Great article from Monday Note on HP and the incumbent's curse

I especially liked the following part:

Engineers being engineers, they craft a workaround: the company’s purchasing department gets a requisition for HP parts, the set needed to re-assemble the 9100A they lust after. This, being HP, is easy to do, the 9100A is “overdesigned”, I used to take the machine apart and rebuild it on the spot as a proof of the product’s maintainability, even by a certified klutz. Next, they have to keep their treasure hidden. They condemn a toilet by pouring plaster of Paris in the bowl, pad the seat, jury-rig a shelf as a desk and keep the door indicator stuck in the “occupied” position. Thus they compute in peace.
Ah, those unruly end-users…

Full article at http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/05/09/the-incumbent%E2%80%99s-curse-hp/

Music to Rock the Nation

I was at the Music to Rock the Nation festival on Saturday. It was organized in the yard of my former Uni, it was nice to see it turned into a fun place for once :-)

The music was ok though we missed the band we most wanted to see. We left the festival early due to impending rain. Wouldn't have been as cool as Glastonbury anyway, especially without the mud!

Great article on Open Source customers vs communicites - thx @sdumitriu !

Instead lets treat the community (time but no money) as a completely separate entity from the customer pipeline (money but no time). The community members engage with R&D over the project. They engage with marketing in a conversation about project direction, and ancillary things like translations in other markets. Customers are qualified through the pipeline based upon the product.    

See also:

I've seen the cloud and the cloud exists - a cloud story

I just got a brand new MacBook Pro 15' (thanks @ldubost!). It was a needed upgrade on my old MacBook 13' (yeah, the one that got fish food spilt on it).

What really amazed me was how fast I was able to perform the switch while suffering almost no productivity loss whatsoever (besides the time needed to install a couple programs). I was able to start using it without transferring any data from my old computer.

All the stuff I need is on our intranet or in my mailbox. I was able to complete a new deal with an US customer without having access to previous versions of the PO I had sent them since the PO itself is a wiki page on our intranet.

Even stuff that used to take me a while, such as transferring my music, is now possible without hassle. I'm a Spotify Premium subscriber thus as soon as I had downloaded the client I was able to access my favorite music.

I eventually transferred some of my old data to my new computer, but I didn't even need a cable to do that - I just downloaded a ZIP from the Backblaze unlimited online backup service I use to backup my computers.

One of the key points I'd like to highlight is how easy it was for both of those services to turn me into a paying customers once I had been able to get taste of how awesome their services were. By the way, I'd happily pay for Posterous as well if it ever introduced a premium version!

While there's nothing groundbreaking about all this, I thought I'd share the experience as a testimony of the fact that the cloud promise (subscription-based online services) is getting more real every day.