The public outrage over the greed and incompetance behind AIG's disasterous credit default swaps is mounting. This article from the NY Times captures the moment.
Well, you reap what you sow, guys. Maybe we will start seeing corporate and personal greed as an addiction that is undeserving of allocades and social grace, and redefine these robber barons as destructive, rather than constructive.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Is HP still a technology company, or just a profit center for Wall St?
One of the HP-EDS executive team managed to speak for an hour today without once alluding to anything except costs, cutting costs, making more profit for the corporation, growth, saving, increasing revenue, increasing margin for the corporation, getting the forecast right...ad naseum.
Hello? Is HP a technology company anymore? The entire hour was so generic and contentless that it could have been an MBA textbook speech designed to present to the wage slaves on day 90 of the 100 day corporate integration plan.
Where is the vision? Where is the discussion of the convergence of RFID chips, mobile phones, GPS systems, and location based advertising using internet marketing and on virtual servers purchased from Amazon web services. Not to mention the competivtive pressure HP is experiencing from Googles cloud algorithms or the Sun merger with IBM, that could profoundly EDS's general leaning towards Sun as a hardware supplier for thousands of client data centers, and create enormous competitive pressure for HPs blade offering. These are the topics that I want my executives to be conversant in, and use to prove their credibility to be running a global technology company.
Maybe the EDS acqusition was the tipping point for HP. Maybe HP under first Carly and now Mark, has become so big that all it's executives are capable of taking about anymore is the bottom line. And basically the bottom line means their bonus check.
Congratuations, Mr Hurd. You've sold out to Wall st. I have to admit it, $42 million is a pretty good price for your soul.
Just please, please don't sell out me. I love working with technology. I love feeling like the work I do is cutting edge. I love feeling that when I read 'Wired' magazine, I actuallly understand the articles. But, if recent HP-EDS executive performance is anything to go by, it's already too late.
Hello? Is HP a technology company anymore? The entire hour was so generic and contentless that it could have been an MBA textbook speech designed to present to the wage slaves on day 90 of the 100 day corporate integration plan.
Where is the vision? Where is the discussion of the convergence of RFID chips, mobile phones, GPS systems, and location based advertising using internet marketing and on virtual servers purchased from Amazon web services. Not to mention the competivtive pressure HP is experiencing from Googles cloud algorithms or the Sun merger with IBM, that could profoundly EDS's general leaning towards Sun as a hardware supplier for thousands of client data centers, and create enormous competitive pressure for HPs blade offering. These are the topics that I want my executives to be conversant in, and use to prove their credibility to be running a global technology company.
Maybe the EDS acqusition was the tipping point for HP. Maybe HP under first Carly and now Mark, has become so big that all it's executives are capable of taking about anymore is the bottom line. And basically the bottom line means their bonus check.
Congratuations, Mr Hurd. You've sold out to Wall st. I have to admit it, $42 million is a pretty good price for your soul.
Just please, please don't sell out me. I love working with technology. I love feeling like the work I do is cutting edge. I love feeling that when I read 'Wired' magazine, I actuallly understand the articles. But, if recent HP-EDS executive performance is anything to go by, it's already too late.
HP Pay Cuts - an unfair act of economic opportunism and greed.
Suffering, suffering. Buddists have a belief that life is suffering. Sure feels like it at the moment.
Thousands of hardworking employees take pay cuts while executive continue to reap millions in bonuses.
Reading Damien Saunder's post about the recent HP Pay cuts (disclosure: I'm one of those taking them, and have experienced the corresponding % drop in job motivation), I believe we are really experiencing not only a financial crisis, but a corporate leadership crisis as well.
Thousands of hardworking employees take pay cuts while executive continue to reap millions in bonuses.
Reading Damien Saunder's post about the recent HP Pay cuts (disclosure: I'm one of those taking them, and have experienced the corresponding % drop in job motivation), I believe we are really experiencing not only a financial crisis, but a corporate leadership crisis as well.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Software for Mindmapping on a blog
Trying to find software to bring mindmapping into my blog.
I created this mindmap about cloud computing using Webspiration. This took about 5 minutes to sign up to this service, 15 minutes to create the mindmap, and 2 minutes to figure out how to imbed it into this blog. The link above goes direct to the website, and the imbedded version is below.
The embedded Webspiration mindmap is very clean and easy to scroll around, but allows no scaling and easy scrolling allowing clear navigation.
A little more fiddly to get started with and embed, but more attractive results and vastly more sophisticated editing is Xmind.
The free version of Xmind involves a download, installation, and then the upload didn't work through my corporate proxy server.
The editing tools are sophisticated, and in the free version everything you create is public. Editing is intuitive and fast to learn, although the added functionality also makes it more time consuming to learn. I created a mindmap in about 30 minutes. Using the website enables full screen viewing and a host of collaboration tools.
Xmind creates a very nice embedded map, with options to see the outline and author. But the scaling creates problems when maps are small. You'd really need a completely separate page to have this work in a blog.
I created this mindmap about cloud computing using Webspiration. This took about 5 minutes to sign up to this service, 15 minutes to create the mindmap, and 2 minutes to figure out how to imbed it into this blog. The link above goes direct to the website, and the imbedded version is below.
The embedded Webspiration mindmap is very clean and easy to scroll around, but allows no scaling and easy scrolling allowing clear navigation.
A little more fiddly to get started with and embed, but more attractive results and vastly more sophisticated editing is Xmind.
The free version of Xmind involves a download, installation, and then the upload didn't work through my corporate proxy server.
The editing tools are sophisticated, and in the free version everything you create is public. Editing is intuitive and fast to learn, although the added functionality also makes it more time consuming to learn. I created a mindmap in about 30 minutes. Using the website enables full screen viewing and a host of collaboration tools.
Xmind creates a very nice embedded map, with options to see the outline and author. But the scaling creates problems when maps are small. You'd really need a completely separate page to have this work in a blog.
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