Quest for voltage
April 9, 2008
I want a car that plugs in, if I can ever find one that (a) really exists and (b) really exists where I live.
Car makers make it sound as though all it takes to drive electric is an open road, a plug, and a credit card. The reality, however, is quite different.
Anchors away
February 8, 2008
Yes, I realize it’s spelled “aweigh.” I was making a point. 
For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, the Asian Internet outages that wreaked so much havoc on overseas business lately were caused–in part–by a ship’s anchor dragging over undersea cables. (You can read about it in WSJ)
The last time this happened, right before the holidays in 2006, a Taiwan earthquake was the proximate cause. Now, you can in some measure predict and protect against moderate earthquakes, but this time the outage was caused by the nautical equivalent of a cow kicking a lantern in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn, and that’s a lot harder to guard against.
When I was a tech reporter covering US federal computing, the nice guys at NIST learned of my fascination with gigantic networks and sent me a chuckle: Mae East was most vulnerable to attack from a sale-crazed Christmas shopper.
Amazon succumbs?
December 1, 2007
OK, call me crazy and non-observant, but I’ve been holiday shopping on Amazon’s new interface for days now and just noticed an odd thing: They’ve got a gen-u-wine ad on the home page. A really, truly, somebody-besides-Amazon-is-buying-space ad on their front page.
A glance at their advertising section, and I see they’re selling “best of breed brands” on the home page, product pages, and “Thank You” page. (And there are more ads below, from “trusted partners,” but Amazon’s flirted with that kind of stuff before.)
Dammit.
The end of the middle (in software, at least)
November 12, 2007
Interesting article in BizWeek on the consolidation in the software industry, triggered by IBM’s announcement that it’s acquiring Cognos.
Cognos makes products that CEOs and accounting types love and middle managers generally hate. Their flagship product is a performance management tool that eats data like candy, and–depending on how well you’ve cleaned and polished your input–spits out balanced scorecards, dashboards, and other strategic overviews that can actually make your life (or your bosses’ lives) easier…if you pick the right set of analytics.
What we sell vs. what they buy
November 3, 2007
Doing a little market research for someone right now. Nothing fancy, just an informal Zoomerang survey: 10 questions sent out to about 3,000 customers, offering them a chance at a free lunch if they respond.
Sent the questionnaire to the veep and the head of customer service for approval, and got an immediate grumble: Why were we wasting five of our precious questions on “stuff we already know,” i.e., business size, which of the company’s many products they own, etc…?”
“If that’s what you want, we’ll just ask the database guy make you a report. We capture all that stuff already.”
I reminded them of the difference between reality and perception. Reality–our product info and sales data–vs. customer perception, which is what they really buy when they plunk down a purchase order. The point isn’t duplicating the data in the CRM software, it’s understanding how much of the message actually got through to the customer, and how much of the customer’s message(s) actually get through to us.