Communication

Tranisition to nowhere

As a user of Postini (now known as Google Mail Filtering) I received a number of communications from the Google Postini Transition team saying that they were migrating services off the old Postini infrastructure and onto the new Google Apps infrastructure and that I could select to transition or not and to keep an eye out for the new agreements and that you can get extra information by following some links. Later, they sent another friendly e-mail saying that your existing service won’t really be affected except to make it better by allowing you to have the power of Google Apps.

Then this morning arrived the non-renewal notice.

Apparently my transition is a transition to nowhere.

Please understand, I do not question Google’s right to no longer offer a service, nor to change their mind. The issue is the poor manner in which they communicated with their customer - somewhere along the way I feel I went from being an asset to being an inconvenience. Read More...

Dead Trees and Their Electronic Equivalent

“You can’t grep dead trees” - is an old Unix saying. It is supposed to promote the value of keeping documents electronically. Sometimes you want the unalterability of paper or its modern equivalent the PDF. However, if you produce unalterable documents it is important to remember that there will be versions. Read More...

Documentation

Most “engineers” are not fond of writing documentation … after all they like building things not writing about them … they will generally agree that documentation is important and that they like to receive good documentation for things that they use. So in spite of some reluctance to do it we all agree that we want good documentation. So why is there so much bad documentation out there? Read More...

How many "I"s are in your team?

The more I think about it the more I dislike the old saw “There is no I in team”. This statement is actually written from the management point of view and is rather self serving. What if we consider all the parties and their interests? Read More...

Good companies listen to bad news

There are a number of management practices that really kill company performance … one of those is actively saying “I don’t want to hear about that” … Read More...