Return of the Duck Truck

Followed the flying feathers again last night and came side-by-side with the Duck Truck. We got caught up in nearly-stopped traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Being after nightfall, I needed flash, so I rolled down my window to prevent glare and grabbed this.

With the window down I could hear the hunderds of them quacking away. When Canadian geese fly overhead their quacking invokes notions of nature, lakes, streams and the like for me. In this case all I could imagine was hoisin sauce.

It purty out here

This is outside the deli where I get lunch some days.

I’m @ work

Looking at Silverlight in the Air through a Prism

Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism, that is. I wish I were clever enough to fit Yahoo Widgets into that title, but my brain just didn’t go there. In any case interesting things may be going on with interfaces. There’s a sudden confluence of ‘solutions’ aimed at pulling experiences out of the browser. This has some positive aspects, the browser remains a page-oriented environment and it demands a degree of bending to it’s will. In the enterprise space, there is great appeal to detaching meaningful experiences from the monolithic approach that ERP delivers.

Is there a downside? I can imagine desktops becoming cluttered with multiple disparate interfaces (You are in a maze of twisty little GUIs, all unalike) with a lack of context providing the conceptual or actual relationships between them. Do people even want to have all these little bits floating about? The proportion of folks who are able to manipulate their computing environments remains low, and I for one don’t believe that Millenials are somehow naturally equipped or even inclined to be more than consumers of services. In some quarters there seems to be an almost mystical attachment to the idea that young-uns are deeply skilled laptop Jedis. I’d like to see some real-world testing, my gut says that they can easily learn to use new apps and devices but they’re just as inclined to ignore customization as us dinosaurs. I grew up on TV, that doesn’t make me an expert on signal propagation or any other technical aspect of the medium. Just a consumer, sorry.

That said, I’m thrilled to see interest in alternative interfaces at places like SAP. I believe the real benefits will come when the UX and design people get to apply their disciplines. It feels like we’re at the start of some innovative thinking around enterprise application interfaces, and it’s about freakin’ time.

No Photo

Driving across the Bronx one pre-dawn morning this week I saw a shooting star. It seemed beautiful and misplaced at the same time. I was not far from the location of the “Good Morning” photo below, that morning there was no charm – it took me an hour to go 4 miles. There’s unexpected beauty to be found if you’re alert enough, I guess.

Google-flavor PCs at…Wal-Mart

Via Google Operating System: Wal-Mart is selling a sub-$200USD PC running an Ubuntu variant with a with a “conceptual Google OS” and Google’s permission to use its trademarks. The OS is available at http://www.thinkgos.com. Man, I love this country!

Innovation, but mostly not.

I had planned on a different subject today but Steve Mann’s bit on innovation in Able Brains touched something off. Read it, and then spend some time with his other writings, it’s been too long since I shilled his blog which is one of my regular reads.

There is a considerable gap between many company’s stated dedication to innovation as a competitive and growth lever and the eventual execution and product offerings. What passes for innovation in many places is too diluted to recognize. Steve offers some yellow flags:

“…if you work at an organization that doesn’t have a culture that (1) values innovation and (2) places governance, budget and resources around innovation – not that it never will but it may be a cold day in hell before Innovation becomes mainstream. Further, many top managers agree that corporate policy actually tends to offer limited incentives to innovation or limits it by placing an innovation team in a risk averse organization or business unit or having no plan to deal with failure other than to junk the team and start over. Some say this is a talent issue, other execs say its a cultural issue. The answer is “yes.””

Couldn’t agree more. I worked in e-business organizations which were walled gardens. We were kept at arms length so as not to infect the general population and once a product was deemed to be sufficiently cootie-free it was sliced out and transplanted into the business. Today, increasingly regulated and scrutinized operating environments makes innovation look more like a risk to be managed. I’ve seen the talent issues run both ways. We may have leaders and managers who have been conditioned to drive risk out, but at the same time we experience few skillful innovators and far too many who claim to be visionary but end up being undisciplined or ineffectual at matching innovation to business benefits.

The aversion to innovate affects more than competitive advantage and growth. I often work with clients whose IT has sufficient control over how apps are deployed to push them into vanilla deployments because they’re managing risk in terms of not wanting to manage code bases or introduce customizations that add complexity to upgrades. The result is business heads who don’t get what they need out of systems, with functional professionals who are relegated to awkwardly aligned processes, managers and employees who need to perform basic tasks and are presented with systems that require hours of training to use. The aversion to innovate at even this simple level – let’s make our systems easier to use by our own – is a direct cause of this pain. Risk needs to have a 360 review process so a fuller measure of is made before a decision that leans towards benefiting a single area is taken.

La Marzocco innards

Clover at Real Coffee

We had a Brazilian French Roast and a kona. This is the way to make coffee, folks. Only eleven thousand dollars!

Clover at Real coffee