strategy

Microsoft's CIO: 'I feel your pain'

I really liked this Ina Fried interview with Microsoft's new CIO, Tony Scott. It gives good insight into how Microsoft "eats its own dogfood," and how it can improve in understanding customer requirements.

On this last item, Scott's commentary was intriguing:

What I am trying to do is improve our world in all three areas. On the dogfood side, I think this is where maybe I bring some value as an outsider. I've been going to Microsoft for years...What I was always disappointed in was the relative degree to which Microsoft could talk to … Read more

Inside Yahoo's social network

In January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang offered a sneak peek at Yahoo's next-generation, socially networked user experience. In a Flash-based demo, Yang showed how Yahoo was opening up its platform to third-party developers and building hooks to socialize the experience for the more than 500 million users of its various services.

But that demo of socially enriched Yahoo services is still incubating, and the company has not been successful in becoming a social-networking hub. Yahoo 360, introduced in 2005 , never took off. A more hip version, Mash, was recently shuttered … Read more

Is Google becoming Microsoft with Android?

There's more than a whiff of truth to The VAR Guy's suggestion that Google's Android antics make it seem like the Microsoft of yore: heavy on marketing and light on substance. In particular, I'm equally dismayed by Google's "vaporware" announcements:

Throughout the 1990s and even today, Microsoft often pre-announces products to engage and excite ISVs (independent software vendors). Win the ISV battle, and you'll win the resulting product wars. It's a smart strategy, and Google adopted it when the company announced the path to Android. ( Check out this preview video of Android devices.) … Read more

Federal adoption of open source: It's just a question of how much

For the U.S. federal government, it's no longer a question of "if" when it comes to open source, a Federal Computer Week article notes, but "how much" and "which projects."

Government officials who support open source now find they have a new decision to make: whether to use one of the growing number of open-source packages that could handle higher-profile agency operations, such as business intelligence analysis, content management or customer relationship management (CRM), to name a few.

I know from personal experience that there are very few federal organizations that are … Read more

While the CIO was sleeping, enterprises look elsewhere for innovation

With SAP and Oracle raising prices in an effort to test the limits of price elasticity, CIOs are devoting an ever increasing share of their IT budgets to feeding bloated technology vendors. As CIO.com's Bernard Golden suggests, however, such devotion to the old guard of IT is making it easier and easier for disruptive SaaS and open-source vendors to "ooze" into the enterprise:

...[J]ust because most of your budget is tied up feeding legacy vendors doesn't mean that the rest of your company isn't going to pursue new IT-enabled offerings, it just means … Read more

Making sense of reorgs

Many technology industry executives are surprisingly inept when it comes to planning and executing reorganizations effectively.

One of the most evident signs of dysfunctional executive management is reorg-du-jour (reorganization of the day, for those who didn't take French in high school). Nothing is more disruptive or counterproductive to the effectiveness of an organization than frequent reorganizations.

Not to pick on Yahoo, but the frequency, if not the execution, of its notorious reorgs has almost certainly contributed to its talent exodus and loss of productivity at a time when it can scarcely afford it.

That said, reorganizations go hand-in-hand with changes in corporate and product objectives and strategy that are often implemented to meet an ever-changing competitive landscape. To that extent, they can be critical to business success, if done correctly.

When do reorganizations make sense and when are they frivolous and disruptive? How can they be executed to minimize productivity disruption and worker frustration? Here's an insider's perspective on organizational change in two parts. First we deal with "how," then we deal with "when" and "why."… Read more

The alternative-energy bubble

What do you get when you mix Al Gore, global warming, whacky environmentalists, skyrocketing oil prices, lots of venture funding, and irrational exuberance? An alternative-energy bubble.

What, you don't believe that there's an alternative-energy bubble? Then you're just not paying attention. It may not be the biggest bubble in the history of technology--yet. And it may not be ready to burst--yet. But it's a bubble, all right. All the signs are there.

In solar energy alone, hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funds have been poured into the likes of Nanosolar, SoloPower, OptiSolar, HelioVolt, eSolar, SolFocus, Solel, Miasole, GreenVolts, Hydro Green, Infinia, Sopogy, Cyrium, SkyFuel, BrightSource Energy--the list goes on and on.

All the usual suspects are in the game: big-name venture capital firms, investment banks, private-equity firms, energy companies, technology companies, individual investors, a new batch of investment companies focused primarily on energy, and even a hedge fund or two.

There are lots of recognizable names, as well, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Microsoft founder Paul Allen, and Sun Microsystems founder and ex-Kleiner Perkins partner Vinod Khosla.… Read more

Money is tight. Buy more open source

CIO.com addresses the souring economy with this counsel for CIOs:

When IT directors take the time to build a business case demonstrating the ROI for these kinds of projects [training, etc.], they tend to get funded. Businesses aren't really interested in cutting costs for the sake of doing it, they just want to eliminate waste and get the most from every dollar spent on IT services. It falls to the CIO to demonstrate the value of IT initiatives to the business in real economic terms, and to counter the image of IT as a cost center.

Given that … Read more

Yahoo plans Groups improvements

Update 12:41 p.m. PDT: I corrected a reference that should have been to Yahoo.

Yahoo has begun sharing some future plans it has for Groups, its service where people with shared interests can get together online through mailing lists, calendars, polls, and other features.

In the "coming year," Yahoo plans to add many attributes that expand the scope of groups, according to the Yahoo Groups blog on Tuesday. Those features include tools for product reviews, service directories, wanted boards, address books, and event planners.

And upgrades to existing features include: a better system for hosting photos … Read more