Me and Vista were the SAME problem...that being Microsoft's inability to perform a platform upgrade for windows in less than ~7 years. Sadly the cash flow wants 5 years, so they have to stump some piece of crap out that will bring in the cash.
ME was just 95 with some stuff on it (like 98) because XP wasn't going to be ready early enough to help the cash flow. Vista was basically win7 with some stuff cut off of it so they could get it to market, since 7 was going to take a couple more years to be ready.
Windows 7 is about all I (or anyone) needs for the foreseeable future. In fact XP is enough for many. Windows 8 is just a knee-jerk "lets put a phone interface on a pc" reaction, seems hard to me to use, and doesn't bring any serious features that would help a lot of people, or even a large minority.
So yeah, I'll be lumping it in with ME and Vista. Pointless crap designed to part people with some cash. The one major difference is that I think 7 will have a lot more staying power than XP, and Microsoft is in the same bucket as RIM. Rode the same pony for too damn long.
Right off the bat, you're going to combat environmental issues, but the biggest problem I see is how you secure these systems, their code and data in an adequate manner.
My company used to do this and yes, it does suck. Not only because it does force unnatural rankings depending on the mix of people, but because the good old boys and people who have connections don't get weeded out as part of the process. I remember one of my good employees getting 'targeted' to land in the bottom of the rankings and having to haul the rank meeting manager and the HR person into a different room and asking if they wanted to continue tarring and feathering the good employee, or should I go back in and bring up the couple of 25 year plus employees who did nothing more than recirculate the air in a cubicle. Turns out they didn't.
How do you defeat this? Pretty much perception, perception, perception. To succeed in one of these things, the managers in the room folding, spindling and mutilating your annual contributions should all know who your employees are, approximately what they do, and have a favorable impression of them. This is a year long marketing effort to get recognition for your people, name them in staff meetings and in written status reports when they do something good. Death is some manager in the meeting that one of your employees did something to during the year, but they decided to wait until the review process to bring it up.
The difference between the guys at the top and the guys at the bottom are the ones at the top got talked about and everyone in the room said "Yep, good guy" while the ones at the bottom were people nobody knew, someone had a bad experience with them, or nobody understood their accomplishments.
So the marching orders are a) make sure you know what you're working on and that what you're working on has measurable value and is important to the business. If you cant identify the value and importance, simply stop doing it. Make sure everyone knows what you're doing. Make sure every time you interact with a manager that its a positive outcome or bring it up with you so you can repair the situation in advance of the review session. Market the heck out of your people and put them in front of as much management as possible. I used to send employees in my stead to meetings or have them make major presentations where most managers want to do it themselves.
Done properly, this could be a good tool. Not done properly (and it usually isnt done properly) its a stress inducing sales job and whoever has the best skills at presenting employees and hardballing the HR people will get the results.
There are also a number of other little things to pay attention to. I found out that each of these sessions has a hunk of money and stock options to give out to the group, but that they rarely allocate all of it and if it isn't allocated, that falls back into the general pool. So I found out that if I approached the HR person and asked if there was any residual we could divvy up among the top 2 or 3 people, they'd often do it.
That was my point...the study I mentioned demonstrated that a lack of objectivity led to results that couldn't be reproduced as easily by someone without the same lack of objectivity. Even that guys study turned out to lack some objectivity.
Its in the breed. School beatings can't and won't help that.
The problem here isn't the flaky science. Part of the problem is that the media and the public think that if someone ran a study with vague correlation and very little causation, that the results are facts. Sadly, the results are usually an opinion piece with some questionable conclusions.
Well, because everyone irrationally wants an iphone if they can afford it, while those that cant buy android.
Where would you possibly think the market would be for a high end piece of hardware with an iphone price that isnt an iphone, at a time when many corporations are having their employees buy their own phones. Without corporate IT pressing a RIM solution and with android and ios growing enough enterprise capabilities to get by as a business phone, there is no market for RIM.
Not really my opinion...just look at the numbers...customers already voted with their wallets.
Seriously, take 5 minutes to think about all of the technologically superior products that didn't make it, right next to the betamax, os/2, and the delorean.
Their CEO isn't very well plugged into reality. Somehow they went from being THE phone for business customers to going out of business in just a few short years. Bravo!
