Despite 6-7 times media coverage of Microsoft, Google/Apple have more buzz!

This article shows that while the industry writes about what Microsoft is doing, Google and Apple are the buzz factors now. That says to me that the industry writers and analysts are not listening to what the customer wants but is touting it own technology horn. Complexity is out, simplicity is in.

The Dell Shell

Ok, is this article a real accurate one or what? But I have to quote fully the most important part that Michael Vizard states at CRN.

"The myth is that Dell is the low-price leader. The reality is that Dell is exceptionally good at marketing systems that appear to have a low price to end users, but more often than not, when one actually configures the system with the appropriate amount of memory, drives and graphics cards to be really useful, it winds up costing as much as any other comparable system. In some cases, the price tag may come in at even more than what rivals are charging for the same fully configured system.

I don't know how many people I've talked with that have come under "Dell's Spell" and spout their marketing logic verbatim. The one thing that Dell does have the execution of a process once the process is defined exactly and precisely. But what I have found is that most people get hooked on "the deal" that Dell makes without realizing the trap that Dell has set. Did you know that Dell offers a 90 day warrantee on it's products? While most people would not go for it, guess what it's offered on? Their lowest price products, but after reading a little more and after they've hooked you you read further to see what you really want and end up paying more than the original LOW price.

In fact, one person that I had been talking with stated the she "originally was going to pay $2500 for Dell laptop but Dell got her a $900 saving and she could have the laptop for only $1600." Let me see here if I was a computer salesman how could I get this through someone's head. I know, here goes. How about if I sell you a brand new laptop that originally cost $10,000 just last week, but I'll give you a 80% discount and sell it to you for $2000?! What a deal right? Wrong!

Bottom line: You get what you pay for almost all of the time!

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

This is a great article that discusses what I had thought about a number of years ago when I got involved with taxonomy for a documentation project I was working on. It's a great read for those that use Google and Yahoo and the differences between how they view things so you can find things. But, this was done in a much better fashion than I could have done. Simple put, some things can be easily categorized and have a beginning and an end, other are too free form to be concrete about it.

Macs Lose to Dell, but at an increased cost to the customer

Well, it seems that cheapest price may be the undoing of Macs at the local school, but value was not the consideration. Anytime you have cost as the deciding factor WITHOUT value, i.e. TOTAL costs being considered, as an inclusive issue your costs will go up! Once you've been "locked in" by a vendor, your costs will go up because they can charge more. It now becomes a "tax" on your use of their product or service.

As the article points out, Microsoft's Office is the defacto standard in business, but the real question is: why? I've used MS Office since it came out and it does not cease to amaze me that people will purchase expensive things "just to keep up" with the Corporate Jones. In many jobs I had I've had no reason to use 90% of the features of MS Office, but the only reason I'm forced to use it is because of corporate policy. As a Small Business owner, the ONLY reason now to use MS Office is buying one copy to verify the limited documents going out to customers, not for the day to day work that I perform. I use Open Office instead. It's just as good a MS Office and allows me to redeploy my hard earned money to better things.

Linux Goes Global (what it means for America)

What most people in America don't understand or have on rose colored glasses to what is beyond our borders, there are things that are going on that affect us here in America in rather disruptive ways if we're not in tune to the global market place. While most American's don't hesitate to use the Windows operating system for their computers, with Apple's Mac OS X gaining in markshare during the last quarter of 2005 as this article points out Apple doubles industry growth, US marketshare jumps, outside of our borders in Europe, Asia, India (see here for the 3 million open CDs to be distributed to Tamil speakers worldwide), South America and emerging nations they are adopting Open Source software in droves because of the lower barrier to entry into acquiring Open Source Software.

The issue for American companies is not if you use Open Source Software, but when. Apple's Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD which is partly Open Source and partly proprietary while most of Linux is completely Open Source.

As a small business owner, do you want to be left behind the global market place because you fail to adopt Open Source Software?

What CIOs should know about the open source revolution

Bottom line: No longer is the vendor in charge of your computer budget, but you can now take charge of how you spend your hard earned cash. Let the revolution begin and continue.

