Power to the People

electric-meter

My promised restructuring of Microsoft will conclude tomorrow but today I want to cover a news announcement from Google that I think is very important, yet that importance seems to have been missed by the mainstream and technical press alike.  My subject is the Google PowerMeter, which is far more strategic than Google is letting-on.

Not that the official PowerMeter story isn’t a good one.  Google has invented these devices that will be distributed to users to measure the electricity consumption of their homes or apartments in real time, encouraging residents to conserve power, which is good for everyone.  I’d love to have one of these gizmos, which in most cases won’t only report […]

By |February 12th, 2009|Uncategorized|374 Comments
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Wall Street Can't Count

This post first ran on January 29th on my mortgage blog.  It got some traction there and  a  few mentions in the press so, lazy bastard that I am, I’m reproducing it here in a slightly improved form that corrects my own math error.

Take a look at this chart that someone sent to me a couple days ago.  I’m making it big so you can see as much detail as possible.  Have a look and then come back, okay?

Pretty scary, eh?  It’s a chart showing the deterioration of major bank market caps since 2007.  Prepared by someone at JP Morgan based on data from Bloomberg, this chart flashed across Wall Street and the financial world a […]

By |February 12th, 2009|Uncategorized|164 Comments
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Yahoo Should Buy Microsoft

microsoft_yahoo_1

My last column was all about the culture of Microsoft and how it makes real change difficult for the company.  It’s not just at Microsoft that these things happen, by the way: nearly all mature organizations get into similar ruts.  And if, like Microsoft, they are spectacularly profitable ruts, well then it isn’t surprising that things stay more or less permanently dysfunctional.

I said last time that a second column would follow with my specific suggestions for restructuring Microsoft, but now that I am really into it I think we might be looking at a total of three columns, not two.  But then I’ll be finished with Microsoft for a few months.

Setting out […]

By |February 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|60 Comments
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Microsoft Has PMS

micromug

Program Manager Syndrome, that is.

A few days ago I called for Microsoft to slash not 5,000 jobs but 50,000 to make the company lean and focused once more. Readers responded by asking which 50,000 Microsoft heads I’d like to see cut off? Wow, what a great question! So great, in fact, that it inspired this column and probably the one after. Because it’s not that simple to just fire half a company. It’s remarkably easy, in fact, to fire the WRONG half.

Restructuring Microsoft has to have a point beyond simply improving profitability, which was pretty darned good to start with. It requires first identifying the systemic problems inside the company that ought […]

By |February 4th, 2009|Uncategorized|163 Comments
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Access Denied: How to Defend Your Systems from an Inside Job

access_deniedLast week a story broke about a former Fannie Mae IT contractor accused of planting malicious code that would have taken down systems and destroyed data right at the epicenter of today’s global financial crisis. The accused former employee has since surfaced claiming innocence so I prefer not to go into that specific case but rather use it to consider the likelihood that similar crimes could take place in other companies.

Well of course the probability is 100 percent simply because similar crimes HAVE taken place in other companies. It happens all the time at an annual cost of BILLIONS.

IT crimes go grossly under-reported because they are so embarrassing to their victims […]

By |February 2nd, 2009|Uncategorized|55 Comments
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