by Francois Gossieaux
August 19, 2011 at 3:05 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09, Microsoft
Three years ago we embarked on a journey of hosting an Enterprise 2.0 discussion through the FASTForward Blog. The aim of this blog was to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to put users in control of information. It was home to the ongoing discussion about Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges.
The FASTForward Blog like the Enterprise 2.0 discussion has had many ebbs and flows. When we started the discussions were focused on Enterprise 2.0 adoption and today we are moving towards convergence.
The conversation has shifted and the focus we had at the beginning has changed. Just look at Rob Patterson’s post “Is Shutting Down Social Networks the best response to unrest”, a quick look at how community and the police are using social media to help with cope with the rioters in the UK or the post about Designing Mobile Apps by Bill Ives.
Those two posts indicate that our content has evolved and our initial purpose has been fulfilled with widespread discussion of E2.0 occurring in businesses and organizations of all sizes.
With that in mind, we will be closing the FASTForward Blog. Microsoft has hosted this discussion and we think you will agree that it has offered a forum for some stimulating, thought provoking and at times controversial conversations and for that we are thankful and hope that you have found value in your visits.
We have asked our most active bloggers over the last year to post closing comments for you. Thank you for the opportunity to host the conversation.
by Paula Thornton
January 11, 2011 at 5:29 pm · Filed under
Microsoft
This is a reflective piece, rather than 2.0 commentary. Credit to @ToughLoveforX who asked for more detail about something tweeted to him. I’ve often dropped crumbs of these stories, including a prior post.
I’ve learned two critical lessons from near-direct exchanges with Bill Gates. Clearly you can learn from both good and bad examples. I offer one of each.
To add a little context, I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, circa 1980, the early PC era. Right out of college I was lucky to stumble into a technology role, as an administrative assistant on assignment from a temp agency.
I remember one day when the guys were quite excited about something they’d found being sold in our own drug stores, in the camera department: a TRS-80 pocket computer. They exclaimed that the unit had more memory than the first big box in our shop (we still had a card punch machine on the floor, for fixes to old programs in use).
As the department ’secretary’, I did a lot of work for the manager who was the first and only person in the company to get an IBM PC, which operated with CP/M. At this time Bill Gates was wooing IBM with his disk operating system, DOS. I quickly learned to generate documents in WordStar.
Ten years later, Bill Gates was still just an average, but well-known guy speaking at local events. After one event, gathered for the informal Q&A, I asked Bill a question grounded in things I was learning from a certificate program in Data Resource Management. I asked him when he was going to separate the files he was creating with his tools from the tools themselves. At that time, content wasn’t portable — it was ‘jailed’ by the tool that created it. He said that he didn’t understand the question — and that was my answer.
Bill’s focus was software. The fact that the software worked and created something was the goal. What happened beyond that wasn’t his responsibility. This mindset would prevail for another 10 years. I was shocked to learn that Office 2000 was the first major release where the various product teams were required to work with each other.
Another lesson I learned from Bill was in noticing a critical change in his public demeanor. At one time, especially onstage at their annual Symposium, Gartner analysts seemed to have developed a penchant for seeing who could make a CEO ‘lose it’. They would follow lines of questions that seemed to intentionally back technology leaders against the wall just to watch them squirm (or fake their way out). Bill was highly competitive. Over the years, when Gates was on stage with his competitors, you could feel the tension between them, and the analysts would bait them one against the another.
One year, mid 90’s, Gates was decidedly calm, even though he was onstage with the CEOs from Sun and Oracle. He sat back in his chair, rather than on the edge, and nothing the Gartner analysts said seemed to ruffle him. It almost felt like I was at a love fest, and there was a group hug about to break out. I was straining my neck (way in the back of a huge auditorium) to see if I could figure out what was going on. And then, in the line of questions, Bill offered the answer himself. He said, “I realized, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make a dollar, I make money too. The pie gets bigger.”
So what did I learn from Bill? You can make a whole lot of money solving a mass-appeal problem even if you just focus on the problem itself and not the larger context in which it lives. And, everyone can have major personal insights that fundamentally change the way they see things — where enemies suddenly become allys — when we look at what we have rather than what we have not.
Another 10 years has passed and I no longer have direct access to Bill. I know that his focus has changed considerably to the efforts of his foundation. And even there he is still learning: “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies, focusing more on instruction).”
Perhaps there are others out there with more recent ‘lessons from Bill’ that they can share.
by Joshua-Michéle Ross
February 10, 2009 at 11:39 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, FFC09 Interviews, Microsoft
As Microsoft’s Director of Business Insights, Dan Rasmus spends his time considering trends that will matter in the world of work and business. Dan’s scenario planning looks not to predict the future but forecast a variety of possible futures. This diversity of possible futures allows companies to develop strategies to succeed in an uncertain world. During his keynote he shared a series of macrotrends that will likely influence business in the coming years. We sat down to discuss scenario planning and some of the key influencers Dan shared during his keynote.
BIO: Daniel W. Rasmus, director of Business Insights for the Microsoft Business Division, guides the research process that allows Microsoft to envision how people will work in the future. Mr. Rasmus analyzes trends in technology, society, education, labor, and economics to devise scenarios used by Microsoft in developing products for tomorrow’s workforce. Before joining Microsoft in 2003, Mr. Rasmus was an analyst with Forrester Research where he invented conceptual frameworks for enabling the future of work, including adaptive work spaces and intelligent content services. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and received a certificate in intelligent systems engineering from the University of California at Irvine.
by Joe McKendrick
November 3, 2008 at 9:25 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, SOA, SharePoint, Wikinomics, Wikis
One of the advantages Enterprise 2.0 approaches offer in many situations is the relatively low or incremental prices at which technology is made available to organizations. It looks like things will even get more affordable.
A recent report from Forrester Research predicts the Enterprise 2.0 market is about to see impending “price drops” on tools ranging from blogs to wikis to social networks. Forrester analysts cite three specific reasons for the price drops:
“Commoditization, bundling, and subsumption. Increased competition and slowing innovation means that there is less differentiation between blogging solutions. Further, many vendors, from Microsoft to Six Apart, now offer a complete, enterprise-oriented suites that bundle a mature set of essential tools, which drives down prices for individual tools and specialized solutions.”
The increasing ubiquity of SharePoint — which supports many Enterprise 2.0 features — also may help to drive down prices from many other vendors, Forrester predicts.
The only area that may see price increases is software for handling mashups, Forrester predicts. “IT departments will prioritize mashup technology as part of portal, business intelligence, and business process management software investments as well as a major component of SOA implementations.”
