ugh...

-
heading to user conference in Montreal. My head has been in a fog all weekend with no remedy in site. Presenting on Tuesday & Wednesday... this ought to be hilarious. If anything the aches and pains should make for some good tweets.

Comments

David said…
Good luck man! Tell everybody i say hi.
May 12, 2008 at 9:39 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ebook readers : the next flip?

-
As an owner of a Flip camera, I was disappointed to hear that Cisco has decided to sunset it's Flip camera operations.At the same time I see the same writing on the wall that motivated this move.  The handheld video market has been sandwiched in two directions. First from smartphones and their increasingly better cameras in a highly portable multi-purpose device, and second from Digital SLRs shooting HD video in better quality. As an owner myself, with the wife's iphone and my android, the flip, continued to be forgotten at home. And most importantly, not missed. It remains a great niche device, but I like many others I suspect are willing to sacrifice the user experience for portability. This was a  great device at home with a young baby, but newer smartphones and more critical things to pack like diapers, food and drink.  Despite our 1st world entitlement people make some (small) sacrifices in quality for portability (see mp3). In our disposable culture, many new tech...
Read more

Cigarettes & LMS'

-
Your LMS will not cause cardiovascular disease. Each time you use your LMS is will not shorten your life by 11 minutes. Still, I believe a traditional LMS is similar to cigarette. A Learning Management System is supposed to be about tracking a user’s learning. What progress have they made, what courses have they taken what are their scores? In reality I think this is not quite true. An LMS is about pushing information. Let me elaborate. Cigarettes are a means of delivering nicotine. Big Tobacco has fought this, but that’s the truth of it. There’s a certain image perpetuated, but that’s just the sales pitch. Cigarettes deliver nicotine and all of its “benefits” to your body. It’s a somewhat acceptable means to get a fix (versus chewing tobacco). Learning Management Systems deliver content to users. What about all the other new functionality? Those are how vendors stay relevant and sell new versions. It’s similar to how Microsoft has to keep “improving” the word processor (read: extra f...
Read more

changes in software maintenance

-
There appears to be a growing revolt against the boilerplate approach to software maintenance pricing(see zdnet ). As a vendor, I appreciate how much revenue this draws in. At the same time from a customer standpoint it can be a challenge in today's cost-cutting environment. The idea of declining fees or a customer-specific agreement are an interesting and at the same time troubling idea. Successful software companies are often judged on their maintenance revenue. A company relying on just implementation dollars could be considered a consulting company. This will change the way software companies are valued, and force them to create new Is the customer actively applying updates? Is the customer constantly calling for support or new enhancements? Perhaps the fee would be based on some level of activity metric. Do you have new users entering the system? Rolling out a new phase? Maybe some sort of rolling average factoring support calls, implementations and active users. This seems to...
Read more