Being somewhat new to the arena, at least in the sense of contracting out my services to those interested, I can relate to this article a lot. Admittedly, many of these struggles could have been avoided by being more clear up-front, and with time and experience, these difficulties or hiccups can be avoided. However, it is a cute little article that I couldn’t resist posting, especially on a Friday.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Click here for the full article.

By now everyone has heard of the departure of Yahoo!’s CEO. The first I heard of it was on Infectious Greed (here and here are the articles I read, but when I went to get the links, I found this one, too), but shortly thereafter, Techcrunch and Mashable were weighing in on the situation, too. Valleywag has an interesting look on the Semel days at Yahoo!, too.

After reading the Valleywag article, it’s a lot less certain that Semel has really done a bad job. Recently, it’s easy to argue that the company has failed to perform, but performance is of course relative, and it might be a bit unfair that Yahoo!, and really any company that relies heavily on online advertising and an online platform for their business, is judged solely by the bar set by Google. What makes the situaiton more difficult is that Google doesn’t seem to be judged by the same standards as other companies and fails to have any real criticism. Looking at Yahoo!’s stock over the Semel-years and considering that timeframe, he really didn’t do that poorly.

I’m not trying to argue that it wasn’t time for Semel to go, but one must consider the reason for him being forced out, and really, he was forced out, might not necessarily be anything that he could have really prevented. Unfortunately, he was guiding a ship that is heading in at least a handful of different directions, none of which clearly define the company, nor could they be exploited on their own for the company to create the success the share holders demand. Yahoo!, as a platform and a portal, is so large in magnitude and scope that it is nearly impossible to turn in one direction, but it’s about as difficult to create enough traction in any of those directions concurrently to meet the expectations of those that inevitably hold the power. In the end, he has no choice, and a la Hollywood, the former Hollywood exec is riding off into the Sunnyvale sunset.

While browsing one of Rob’s favourite blogs, I came across an article that, on the surface, seemed really bland and missing something, but after following the link, ended up being the coolest thing I’d seen all month. The actual video that is being referenced provides some amazing possibilities (Note: I wasn’t able to see the video on the homepage of the blog, but looking at the direct link, it seems to be there. If you can’t see it on ForgetFoo, click on the CollegeHumor link.). After watching the video, I went to check out Paul Kedrosky and noticed a short post about TED. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, was started in 1984 and seems to be an important driving force for innovations; consider the following points from the TED website:

• An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired imagination.
• An idea weighs nothing.
• It can be transferred across the world at the speed of light for virtually zero cost.
• And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.
• It can reshape that mind’s view of the world.
• It can dramatically alter the behavior of the mind’s owner.
• It can cause the mind to pass on the idea to others.

More and more articles I read are talking about the need for more more IT professionals, but the issue seems to be more real when I read it in one of those paper-based blogs you may have heard of, like an article by Gillian Shaw in the Vancouver Sun yesterday. Hitting a peak at the with the Y2k phenomenon, the IT industry and those looking for gainful employment quickly fizzled out as start-up companies became things of the past and the infamous 1.0 bubble burst. With IT becoming more and more important for the average small and medium enterprise and larger corporations having more concerns over their own IT departments, especially in the wake of several well-publicized security blunders, individuals looking for work in the IT industry are now able to look for the opportunity that interests them the most. More and more, companies will need to look at retaining the talent they have and rewarding those individuals, because if they are not interested in doing so, another company is, and turnover is rarely a good thing. From the article, some interesting numbers:

1. 90% of technology and telecommunications companies expect it to be difficult to find technically skilled help over the next 3 - 5 years
2. 60% expect a shortage of talent
3. 67% say developing leadership talent is the most critical talent issue
4. 48% say retention of key talent is the most critical issue
5. 80% indicated educations institutes and employers need to work with eachother to ensure an adequate supply of new talent
6. 60% of organizations plan to increase their investment in recruiting
7. 67% will rely on financial rewards and incentives to attract and retain talent

Note: Image was borrowed from TalentedTechies.com.

As if the software giant didn’t have enough battles to fight, they have chosen to expand their services to offer an Adobe-like suite of applications, Expression Studio. After the recent purchase of its #1 competitor, Macromedia and the accompanying suite of multimedia development applications, Adobe is in complete control of the market. In fact, it’s difficult to even consider the name of a company that competes in the field, although names like CorelDraw do come to mind (I can’t be certain the application still exists or is being worked on). While one of the four applications included in the suite is simply a re-introduction of an old application, FrontPage, the new application suite introduces Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, or MS Flash, and their .Net platform.

The article I’ve read about the suite has some good things to say about the package, although there are some questions about the label it attempts to wear; more complete, seamless integration of the individual applications with eachother, one of the expectations of the Office Suite of Applications, and an image-editing program are needed to really start to challenge Adobe’s powerful packages. However, for the price tag and what is delivered, Microsoft seems to have done fairly well with this release, and it would seem the most important aspect of the release is a platform to push Silverlight and .Net.