This ZDNet headline makes it sound like VMware will offer the sliderocket technology as an appliance, a la Zimbra. I have no idea if this is true and haven’t seen anything to corroborate this except that it might be an obvious guess.
Zimbra’s ability to provide collaborative editing of documents is somewhat of a joke when compared to google docs, but sliderocket is in many ways a superior and more groundbreaking product than google doc’s presentation app.
Speaking of files being so 1990….
Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”
Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”
“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”
…Eventually they won people over by a logical argument–that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.
A well done meditation on digital storytelling while being a great example of digital storytelling itself. Found on Ryan Wetzel’s posterous.
Walmart based this incredibly expensive misadventure on what customers said, rather than what they did. And the customer experience is all about what customers do. In real life.
Read the whole story.
There have been times recently when the subject of what students or faculty actually want out of our services has been discussed intently. The question on the table is what the optimal user experience would be. In these discussion I have found myself arguing against purely data-based decisions. It is really hard to argue against data, yet I knew that somehow data alone was not enough. I could feel that data was somehow obscuring the solution. In principal, I had a gut feeling that data would not support a true innovative or creative leap. I kept finding myself saying things like “You can’t ask someone what they want, they don’t know” or “We’ll make something better than what this user wants.” Reading the Walmart story above I begin to see the situation more clearly. It is something so obvious when you say it, but it is something often ignored. Simply asking users or listening to what they say is not enough. You need to actually observe to get at the truth. So, perhaps my problem is data is not too misplaced, but it is more a questioning of the type of data we had, not the very concept of using data to reach decisions itself.
Now this analogy between Walmart redesigning its floor layout and designing technology services in higher ed is not completely congruous. Maybe the new Walmart was a better user experience, and a customer buying less stuff is actually a happier customer. Good for customers, bad for Walmart. The basic tenet holds though. Making a decision related to customer experience is better based on not only what customers are saying. It is valuable to know what customers are saying, but it doesn’t mean the customers are right. You’ve got to dig deeper.
See also making users happy is a sucker’s game.
By way of Gary Tan, I found this Ted Talk by Robert Thurman.
Gary quotes Thurman:
“…all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it’s the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that’s going on everywhere in the planet.”
I do believe that the internet is creating some kind of shared consciousness, some kind of super brain. I have mentioned this idea in many of my previous posts under various names that I am too lazy to go look up right now.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that it would lead to us to all becoming compassionate and enlightened, in the buddhist sense. I think it makes it easier for us to be aware, and that is the first step towards compassion. McLuhan felt that the media of film and television would bring about political change – when those in oppressed or poorer countries saw in moving pictures what those in more free or richer countries had, it would lead to a reckoning.
Really, I do see humans using the internet to augment their consciousness. I also have a belief that eventually compassion will spread more thoroughly through the world. Is one the cause of the other? I don’t think so, but I do think that both trends compliment each other.
The result of a workshop led by Evan Roth.
See also: Freedom, Art, And Viral Media… In 40 Minutes and Cache Rules Everything Around Me.
Just read this piece from Tom DeMarco. It is a PDF, so watch out. (Seriously, putting pdfs on the web….).
It is short, so you should just read the whole thing. The gist is that you can’t control software projects, so maybe we should stop trying. And knowing that software projects run off the rails, we need to be pick the right projects. We need to aim for projects that have potentially huge returns – software that is transformative or at least has huge financial implications, “…strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects.” This is not coming from a young hotshot silicon valley start up hipster, this is coming from one of the fathers of software engineering as a discipline.
At ETS, there are more potential software projects than we can feasibly do. We need to be smart about which projects we take on, and be realistic about the commitment that taking on new software entails. I am excited to be working on some potentially transformative projects in the near future. Hopefully we can recognize them, embrace them, and give them the nurturing they need to succeed.
A few weeks before the portfolio was due, two of his colleagues (the poet he had written up and an eighteenth-century scholar with whom he chats regularly) suggested, after they had heard him talk once or twice about the peer-review process for a Good Article, that he should include it under “research” as well. And at many universities, the decision hinges in large part on the research section – where the “publish or perish” phrase comes from. Candidates for tenure must demonstrate that they have published in peer-reviewed publications.
See also: Clay Shirky’s Keynote at the TLT symposium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyaTuG7oVcI
hat tip to Gary Chinn – http://twitter.com/gchinn – for pointing me to the article.
