Travel Woes
All things considered, we are very fortunate to have a transportation system that is highly reliable and gets us to where we want to go in an amazingly short time. The travel industry is a complex one and there is a huge legacy of process, management systems, and technology that makes it difficult to be […]
Firetruck
Everything was on schedule as the Boeing 757 taxied toward the runway at the John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. All of a sudden there was a loud crashing sound and the airplane shuttered. Apparently the fire truck driver had gone for lunch and left the emergency brake off. The giant yellow truck rolled across […]
Netflix – Master Of Inventory
Netflix has an amazing system for managing their DVD rental inventory. I watched a Netflix DVD this past weekend. On Tuesday I put the DVD in the pre-stamped, pre-addressed mailer and took it to the post office around noon. I received an email from “Netflix Receiving” time stamped 11:27 AM the next day that they […]
On Demand
January 10, 2013 Note (this is the original story – an edited and revised version may be read here.In the height of the “dot com” frenzy a class of companies emerged called Application Service Providers (ASP). The ASPs claimed to solve all known business problems by providing applications over the Internet. Solutions covered a wide […]
e-tirement update
When I “retired” fifteen months ago after 35 years at IBM, my friends and colleagues held an “e-tirement” party. I’ll never forget it. What is “e-tirement? Not sure there is a formal definition — I guess it is mostly continuing to do what I have been doing for quite a few years — writing about, […]
