You may remember one of the Beatles’ first hits, ‘Can’t buy me love’. There are many reasons why the song lives on. One of them that there is – even these days – a lot if stuff you cannot buy. Like my mother in law observed about her situation at a care facility recently: I need hearts more than hands – and they cannot be bought.
Technology
USB-C is the law. And so much better. Let’s move on, right? Of course. Except USB-A is all over the place. And it’s not going away any time soon. The reason? Simplicity rules …
Consider this scenario: A huge machine the size of several football fields producing products (or services) vital to the world. In the process, it guzzles more energy than a steel plant, ‘eats’ data by the shipload (think supertankers) – delivered via pipes the size of the cables carrying the Golden…
Obviously, there is no such thing. The world is seemingly nothing but great challenges these days, the ‘greatest’ being the one closest to heart at the moment. If you break a leg, crash your car or your house get hit by a missile, that’s your world’s greatest challenge right there and then. On a broader scale there’s climate change, war, fascism, pandemic(s) and more. And finally there is migration – on many levels.
Autonomous cars are saving lives – every day. Silently. We don’t notice. Actually – most of us don’t know. What we do know is that selfdriving cars are dangerous. According to the news, they are frequently involved in accidents and kill people. Two very different pictures of the same reality. Which one is right?
It sounds brutal, but those of us who’ve built businesses know it’s the truth. Business – like nature – is trial and error, death feeding life, pain feeding gain, survival of the fittest – meaning ‘the most adaptable’. Therefore, government ‘life support’ for businesses in rough times is almost always a bad choice. Bad for business, bad for the future.
All this hoopla about data, data science, data lakes and data protection leave the impression that data is a new thing. That data somehow popped up at the beginning of the digital revolution and became the most important thing in the world. This misperception prevents us from seeing and understanding the big picture. Including scams lurking just around the corner…
Data is vital to the digital economy. As vital as the red and white blood cells to your body. Which makes dataflow equivalent to your blood flow. What happens if you’re fed bad data? Corporate blood poisoning? You bet!
‘Retrocomputing’ sounds old. That’s exactly what it is: About systems and software from yesteryear and long before that. And since things change extremely fast in the tech-business, ‘retro’ must mean obsolete – with a scent of museum. But wait. Not everything changes all that fast. Some things hardly change at all – and continue to run the same old stuff forever. Who’s taking care of that?
Want to learn from the best? Make sure you don’t repeat their mistakes? Save time and money, collect the glory? Of course. That’s what Best Practices has been about – for ages. And for a long time it worked. Now it doesn’t – for obvious reasons. Why are we still using it?