Who's Your Data?

A customer asked me to send our very best consultant to his site to troubleshoot a software problem.

I sent Pete, who is the best. My secret is that he is not a consultant at all, he is an engineer. The guy who works on my car is a mechanic. I have a Porsche (I know, a consultants car). For the average $250.00 oil change I suppose he would like to consider himself a consultant to my Boxster. Best I can tell the difference between a technical engineer and a technical consultant is price.

Why do customers want a consultant onsite? I am sure Webster’s or Wikipedia have neat little definitions that would help illuminate this subject. I have a standing policy that no blog shall be researched, so this subject is unknowable from a reference standpoint.

Consultants encourage customers to make paradigm shifts and consider the outflows resulting from the inputs. They know how many trillions of dollars will be spent on storage by the year 2013 and the top 3 reasons why CIO’s are implementing ERP. A Consultant can pick up the tab for an expensive dinner (and charge it back). He or she can order french wine as easily as a domestic pinot noir.

An Engineer has dirty hands from uncrating servers and pulling cables. He or she wants to implement Linux in the data center because MS has to be rebooted every week. The Engineer knows where the best barbecue place is and orders everything including socks and underwear online. I like engineers. I don’t dislike consultants.

Let me ask you a question…if you were stranded on a desert island with one person (and you had already ordered the wine) who would you count on to help you survive, the engineer or the consultant?

Posted by Matt Hamilton at 11:40 AM | | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I was finshed reading Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen I was left with a single thought…he hate me.

Andrew Keen apparently hates the very idea of somebody like me writing this blog. That is unless in the very last chapter of the book (which I did not read) he yells “April Fools” and jumps out of a cake. Or to be more accurate and less amateurish…he jumps out of the cake first and then yells “April Fools”.

The premise of Cult of the Amateur is that me and my ilk are taking jobs away from legitimate writers, downloading music at the expense of the artists and even worse reviewing movies and books that we have absolutely no business commenting on (oops). By the way this last weekend my wife and I saw Stardust, the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel. It was very well done (oops again).

It is hard to know where to start with Keen’s elitist nonsense (I have no right to that opinion). Keen believes that Web 2.0 is the root of all evil, but I am not sure why. Apparently he never got the memo about the “democratization” of information. Or if he did get the memo he thought it was so poorly written that he threw it away.

I will just comment on one of his early rants in the book about Wikipedia. He said there was a lot of bad information on Wikipedia. Keen contrasted that to Encyclopedia Britannica, professional newspaper reporters, etc. I have read so much bad information in newspapers and in magazines that I am literally typing with one hand at this moment and scratching my head with the other hand.

I referenced Wikipedia twice today. The first time to check a few definitions for a network analysis I was working on and the second time to get an overview of top secret government security clearances. I know enough about both topics to feel confident that the info was accurate enough for my purposes. I will not be downloading blueprints for a nuclear reactor from Wiki…on the other hand; I have no plans to build a nuclear reactor.

After reading all but the last chapter my amateur opinion of Cult of the Amateur is that Andrew Keen wants to be provocative…just like the bloggers he hate.

Posted by Matt Hamilton at 04:36 PM | | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Great news for us open sorcerers…OpenOffice is OK now!

I used this world beater when it was StarOffice. Somebody in Germany in the mid-1980s thought MS Office needed some open source competition. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. I used it for the first time in July of 2000. It was awful.

There is still a StarOffice product (I think), but this is the open source derivative. BASE is the database product; CALC is a spreadsheet; DRAW is weirdly enough a drawing tool; IMPRESS is a presentation tool; MATH should have been included with CALC and WRITER is a writer.

Those are the modules you can download for FREE! Whch is a huge price difference over MS Office unless you live in China, where MS Office costs like $1.00.

I used the StarOffice presentation tool in 2000 to create a presentation for delivery at a Sun Microsystems conference. I thought that was very open of me. What a disaster. It was buggy as heck. Half the time it would not open.

Last week I made a presentation in Pheonix to a customer migrating from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I downloaded OpenOffice in 15 minutes and I was creating my Impress presentation immediately. I actually enjoyed it more than that dreadful Redmond product called Powerpoint. The customer and the Red Hat sales rep in the room thought it was a nice touch as well.

I don’t like to do too many commercials, but give it a fair chance. Go to openoffice.org and download the package. If I was starting a small business today I would use it in a heartbeat (that’s very quick if you didn’t know). Trust me, OpenOffice really doesn’t suck.

Posted by Matt Hamilton at 10:39 AM | | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

We went to Breckenridge and did a lot of family activities in the mountains. I was struck by how non-pervasive…non-universal…well, there are lots of places that still don’t use new-fangled, computer based, automated technology. It’s fun to work with the largest IT enterprises in the world every day, but it is also fun to see how the common folk do things.

We rented a jeep for off road four wheelin’. The rental process took an hour. Everything was done by hand. Even the credit card imprint was taken on an old timey slider thing-a-muh-jig that makes a carbon copy of the credit card. There was a nifty satellite phone for the jeep that was six times more powerful than conventional cell phones…except it wasn’t in the jeep, so that doesn’t count.

The Dillon Marina rented speed boats and pontoons using clipboards and paper forms. I had called the day before to reserve a time. The person who answered the phone failed to transfer our data to a bulletin board. We got the boat anyway, but it was left to poor pathetic humans to remember to post our info.

The Ranch at Keystone golf course was a little better. They accepted an automated on line reservation.

I am sure the lack of technology is a price issue. To automate the jeep rental process, they have two choices, build it or rent it. If the jeep rental company built their own, they would need hardware, software and somebody to maintain it full or part time. At the low end the intial investment would be $25k. The labor would be expensive…$25k part time, $50k full time. Looking at their low-end operation, I am certain that would be a difficult investment. They may not know that there are outsourced options. A small business could outsource the whole thing for $2k a month. Even that might cause a cash flow problem.

If they rent five jeeps a day for 28 days, seven months a year and the average rental is $225.00 per day…they are grossing $220,500 a year. Costs before the two principles pay themselves are probably half of gross. They might make $50k a year each before taxes. I hope they have other ventures going. You can’t sleep in a tent in Breckenridge for $50k a year.

Technology is going to have to get a lot cheaper before it makes sense for many small businesses. And I mean a lot cheaper. The jeep rental company could justify a $5k investment; five times cheaper. The good news is that costs will get to that price point. The bad news is that the lower price point will put a lot of tech companies out of business.

Posted by Matt Hamilton at 06:11 PM | | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)