brainmower

Boxee vs Hulu – The viewers lose

In a recent blog post Hulu stated their content providers requested they "turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes". Hulu is pulling their support for Boxee effective 02-20-2009. Removing Hulu integration with Boxee is a lose/lose idea for Hulu, Boxee, Content Providers and Users.  Let's break it down. Content Providers: The content providers want eyeballs because eyeballs mean revenue. To gain those eyeballs content providers want NEED to e...

Dell Mini9 and the Cloud

My Dell mini9 arrived.  The mini9 is Dell's entry into the netbook market. I have been quite skeptical of the cloud and the value of a netbook, but I'm at the airport on free WIFI and I've been accessing everything I need from my web browser. Webmail, my companies CRM, Facebook, Twitter...all from a 2lb, $400 laptop. I feel the mini9, except for a few keyboard oddities and a slightly dim screen, was a great purchase. If I'm not on the Internet, computers have little value to me. Everythin...

Good is better than Best

I am currently reading Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith. It's a good read, but there is a page and half that has had a major impact on me, showing me where I have a huge blindspot in business and how I stop my own progress.  This page and a half is possibly the most important material I've read in a book in several years (for me it applies directly). The author talks about the Fallacy of Planning in a business setting. He ranks plans in this order...

Google Chrome is your new PC

Google has released a new browser called Chrome.  Unlike Firefox or IE, Chrome is intended to be a full Operating System in the near future.  It's pretty clear Google wants to change the rules of Information Technology and Chrome is just a starting point.  Just like Email became Gmail, it appears Google intends to replace the PC with the GC (Google Computer).  The Google Computer will run Chrome as an OS and a suite of Apps Google will provide in the cloud.  Once Google picks up a decent fina...

VMWare’s sucky patch

VMWare just pwned themselves by releasing an update that is disallowing any process with a start date of 08-12-08 to launch. More info here. I am an unapologetic VMWare fan, but this is a huge screwup. Tomorrow will be interesting. This occurs within 24 hours of Gmail going down for an hour. Anyone think too much success is leading to sloppiness at these companies?

Why we ditched Hewlett Packard

I made the decision to ditch Hewlett Packard as our primary hardware vendor after being an HP advocate for 15 years. I love HP Servers, but their channel support is atrocious. As an HP reseller I have always been anti-Dell, but given recent events with HP we've committed to switching to Dell. Our goal was to obtain a Dell Premier login, thereby freeing us to order equipment on the web at significant discounts. With our Dell Premier login our margins are almost triple what we received a...

Cloud Computing and Competitive Advantages

There is a lot of buzz about Cloud Computing. Briefly (from wikipedia), Cloud computing refers to computing resources being accessed which are typically owned and operated by a third-party provider on a consolidated basis in Data Center locations. Examples of Cloud Computing include Google Apps, Apple's MobileMe and  Amazon's S3. A brief history of how we arrived at this point in computing history. A few decades ago all of the brains of a computer lived in huge mainframes. Terminals (a...

Apple’s MobileMea Culpa

Received an email today from Apple regarding MobileMe. It's a mea culpa of sorts. A Corporate "Oops" if you will.  The entire body of the email is available at the bottom of this post. The email very honestly lays out the issues Apple had with the transition to MobileMe.  The reason I'm posting it here is that Apple does the right thing.  They come clean about the issues and then give subscribers an extra month for free.  When most service providers have outages (I'm talking about you TimeW...

Interrupt driven

As a technical consultant my work life is interrupt driven.  Long term projects are constantly put on pause to deal with urgent issues that require immediate attention. Today was different:  I forgot to take my cellphone to work.  Without my cellphone, I was not interrupted by text messages, twitter updates, brightkite posts, automated SMS alerts and phone calls.  A direct result of removing these interrupts, a highly productive morning.  This unintentional experiment has reinforced the value...

Insanity of the small business

Last week we lost a large chunk of revenue when a client switched to a new services provider.  Today, it appears that client may be coming back into the fold with a big project in tow.  Also, we received a PO from a new client and a surprise opportunity just came our way. In the span of 24 hours these new opportunities grew to be approximately 1/4 of the revenue we did in all of 2007. We could not have predicted any of this and none of it is certain.  The swings in potential revenue wreck ...