Category: Communities of Practice

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Journal: Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Tools

A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.

Titled “A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org,” the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.

A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. “If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?” according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.

“When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district,” states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.

Comments are not enabled on the video's YouTube page.

Microsoft is facing competition from OpenOffice.org on multiple fronts, from the commercial version sold by project owner Oracle, as well as offshoots like the recently announced LibreOffice.

Read rest of article…

See the Video

Phi Beta Iota: Google is in more trouble than Microsoft.  Oracle will not scale, and IBM is not as imaginative as it likes to believe.  Microsoft, however, has no strategy at all.  Attacking OpenOffice in an era of Open Everything is a sure sign that Microsoft leadership is struggling–and this tracks with the decline of the company under Steve Balmer.  We believe there will be a need for Bill Gates to take the helm again, or Microsoft is going to start falling apart and will fail to use the time it has right now–the next two years–to bury the competition by innovating itself into the future.

Guest Comment:

“Microsoft as a corporation is disgraceful. The classic case is when they bribed Nigerian Officials to replace Linux with Windows on school computers. http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.geek.com/articles/news/mandriva-ceo-calls-out-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-2007112/ I prefer to work with an operating system with a Social Contract  http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.debian.org/social_contract or code of conduct: http://www.facebook.com/l/8396a;www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct”

Tip of the Hat to Paul Harper at Facebook.

Robert Steele's response:  Quite right. Not sure we can turn a pig into a cow, but miracles do happen. I predict Bill Gates will return to run Microsoft, the question is, has he learned to listen to others? Jury is still out on that one.

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Reference: Peggy Holman on Government and Change

03 Economy, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process, Real Time
Peggy Holman

The Challenge of Power (Extract)

There are virtually always political barriers!

What I have found to be true is that when the issue faced is more important than their position, people in power positions will engage. In other words, they’ll step up when:

  • the situation reaches the point that they realize that they can’t solve it alone;
  • it is critical to their success; and
  • they’ve found a partner to work with that they’re willing to trust.

Essentially, these are the conditions when anyone will engage. It’s just that people with more to lose tend to wait longer. By then, the situation is really messy and they’re desperate.

Don't Hold On

Peggy Holman knows a lot about change in organizations and communities and she wrote Engaging Emergence to help people not only deal with unexpected and chaotic change, but even come out ahead by engaging it proactively.

But proactive engagement means letting go of some things just as much as discovering new things. To help you navigate, Peggy presents her list of The Five Things We Need To Let Go Of To Effectively Deal With Emergence:

1. Give Up Command and Control.

2. Give Up Habit and Routine.

3. Give Up Top-Down Decision-Making.

4. Give Up the Existing Order.

5. Give Up Thinking That You Have the Answers.

Read the full blog with paragraphs and examples for each of the above….

See Also:

Worth a Look: Engaging Emergence

Journal: Self-Organizing Emergence from Chaos

Review: The Change Handbook–The Definitive Resource on Today’s Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems

Reference: Peggy Holman Free Video on Emergence

Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Peggy Holman

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Journal: Lean Sigma, ScrumMasters, & Deja Vu

03 Economy, 04 Education, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Methods & Process

If You're Looking At The Past To Design The Future, You're Going To Crash And Burn

One reason why Apple is innovating and winning, while Nokia is not.

Unfortunately, the headline using a dramatic effect to get attention, but is not an accurate statement.   Be careful about too much credit to Apple's current design efforts. Apple has had several flops in the past. Is this conscious or are they experiencing their own randomness?

It can be easily observed that systems endure with marginal improvements. Of course, if you do not want the undesirable effects that are being generated by your system, making marginal improvements has little hope of removing these undesirable effects, since effects can only be created by deeper cause(s).

So to claim that looking at the past to design the future demands that you will crash and burn is an easily disproved hypothesis. Yet, we also know that when you design a system for the future, you can also build an ineffective system. The world is littered with dead businesses created on the belief that they will have the utopian design.

Continue reading “Journal: Lean Sigma, ScrumMasters, & Deja Vu”

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Journal: BRICS Innovate Externally Not Internally

01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 India, 06 Russia, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

How BRIC Innovators Will Defeat You

11:13 AM Thursday October 14, 2010

For reasons yet unclear, BRIC companies and entrepreneurs now consume roughly half my professional time. The Brazilian, Russian, Indian, and Chinese (BRIC) managers I meet are as sharp, credentialed, energetic, and hungry as their Silicon Valley or Rte. 128 counterparts. Sometimes their English is even better. They desperately want to be world-class innovators.

