distributor or resellor makes 10% on a sale, it will take an order of at least $5000 just to break even on one visit. If multiple visits are needed or if there is substantial bid and quote activity, the purchase size needs to be much higher. Not only that, the vendor still needs to make a profit. If a vendor doesn't smell at least $50,000 to $250,000 in buisness, it isn't worth his time.
On the other hand, the new guy in the market without customers will take a risk on a small client in the hope of growing that buisness in time. But if that client doesn't grow at the same rate as the new guy, the client will be dropped.
Actually, I think he could do it equally well in C++, following some special guidelines. Within a given program, either all loops would either begin with "do", or none of them would. In addition, Yoda's code would never use exception handling.
on to one, migrate we would.
Stolen, the suits would think it was.
Why would the author even think to engage IBM Global Services for their disaster recover plan when a regional consultancy would have been more than happy to pick up an account of their size? With a budget of $25K I'm not surprised they were turned down. IBM GS probably burns more than that per day on room service. Sheesh, operational excellence indeed. If that's how he manages his budget he needs to work on operational efficiency.
er lisp?
...Standardize We Must!! RPN, IBM change name we must!!
W.W.Y.D. ?
Big Co. pays more attention to potential customers who actually have money to spend with them. Also, some products are out of reach of small companies.
Wah. If you don't know that a 17 year old, dressed scruffily, who hasn't shaved for 5 days, will receive less attention at a Mercedes dealership than the nattily dressed 40-ish man, you just don't live in the real world. Sure: the 17 year old could be Bill freaking Gates, or a rockstar. Or might become one some day, but will have been so soured on the treatment received that they vow never to buy a Mercedes.
But frankly, almost all of the time, talking to the 17 year old is a waste of time at best, and at worst you lose the customer that is really ready and willing to spend money with you because you've ignored them.
Y, it sucks. So it goes. You might argue that one of the ways that Microsoft got as popular as they did with CIO types is because everyone uses them at home, so 17 year olds that get their start troubleshooting home computers go on to CIO jobs and stick with Microsoft because they know it. But, frankly, if that was all of the answer Apple would rule the world--everyone in a certain generation used them at school, but it did not help their adoption in enterprise.
btw: can we stop linking to CIO mag, please? It has the absolute worst S/N ratio of any online mag out there, and the article content generally isn't that good either.
--
$tar -xvf
If IBM could make money providing services to size X companies, they would.
If IBM doesn't want your business, take your business elsewhere.
And isn't developing a disaster recovery plan his job?
Let me see, now that he's got the whole "operational excellence" thing sorted out and he's made the "Executive Leadership Team" he wants to sit around all day dangling a whole $25K infront of consultants instead of, i don't know, fiquring out how to implement a disaster recovery plan .
"With such a small shop I have to spend a great deal of my time maintaining operational excellence." ...plugged out the the kettle from the UPS and plugged the server back in.
"During my first year at Sequoia I concentrated on improving the processes that affect operational excellence." ...stopped answering user queries with "Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?"
"With these processes largely working, I must now spend my time providing a technological vision for Sequoia." ... 1 week surfin' = 3 slide vision Powerpoint.
"As you can imagine, creating a fully functional disaster recovery plan requires an enormous amount of time--and, as I noted above, I've been focused on operational excellence, not long-term strategic planning." ... No, we have never tested restoring from the backups.
You know what happened? IBM consultants met someone a bovine coprologist even mightier than them, and that scared them.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Obviously this guy is clueless about the true costs of things, which is very common. The cost to IBM (not to you) for one of their consultants is probably in the $100 + an hour with all the benefits, contracting costs, HR costs, etc added in, even worse if you want someone really experienced. At that rate $25k only buys you 250 hours (that's 6 weeks). This is barely enough time to make a dent in the task, let alone purchase any hardware. By the time IBM has set up a contract with you and sent a person in to do the job you're already broke and they've lost money.
Overall this guys $25k probably won't even cover the hardware and software licenses he will probably need, let alone a consultant. Everyone forgets about software license costs, which for something from IBM is gonna be more than the overall hardware cost. Completely clueless.
If you ever want to figure out what it would cost you to hire yourself take your salary, double it to account for HR, management, supplies and office space, then divide by 2000 (work hours in a year assuming 2 weeks worth of vacations, no holidays).
