On the Return On R&D

After my last post, where I showed Apple to be the least innovative company around, some words were exchanged on that conclusion (...). Needless to say, after crushing Larry Ellison's suggestimation on Oracle having a way bigger and better R&D than SAP and IBM, only quantitative arguments were brought forth, and by only one person

So, why now? To tell you the truth, the figures on Apple were quite sobering

Want another Apple? No thanks?!

For those who follow my blog closely, they'll recognise the picture; I've used it before and thought it would be very apt for this post too.
After yesterday's announcement of Q4 results, the web is full of buzz surrounding Apple and its giant achievements for this year - and rightfully so

In this post I'll show the financial path Apple has traveled in the last 5 years, and why I think their glory ride to be over.

Enterprise Landscaping

Behold the second piece of my garden, together with some part of the bridge. The pile of tiles is there to nag me so I'll leave Twitter and blogging alone and get to redo this piece of garden

Redo? Yes, redo. When looking for inspiration today, Henk van Zuilekom was kind enough to give me "one of those tasks":

@MartijnLinssen draw a parallel between re-doing legacy applications and re-doing a garden. where does it all go wrong?

Facebook Groups: their own Trojan Horse

When Facebook announced their Facebook Groups yesterday, I had a funny feeling. I was following Augie Ray who was doing an absolutely great job at live-tweeting the event, and there were a lot of words used. A lot. An awful lot, really.
What was the big news? Well, you are now allowed to download your own stuff, and there now are Groups on Facebook

Downloading is what you think it would be, and Groups also are what you would think it would be. Still, so much noise around these 2 small and slight improvements

Labor laws in Europe, and resignation

Given the amount of conversations I've had lately about resignation, and the apparent lack of knowledge from people outside of the Netherlands about our Labour Law (not surprisingly), I deemed it fit to write up a short one on resignation, and the situation in Europe regarding that

In the Netherlands, everyone has a notice period for resignation / termination: the employee usually has 1 to 2 months notice, for the employer it depends on the amount of years someone is employed:

The Evangelist, the Priest and the Monk?

I eavesdropped on a conversation yesterday between Olivier Blanchard and David Armano. Tracing it back, this is where it started:

David ended that Twitter day with

building is harder than tearing

no doubt referring to this debate. I call it debate, because for some its obvious goal was about getting right. It all started with Olivier's fun and provocative post Turning a new leaf. A happy leaf

Can HP and Leo give Larry a hard time?

After the news of Leo Apotheker joining HP, ample comments arose: Dennis Howlett's,Vinnie Mirchandani's, Ray Wang's, and Horses for Sources' are only a few of those. Above, an artist's impression of what the new SAHP would look like.
(Just kidding, it's a

NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image capturing the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks

- thought that it'd make a nice picture)

Dummy's Guide to Standardisation

I was going to write something about open and closed IT standards, but was struggling. It turns out to be rather hard to define exactly what open and closed are, when it comes to IT standards. That's why I postponed this post, but fortunately Dick Hirsch reminded me of it, so here it is

Why this post? Because we are growing towards a more and more standardised world. Cloud is going to hugely drive standardisation, and Social Media are going to hugely drive mutual understanding and co-operation. Even though I once said that these are two forces at work that will greatly disrupt IT 1.0, they will work together on one thing: unifying this little planet - and my business will contribute to that