Gizmodo : G-Money and Me: Bill Gates Interview: "On the way to LaGuardia to catch a flight to Las Vegas, I got a call from Microsoft's Larry Cohen about a possible sit down with Bill Gates. I didn't quite know what to think of it, but I wasn't going to turn it down. I would ask the hard questions: Does Balmer really eat children? Can I swim in your Money Bin? I didn't quite muster the balls to ask those, though, and instead acted like I had real questions or something."
Why does Billy Gates do an interview with Gizmodo before Scoble? To my knowledge Scoble has never done an interview with Gates, yet the dudes from Gizmodo get to talk with him? Scoble has done more to attract the attention of sneezers over the past year than all Microsofts other marketers combined. I think that's the real insight from this interview, that the big boys at MS still don't get it.
I just finished my latest review of what's going on in open source help desk software and thought I'd post up some links to the better looking ones. I don't really see them as competitors to my companies
First off many folks using these packages will never be customers. They may not be able to afford it, may prefer open source software, or may simply be comfortable using what they have. Second is that I believe people looking to purchase a help desk solution require a certain look to the software which most of these lack (as does most open source software applications). This is NOTHING to do with how good the software is, but is a fact of life. Someone looking to buy a Lexus isn't going to buy an Accord even though it's just as safe, gets better gas mileage, and is 30K cheaper. This actually goes back alot to the pricing stuff I posted about before. Third is that alot of great innovation occurs in open source help desk software and I want to make sure I'm on the cutting edge. The other commercial players in this space are slow and barely innovate at all so the best place to look for "what's hot" is in open source. Number four is support. What many organizations want when they buy software is simply someone to help them when it goes wrong(which is usually does at some point). I have more, but I'll save them for another day :-)
Ok enough business. Here's the ones I've most recently checked out in no particular order but with total duds removed. I reviewed about 20 but most had not been updated in a long time,etc:
The Red Couch: Competition...: "2) There are no books that are currently on the shelf that talk about corporate blogging and how doing a blog can help your business get adoption, build markets, get customers, or even just get a better Google ranking. Are we missing any?"
(Via The Red Couch.) - Blogging about your business? (like me) Then you should be keeping up with Scoble and his escapades in the book biz. Scoble, your right there are no practical guides to building markets with blogging. Most of the books are on media or the cultural aspects,etc.
I've used countless web based software products. Free, shareware, paid and one thing I've never understood is the lack of a system information page. I don't think I've ever seen a comprehensive information page with details on the software itself, such as database usage, internal variables, and so on. I certainly have never seen one that reports on the state of the server itself, in my case PHP.
So in the help desk software we're building I've just finished adding my first rev at one. It's semi buried in the administrative interface as it should be. Not in anyone's way but there in case it's needed. I think it's going to be a huge time saver for supporting HelpSpot users.
Now I know you techies out there are thinking, "well I just go to phpMyAdmin for database information and run phpinfo() to see how PHP is setup". True, but I'm not writing software for you! As I've said in previous posts I need the help desk manager to be able to give me all the information I need to support them. If they have to go to IT, game over.
Now some of the nifty features include a nice HTML table with all the internal HelpSpot variables, a dump of all the php.ini settings, php version, database info like type, version, and table info like sizes. I'm also considering adding some info on slow queries and so on. In addition to all this being in HTML tables, at the bottom of the page there is a text area with all the information in text format. This will allow the user to easily copy and paste the information into an email for our review. No having them contact IT, dig around the MySQL command line, etc.
I'm excited to see if it's effective. If it is perhaps more software will pick up on making this type of information convenient for users to access.
Winderfaces: "I'm going to start calling utterly crappy interfaces 'Winderfaces.' I've munged the words 'Windows' and 'Interfaces.' You pronounce the word with a short 'i,' not a long 'i.' As in 'windows' and 'interface.' Since nearly all bad interfaces find their home on Windows, it seems a natural fit."
And right on time after my last post, I see that Zend has a new product coming out that touches on some of my points below.
" The new product consists of comprehensive features that streamline development and deployment, increase application responsiveness and provide detailed forensic data on problems that occur throughout the PHP application lifecycle." - (via Zend)
Where have all the good databases gone: "My message is to the Open Source community that has, so ably, built LAMP (Linux, Apache and Tomcat and MySQL and PHP and PERL and Python). Please finish the job. Do for databases what you did for web servers. Give us dynamism and robustness. Give us systems that scale linearly, are flexible and dynamically reconfigurable and load balanced and easy to use."