If you make $50k a year, you cost $50 an hour.
If you make $100k a year, you cost $100 an hour.
If your company wants to make a profit hiring you as a consultant they have to charge more than that.
If you follow this logic the reason for the obscene costs for lawyers and doctors (doctors have even larger supply costs plus insurance) becomes obvious.
Yoda is in exile due to the Chancellor Count Bush Administration surprise attack against the Jedi and Republic. Help us Obi Wan.
Posting as AC to protect ex-employer and his clients.
We were engaged to develop a large web app for a large not-for-profit (in the Care Sector) to replace their aged tape based mini-computers. We suggested IBM hosted services for hosting because of the incredible uptime you get with Linux VMs running on S390. IBM did not want to talk to the NFP directly however, despite their large (for that sector) annual budget. They wanted to have us acting as middlemen, for no apparent reason we could see. It was almost as if they didn't want to be seen 'hanging out with the spastic guy' - it was very weird.
I heard (I wasn't in the meeting where it was allegedly said by IBM) that IBM was only going to deal directly with large customers (i.e. Fortune 500 and Governments), and was building a network of 'Partners' who would manage 'smaller' clients. My colleague had the impression that 'manage' meant 'accept all risk'.
that's why they sell those calculators
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I believe you mean NCR.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's what Yoda would say to him.
Hahaha! Bovine coprologist - I love it! Is that anything like a terminological inexactitudarian?
"Machines, Business International"
--
make install -not war
I noticed from the article that $25,000 was the budget for implementing a fully functional plan. In addition the consultants must be experienced. Developing the plan is his job but I'm guessing his non-profit is not only cheap but has unrealistic expectations regarding what a disaster recovery plan that is fully functional entails. Being realistic, if their IT infrastructure gets wiped out by a flood, why bother with disaster recovery...they probably don't have the budget to replace anything before the insurance kicks in let alone have any type of backup sites/redundant infrastructure/replacement personnel available.
Another implication of the article is that only large consulting firms can do a quality job that adheres to best practices. "I'd like access to the same expertise that my colleagues at larger companies have." Could he really mean, he'd like the same expertise that his colleagues have at larger companies but for $15/hr. Isn't that what Craigslist is for?
I got out my bullshit bingo card and almost won...
strategic concerns
providing outstanding technology to our colleagues
strategic value
operational excellence
operational excellence
technological vision
technical vision
business vision
operational excellence
tried-and-true management principles
best practices
If only the same phrases weren't used over and over.
Fear leads to patents. Patents lead to lawsuits. Lawsuits lead to suffering....
Yeah, glad someone else noticed this.
At $1.25 for a 24 oz, it is cheaper for me to buy a 2 liter for $1.25 - $1.50 and throw away the unused portion if I don't get around to it before it gets flat.
Same thing has happened at restaurants that have upped their drinks to $2.25. OK, I could grin-n-bear it for $1.95, but once you crossed the $2 barrier for ICED TEA, water please.
Same with candy bars. $0.69 even at a grocery store? I used to (as a kid in the late 70s) get them for free with a $0.25 off coupon. $0.50 was bearable if I wanted a treat. Now, F' no.
Back to Coke, the only ting you can really get in liters in the US is Coke et al. I used to assume this was because Coke was international and had standardized world-wide on a size. Then I spent 3 months in AU/NZ. There they don't have 2L bottles. They have 1L & 3L (which I can't even finish off a 2L before it goes flat) So, much for my theory.
His lack of vision would result in the employees getting murdered, and he would go hide in a swamp.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...or you will not the worlds in conquest enmesh.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
NCR woulld seem to fit a bit more than IBM given some of its circumstances nearly following script. It'd fit given that it was a large company(similar to something Yoda would lead) with influence across the world, but then extinguished(via AT&T and Nyberg) to obscurity.
That's not to mention that their local presence is all but going or gone, and with a similar touch.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I agree with you completely about IBM, but Coke?
"I guess it works the same as what happened to my beloved coke machine today. They upped the price to $1.25. Nobody drinks coke anymore except the people who are REALLY addicted to it."
Upped? Let's see, Coca-Cola was introduced in 1886 at $0.05. In today's money, that's $1.09. Wow, a whopping 15% price increase over a mere 120 years! Yow!
They kept the price the same for 70 years despite hugely fluctuating costs.
