All Posts in Technology

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Random thoughts while on vacation in southern Spain:

Want to know how to motivate people? Forget the books and formulas — even mine; even Daniel Pink’s!

Just pay attention to your life. For example, there I was, “canyoning” at the top of a 90-foot cliff (estimated from the top; from the bottom estimates ranged from 3 to 4 meters). Below me was a pool of water of uncertain depth.

In the pool were my stepsister and stepbrother who had just cheerfully jumped in. Next to me was our guide and a young woman, perhaps 27 years old, who had joined our little expedition.

While perched on the rock, while our guide was explaining that all I had to do was take one step, I idly wondered if the proper diagnosis was acrophobia (fear of heights) or bathophobia (fear of falling).

But with two already down an all four watching me …

This is why, when you manage projects, you want a weekly status meeting, where everyone on the project interacts with everyone else on the project team as they discuss whether they made their deadlines for the week or not. Neither my list of motivators (need for approval, exclusivity, fear, greed, and guilt) nor Pink’s (autonomy, mastery, purpose) mentions peer pressure.

But peer pressure is what launched me off the rock and into freefall. And when you’re managing a project, peer pressure is the your most effective tool for keeping everyone on schedule.

* * *

We drove to Gibraltar. On the way we  read  a wee bit of its history: England got custody as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, and Spain has been angry about it ever since.

Having driven there, gazed upon it, and admired it, and also having spent time and energy facilitating discussions and brokering agreements, I have this advice for Spain:

Get over it. It’s a rock. Sure, if you owned it maybe you could get Prudential to pay you for usage rights, but probably not. Other than that … your economy is in depression, your overextended banks took you there, bailing them out nearly bankrupted your government, and you have no control over your own currency.

My advice: Ignore the rock. My related advice to the managers and staff who read this missive on a regular basis: Someone you worked with slighted you recently, or insulted you, or otherwise took possession of your Rock of Gibraltar. Your best strategy just might be to ignore it, too.

(Along these lines, Ambrose Bierce once wrote of a lion’s encounter with a skunk. Feeling threatened, the skunk did what skunks do best, but the lion took no apparent notice. So the skunk said something like, “Sir, I beg you to notice that I have set upon the earth an implacable aroma.” To which the lion replied, “You needn’t have bothered. I already knew you were a skunk.”)

* * *

My Dad updated his iPad to iOS 7. It froze mid-update. As I’m the closest thing to a resident tech here, it was my responsibility to do something. It being an iPad, I pushed various buttons in varying combinations until it unfroze, at which point the screen informed us that nothing else was going to happen until we plugged it into iTunes.

With my usual technical panache I figured out this meant the iTunes software and not the iTunes store. So we found an appropriate Windows laptop, downloaded and installed iTunes, plugged in the iPad, and pushed various buttons in varying combinations once again, until voila! The iPad booted up. Remarkably, it was then able to restore from iCloud and my Dad was back in business.

Apple. It just works. Except when it doesn’t.

So then, for reasons that mattered at the time but not to you, I had to install some videoconferencing software on my personal Windows 8 tablet. Pathetically enough, the software didn’t detect that it was being installed on a version of Windows with which it was incompatible, but it was, and it didn’t, resulting in a hung system, followed by an uninstall, after which  much of the installed software no longer worked.

Fortunately, Windows 8 comes with a feature called “Refresh,” which is supposed to fix up munged systems without doing any collateral damage. Unfortunately, Refresh caused quite a bit of collateral damage: It uninstalled every bit of Windows Desktop software, including Microsoft Office.

Which is why I’m writing this week’s column using whatever Google calls its office suite these days.

Proving that no matter where you are and whatever you face, there’s probably a way to fix it, but there’s a good chance the way you find will be pretty annoying.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Tablet Shipments Forecast to Top Total PC Shipments in the Fourth Quarter of 2013 and Annually by 2015, According to IDC (IDC press release, 9/11/2013)

It’s the story that would not die! It’s the end of the PC era! It’s the end of Microsoft (which, oblivious, continues to increase revenue at comfortable operating margins, year after year after year)!

It’s …

Not what most industry commentators keep saying, over and over again. What it is:

Two facts:

  1. Television shipments are in decline.
  2. Tablet shipments aren’t just increasing, but ten or so tablets are sold for every television.

Conclusion: The advent of tablet devices has taken us into the post-television era.

Congratulate me! I’ve achieved perfect incoherence. Impressive, eh?

The PC marketplace is now saturated. Every consumer who wants one has one. Every seat in every business that needs a PC has a PC.

And we’ve just about reached the point where the software people use the most no longer requires more and more RAM and CPU cycles.

Which means the only reasons anyone has to buy a new PC are (1) the old one has worn out; or (2) they’re starting a new business or growing the one they have, and need them for the employees they’re hiring.

We aren’t entering the “post-PC” era. We’re entering the PC-and-a-bunch-of-other-stuff era. Call it the PC-plus era if that’s less of a mouthful. Here are the main pluses and what they mean to you:

VDI: Virtual desktops, the trend that refused to start. Instead of using the storage and processing power that’s sitting right in front of each user, you’re supposed to prefer a bunch of additional servers, more complexity in your networks, and more draw on the limited AC power you’re able to pipe into your data center.

VDI is real, but not general-purpose. It’s fine for production workers whose responsibilities are limited to a fixed set of enterprise applications. You can save a few bucks (but less than you might think) by buying specialized VDI terminals for them, and you will gain a bit of control, so what the heck.

A variant … offline VDI, where each PC image is managed centrally, but is executed locally … would be a terrific possibility for BYOD, if only the user’s device was a Windows tablet that could support it (Android and iOS-based tablets just can’t handle the load). Beyond that? Mostly, you’ll irritate people.

Employee smartphones and tablets: Business travel is annoying, as anyone who does a lot of it can explain in much more detail than anyone else wants to hear. The last thing you need to do is make it more annoying by forcing travelers to haul two laptops along — the one IT provides for business use, which is already an annoyance, plus their personal laptop to handle personal business, which doesn’t go away just because they’re traveling.

IT can make a lot of friends by providing smartphone apps that provide secure access to basic functionality for enterprise applications, plus a VDI client for tablets that allows travelers who don’t need to do a lot of computer work do what they do need to do on a tablet.

Consumer PCs, smartphones and tablets: This is what will hurt the most. Consumers will continue to use PCs to interact with your company’s website. Nothing you’re doing now will go away.

Meanwhile, a lot of them will also want to use the functionality you provide through your website on their smartphones. Casual customers (and “customers” who don’t buy from you but do want your content) will be happy to use their phone’s browser … often, they won’t even care if you don’t provide a specialized version of your website built for the smartphone’s small screen.

But regular customers will want an app for that … not only because an app’s user interface is designed from the ground up to be useful on their smartphone, but because the whole experience is smoother. Make that two apps — one for iOS, the other for Android. And you never know … if Microsoft is able to sell Lumias in any quantity, you might have to make it three.

Then you’ll need another set of apps designed for the tablet’s form factor.

Oh … and you probably won’t get to add any staff to handle all of this additional responsibility.

What can you do about it?

Oops. Sorry … we’re out of space. Stay tuned for next week’s episode of All Things Considered I think I’ll Take Up Organic Farming.

* * *

Full disclosure: My employer, Dell, sells lots of products and services connected to this week’s topic. None of the folks who are responsible have asked my opinion, though. In the interest of symmetry I haven’t asked them for theirs, either.

Comments