Tom Austin

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

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Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'

Windows 7 Update Advisor: Why can’t someone take responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience?

November 2nd, 2009 · 4 Comments

I downloaded this tool from Microsoft. According to Microsoft, “It scans your PC for potential issues with your hardware, devices, and installed programs, and recommends what to do before you upgrade.”
Nice idea! Kudos.
I installed it and ran it on my Lenovo X61 tablet. It chugged away for a while and then produced a nicely formatted [...]

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Personal Opinion: the PC industry model is terribly broken – will anyone step up to the problem?

October 3rd, 2009 · 6 Comments

In the movie “Network”, TV anchorman Howard Beale breaks down and tells his audience to go to their windows and scream out “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” That’s not me. I don’t have to tell anyone to do that. I bet there are millions of people who are [...]

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GM goes eBay — will transparency, efficiency and professionalism come along for the ride?

August 11th, 2009 · No Comments

(These comments are my personal opinion and are not an attempt to depict any Gartner position or consensus.)
This is such a positive move if it opens the door to something far more intelligent than the stupid haggling that most auto dealers put people through.
With gm.ebay.com, you can make an offer on-line and not have [...]

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Abhorrent business practices, version 723.1

August 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment

These comments are my personal opinion, of course, and do not represent Gartner’s official position (except we wrote about something related to it years ago…)
The Times of London has a story today about a vendor demanding that its customer sign an agreement to not say anything, to anyone, anywhere and anytime about the fact that [...]

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Early stage tool suggests new collaborative-editing approach

July 10th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Have you ever sent out a word document to several people for their review and revisions only to then struggle with multiple overlapping edits in 6 to 8 different word-doc versions of the document that you have to piece together? What can you do? With Microsoft Word, you have to do multiple pair-wise comparisons but [...]

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Decision Delusions

June 11th, 2009 · 2 Comments

I am here at the New York Sheraton Towers Hotel, this morning and was just passed by someone in a formal waistcoat and other formal regalia – a veritable Rich Uncle Pennybags without tophat. I’ve been here many times before in my life, from its early days as the Hotel Americana, famous in business school [...]

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AI-rats, self-organizing social systems and the cloud

June 8th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Physorg has a news piece on artificial rats. This might seem whimsical (or the subject for a “Golden Fleece” award unless you apply a lot of converging threads.
This piece is about rat-like robots. It brings to mind, Rodney Brooks’ work at MIT on the elegance of simple robots.
What this article doesn’t go into [...]

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Will the Google Wave inspire a Revolution?

May 29th, 2009 · 6 Comments

Google inspires and frustrates, leads and lags, marches to the beat of a different (non-enterprise) drummer and wants everyone (including enterprises) to love and adore it.
What a mix! I have been looking at Google Wave and I am really, really impressed. At the same time, I have serious misgivings about whether Google understands what it [...]

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The iPhone is not a Phone

May 5th, 2009 · 2 Comments

Daryl Plummer and I have been carrying on a conversation (with several others) about understanding what an iPhone is. First and foremost, it is not a phone.
The iPhone is the first clearly visible member of a new class of Internet-savvy populist toolkits that you can carry with you. (Insert list of newly introduced competitors [...]

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Twitter Quitter Critters

May 4th, 2009 · 2 Comments

Where have all the users gone?
The press has been repeating a piece today covering a story (originally from Nielsen) that Twitter quitters found to outnumber tweeters. 
So…are you a twitterer? Have you twittered more or less in the last 30 days than in the previous 30 days?

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