Fifteen percent of US CEO's are without a college degree. Plus your analogy requires a set of physical skills. If the non exercising guy is 7' 5" tall and can run and handle a ball, lack of exercise might not be much of an issue. See "Bill Laimbeer".
We keep forgetting that a lot of these 'college dropouts' who went on to become successful CEO's came from wealthy families and had their business venture not worked out, they'd have gone back to college and then laid around enjoying their trust funds for the rest of their lives.
We're also looking at this situation rather orthogonaly. Often these successful companies became successful because of a great idea or product that resonated with people. Many of them incorporated more senior managers there to help guide the 'ceo' who invented the idea or product...the VC people usually see to that. So the fact that the 'ceo' dropped out of college and doesn't have a degree is pretty much 110% irrelevant.
Foil that with the fact that many college degree laden ceo's are lousy ceo's. I can think of 4-5 right off the top of my head that couldn't find their ass with both hands and a swivel waist. The netflix ceo comes to mind. I hear he's quite good at making deals for content, but he's a blaring moron. Without looking, I'm sure he has at least one or two degrees.
I took a different route. When I looked at computer science programs in the late 70's when I graduated high school, they were mostly 5 years behind what the industry was already doing and the few schools with highly contemporary programs (dartmouth, mit, etc) were expensive and hard to get into. Since the maturing computer business needed people, my relative immaturity and lack of a degree were easily overlooked by many. Twenty years later I'd started and sold several businesses and was sitting on the board of a half dozen companies my company had invested in.
There were 3-4 companies I'd have liked to work for that nixed me because I didn't have a degree. That wasn't really a problem. I made a few billion dollars for people who weren't so short sighted.
The real story here is the percentage of people who go to college and get a degree and never use that degree in their job, or who walk around for ten years with college debt for a degree that didn't really help them that much...not the children of wealthy families who decide to punk out on Harvard and try to sell software...
I saw a study done recently where the author found that the results of many studies are quite difficult to reproduce, and he found that the more you tried to reproduce them and the more you talked publicly about your results, the more difficult it became to reproduce the results.
The problem is that researchers usually aren't approaching a study as "Lets do xxx and see what happens, then write about that". They've been funded by someone who has a particular result or proof point they'd like to see, or the study operator has a vested interest in the study outcome. At least an expectation of what they think they'll find.
Our happy little brains then lead us to that conclusion or desired outcome, and we'll gleefully ignore the things that detract from the results.
And yes, the guy who did this study of study results also found that his ability to reproduce his own results became more difficult as time went by.
For a couple of good examples of how this works, see the studies on salt and saturated fats in our diet. The intersalt study folks threw out 40% of the data that said that salt had no effect on health, suggesting that since its well known that salt affects your health that the people who weren't affected must be lying about their salt consumption. So almost half the data suggested no result, but it was discarded because it didn't fit with the desired determination. Same thing happened with saturated fats. The original researcher took 21 countries worth of data but only 5 of the 21 showed health issues that were allegedly correlated to the consumption of saturated fats. The other 16 showed no correlation at all. In fact, the real correlation was to high caloric, high sugar/carb, highly processed foods and health issues, not anything to do with saturated fats. There are cultures that eat 50-70% of their food intake as fat and they have little to no cancer, obesity or diabetes. Take one of those people and move them to the US or England and put them on our diet? They get fat and sick.
Of course, even when the study obviously sucks, the press can be counted on to come to conclusions that the study didn't even address.
...someone who wasn't around during the mainframe/minicomputer era who has a vested interest in shifting horsepower from the desktop to the server room comes along and makes me chuckle.
We got away from thin clients because 1) the performance is variable and lousy, 2) single point of failure in the network causing the device to become useless, 3) they dont save any money and in fact may be more expensive, 4) the user loses control of what they can and can't do, 5) the user has to wait on someone to develop the back end service before they can use it on their client.
So basically its a solution with a lot of problems in search of a valid application.
Those would be the stupid attorneys, since the breathalyzer stuff is arguable, while the blood tests are very hard to argue with unless they lose or mismark your sample, contaminate or or perform the test improperly.
