Thomas Otter

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Entries from July 2009

Software and the Maginot Line

July 27th, 2009 · No Comments

photo via wikipedia. thanks!
This weekend we did some camping, just across the border into France, and very close to part of Maginot Line. Next time I visit that area I’m going to take some time and actually visit a couple of Ouvrages, go inside and see the working railway and the logistics of [...]

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Tags: software industry

Learning from Jeff Bezos and musing on the Kindle, ERP and history

July 24th, 2009 · 1 Comment

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It is full of excellent nuggets. Obsess about your customers, not your competitors. Invent. Think long term. Be prepared to be misunderstood.  I wonder how many other CEO’s could present their business principles in this precise yet genuine way?  I believe the presentation was mainly aimed at [...]

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Tags: CEO · Law · books · history · politics

Visualization and HR data.

July 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

I’m convinced that too many user interfaces are trapped by tyrannies of table and text. I while ago about blogged about many enterprise software UIs being like Donuts. Via Steve Clayton this arrived in my feedreader this morning. It is goodness. Someone give this fellow some HR system UIs to work on.
 
 

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Tags: UI · usability · visualization

On renaming.

July 1st, 2009 · 3 Comments

St Petersburg has had several name changes in its 300 years or so of existence, being known as St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and then back to St Petersburg. Czars, revolutionaries, dictators and democrats have all left their mark on maps, signs, history books and now navigation systems throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union. In [...]

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Tags: history · software industry