Unsolicited Advice

Breadth, Focus, and the Need to Practice Thinking

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 21, 2011 / Leave a comment

I had a great conversation a few evenings back with a new friend. She had read many of the same books I used to read when you saw Book Reviews popping up on this blog on a very regular basis. I still read those books, but MUCH MUCH slower than...
VMWare as the Amazon of PaaS

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 20, 2011 / Leave a comment

Note: This is an extremely geeky post… if you have no interest in Enterprise Infrastructure it will not only bore you, it probably won’t make much sense. I noticed this week that VMWare expanded their Cloud Foundary offering to include support for .NET. I had three seperate thoughts about this...
We’re Not Nearly Done Making Things Cloudy

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 12, 2011 / Leave a comment

Note: I had written a very elegant post on this topic, but it got lost deep in my wordpress instance… so all you’re going to get is the executive summary. Amazon’s cloud is starting to reach critical mass and that is believed to be a sign that cloud computing is...
Time to Clean Up the Amount of Cloud Washing

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 23, 2011 / Leave a comment

When I was with IBM, we used to have a term called, “Blue Washing”. The term referred to taking a software product from a new acquisition and slapping the IBM logo all over it to make it in to a new product. The product usually was mostly unchanged and not...
Why I’m Glad The Kindle Fire Is Nothing To Be Excited About

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 18, 2011 / 1 Comment

The Kindle Fire was met by a massive yawn from the tech community over the last couple days. The early adopters found it to be slow, locked down, unflexible, bad at messaging and generally unimpressive. While some people, like Fred Wilson, found it useful for a very specific purpose, no...
The Danger of Having a Long Roadmap

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 12, 2011 / Leave a comment

Fred Wilson’s post today is about the advantage of having a long roadmap… he cites an interview with Denis Crowley of Foursquare and notes that the team there did not panic when Facebook Places came out because they knew they had a better vision for where it could go. I...
Deliberation

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 10, 2011 / Leave a comment

I’m tempted to write a whole lot about Penn State’s Board of Trustees and Joe Paterno this morning, but I’m not going to. We don’t know the facts yet, and whatever I wrote I might well end up eating my words (I fear there may be much more to learn...
The Hard Days

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 8, 2011 / Leave a comment

For me, the easy days are the ones where I can see success clearly. When I go for a run and beat my best time by a minute or nail a client presentation or finish a product. Those are the days that make me want to double down and work...
Heroes

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 7, 2011 / Leave a comment

This year I’ve watched as Steve Jobs passed and Joe Paterno has been hobbled. Two men who I had only a few years ago considered invincible. I could only understand it vaguely, I knew that they were mortal but it was something that I had almost allowed myself to forget. ...
The Future of Media is Here, When’s The Past Going Away?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 27, 2011 / Leave a comment

Lately I’ve seen several articles that lump all the media industries together (Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Music, TV, Movies) and discuss their impending doom. The story goes that the era of commissioning, creating, publicizing, distribution, selling is coming to an end. In this post Mainstream Media world creation will be accomplished by...