The only benefit you get from a blood test is that usually they have to transport you somewhere special like a hospital to perform it, and it'll be done 30-45 minutes after you were brought in. So your attorney can argue that the blood test result was as much as an hour or more after you were behind the wheel, and this represents what your blood alcohol level was at that time, not when you were driving.
Once the cop decides he's going to arrest you for a DUI, its pretty irrelevant what data he does or doesn't collect or how its collected. Unless you're up for spending six to eight months of your life and about $15,000+ to put on a jury trial (and who knows what a jury is going to do), you're pretty much guilty on the spot. Its all well constructed legislation that was passed literally without opposition, as no politician is interested in sticking up for drunk drivers.
Further, in many states (like California) you're charged criminally AND as a separate administrative process by the department of motor vehicles. The DMV portion in CA simply requires that there be sufficient evidence of guilt and is independent of whatever happens in court on the criminal aspect. The DMV considers a police report with the arresting officers opinion that you were incapable of driving as sufficient evidence, without a need for a breathalyzer result. Further, some people are convicted of a dui with a blood alcohol level below.08, again because the arresting officer felt based on his observations that the driver was drunk.
The "cake" in this situation is the truth about the dividing line between social drinking and drunk driving. I think most people would agree that having a drink or two after work or with dinner is social drinking and should be legal if one should decide to drive home. However many people would be legally drunk on two drinks the size and composition of what many bars and restaurants pour.
Throw in the pressure to make DUI arrests, the ridiculous amount of fines and fees that fill wallets, the lack of any sort of sympathy or lobby effort to make things fair and reasonable, and then leave the 'social or drunk' decision to the cop...
So its advisable to stop worrying about the cockamamie systems they use to 'prove' whether you were too drunk to drive, those don't really matter much. Understand that there is no such thing as 'social drinking and driving', that by speeding a little or failing to stop completely at a stop sign can easily lead to a DUI arrest even if you haven't had that much to drink, and that arrest will be fairly devastating in terms of financial and personal impacts.
That stuff happened A LOT last year when the PSN was hacked and down for a long time. You had to jump through hoops to get the ps3 to play netflix. I tried a google tv box which did 80% of what I wanted, as did a roku player. At the end of the day I had to use a full blown computer with a keyboard to get 90% of what I wanted. Now I'm minus live tv, sports, news and have to winnow through the 47,000 different show/retention schedules that differ for each program (You can see this show, but not that one. These two episodes but not these three. Three most recent. Some random episode from last year. You'll get used to it)
Seems like everything has a big hole in it that makes it useless for some slice of customers. The roku player wont authenticate an hbo go account if you're a directv subscriber because directv wants to obstruct who uses content, and it has to go through their box. The google tv box wont play regular hulu and has no hulu plus app.
The technology is there and the content is there, but the obstructionism and protectionism and bunch of old bald guys who want to control the distribution will continue to make a mess of things for years to come.
Great article. I called my wife and told her that when she got home, I'd give her a protein injection to protect her from potential radiation hazards. She's thrilled.
This is akin to saying "Our house hasn't been broken into yet, but everyone elses in the neighborhood has, so buy ours and live in it...its break-in proof as evidenced by the lack of break-ins!"
The lie here is creating an excess value proposition by claiming a capability, in this case being fully or almost fully resistant to malware and viruses. Of course no operating system could feasibly make that claim and no marketing person should be able to maintain a straight face while saying it.
Someone should have sued right away, because anyone who has any experience whatsoever with computers knows that there is no such thing as an operating system that is immune to malware or viruses. That even a computer neophyte would think that to be possible seems ridiculous.
Ehhh...you have a couple of dynamics going there. First off a married or taken guy is 'pre-approved'. Second you're only likely to have one type of relationship with an attached person, they're going to keep their mouth shut and not tell all of their friends, etc.
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Me and Vista were the SAME problem...that being Microsoft's inability to perform a platform upgrade for windows in less than ~7 years. Sadly the cash flow wants 5 years, so they have to stump some piece of crap out that will bring in the cash.
ME was just 95 with some stuff on it (like 98) because XP wasn't going to be ready early enough to help the cash flow. Vista was basically win7 with some stuff cut off of it so they could get it to market, since 7 was going to take a couple more years to be ready.
Windows 7 is about all I (or anyone) needs for the foreseeable future. In fact XP is enough for many. Windows 8 is just a knee-jerk "lets put a phone interface on a pc" reaction, seems hard to me to use, and doesn't bring any serious features that would help a lot of people, or even a large minority.
