My recent series of columns on troubles at IBM brought me many sad stories from customers burned by Big Blue. I could write column after column just on that, but it wouldn’t be any fun so I haven’t. Only now a truly teachable lesson has emerged from a couple of these horror tales and it has to do with U.S. IT labor economics and immigration policy. In short the IT service sector has been shoveling a lot of horse shit about H1B visas.
The story about H1B visas is simple. H1B’s are given for foreign workers to fill U.S. positions that can’t be filled with qualified U.S. citizens or by permanent U.S. residents who hold green cards. H1Bs came into existence because there weren’t enough […]
I know I promised a third part in my crowdfunding series but the first two parts have generated a lot of backchannel discussions that have put part three in a bit of flux. We have a chance to do something really amazing here so please give me another day or so and I promise to be back with something fun to read in part three. In the meantime there was something I found especially interesting about Apple’s announcements yesterday….
Beta versions of Windows 8 this week 
So Facebook is now a public company but with the shares only one day old the news is already bad: Facebook shares didn’t pull a Google or a Yahoo or a Microsoft or even a TheGlobe.com and soar out of sight on IPO day. They ended right where they started pretty much after the day traders took their easy profits. And while Wall Street sees this performance as a dud, Facebook itself sees it as a masterful piece of financial engineering.
Proving once again that I am an idiot, Facebook went public this morning with neither a whimper nor a bang. Back in January I 