CategoryStrategy

The boring but impactful things our clients are doing

Data 3.0 I’m in my mid 50s now, which means I’m in that stage of life where I’m highly focussed on health. I want to live not only a long life, but also a healthy life. One of the books I’ve been re-reading is the excellent Outlive by Peter Attia. If you’ve read it you’ll recall he discusses the topic of Medicine 3.0. As a quick oversimplification:  Medicine 1.0 was the initial medical...

Internet strategy

An interesting read from Noah Smith, usefully summarising the demise of the internet as we have known it. Now it has degraded into a hot mess of ads, misinformation, laughable summarising and walled gardens. So long beautiful, open internet. How to respond then? Good question, and one I’m pondering at the moment. I don’t have the answer yet (or perhaps won’t ever) but it does...

Strategy versus Tactics

A handy analogy to use next time you’re trying to remind someone about tactics versus strategy.

Strategy is the recipe

Tactics are the ingredients/utensils

When you’re asked what your strategy is for the year ahead, tell them about the cake you’re baking, not the spoon and flour you’re using.

Hat tip to Chris Voss and Never Split the Difference for this reminder.

What Would I Know?

You know when you read lazy tech reporting and it just wastes your time? Yeah, I hate that. People who don’t really know much, but are more than happy to share their ill-informed opinions. Or worse, they’re a walking case study for ignorance parading as opinion… yeah, we all hate that. So, why do I feel the need to contribute more of the same? Well, basically, I find that...

CLARITY: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)

After chatting with a few people about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) recently, it’s clear that the technology is not that well understood (even though, in my opinion, Microsoft have done a pretty good job of articulating it – much better than say OBA for example). So in this post I’m aiming to give a high level overview of VSTO and clear up some misconceptions. As usual this is...

CLARITY: Office Business Applications (OBA)

Office Business Applications is a term getting bandied about a fair bit these days. What is it exactly? Well, answers differ, and you’d be forgiven if you thought it was as simple as using Office to build Applications for use in Business. The purpose of this post is to try to get some simple high level understanding of OBAs. In later posts I’ll be digging into resources and also covering VSTO...

CLARITY: SQL Server 2008

One of the problems we often encounter is information overload. There’s no shortage of great articles, examples, podcasts and webcasts on every conceivable technology. Microsoft’s products are no different. Thus, the following is comprised of numerous sources easy to find online – there’s no special insight here. Rather, I’ve just simply tried to distill a product to...

CLARITY: CRM Live becomes CRM Online

The main interest in this article from Mary Jo is not about CRM (who cares about a name change after all) but rather how Microsoft are clarifying their terms: Live: Consumer focus Online: Business & Enterprise focus, hosted by Microsoft Hosted services: hosted by Microsoft partners And don’t miss the revenue sharing snippet at the bottom – Microsoft will share 10% of the CRM Live...

CLARITY: VSTS, VSTO, VSTA, VSX

Seems like Microsoft is having a V Day, every day. Here's a run down of the main V technologies/tools: VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) Firstly, Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2008 (the current version) is Microsoft's IDE for building .NET based applications, be they Web, Desktop, Device or Microsoft Office based. Visual Studio comes in a number of different versions, grouped into three...

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