by Jeffrey Mann | June 29, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Ah Minitel.I always had a soft spot for this strange, pre-HTTP online service. It was kind of like the Internet, except for most of the things that make the Internet so compelling. And now it is finally going away. To be honest, I didn’t realize it was still around so its continued existence was the [...]
Category: consumerization devices europe technology Tags: France, Minitel
by Jeffrey Mann | January 26, 2011 | 7 Comments
I wish to apologize for all of the demos I have somehow disrupted, those in the past and I am sure, in the future. I see a lot of vendor briefings as an analyst. A disturbing number of them go wrong. I cannot count how many times I heard the phrase “Haven’t seen that before…” [...]
Category: being an analyst conferencing humor technology Vendors Tags: BSOD, crash, demos
by Jeffrey Mann | September 26, 2010 | 10 Comments
I’ve been thinking about “creepiness” over the last couple weeks. I’ve been finding the concept come up more and more as I speak with end users and vendors about social software, because it is becoming a real barrier to adoption as end users react with sometimes unexpected revulsion at what seems normal or trivial to [...]
Category: compliance email Google privacy social media social software technology Tags: creepiness, creepy, gcreep, Google, privacy, SNA, social network analysis, social networking
by Jeffrey Mann | February 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
You may not have realized it, but today is the third annual Safer Internet Day, a day to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially for children and young people around the world. The awkward name, doofy logo and stiff language quickly identify this as a government initiative (with [...]
Category: Cloud collaboration consumerization Facebook privacy security social media social software technology Tags: children on the Internet, EU, Facebook, Insafe, privacy, Safer Internet Day, social networking, social software
by Jeffrey Mann | January 8, 2010 | 5 Comments
Like many places in the northern hemisphere, it snowed here last night. So like many people, I started the day clearing the driveway and creating a path to the front door. This takes some time, and since it is fairly mindless activity, my brain wanders while doing it. I get lots of ideas when I [...]
Category: collaboration social software technology Vendors Tags: adoption, pointless, snow, social media, tagging
by Jeffrey Mann | December 30, 2009 | 9 Comments
Last year, I did a blog post on what I call my anti-resolutions for the year. Traditionally, many blogs publish their predictions and personal resolutions around the end of the year. So I won’t. Instead, I want to talk about my anti-resolutions for 2010.They are “anti” in a couple different ways. The main one is [...]
Category: being an analyst collaboration email humor Magic Quadrant Microsoft predictions social media social software symposium technology Vendors Tags: a android, chromeOS, humor, integrity, Mac, Magic Quadrant, reply all, scuzzball, sharepoint, social media, Vendors
by Jeffrey Mann | December 18, 2009 | 8 Comments
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is getting a lot of flak for a statement he made about privacy in a CNBC interview. Here is the quote that many people are upset about: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Wow! What an [...]
Category: Google privacy technology Tags: cnbc, Eric Schmidt, Google, privacy, something to hide, spanking
by Jeffrey Mann | December 9, 2009 | 1 Comment
I am sitting in the audience, waiting for the LeWeb conference in Paris to start. I am more accustomed to being backstage, waiting to speak at conferences. Organizing and speaking at Gartner conferences has sort of ruined me as an attendee at most of these things. I get antsy after a few minutes of sitting. [...]
Category: Events startup technology Vendors Tags: europe, innovation, leweb, startups
by Jeffrey Mann | October 22, 2009 | 2 Comments
A journalist for an industry publication in Chile asked me some questions recently about Web 2.0 business models, when there doesn’t seem to be a lot of business actually going on. Here are some of the edited answers. Do you think it was a bad business decision for Google to acquire YouTube, in terms of [...]
Category: Google microblogging technology Twitter Tags:
by Jeffrey Mann | July 9, 2009 | 9 Comments
Before I was an analyst, I can remember lamenting why the people in our industry were so obsessed with chips and operating systems. It was around the time when DEC released the Alpha RISC chip, and rivalry between the different strains of UNIX and Windows was at its highest point. The horse race between BSD, [...]
Category: Apple Google IBM Microsoft technology Tags: chrome, Operating systems, OSX, RISC, Unix, Windows
