Business Ramblings – Page 2

How You Work Determines What You Accomplish

June 22, 2009 Leave a Comment

At the end of last week I was directed to Matt Mullenweg’s post The Way I Work, Annotated, which he wrote after his The Way I Work article was published in Fortune. It was a great insight into how Matt uses technology and structures his day to achieve the things he wants to achieve. (also check out the other The Way I Work articles from Fortune).

Then, this past weekend, I heard a radio interview with Jim Lehrer on KQED’s City Arts and Lectures where Lehrer talked a bit about his working style and how it changed in recent years (after his heart attack). The key thing that Lehrer mentioned was creating a list of what he wants to do and then comparing that to what he did do on a daily basis.

Both of these were a great reminder to me about the things that you want to accomplish. I have a note card sitting on my desk with three aphorisms printed on it. The first one is “Your Focus Determines Your Reality”. Every now and then you need to step back and analyze your focus and look at your reality so you can do a gut check. Coming across the aforementioned items recently reminded me to do that…

A New Data Center Measurement Metric

May 16, 2009 Leave a Comment

One of my clients made an interesting comment this week about a new way they are thinking of measuring their data centers. Anyone dealing with virtualization knows that measuring a data center on square feet or number of physical servers alone is rather meaningless. We mostly talk about ratios: VMs per Socket (CPU) or VMs per Core. But as green initiatives push on I had one client mention the new metric of VMs per Kilowatt hour.

This is interesting because it not only takes into consideration the efficiency of your virtualization solution, but also the power efficiency of your servers, storage, and network. What is the efficiency at which one can run a data center? When you get into a cloud computing environment where users pay for what they use, don’t the providers also want to only be paying for what is required? If companies are now placing notes in their annual reports on their corporate carbon foot print, shouldn’t they also be thinking about defining, measuring and tracking their data center carbon foot print?

This takes one down an interesting thought process that I think I’ve only scratched the surface of.

(Thanks goes out ot Mike P. for pointing me to the above Dilbert strip!)

Twitter & Derivative Markets Commonality

April 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

While catching up on some email today, I came across an confluence in my inbox. First, I catch the following Computerworld headline in a technology industry email newsletter:

As rumors swirl, Twitter says no rush for business model

A few email later, I run across a humor email (that I’m sure everyone has seen by now) that discusses derivative market explained for laymen. It starts off:

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers – most of whom are unemployed alcoholics – to drink now but pay later.

My first raction to Heidi’s business plan is ‘how acinine, she’ll never see any money by loaning drinks to alcholics.’ By now we all know the rest of the story about the derivative markets, banks kept giving Heidi loans based on her debt assets only to never see their money come back.

And now we switch over to the alcholic users of the web 2.0, where everyone can get drunk for free off of their favorite services. So, will Twitter’s VCs and Investors ever see their investement dollars turn into the lucrative cash flow that Heidi’s bankers thought they had? Or will Twitter end up with some risk manager calling in the marker and cause the fall of the micro-blogging derivative markets?

Guess Twitter needs to determine which definition of business they want applied to them:

3. a person, partnership, or corporation engaged in commerce, manufacturing, or a service; profit-seeking enterprise or concern.

or will they keep focused on features and building more mass market appeal adding more noise to the signal until they reach

11. excrement: used as a euphemism.

Round and round we go…last call, drink up!