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Quoting IT: WSJ on Innovation

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By Bryan - Posted on 02 September 2009

"Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents."

"This new environment also has big implications for managers. Simply put, bosses must be prepared to give up some control. With testing so cheap, easy and accessible, there's less need to ration it as they have in the past. Managers used to directing the company's innovation efforts must give their workers the freedom to come up with ideas on their own and pursue them without lots of red tape."

"Some of the best experiments come from outside the chain of command."

"Not only do we expect managers to solicit and welcome more ideas from lower down in the ranks, we expect that lots more people will be invited to review experiments and make changes."

-Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Schrage, "The New, Faster Face of Innovation", The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2009

The Innovation Odd Couple: Google and P&G

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By Bryan - Posted on 19 November 2008

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.

Windows XP SP3, Internet Explorer 6, and Complacency

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By Bryan - Posted on 06 May 2008

Opinion: Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?

There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.

XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.

So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.

Quoting IT: Prisoners of Legacy

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By Bryan - Posted on 07 January 2008

"We’re now at the point where the most innovative technology for users really is being created in the nonbusiness space. Corporate IT has become the prisoner of legacy technology, and the result isn’t just stodginess — we’re missing out on innovation that could make our users more productive, more effective and more successful."

--Frank Hayes, "Prisoners of Legacy", ComputerWorld, January 7, 2008