Wait, that's price per serving. Initially Coke was sold in 6 ounce servings. So in today's money, it would actually be $2.18 per 12 ounce can. So it's really 44% cheaper per ounce than 120 years ago. You were spoiled by them keeping the price at exactly 5 cents for 70 years, but after they started raising prices, they actually tracked slower than inflation, overall.
Yes, I know big numbers are scary, but it's called inflation, and it's not just the Coca-Cola company being mean.
This CIO is engaging the wrong type of firm for what he wants. I work for a "Premier IBM Business partner" in Lansing, MI and we do this type of work all the time. We put together HA/DR solutions and serve some surprisingly large customers despite our simple business partner status.
Big blue takes a pass on work that is "this small", but that's what the partner network is for. We don't have the resources for huge projects, but we are perfectly geared for projects of this scope. Not only that, but we are focused enough to deliver quality product and quality customer service where big blue cannot. Additionally, due to our having a small but long-serving tech staff, we are not "green" as the writer complains. An organization the size of IBM simply is ineffective at serving projects of this size.
He should have, or the IBM reps he was in discussion with, contacted an IBM business partner in his area that could have helped him. IBM Business partners have always been part of IBM's strategic vision and the author of this piece completely ignores them and the role they play.
Not funny; not insightful; not even close to realistic.
This guy is an idiot and I have no sympathy for him.
He has what is a small to medium business and wants the 900-pound gorilla of the consulting business to cater to him? Turn this around. What is wrong with all those small to medium consulting businesses? Are they too small for his company to pay attention to them?
Hypocrite.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Okay, look at the reality of what this guy is asking for:
Sales time. Believe it or not, good sales people cost a lot of money. You have the choice of hiring a bad salesperson, who doesn't know what he's talking about or doing, or a good one. So a salesperson will run you, even in a crappy small company, $60k per year (plus 20% for bennies and taxes). Now, IBM needs someone who is, shall we say, better than good. They have lots of products, and they have to be able to deal with everyone from an analyst to a CIO. Not only that, but they have team behind them, usually comprised of some inside people and a sales engineer or two, to answer questions.
So, realistically, you have about $500,000 in salaries, commissions, and benefits in a small sales team.
Let's divide that by $25k. 25/500 = 20. That means that the sales guy, just to cover his costs, has to sell 20 deals a year to small businesses to make a living. Oh, wait. That's not the case. He needs to make a decent profit, as well. Lets put it at 25% or so, conservatively. So we're up to $625,000, or 25 deals a year.
Oh, wait. That doesn't include the salaries of the engineer who does the work. Tack on an extra $150k or so for a top notch "Jedi Master". And that would be cheap. So were' up to $650k plus 25% margin, or $812,500. Or about 32.5 deals per year.
Now, we all know that even a lightsabre wielding Jedi Master sales guy won't close every deal. So lets say, which is a huge gimme, that he can close 50% of the deals he is given. So he must now, conservatively, talk to 65 customers a year, bare minimum, to earn back his money and make a little profit.
Oh, shit, we forgot expenses. You know, office space, cell phones, internet, computers, support, travel, lunches, dinners, visits to strip clubs.
Tack on another $50k per year for that. Or 2 more deals closed (we're up to 34.5, if you were paying attention) or 69 customers talked to if he was lucky.
That means we're averaging more than a deal closed per week, and, let me tell you, it doesn't happen that way.
And we haven't even scratched the surface of expenses, including things like marketing, customer acquisition costs, back end support costs.
The reason that IBM doesn't do this isn't because they don't want to. Its because they *CAN NOT*. This is not their business. They have a defined business plan. I can guarantee you that nowhere in that plan do they deal directly with SMB's for $25k deals.
Instead, they have a very established partner network to deal with this. And some of those partners are quite good, quite knowledgeable, and employ guys with as much if not more experience than some of those IBM engineers. Sure, there are bozos. But if you do due dilegence in selecting a partner, you should be able to eliminate those quickly and quietly, especially if you have big business experience.
Note: all of the big boys have a partner network. IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco. Plus all the others. Every single one. Some of them have gone to the extent of putting their top partners into their traditional stronghold space of Fortune 1000. Cisco is notable for having put partners into their Named Accounts many years ago.
