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Saturday, January 12, 2002 |
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This Business 2.0 story makes this book with memos from the CEO seem a lot more interesting. Actually, I sorta hate to say it, but there were several interesting articles in this month's issue. Since got bought out, the stories have a lot more rigor and depth - probably because they're pulling from a more mature pool of business writers. 1:47:56 PM 
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It's the first Drucker I've ever read. If it's all this good I have a lot of reading to do. In a nutshell, the book lays out a definition of management (why we have it, what responsibilities are entailed by management, etc), discusses the key challenges of management, and gives direction on the best (and worst) ways to address them. The impressive thing about it, from my point of view, is that all of it seems to hang together in a connected and consistent framework. Even if you know all the practices he describes, you'll benefit from seeing how they fit together and build on each other. It rings true with my experience -- it fits with the good and bad management experiences I've had in my career. And, it's well-written. Clear and easy to read. I want to memorize this book -- both for the overall content, for the anecdotes of good and bad management, and for the embedded management proverbs (e.g. Businesses don't reform customers; they satisfy them). |
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like the idea, we'll see if I can execute on it... maybe tomorrow... 10:37:19 AM
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rdf. An article on using RDF -- haven't decided how I feel about RDF... 10:37:11 AM
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IBM is a juggernaut. Now, they'll let you skate for 90 days before paying them -- in slow economic times, everyone wants to pay slowly. At the end of that, you can finance the payments. A key differentiator in a tight services market -- esp. since most of their competitors can't afford to offer it. This is important to IBM because: |
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I think IBM decided that RMS was mostly right -- software is mostly a service. There are a few places where you can sell shrink wrapped software that actually meets some need for a large number of people. But most of the lines of code out that have been written are in service to a unique problem only a few people have. When they saw this, they embraced open source -- not because of freedom, but because it makes them more money. It makes it less expensive to solve more problems with custom software. For them, that means an opportunity to sell more hardware and the service of writing the software. 10:36:28 AM
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Imagine if you took *every* line of software currently in deployment, counted how many times it had been deployed, and sorted the list. I think you'd find, that at one end, there was a very narrow band of software that been deployed millions of times (e.g. Microsoft operating system code). At the other end would be an amazingly long list of lines that had been deployed exactly once. A similarly interesting thing would be to count how many times the lines had been executed and sort it by that. How does open source software effect the picture? I think it creates expands the middle range of code(the infrequently deployed) and enables developers to blow out the tail of the list (the single-deployment type). If you want to be in the software business, where are the lines of code you'll write likely to end up? 10:35:50 AM
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Last update: 8/16/2003; 7:00:21 PM .
