Helping your business to do more business
As a techie I confess that I hate marketing, but as a business man I understand the need for it and the value that it brings to a company. I hope that as time has progressed I've learned enough to get by. But it's a difficult dichotomy to live with and I struggle with it every day.
According to some commentators we're now living in what they call the 'Post PC Era'. Apparently, this is because we're using our mobile phones, and Tablets (if you have one) to consume information and run 'apps' on. By saying this it implies that the PC is in decline, while 'mobile' which seems to include the Tablet is on the rise, that's a big claim.
Part of the art/science of programming is taking a big problem and breaking it down into smaller problems. The idea being that on their own the smaller problems are far easier to solve, and in doing so you then find that the big problem has also been resolved. It's a technique I use regularly, breaking a project down into its base functionality and then working on and testing those functions until the whole project has been written.
I watched a programme on TV last night called 'Dispatches Undercover Social Worker', it was a secret camera type investigative report where a reporter had gone to work for Surrey Social Services department for 3 months as a support officer. It was disturbing to see that people who by and large cared about what they were doing were hampered by having to fill in a lot of forms after having visited a child at home. A lot more time was spent form filling than in actually helping the child, with many of the workers feeling distress and frustration at a system which values form filling over the protection of the children themselves!
I'm finding the ongoing row between Apple and Adobe quite fascinating, with both making some interesting points. I must admit I don't use either companies products apart from Flash and Acrobat Reader (and I avoid QuickTime as much as I possibly can), I think both companies products are expensive for what they are. Although having said that I can't find fault with the design and quality of Apples hardware and there are no tools which equal the likes of Photoshop and Dreamweaver.