October 1, 2009

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A word to the whys

October 1, 2009 in Business, infrastructure | 1 comment

Craig Burton in Open Letter to Steve Ballmer:

  Well F*&% me. Dude, after all of these years, you are still micro managing the Windows release!

  Now I know why Microsoft is now been relegated to insignificance in the identity market.

  The reason is simple. Internal policy, managed by you, prohibits product mangers from keeping up with trends and innovation.

  Let me repeat, if the Federated Identity Group made the required changes to the CardSpace selector today, it will be two years–maybe longer–before it makes it to the market.

  The bottleneck to this problem–and I suspect a slew of others–is you.

  As your friend and long-time competitor/advisor on these issues, I urge you to rethink how this is works. Because it isn’t working.

Craig has such a gentle way of being blunt. My fave line from Craig, addressed to a lame consulting client we shared many years ago: Put down the customer. Step away from the marketplace. I believe that’s what Craig is saying Microsoft is doing here, even if they don’t mean to.

Metaphorging

October 1, 2009 in Blogging, Ideas, infrastructure | 1 comment

Interesting volley between (also @cgerrish) and myself, centered on the topic of silos vs. pipes, beginning with my post Values and Valuation, then continuing in Cliff’s The Silo & The Pipe: Doc Searls gets Venezuelan, and in the comments below that post. While I don’t wish to abandon the silo metaphor (or any metaphor that works — a wondrous irony of all metaphors is that they are literally wrong yet meaningfully helpful, even necessary), I like the way Cliff connects the (literal and metaphorical) pipes of Unix command lines with pipes of data plumbing between Web services (such as those offered by Twitter). Much good stuff to chew on there.