In my youth I was highly engaged in amateur car racing. One of the many challenges of this endeavor was the management of the unpaid volunteers who were helping to prepare the cars. Later, as a manager of professionals I came to realize that a person’s best work is always voluntary. Being paid does not automatically compel one to deliver excellence. Creating and maintaining a company culture where individuals ‘volunteer’ their best work is one of the major activities of leadership. How are you inspiring your ‘volunteers’ to deliver excellence in your organization?
I recently received a link to a compelling blog article on continuous deployment at IMVU. Continuous deployment methodologies are really capable of disrupting the traditional enterprise software release cycle. To me this is another checkmark favoring SaaS for enterprise software applications. Existing SaaS web applications already provide the software vendors with direct daily feedback about actual end user behavior. When this insight is combined with rapid deployment, the user experience will improve dramatically in ways that will never be achieved with traditional software license sales. These compelling benefits are in addition to the lower deployment and development costs of SaaS. Traditional enterprise software licensing is on its deathbed.
Google announced earlier this week that it was developing an internet operating system based on its Chrome browser and Linux. The press and blogosphere are having a field day predicting mostly that the Google Chrome OS will fail to replace Windows as the dominant desktop/laptop operating system because of legacy application compatibility issues and user expectations. But this is all in-the-box thinking. Google has made a major broadband investments which includes O3B networks a company who is planning to launch satellites next year to ultimately serve the world’s three billion people who do not currently have access to affordable broadband internet service. Will these first time broadband users become the primary market for the Chrome OS? Only time will tell.