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Not that long ago but in a place far away, I came to the conclusion that devices that purported to help people manage their days in fact made the problem worse. I was taking aim at everything from the Palm to the Franklin planner. The problem as I stated in my long lost archives of […]
Number 9 Dreamforce
For a Beatles’ fan and a fan particularly of John Lennon, the number 9 has an important meaning. It has enough meaning Lennon wrote a few songs referencing it, including Number 9 Dream. Perhaps I like Number 9 Dream because it seems to be, quite literally, calling my name on the background vocal track. But […]

Cezanne’s Apple
Cezanne wrote once “With an Apple, I will astonish Paris.” Cezanne at the time was a notoriously sophisticated and gifted walking set of contradictions. He loved everything he hated and hated everything he loved. He approached painting with scalpel-like precision but with a scalpel to canvas nonetheless. He wanted the world to bleed – and […]

The Real-Time Brand
As I write this, it is kickoff time for the Super Bowl, an event that galvanizes people as much as Bill O’Reilly does on a day to day basis. The Super Bowl is a brand, and while millions watch it, millions refuse to watch it, and hundreds of thousands are forced to watch it because […]

Organized Robbery
We’re at a time of rebellion against maintenance fees, which now include the elements of insurance, extortion, declining systems, and of course refactoring all of which add to the costs of any implementation. Add that into the actual implementation itself, and one is left with whopping fees and eventually ineffective…

Dreamforce: Decade of Inspiration
I was at the first Dreamforce. It was in a hotel — the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco and it attracted 500 people and perhaps another 200 employees — roughly 2/3 of the entire company. The big announcements were related to sales force automation, but the company also announced custom tabs and some nifty […]

Does Twitter (Really) Make you Smarter?
When 95 percent of college students use social media tools, perhaps excessively, it seems almost impossible to isolate a study that tries to answer the question “does social media make you smarter.” This is an awkward and irrelevant question to ask and anyone who has been born since the industrial revolution but before Facebook was […]

Software is Roadkill
The fastest way to become roadkill to venture capitalists is to become a software company. Software may not be inherently evil (it has created wealth for many people that is in proportion to the pain it has provided to many customers). Software and specifically on-premise enterprise software, however, is clearly…

An debate with the Doctor of Failure
Failure happens. There are many issues and stakeholders in any technology implementation process and any of them adds complexity that can lead to failure. The question is how much technology, the DNA of the technology vendor, and other stakeholders contributes to the failure. Is it always a project management issue…