So yeah, I'll be lumping it in with ME and Vista. Pointless crap designed to part people with some cash. The one major difference is that I think 7 will have a lot more staying power than XP, and Microsoft is in the same bucket as RIM. Rode the same pony for too damn long.
Didn't we do this already? Dump terminals with remote mainframe storage and applications for PC's, so we could do what we wanted to with it?
Right off the bat, you're going to combat environmental issues, but the biggest problem I see is how you secure these systems, their code and data in an adequate manner.
In short: stupid!
The extra work you used to be doing might have been what got you the '3' and my favorite benefit, the salary continuation program.
My company used to do this and yes, it does suck. Not only because it does force unnatural rankings depending on the mix of people, but because the good old boys and people who have connections don't get weeded out as part of the process. I remember one of my good employees getting 'targeted' to land in the bottom of the rankings and having to haul the rank meeting manager and the HR person into a different room and asking if they wanted to continue tarring and feathering the good employee, or should I go back in and bring up the couple of 25 year plus employees who did nothing more than recirculate the air in a cubicle. Turns out they didn't.
How do you defeat this? Pretty much perception, perception, perception. To succeed in one of these things, the managers in the room folding, spindling and mutilating your annual contributions should all know who your employees are, approximately what they do, and have a favorable impression of them. This is a year long marketing effort to get recognition for your people, name them in staff meetings and in written status reports when they do something good. Death is some manager in the meeting that one of your employees did something to during the year, but they decided to wait until the review process to bring it up.
The difference between the guys at the top and the guys at the bottom are the ones at the top got talked about and everyone in the room said "Yep, good guy" while the ones at the bottom were people nobody knew, someone had a bad experience with them, or nobody understood their accomplishments.
So the marching orders are a) make sure you know what you're working on and that what you're working on has measurable value and is important to the business. If you cant identify the value and importance, simply stop doing it. Make sure everyone knows what you're doing. Make sure every time you interact with a manager that its a positive outcome or bring it up with you so you can repair the situation in advance of the review session. Market the heck out of your people and put them in front of as much management as possible. I used to send employees in my stead to meetings or have them make major presentations where most managers want to do it themselves.
Done properly, this could be a good tool. Not done properly (and it usually isnt done properly) its a stress inducing sales job and whoever has the best skills at presenting employees and hardballing the HR people will get the results.
There are also a number of other little things to pay attention to. I found out that each of these sessions has a hunk of money and stock options to give out to the group, but that they rarely allocate all of it and if it isn't allocated, that falls back into the general pool. So I found out that if I approached the HR person and asked if there was any residual we could divvy up among the top 2 or 3 people, they'd often do it.
That was my point...the study I mentioned demonstrated that a lack of objectivity led to results that couldn't be reproduced as easily by someone without the same lack of objectivity. Even that guys study turned out to lack some objectivity.
Its in the breed. School beatings can't and won't help that.
The problem here isn't the flaky science. Part of the problem is that the media and the public think that if someone ran a study with vague correlation and very little causation, that the results are facts. Sadly, the results are usually an opinion piece with some questionable conclusions.
Well, because everyone irrationally wants an iphone if they can afford it, while those that cant buy android.
Where would you possibly think the market would be for a high end piece of hardware with an iphone price that isnt an iphone, at a time when many corporations are having their employees buy their own phones. Without corporate IT pressing a RIM solution and with android and ios growing enough enterprise capabilities to get by as a business phone, there is no market for RIM.
Not really my opinion...just look at the numbers...customers already voted with their wallets.
Seriously, take 5 minutes to think about all of the technologically superior products that didn't make it, right next to the betamax, os/2, and the delorean.
To be fair, we'd have probably invented beer without pussy. But we may have invented it sooner so as to engage the really fat cave girls.
"We're fully behind yet another software release that nobody will care about, nor will have any impact on the company's future success.
Nobody cares RIM. Unless you're working to get android on your hardware, you might as well pack it up and go home right now.
"We have destroyed 2 tanks, fighter planes, 2 helicopters and their shovels - We have driven them back."
I think we were pretty much finished off when our shovels were destroyed.
