Helping your business to do more business
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.
A fairly new technology that has been around for a couple of years now and which I've followed with interest is Microsofts' Silverlight, I've written about it in this blog on more than one occasion. I've long believed that it has the potential to improve the users experience of web applications, in much the same way as Flash has done with rich media.
We're all aware of the inexorable march of computer technology, processors continue to get faster, as do graphics cards, memory increases, hard disks are getting positively huge (capactity wise anyway) and of course new software is released with ever more capability. But in all the clamour surrounding the release of new technology many people aren't aware of a technology which has been around for many years but is only now gaining more traction and dare I say more relevance.
"We have access to too much information." I'm sure that if I'd said that 100 years ago I would have been considered a little odd, and if I had said it to Copernicus, Da Vinci or Galileo they would thought it extremely bizarre perhaps even considering me a little mad.