My del.icio.us bookmarks for February 18th through February 25th
February 25, 2008
These are my del.icio.us bookmarks for February 18th through February 25th:
- Companies Can Make Money With Widget Ads - Yes they can and it makes a heck of a lot of sense to be thinking about this from a content perspective
- The Risk of Spreadsheets « Manage By Walking Around - Nigel disagrees with me but that's OK - it's a well reasoned argument
- http://blog.awakenedvoice.com/2008/02/23/gmail-upgrades-linking-tools/ - Ooooh - now that' nice. Cute feature.
- Board Culture and Global Governance - Interesting take on the board culture issue
- NetBooks: Integrated SaaS Suite for Very Small Businesses. Almost.| Zoli’s Blog - Zoli's excellent review is well worth the reading. Plenty of good detail and a balanced critique.
- gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: new york bartender allegory - Sounds painfully familiar
- ITPro: News: Morrisons commits to Oracle in ‽110 million IT move - Brave people. It will be interesting to see if Oracle is able to meet as much of their needs as the existing systems. The presumption is that they will but as enterprise software has a habit of being oversold.
- CIS penalties: A nice little earner! - 15 Feb 2008 - Well yes, but only if the penatly notice stands up as valid. Happened to mne once many years ago. Got it overturned.
First class or coach?
February 25, 2008
Ron Baker offers an interesting discussion about value delivery where he demonstrates the Adaptive Capacity Model using the airplane as a metaphor. The illustration at the top of this post sets the scene.
In this model, Ron suggests that:
And here’s the biggest question of all: Where does the customer want to sit?
The firm DOES NOT decide this, the customer does. How? Ask them. We have firms who slide the picture of the plane over to the customer and ask, “Where would you like to sit in our plane.” This forces the firm to communicate the value proposition for each section of the plane, just like the airlines have (quite effectively I might add).Keep it simple with this. I know from experience how we can add many layers of complexity that don’t mean a whole lot. People will draw their own conclusions from the metaphor, that’s the beauty of thinking for one’s self.
Ron goes on to say the metaphor can help the firm decide how it organizes its client groups according to different value delivery check points. I don’t have a problem with this in principle but I do in practice.
Experience shows that clients want value but at the lowest possible price. They consistently push those boundaries and as practitioners we tend to give way - often far too readily. In order to make this model work, we have to be confident we ‘know’ the value we can deliver to each class of passenger. That takes a good amount of effort to work out.
As an alternative, I have recently found that when practitioners adopt a factory style of production in relation to compliance work, they can adopt the EasyJet model of service where there is no real distinction between where you sit. These practices adopt fixed prices but, like the low cost airlines, concentrate on ensuring they squeeze profit from each menu item. They are among the most profitable firms I know. And with the happiest clients. Why? Because for these clients, who constitute the majority of those who cross our doorstep, the work is mostly viewed as a commoditized necessity where price is a sensitive issue but where service delivery has a value. Just as with the low cost airlines, it’s about delivering on the promise of safely landing on time, most of the time.
VMWare Fusion: nice. Now what?
February 25, 2008
Following my installation of Parallels on my MacBookPro, the nice people at VMWare asked if I’d like to give Fusion a shot. Fusion is another virtualization technology that allows me to run dual operating systems on my MacBookPro. The theory runs that I get the benefits of both operating systems and can seamlessly slide between the two.
Installation is straightforward - the usual Apple ‘click ‘n’ go’ approach I’ve come to enjoy and running XP is similarly easy. Fire up Fusion and XP is there. Fusion allows me to import my Parallels setting which saves a lot of messing around with re-downloading applications I’ve already got running in that environment. So far so good. But…
It opens up a whole new set of problems. Do I want to be in Windows most of the time when the applications I use are largely in the Internet cloud or do I stick with the native Mac operating system?
Right now my main reason for running Windows is so I can use LiveWriter. As of today I have two other reasons. First up is the new Internet Explorer 7 browser which emulates many of the best parts of Firefox but without the horrendous memory leaks that seem to plague Firefox. IE7 seems to run as fast as the new Webkit Safari browser and is more feature packed. Score two to Windows.
Today I also stumbled across Spacetime, courtesy of a couple of Tweets from Marilyn Pratt and Luis Suarez. Spacetime is a 3D search tool that allows me to quickly get past the cruff that Google search usually delivers on complex search terms. It is waaaaay cool and adds value to my research needs. But it’s only available on XP/Vista with a Mac version ‘coming soon.’ Isn’t it always the way? In one sense that doesn’t matter because I can still drag research material into a cloud service I’m currently testing but can’t name that helps me easily organize research material. BTW - when this goes public it’s going to be awesome.
Finally, I received an email from a company that has turned del.icio.us into a custom search engine called deli.Goo. According to ReadWriteWeb:
The way it works is by creating a Google Custom Search engine based on all of a user’s del.icio.us bookmarks, all of the bookmarks under a single tag, or all of the bookmarks under a single tag from a single user.
So now I have four killer reasons for sticking with Windows. Anyone involved in sales at Redmond reading this must be grinning from ear to ear. But even then it’s not quite that simple.
Windows doesn’t render its screens as well as Apple in the VMWare fusion environment. I’m sure I’d get used to it over time but right now it doesn’t ‘feel’ just right.
The jury’s out but in the end I’m going to vote with convenience. Whatever that ends up meaning.
UPDATE: Robert Scoble also thinks VMWAre Fusion rocks.
Xero - a new contender to watch?
February 22, 2008
Last evening I fielded a call from Rod Drury, CEO with Xero, a New Zealand based vendor that is hoping to make it big in the UK. I’ll be meeting the company next week for a full briefing. In the meantime, he provided some insights into the company’s strategy that are worth sharing.
- The company IPO’d early on the theory that credibility through public ownership matters and in order to lock in value. Both ideas play directly towards vendor viability, a key element in any software buying decision
- They kicked off by looking to attract accounting practice partners. They homed in on forms with particular characteristics as a way of validating the market. Today they have about 100 in NZ including some international brands
- They then backed that by partnering with local banks to provide host-to-host connections that could be used by Xero to change customer behaviour through auto uploading of key data. Those banks are now an important source of referral.
- Developing a strong vertical market strategy that allows them to quickly understand and develop markets based on need.
Rod has an infectious quality to the enthusiasm he exudes. As a founder he’s not lost any of the gung-ho crazy spirit you need to make a business like this fly. I’ll be taking a peek under the covers and will share more of what I learn about this company that hails from what Rod describes as: “This tiny rock from somewhere in the South Pacific.” If the first impressions are indicative of the company’s DNA then it will be an interesting and entertaining day. You don’t often get to say that about a software company.
In the meantime - check out the company blog.
