Michael Maoz

The joys of home ownership. Mortgages, cleaning services, lawns, plumbers, roofers, electricians, carpenters – it’s like you have hooked up a powerful vacuum cleaner to siphon off your cash from a declining asset class. But it does give a person a view into the world of consumer retail operations from the outside. It’s not that [...]

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As I listened to the US President Barack Obama answer questions about healthcare reform Wednesday night on television, my mind kept going over the scenarios from my own family: on forms submissions, claims to insurance companies, incorrectly-cancelled services, failed notifications, denials of coverage, faulty claims codings, failures to inform or support – that my family [...]

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After 11 years living in the United States, I moved homes. There is a lot to learn about deceptive business practices from realtors and bankers, and about insurance companies that automatically raise your rates because you have a less-tony postal code (but 11 years without a claim).
What really struck me during the move was the [...]

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In the ancient myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son try to escape Crete with the secret of the labyrinth, but need to avoid travel by land and sea because king Minos controls both. So they decide to build wings and take to the air and fly. It all looks beautiful from so [...]

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In a round of client visits that took me 17,500 miles in eight days, and to meetings with over 75 businesses over five time zones, I saw experiments with Twitter, SMS, FaceBook and Wikis that laid bare the huge gap between where businesses want to be in engaging customers, and where the major business software [...]

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Buyers of goods and services have certain intentions in mind when they establish a business relationship with a business. In the case of health insurance it is to stay insured in time of need. You think that is obvious as an unbiased outsider, but most insurance companies breaks the implicit promise in their relationships by failing [...]

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Watching the Google Waves from the near distance, searching Topsy for something about Turvy but knowing only Bing would understand my true context, I listened to Mahler’s cowbells and mandolin in Symphony #7 and waited. Yeah, it sounds nuts, and it is pretty spacey. Just like when I am on a conference call with a [...]

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I didn’t blog while travelling. It was a more than full time job to listen to clients as I went from country to country and city to city, meeting IT and business executives from over 85 non-US and non-EU countries. About 2% of them use software as a service according to the Gartner definition. They [...]

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