I sent off my V-moda headphone for repair. The address was somewhere in Los Angeles, California, and I live in the Netherlands. They checked it and sent me a replacement with no questions asked. The only problem? I sent them off on the 23rd of February and got them back yesterday, 15 days later. Even [...]
As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, [...]
where I write about how the process blogging and that of business are incompatible.
On Starbuck’s new community initiative, on what is wrong with Starbucks, on third places.
In many ways, I consider this the best strategy book, I’ve ever read. “Valuation,” by George Norton, is, as the name suggests, a book that uses financial models as a basis to build (sound) strategies. It is also a textbook—my version is hardcover and 190 pages long—but written in a format that reads easily and [...]
One of the first thesis topics that was proposed to me, as part of my strategic management master, was to research why companies are located where they are. Turned out that this is some super-secret thing and there hardly is any data on it. Our assumption was that this must hence be strategically significant. I [...]
I read too much and review too little. Following is a list of books, I’ve enjoyed and a single line to describe what I learned from them. What the CEO wants you to know: turnover is the lifeblood of a business. The E-Myth Revisited: assign roles and responsibility for every aspect of your organisation (even [...]
The matter of Rhine Capitalism vs. Anglo Saxon Capitalism, referring to the battle between the capitalist system that has long reigned in the US vs. the more socialist system that came forth from European countries, is one that is on the table right now. The question is this: should we let the market be free, [...]
I have to say that I (Vincent) am a little baffled by the amount of effort that goes into IT or ICT. I thought we had these discussions some years ago and the general consensus was: IT is not the source of sustainable competitive advantage. Yet, when I opened my Economist from two weeks ago [...]
So some short thoughts. Plenty of people have been criticising both the Seinfeld+Gates ads and now the crowdsourced variant of “I’m a PC.” I’ve only really read three points of view, namely Micheal Arrington’s (a media guy), John Gruber’s (a Mac-head), and Jason Kottke’s (an (alternative internet-)culture guy). All three have been fairly negative about [...]
The way I blog is pretty much continuous; I try to relate everything—from fashion, to relevance, to mobile-commerce, to SOA, etc.—to a general theme, which I eventually hope to use as a framework of principles and values in my future activities. I guess that this to some extent answers my previous question of whether process-coding [...]
Context: I’m currently in discussion with a number of companies that are involved with SOA-vending & -consulting. As a result, I’ve been studying up a little on this market and hope to learn more by writing about it. Note: Since I know, judging by the response to other articles on enterprise-software, this isn’t exactly the [...]
Judging from Vincent’s latest post (and the comments!) about why he thinks Android will suck, there are many misunderstandings about global smartphone markets. First of all, they are a small subset of all handset market – just about 10%. There are many who are blinded by their US-centric power-user views. The echo chamber of blogs [...]
After two months in my new life as an entrepreneur, having turned my back to the corporate world, all I can say is that it’s been so much fun – & hard work, that I believe, & I know that I made the right decision. Let alone that I strongly advocate all my mates to forget about [...]
Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams. Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by [...]
