Mathew Ingram, after reading the Wall Street Journal’s article Gates-Ballmer Clash Shaped Microsoft’s Coming Handover, suggests that Microsoft killed their future for the present by killing NetDocs, their web-based office apps suite so as not to cannibalize their cash cow, Microsoft Office.
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What Hath OLPC Wrought
According to the Economist, “The $100 laptop has been a success—just not, so far, in the way its makers intended.” The success is that OLPC inspired the development of machines that are expected to be bigger successes, such as the Asus EEE PC and the Classmate.
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How to Never Finish Your Project
How to Never Finish Your Project is Michal Marcinkowski’s list of things that he describes as “things that I’ve learned during my years as a game developer. This is especially useful if you’re not really trying to do something of value, have a different agenda or simply fear success.”
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The Economist on Jimmy Wales
The Economist’s article, The Free-Knowledge Fundamentalist, looks at Jimmy “Wikipedia / Will trade sex for edits” Wales. “Jimmy Wales changed the world with Wikipedia, the hugely popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. What will he do next?”
A ThirdAge/JWT Boom study has data that suggests that “people over age 40 participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking or blogs despite being heavy users of other online services.”
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The “Cubicle Rage” Video
Have you not seen the video in which a cube farm worker flips out and starts tearing the office apart? Gizmodo has two videos, one from an overhead security cam and one taken by a coworker on his cell. I have some questions that I’ll pose in a longer post.
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The Moral Life of Cubicles
The final lines of the article The Moral Life of Cubicles: “The cubicle revolution, in fact, was above all ideological. The clichés hurled at cubicles were woven into their sound-dampening fabric board from the beginning. Any discerning criticism of office life will have to take this moral history into account. Indeed, it is precisely the axioms of what makes for a good company and a good person buried within the cubicle that most need to be uncovered and held to critical attention.”