Their CEO isn't very well plugged into reality. Somehow they went from being THE phone for business customers to going out of business in just a few short years. Bravo!
I'll bet he has a college degree.
Fifteen percent of US CEO's are without a college degree. Plus your analogy requires a set of physical skills. If the non exercising guy is 7' 5" tall and can run and handle a ball, lack of exercise might not be much of an issue. See "Bill Laimbeer".
Nah, we're not posting this from a cave because the cave didn't impress women, so we built houses with electricity in them and running water.
Absolutely everything on earth came about because of pussy. If there were no pussy, we would be sitting in caves gnawing on raw meat.
We keep forgetting that a lot of these 'college dropouts' who went on to become successful CEO's came from wealthy families and had their business venture not worked out, they'd have gone back to college and then laid around enjoying their trust funds for the rest of their lives.
We're also looking at this situation rather orthogonaly. Often these successful companies became successful because of a great idea or product that resonated with people. Many of them incorporated more senior managers there to help guide the 'ceo' who invented the idea or product...the VC people usually see to that. So the fact that the 'ceo' dropped out of college and doesn't have a degree is pretty much 110% irrelevant.
Foil that with the fact that many college degree laden ceo's are lousy ceo's. I can think of 4-5 right off the top of my head that couldn't find their ass with both hands and a swivel waist. The netflix ceo comes to mind. I hear he's quite good at making deals for content, but he's a blaring moron. Without looking, I'm sure he has at least one or two degrees.
I took a different route. When I looked at computer science programs in the late 70's when I graduated high school, they were mostly 5 years behind what the industry was already doing and the few schools with highly contemporary programs (dartmouth, mit, etc) were expensive and hard to get into. Since the maturing computer business needed people, my relative immaturity and lack of a degree were easily overlooked by many. Twenty years later I'd started and sold several businesses and was sitting on the board of a half dozen companies my company had invested in.
There were 3-4 companies I'd have liked to work for that nixed me because I didn't have a degree. That wasn't really a problem. I made a few billion dollars for people who weren't so short sighted.
The real story here is the percentage of people who go to college and get a degree and never use that degree in their job, or who walk around for ten years with college debt for a degree that didn't really help them that much...not the children of wealthy families who decide to punk out on Harvard and try to sell software...
I saw a study done recently where the author found that the results of many studies are quite difficult to reproduce, and he found that the more you tried to reproduce them and the more you talked publicly about your results, the more difficult it became to reproduce the results.
The problem is that researchers usually aren't approaching a study as "Lets do xxx and see what happens, then write about that". They've been funded by someone who has a particular result or proof point they'd like to see, or the study operator has a vested interest in the study outcome. At least an expectation of what they think they'll find.
Our happy little brains then lead us to that conclusion or desired outcome, and we'll gleefully ignore the things that detract from the results.
And yes, the guy who did this study of study results also found that his ability to reproduce his own results became more difficult as time went by.
For a couple of good examples of how this works, see the studies on salt and saturated fats in our diet. The intersalt study folks threw out 40% of the data that said that salt had no effect on health, suggesting that since its well known that salt affects your health that the people who weren't affected must be lying about their salt consumption. So almost half the data suggested no result, but it was discarded because it didn't fit with the desired determination. Same thing happened with saturated fats. The original researcher took 21 countries worth of data but only 5 of the 21 showed health issues that were allegedly correlated to the consumption of saturated fats. The other 16 showed no correlation at all. In fact, the real correlation was to high caloric, high sugar/carb, highly processed foods and health issues, not anything to do with saturated fats. There are cultures that eat 50-70% of their food intake as fat and they have little to no cancer, obesity or diabetes. Take one of those people and move them to the US or England and put them on our diet? They get fat and sick.
Of course, even when the study obviously sucks, the press can be counted on to come to conclusions that the study didn't even address.
We're not sure if they died in a flood, but they were wearing the right pants for it.
...someone who wasn't around during the mainframe/minicomputer era who has a vested interest in shifting horsepower from the desktop to the server room comes along and makes me chuckle.
We got away from thin clients because 1) the performance is variable and lousy, 2) single point of failure in the network causing the device to become useless, 3) they dont save any money and in fact may be more expensive, 4) the user loses control of what they can and can't do, 5) the user has to wait on someone to develop the back end service before they can use it on their client.