These people aren't interested in launching imitations. They're not looking to be even lower-cost suppliers or sub-contractors to a WalMart or HP or JPMorganChase. They want to be valued as much for their ingenuity as for their prices.

Consequently, they appear particularly open to ideas and experimentation. They know they lag so they'll grasp any reasonable innovation edge they can. Measured by brainpower and grit, there's no reason why BRIC enterprises shouldn't consistently out-innovate their richer rivals. Money isn't the vital variable holding them back. So what's the issue?

Read about the BRIC cultural flaws….

Tip of the Hat to  Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.

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Reference: How Web-Code Geeks Help NGO’s and Media

Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Methods & Process, Non-Governmental, Open Government, Reform, Tools

Jon Lebkowsky Home

Events this week – NPOCamp and Austin News Hackathon

Cross-posted from http://effaustin.org.

Two great events coming up this weekend in Austin, sponsored by EFF-Austin.

Friday, join us at NPO Camp – a Barcamp for Nonprofits and Techs. We had one of these several months ago, and it was a real blast! The idea here is to bring the nonprofit and technology communities together for a day and talk about the technical challenges the NPOs face, while educating the techs about that world. Last event, we had 200+ attendees forming into sessions and pods; all were lively.  Greg Foster, our newest EFF-Austin board member, has done most of the legwork in organizing the event, with major production assistance from Maggie Duval, also a board member and producer of the annual Plutopia event during SXSW. Sign up here.

Saturday, coders and journalists come together to build innovative news applications at the Austin News Hackathon, cosponsored by EFF-Austin and the local Hacks Hackers chapter led by Cindy Royal.  The day will begin with a presentation by Matt Stiles and Niran Babalola of the Texas Tribune, talking about some of the news apps they’ve been developing. Then teams will form to match ideas from journalists with technical expertise from the coders who are attending. These kinds of events are the future of journalism!  This event also benefited from Maggie Duval’s production assistance. Sign up here.

Both events will be catered by Pick Up Stix of South Austin.

Phi Beta Iota: The convergence-emergence that is starting to pick up momentum is happening all around us.  Here we see two example of “cognitive surplus” creating “infinite wealth” as web and code geeks help, respectively, non-profit organizations and journalists.  This is the model of the future–there is plenty of wealth for everyone, we just need to stop corruption at all levels across all domains–we do this with transparency where money is involved, and with open space where money is not involved.

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Journal: Green Party Candidate Swarmed by Police

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society

Green Party Candidate Ejected

POSTED: 6:11 pm PDT October 12, 2010
UPDATED: 6:56 pm PDT October 12, 2010

Before Tuesday's gubernatorial debate at Dominican University of California, Green Party candidate Laura Wells was escorted away by security outside of the hall where the event was set to take place.

Watch the video….

Tip of the Hat to Christina Tobin at Facebook.

Phi Beta Iota: US citizens still living with the delusion that they live in a democracy need to be reminded that there are 65 political parties in America, and a two-party tyranny.  The final nail in the coffin of US “democracy” was the disenfranchisement of the League of Women Voters by a “Commission” consisting of the Republican and Democratic parties.  They did this because the League wanted to ask questions not revealed in advance, and wanted to include third, fourth, and fifth party candidates.  In our view, no organization that hosts a political event with two or more candidates should be allowed to exclude ANY legitimate candidate, and certainly not the Greens, Reforms, Libertarians, and Independents.

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Journal: Microsoft Bing Plus Facebook

11 Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process, Mobile, Tools
Full Story Online

SEATTLE — Microsoft is starting to incorporate what your friends do on Facebook right into its Bing search engine.

A new feature rolling out Wednesday will start showing what Facebook friends “like” on the search results page.

On Facebook and sites around the Web, people can click a “like” button to show support or share information with friends. On Bing, if you search for a topic in the news, articles friends have shared on Facebook might appear. Restaurants and movies that friends have “liked” could help you decide what to do on your next date.

Microsoft has been working with Facebook since 2006.

The feature could help distinguish Bing from Google, which only has access to information users make public.

Phi Beta Iota: The various Microsoft initiatives are both inspiring and troubling–inspiring because Microsoft is clearly struggling with its inner demons and reaching out to “not invented here” options; and troubling because there does not appear to be any over-arching strategy.  Amazon is the mother lode for intelligent content–when will Microsoft bite the bullet and make Jeff Bezos an offer he cannot refuse?  THAT will be a game changer.