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Content is King by Bill Gates

Content is King by Bill Gates

I’ve had a frustrating time trying to find the original ‘Content is King’ article written by Bill Gates back in 1996. There’s a few sites that have a copy of the essay, but nothing on the Microsoft site (it has been removed from the Bill Gates Published Writing page). Wayback Machine seems to be the only other option (thanks to Andrew Heenan for the link).

If you can find a Microsoft link could you please let me know. For now, I am adding the essay in it’s entirety here (as I will be referring to it in a future post).

Content Is King – Bill Gates (1/3/1996)
Content is where I expect much of the real money […]

By Craig Bailey|May 31st, 2010|General|190 Comments

Coding Kihon

I loved Sara Ford’s thoughts about coding katas. Yes, most coding should really be referred to as coding kihon (as you practice daily), and coding kumite when you’re deep in a project. Nice one. I also enjoyed Steve Andrew’s post on Shotokan Development that Sara linked to. Oh, and good luck in your new role Sara.

By Craig Bailey|February 2nd, 2010|Developers, General|6 Comments

Predictably Irrational

You’ve probably heard of Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational by now. It seems to be garnering a cult like following of late, and will likely be one of those books that everyone has an opinion on (along with The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Purple Cow, and of course Twilight ) Aaron Wall put me on to the book a few weeks ago and I have to agree it’s well worth reading. The book covers the irrational behaviour we all seem to exhibit, and looks at how to both insulate ourselves from the ‘tricks’ played on us, as well as how we might use them to our advantage. It works both ways I guess. […]

By Craig Bailey|October 6th, 2009|General, Main|2 Comments

New Generation workers and Email

I had to shake my head when I read this Accenture survey on the demands of the Millennial Generation. The usual ‘demands’ of wanting to choose their technology, insisting on state-of-the-art technology, not wanting to seek corporate approval, requiring new communication channels, etc all came up. It seemed odd that a survey like this would appear after all the economic changes of late. Turns out that although the results were published in November, they were based on a survey conducted back in June this year. How times change*. I’m guessing if Accenture conducted another survey, the ‘demands’ of Millennials would be more like the rest of the workforce at the moment: […]

By Craig Bailey|January 4th, 2009|General, Link, Main, Management|4 Comments

Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell is a great story-teller, no doubt about it. I loved his latest book Outliers. And whilst I agree with Joel Spolksy that the book is little more than cleverly strung together anecdotes, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. For example, Gladwell’s chapter on the necessity of hard work (you must do your 10,000 hours) to achieve success is a good motivator. Yes, it might be common sense, but how often do we see people falling for the ‘overnight success’ mentality? Pretty often, if the sales of ‘get rich quick’ and ‘instant solution’ books/seminars/etc are any indication. Just got to find that shortcut… However there were […]

By Craig Bailey|January 4th, 2009|General, Main|2 Comments

Adobe Infinite Images and Deep Earth

Adobe has been experimenting with it’s own image navigation & stitching together technology, and Infinite Images is the latest demonstration of it (see here for the ReadWriteWeb article). You, me and every other Microsoft watcher will immediately see shades of Deep Zoom and perhaps a little Photosynth in this. What’s cool about the the Adobe system is how it uses tagging (based on characteristics of the images) to provide an endless linkage between them. It’s pretty cool, and you probably need to see the video to understand what I’m talking about. The main difference between this and say Photosynth is that with Photosynth you provide the images and tell it which […]

By Craig Bailey|December 22nd, 2008|General, Link, Live, Microsoft|0 Comments

Werner Vogels – Chief of the Year 2008

Amazon’s CTO – Werner Vogels – has been awarded the Information Week Chief of the Year title. He’s quickly given the credit to his team of course, legend that he is. Now, it’s easy to be cynical of awards – it seems that sometimes companies/twitter abusers/magazines/etc just create them as a marketing device – but regardless, it’d be hard to disagree with the decision in this case. His humility (if you’ve been reading his blog for a while), ability to see the future, and downright scary intellect are pretty impressive. Here’s how Information Week describes Werner: “Amazon’s 50-year-old CTO has emerged as the right person at […]

By Craig Bailey|December 22nd, 2008|General, Link, Management|0 Comments

When the chips are down… people play games

Should we be surprised by this Gartner report outlining the second year on year decline in PC chip sales (they’re predicting a 16.3% decline). Intel and AMD must be doing it hard, like, ahem, just about everyone in the IT industry. Well, not quite. At least games are doing well, with sales of game hardware and software in the US up by 10% over last year’s figures (that’s a nice little $3B effort in November thank you very much). Perhaps the chip companies need to turn to other revenue streams. Like, say, a new clothing line. And my apologies for the worst blog post title in a long, long time. […]

By Craig Bailey|December 17th, 2008|General, Link|0 Comments

WordPad Zero Day exploit

OMG, panic! But don’t be distracted by that other zero day exploit (you know, the Internet Explorer one), here’s where your security gaze should be firmly focused: WordPad. It turns out that WordPad has a significant exploit. And by significant, I mean it affects at least one person. I strongly recommend WordPad users (both of you) stay glued to your browser screens (here) in anticipation of a high priority patch being released any day now. Alternatively, you could stop using WordPad… In all seriousness, there is now a patch for the Internet Explorer vulnerability. Download the patch from here. Technorati Tags: Armageddon

By Craig Bailey|December 17th, 2008|General, Humour, Link, Microsoft|0 Comments

Google Chrome leaves beta

I’ve been using Chrome a fair bit lately. Why? It’s fast. And although people point to its lack of basic features, plug-in architecture (although that is in the works), cross platform support and it’s lack of market share, I for one don’t care, as long as it is fast for browsing. I use Firefox when I need the other stuff. Anyway, Chrome came out of Beta yesterday. Download it here. Love the inbuilt address bar search (yes, look closer Technorati Tags: Chrome

By Craig Bailey|December 12th, 2008|General, Link|0 Comments