Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Microsoft dominance is going - fast!

When a company the size of Microsoft can leave thousands of customers in distress and not resolve the issues, then it has the seeds of failure within it. Recently, many users of its "Office Live Small Business," which provides website hosting and email to thousands of small businesses stopped working correctly. Thousands of users were unable to access their email and contact database. This has continues for over a week now, and Microsoft has not only been unable to fix it, but continues to give totally unhelpful replies to customers who contact customer support. Even a small ISP would do better than this. No one in senior management seems to care at all either.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

The need for Nuance

Most people feel so uncomfortable with uncertainty that they will sacrifice accuracy for comfort. As a result, they are not prepared to consider nuances in situations. We force-fit new situations into the solutions to old ones. We over-simplify analyses. We make generalizations about people and things.

In so doing, we do ourselves a disservice. Many situations are complex and need to be examined as such. People are not uni-dimensional. When we compress a complex situation into a 30 second sound-bite, we short-change ourselves.