As full disclosure, I work for a company that has, at one time or the other, partnered with every one of those guys. Some of those partnerships were great. Some were a disaster. In every single one, we had highly qualified engineers with decades of experience in multi-discipline IT skills supporting our customers. In fact, one of those partners (won't name them but their one of the biggest of the big) used to slip us business on the side when the customer was unwilling to pay their rates (~$350/hour, travel exclusive) because they knew we could do the same job at less than half the cost.
The point of being a small IT specialty business is to be able to provide a service to a completely different kind of customer. My company has ~25 full time employees in house. We have 450 or so on-sit
I'm guessing you're a programmer - and if you really believe your own BS, it's no wonder you're HomelessInLaJolla. :-)
I am in the same position as 'small IT firms'. Here is my story...
I am a south asian. Obviously, I don't have much wealth to afford a degree in US or UK. So I went to south-east uni investing all my money to earn the B.E. Meantime, I found it interesting to do research, which was inevitable as I got many awards both inside and outside of the university for my work. On top of that, few publications in local conferences.
After my undergrad, I started applying 'somewhat recognized' universities to continue with my PG. Disaster... all they do is encourage to go through the painstaking application process (which also needs to pay considerable amount of money + other transcript charges + courier). Then they confirm in an e-mail saying "you not worth it".
What I understood, if I had a degree from a top university, I would have much better chance in getting into a good PG university (probably with funding). So I had no option but to join the same old university to continue my studies. I have to work my way up, like working for small unis first, then gain experience, more publications so on.. there might be a chance to go up to a good university, but I doubt about the chances.
Same thing with IBM and any other big cooperation, they don't give much consideration on working with small firms. Isn't this the reason why 75% of the start ups die at the begining ???
If Yoda ran IBM, he would miss an emerging trend, a new force that is seemingly allied to him would rise up and betray him, and he would lose a pitched conflict. Not that I was thinking about Microsoft and the OS/2 divorce and following Warp v W95 battle, but it seems like maybe Yoda already did run IBM...
This is my sig.
Everyone knows that IBM uses Star Trek strategy and not Star Wars strategy. That is how OS/2 bombed despite having a "Star Trek" theme and name of OS/2 3.0 Warp.
Just make an OS/3 based on Linux and call it OS/3 1.0 Yoda. Modify WINE to run the OS/2 API into Linux as well. Make sure that all IBM Windows software works on WINE, and has Linux ports as well.
Instead OS/3 1.0 Yoda on every new IBM PC sold, and also port it to the Mainframe, iSeries, pSeries, etc systems as well.
Design Yoda to be so simple that Young Jedis can use it as well as the older adults with no computer knowledge at all.
Take the Firewall/AntiVirus protection and call it "The Force".
License OS/3 1.0 Yoda to other OEMs like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, ASUS, Acer, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
's/IBM/BMI/g'
"Business machines international"
Bought the ticket, taking the ride.
You're 100% correct. IBM-deals aren't for $25k. A sales guy raking in these kinds of deals will get a ticket back to IBM-reeducation-camp. $250k is seen as reasonable, but the real deals are at least >$1M. And the sales people that make these kinds of deals get a verrry nice bonus at the end of the year.
This is the reason they gave your company some small stuff. It isn't interesting to them, and is merely used to keep both you and their customer happy until something big comes along. I have to hand it to those sales guys, they know how to handle relationships. They also know a good opportunity when they see one, and when they do they make sure they are the first to close the _real_ deal.
Why do management types persist in "transitioning" which makes them seem inarticulate when "making the transition to" is right and easy? Is this a US/UK difference?
This is all just my personal opinion.
Desks, lower would they be.
AT&ROFLMAO
... he'd have a translator on hand at all times.
He'd ignore looming business threats until far too late, and then be the only director left standing after all the corporate bloodletting. Then he'd bugger off to a retirement in the jungle somewhere.
You only get to do that if the joke was funny.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
What? That's like saying: What would Yoda be if he became the dark lord of the Sith?
The SMB sector is hard to profit from because the operational structures and processes that IT firms use to standardized are geared towards larger deals. Just to walk in the door generally blows the budget. A $25K deal would be one persons time for 2 months including all the presales time. So the SMB customers have to come to us, not the other way around.
I feel the reason this article was slashdotted was only because of the interesting title, and not because of the contents. I found the article quite boring and uninformative.
I thought Yoda wrote AIX...?
