Brian Prentice

The media’s obsession with layoff tallies is starting to remind me of the body count reports from the Vietnam War. But I just read an article “Half -a-Million Job Cuts: Is There a Strategy Behind the Layoffs” on Knowledge@Wharton that reminded me that there is another angle to these layoffs. As it points out:
…for many [...]

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No, this is neither a prediction or an imminent possibility! But I’m just wondering – what if Google went bankrupt?
I think this question is extremely pertinent in the light of our current economic fiasco.  At the moment we’re learning a very painful and very expensive lesson. To avoid the systemic collapse of an industry central [...]

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With Microsoft’s announcement of their financial results and the impending reduction of 5000 employees – their first major layoff – I find myself thinking back on one of the more profound experiences I had in my professional life.
It was the late 80’s. I was a young man who had been working at Apple for nearly [...]

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Well, it turns out that the ballyhoo over the 2 Google search = 1 cup of hot tea’s worth of CO2 emission is turning out to be hot air itself.
It turns out that the 7 grams of CO2 per search was a misquote from physicist Alex Wissner-Gross who has been working on a set of [...]

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Like my colleague Anthony Bradley, I also speak to a lot of IT departments worried about people wasting time on social networking sites like Facebook. But Anthony is a much nicer guy than I am. Oh sure, I firmly believe there’s a lot of time wasting going on. But it’s not from the employees socializing [...]

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Steve Ballmer was in my part of the world last week and while speaking at Telstra’s annual investment day made a statement about Google’s Android that will doubtlessly get a lot of mileage in the blogosphere. Specifically he said:
"I don’t really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does. If I went to my shareholder meeting, [...]

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A consistent theme that appears in any discussion around Software as a Service (SaaS) is the extent to which these products are brought into organization by business users rather than IT departments. Based on my interactions with clients this is clearly the situation in a majority of cases – and this is consistently confirmed to [...]

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Was it just me? Did anyone else notice that the defining experience of the credit boom was the mind-numbingly boring dinner conversation? Surely I wasn’t the only one enduring story after story of the latest home renovation, valuations of investment property portfolios, the status of junior’s private school enrolment and the relative merits of 4×4 [...]

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I was pouring over the transcripts of Steve Ballmer’s interview at the Churchill Club last week when I ran across this answer in relation to Microsoft’s position in the mobile phone market:
“…if you go out five or ten years, this year there are about 125 million smart phones sold. I think if you go out [...]

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…one giant leap for me!
Now, I think this might be something like the 193,846,963rd blog in the world. Luckily for me the Gartner branding affords me the luxury of being able to cut through a little bit of the noise your average blogger might face. So, I think I owe you a little perspective [...]

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