Joel Stoddard

Spend less time chasing perfection and more time trying out possibilities.

Good points Saqib – This is a bit of a debate on which came first, the chicken or the egg. Why would an average person go see a band they know nothing about? Newer/Unknown bands don’t make their money on song/album sales. They make some money on performances, but many are searching for the right break or the right person to discover them. The…[Read more]

Kevin – My point is that success is relative and many authors who write books aren’t making a living off of writing alone. There are many examples in this discussion thread alone of people who want to publish something. The driving force could be wealth and fame, or it could be getting your message out to an audience. Take a look at median…[Read more]

Great perspective Alex. I work in software development, so I tend to view a lot of problems through that lens. A very popular trend is to release products early and iteratively update them based on the needs of your users. This basically lets development teams focus the most effort on the things that matter to their users the most. If I look…[Read more]

Kevin – I disagree that self-publishing is a game where newcomers will have difficulty being successful for a few reasons. First, success is a sliding scale, 1 download generated through self-publishing is more than an unpublished book would every get. Second, there is a social/viral factor to self-publishing. YouTube has similar successes of…[Read more]

A couple years ago my team started following the agile software development methodology. We specifically follow Scrum. Along with this transition came an opportunity to be involved in the broader agile community of practice within Microsoft. For background, agile as a methodology is being adopted with varying levels of success throughout the…[Read more]

I don’t think the age of agents and publishers is dead, however, it may be dying. According to this article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/10/amazon-vs-book-publishers-by-the-numbers/) e-books account for 30% of book sales, which means paper books still dominate the marketplace. My assumption is that most self-publishers w…[Read more]

Open innovation is a priority of the new CEO at my company. When he started, he instituted annual “Hackathons” which are time boxed to one week, but basically allow employees the creative license to develop teams and build/improve upon ideas. Once projects are off the ground, employees are able to work on their own time to further improve the…[Read more]

Saqib – I disagree with your take on the In Rainbows release. Radiohead as a band is known for being unconventional and anti-establishment. They also have a history of trying different ways of distributing their music. From a musical standpoint, Radiohead creates albums that that build as compositions or concepts rather than a group of i…[Read more]

As highlighted by the case, the record label benefits from higher profit margins on digital media. The figures quoted in the case are dramatic $, 0.75 profit for physical media versus $5.60 profit for digital media. From a pure profit standpoint, it is hard to understand why record labels were so resistant to digital media. The reason record…[Read more]

Good points Eric. In my experience, Banks, Education, Healthcare and Law firms more than any other sector want to know what comparable entities in their sector have adopted a product or service. There is a certain trust that comes with that knowledge that someone else has worked out the kinks. Paul points out some good reasons why it is tough…[Read more]

Paul – compliance is always a concern, but cloud services providers have been able to mitigate those concerns by gaining third party certifications of compliance (FIPS, FERPA, HIPPA, ITAR). In each industry lighthouse customers have paved the way for others. For example your CIO may say, if it’s good enough for Bank of America, it is good enough…[Read more]

Mike – you hit the nail on the head. Amazon was born in the cloud and that influences everything they do. Believe it or not, Amazon makes changes to their online services ever 11.6 seconds. They have a very sophisticated build system which allows developers to deploy changes directly to their customers. Think about Microsoft’s lineage in…[Read more]

Mike – Microsoft has taken Amazon and Google very since the race for cloud dominance began. All three companies compete heavily in the cloud arena. Each has their own particular strength but all three companies compete pretty fiercely. AWS launched first, Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) launched 2 years later. A key distinction between the…[Read more]

Alex – There are several other enabling factors that I think of around global brands. First, IT enables communication and coordination from anywhere without significant cost. Second, IT enables anyone with a translation engine and a couple lines of code to target market to people in their own language. Third, the Internet provides instant r…[Read more]

Kristin – Embrace the dark side. It’s coming and you can’t hide from it! (Just kidding…) You bring up some good points about the lines between personal and corporate use. To an extent, these worlds are colliding and there isn’t much we can do about it. Devices are viewed as a way to increase productivity, or a way to organize your life, or a w…[Read more]

Kevin – elasticity is one of the key value propositions of cloud based applications. Here is a good article on how Microsoft’s cloud computing platform dynamically scaled for the launch of J.K. Rowling’s online Harry Potter experience.…[Read more]

The cloud is not a new idea. Instead it is a new incarnation of an old idea. In many ways “the cloud” is analogous to the Internet itself. At a high level, the Internet was created to allow information to be dispersed efficiently across several locations to lower the risk of losing the information. “The cloud” in the generic sense of the ter…[Read more]

BYOD is pervasive at Microsoft. With a global and highly mobile workforce, safe and efficient access to internal resources is key to productivity. The overall strategy is enabled by layers of security that apply to different systems based on the type of information contained on the system. Microsoft also segments public/private networks and…[Read more]

AWS has four services: Simple Storage Service (S3) which provides cheap but highly available unstructured storage, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which provides a scalable compute capabilities, SimpleDB which provides highly available structured storage and finally Simple Queue Service (SQS) which provides a robust communication method between AWS…[Read more]