Michael Seguin

My Digital Me

All cloud, all the time

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As the pace of technological change accelerates, we seem to be increasingly drawn to buzzwords. They rear up as the public tries to encapsulate the latest craze, and then die off just as quickly it seems. Virtual, web 2.0 (since when did zero become ‘O’ by the way?), disruptive, responsive, crowd. My latest favorite is cloud.
It is all cloud these days, all the time. If you are building a website, webapp, app, or really anything having anything to do with technology, you had better be ‘in the cloud’ or it is all over.
‘Cloud’ has come to mean so many different things, but at the end of the day, the idea is that rather than being tied to a physical server, or cluster of servers, that the “network really has become the computer” (thanks Sun micro, for seeing the clouds before the rest of us).
It isn’t until we start really thinking things through that we stop missing the cloud for the silver lining. While there are undeniable advantages to ‘cloud based stuff,’ whether we are talking cloud computing (the ability to have compute cycles augmented or shifted on the fly due to the elasticity of cloud based server resources), cloud fronting (the ability to have web requests served from the closest server to the client request), cloud storage (see computing, think storage), etc.
Understand this – remember it…

Telecommuting Fail

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Happiness is not a goal, productivity is the goal

I know Yahoo’s stock is turning around, and I am sure that Marissa Meyers crusade to turn the company into a clone of Google is in part to thank (though to be honest the value of its decade old investment in about-to-go-public Alibaba.com is mostly responsible)… but I just cannot help but poke fun at the telecommute fracas they had recently. So here is a brief parody of how I would feel if I was working there.

Yahoo CEO: No more telecommuting, period.

Yahoo employee: But – I was hired with the understanding that I can work remotely!

Yahoo CEO: Is that written in an employment contract? No? Sucks for you.

Yahoo employee: But – all the studies ever conducted on the subject show that employees who can work remotely are both happier AND more productive.

Yahoo CEO: Individually perhaps… but collectively we are all happier when no one individual is happy.

Yahoo employee: But – my commute steals 2+ hours from my day. If I can telecommute, I work a much longer day. And I am happier, so I work harder.

Yahoo CEO: Happiness is not a goal, productivity is the goal.

Yahoo employee: But again, I am more productive when I am happy. I am more happy when I don’t have to commute.

Yahoo CEO: we feel that if we can all work together to eliminate happiness as a goal, that all employees will have similar levels of productivity.

Endorsements gone wild

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I am really quite happy to see LinkedIn consolidating their hold on the future of online resume. However, it is also getting a little silly.  Every day I get a slew of new endorsements on my skill set, often from people who do not know me.

This happens of course because LinkedIn is trying to drive up user engagement – and it is working.  This underscores a fundamental problem that we face as social media increasingly influences our communications.  These companies are of course going to try to monetize the experience, and sometimes that has unintended consequences.

 

What will be the value of endorsements when everyone has endorsed everyone else, for everything?  Auto-suggesting endorsements when people log in is a bad idea.