So basically its a solution with a lot of problems in search of a valid application.
Those would be the stupid attorneys, since the breathalyzer stuff is arguable, while the blood tests are very hard to argue with unless they lose or mismark your sample, contaminate or or perform the test improperly.
The only benefit you get from a blood test is that usually they have to transport you somewhere special like a hospital to perform it, and it'll be done 30-45 minutes after you were brought in. So your attorney can argue that the blood test result was as much as an hour or more after you were behind the wheel, and this represents what your blood alcohol level was at that time, not when you were driving.
Once the cop decides he's going to arrest you for a DUI, its pretty irrelevant what data he does or doesn't collect or how its collected. Unless you're up for spending six to eight months of your life and about $15,000+ to put on a jury trial (and who knows what a jury is going to do), you're pretty much guilty on the spot. Its all well constructed legislation that was passed literally without opposition, as no politician is interested in sticking up for drunk drivers.
Further, in many states (like California) you're charged criminally AND as a separate administrative process by the department of motor vehicles. The DMV portion in CA simply requires that there be sufficient evidence of guilt and is independent of whatever happens in court on the criminal aspect. The DMV considers a police report with the arresting officers opinion that you were incapable of driving as sufficient evidence, without a need for a breathalyzer result. Further, some people are convicted of a dui with a blood alcohol level below .08, again because the arresting officer felt based on his observations that the driver was drunk.
The "cake" in this situation is the truth about the dividing line between social drinking and drunk driving. I think most people would agree that having a drink or two after work or with dinner is social drinking and should be legal if one should decide to drive home. However many people would be legally drunk on two drinks the size and composition of what many bars and restaurants pour.
Throw in the pressure to make DUI arrests, the ridiculous amount of fines and fees that fill wallets, the lack of any sort of sympathy or lobby effort to make things fair and reasonable, and then leave the 'social or drunk' decision to the cop...
So its advisable to stop worrying about the cockamamie systems they use to 'prove' whether you were too drunk to drive, those don't really matter much. Understand that there is no such thing as 'social drinking and driving', that by speeding a little or failing to stop completely at a stop sign can easily lead to a DUI arrest even if you haven't had that much to drink, and that arrest will be fairly devastating in terms of financial and personal impacts.
That stuff happened A LOT last year when the PSN was hacked and down for a long time. You had to jump through hoops to get the ps3 to play netflix. I tried a google tv box which did 80% of what I wanted, as did a roku player. At the end of the day I had to use a full blown computer with a keyboard to get 90% of what I wanted. Now I'm minus live tv, sports, news and have to winnow through the 47,000 different show/retention schedules that differ for each program (You can see this show, but not that one. These two episodes but not these three. Three most recent. Some random episode from last year. You'll get used to it)
Seems like everything has a big hole in it that makes it useless for some slice of customers. The roku player wont authenticate an hbo go account if you're a directv subscriber because directv wants to obstruct who uses content, and it has to go through their box. The google tv box wont play regular hulu and has no hulu plus app.
The technology is there and the content is there, but the obstructionism and protectionism and bunch of old bald guys who want to control the distribution will continue to make a mess of things for years to come.
Great article. I called my wife and told her that when she got home, I'd give her a protein injection to protect her from potential radiation hazards. She's thrilled.
This is akin to saying "Our house hasn't been broken into yet, but everyone elses in the neighborhood has, so buy ours and live in it...its break-in proof as evidenced by the lack of break-ins!"
The lie here is creating an excess value proposition by claiming a capability, in this case being fully or almost fully resistant to malware and viruses. Of course no operating system could feasibly make that claim and no marketing person should be able to maintain a straight face while saying it.
Someone should have sued right away, because anyone who has any experience whatsoever with computers knows that there is no such thing as an operating system that is immune to malware or viruses. That even a computer neophyte would think that to be possible seems ridiculous.
... because somewhere along the line someone gave them money based on their success, which appears to have been faked for some period of time.
Fire up your lawsuits and get the popcorn ready.
Ehhh...you have a couple of dynamics going there. First off a married or taken guy is 'pre-approved'. Second you're only likely to have one type of relationship with an attached person, they're going to keep their mouth shut and not tell all of their friends, etc.