You must just have had a useless admin.
We use clearcase to store and replicate our source archive globally. Its flexible branching strategies allow us to work effectively on multiple releases of our codebase, and checking files in takes a few seconds.
I don't know what this "History explorer" you're talking about is, but the graphical version representation makes it very easy to see which version you're currently looking at and which you want.
It sounds like both your admin and yourself are totally incompetent.
Two books from Dr. Tom Morris worth reading: 1) What If Aristotle Ran General Motors 2) What if Harry Potter Ran General Electric Recommend then, I do.
"Sequoia's IT team has nine members. With such a small shop I have to spend a great deal of my time maintaining operational excellence. However, my role must move from an operational one to one that is more strategic. During my first year at Sequoia I concentrated on improving the processes that affect operational excellence. "
:).
My PHB-dichlorian meter has just gone off the scale!
"I do not have the expertise to create a plan that can withstand the scrutiny of auditors and Sequoia's board"
Is this the CIO rag equivalent of one of those "Ask Slashdot" stories where an obviously incompetent submitter asks Slashdot about how to do his job?
Sounds like he's whining that someone should help him do his job for 25k while he keeps being paid big bucks for helping his staff play buzzword/bullshit bingo at "operational excellence meetings".
"Not only are the IBMs of the world leaving money on the table, they're also risking future sales. " "Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do if he were running a large consultancy."
AFAIK IBM are in the business of providing all sorts of complex hardware, solutions and choices to customers, AND having lots of patents so that there's a high chance that they can do/provide something that others can't legally. They're not like Microsoft where everything must be Microsoft, or other "One True Way" vendors. The more choices the better.
If you want a system that uses Java, VB.Net, Windows, Cisco, Redhat Linux and an old AS/400 sure no problem. Too many choices to choose from and need help? No problem, IBM has a bunch of expensive consultants to help you make those choices.
Not enough money? Sorry, can't hear you, I think you've got the wrong number.
While you're at it why not call up Learjet/Gulfstream/Boeing and tell them you have a 25k budget?
Maybe if Yoda ran Boeing, they'd be selling planes to all these people with 25k budgets... Haha.
I suppose he's not used to flying economy eh? I feel a _bit_ sad for him.
But maybe that's because I didn't read the whole article - I just had a nice dinner and would prefer to keep it in
Darl McBride: "Copyright infringement? There's no copyright infringement here; pay no attention to these people."
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Proof he's a liar
Nothing HILJ writes can be considered accurate or factual. It's best to just ignore what he writes.
It's true! Seriously, guys, what if everytime someone made a pop culture reference they got a ticket from a REAL LIFE police officer!?!? Whoa-HO-HO, FOLKS! The concept made me SO EXCITED that I just plopped an *OOPS DOODIE* right into my startched khakis!! What if after getting fifteen of these tickets, you got entered into an online registry JUST LIKE YOU WERE A SEX OFFENDER and you had to go around your neighborhood, knocking on doors to let your neighbors know that you're about as hilarious as an episode of Family Guy??!? "Hi, it's me. I'm the guy that seriously wants to talk about which Doctor is THE BEST and why and also you might want to hit up the corner booth at the Denny's over by 71st and Memorial this coming Tuesday because we're having a Bab-5 discussion (with SUPER BIRDS and SEASONED FRIES), but maybe it would be better if we talked about G-Force, but ha ha, no, seriously, cut my nostagic nuts off before I am able to breed."
A dog that FUCKING talks?!
Fuckin' kegger, dude!!
Yoda ran a large organization (as part of the Jedi council) and lost it all in a single day to the emperor. Do you really want this to happen to your organization?
It would be BMI. What could be worse than that?
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Use it would they.
Still IMing in the stone age?
Don't use the force. No one has designed, written, or implemented what you need. Don't use google (or the S.E. of your choice) or wikipedia to find what you need. Do everything you need yourself, or spend your limited budget on fluff (said 'cause your posting used some phluffy phrases). Don't make use of others' work.
Not.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.
Besides, we all know George Lucas doesn't deserve any respect anymore.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Forth programming language main the be would.
Fails to leverage sufficient synergy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
may be this is a correct question: what if Yoda runs IBM?
Everything can be done simply with NAND and NOR gates. Everything else is just cruft.
goddamn hilj is a fucking retard.