Quality, not expensive, always wins

Having been involved with process improvement and the Baldrige efforts for a number of years I see this all of the time in business and in life. As the quote states "The University of Northern Colorado's Monfort College of Business says applications have been on the rise since it became the first business school to win the prestigious Baldrige Award late last year." For those that have their game hat on and understand the significance of this, this is a no brainer, but for those that have not learned what this is about, they'll either continue to suffer or ask for "favoritism" or "a break" in the issues because of their failure to change. You see this all the time for businesses when they ask for the governements help in stemming the tide of competing products. Does this mean that all product are fair that come for overseas? No, but to give the illusion that overseas is always the problem is bad for business.

The one thing that most people are not aware is the Linux kernel has better quality than proprietary ones. This article Linux Kernel Software Quality and Security Better than Most Proprietary Software tells the whole story about why Linux is better. When quality is better, over time your costs go down, buy poor quality and your costs will go up. While my grandfather always said "Pay enough to get the job done," sometimes it can be short sighted. With that said, for small businesses always buy good value, never on price, for either cheap or expensive will cost you money.

If you hit the tree, you missed the forest

As I begin my quest of building my own business and writing my book documenting this growth and the computer use involved and needed, my good friend Triche Guenin's skills and talents may be above the needs of the normal SMB of under 10 employees, but as you begin growing you can't lose site of your vision and the necessary changes that may need to occur in which her experience will undoubtfully come into play.

Why do I state this? Because as another entrepeneur Roger Denton of SharePlan fame, a project management software that less complicated than Microsoft's Project and is great for the SMB market, notes that most tools that are simple can get the job done just as well as the more expensive ones.

As an SMB owner, don't feel that you have to pay through the nose for good stuff. Keep it simple and make sure that you keep your vision in front of you instead of the tree.

OOo Off the Wall: What New Users Need to Know About OpenOffice.org

As one who enjoys using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) I really enjoyed this article explaining the differences between Open Office (OO) 1.1.4 and the new version 2.0 due out soon. This is a great article for those that are considering OO instead of Microsoft's Word or Excel. For the SMB market with companies of one, OO is a great alternative to paying hundreds of dollars just to do simple letters and such.

For more information about Open Office click on the link. For parents that want to give their middle or high school a greater chance of getting good software, this your chance to get good stuff for free.

Walt Disney, failure, his views and my thoughts

As I've been writing my book, I've always heard that Walt Disney had difficulties with his business, but now that I've read about what he went through, I don't see it as bad. Or, at least I can see some of the light at the end of the tunnel I'm going through. It's nice to know that Walt was not immune to things and that those in leadership positions need to communicate with those below to help understand the issues involved with running a business. Walt's dealing with his strike means that while he considered his employees his family, they considered it a job. When you let other become "part owners" in your vision, not only are the failures felt by everyone, so are the successes. I particularly don't like entrepreneurs who state "It's MY business," and while it is true, they fail to see that they bring on others that are helping them along and it's their career their staking on the entrepreneur's vision as well.

It was also good to read that Walt Disney has faith in God (Walt Disney on Faith, Church, Bible Study, Prayer & God), it's a shame that today you can't mention God without offending others. He wasn't offensive at all, but believed that there is good in people.

My Book is coming along

Well, I've passed the 22,000 words on my book about the SMB market with computers. Whew! As I was reading "The Millionaire Mind" by T. Harv Eker the one thing that he states hit home. He states that rich people are bigger than their problems while poor people are smaller than their problems. Good stuff! I need to keep reminding myself of this while I write this book. I'm bigger than this book, I'm bigger than this book.

The other part I liked was his quote of Richard Kiyosaki's comment that Richard is recognized as a best SELLING author, not a best WRITING author. Same goes here. My writing is to show my thinking processes, not my writing skills. Thinking from a process point of view is my talent, writing is a skill.

Saw on CSPAN Thomas Freidman discuss his new book "The World's Flat" oday during the National Governor's Association Conference which discussed education and technology and about how the various technologies and events in the world's history have flattened the world so that we're now at a global tipping point that there, in my view as
well, is now going to be an new economy this century that will be far and away the most dominant compared with recent growths. After reading Eker's book, I want to be at that point as well.

Off the take a rest from writing and reading for more research.