Helpdesk keyboard

The idea of a configurable keyboard, that displays key assignments based on the application isn't really new. The optimus keyboard is another example. However, the helpdesk version of the keyboard is pretty unique. (Thanks, Manuel.) I can think of a few more key assignments, for example, "Ugh", "I'm in a tunnel...", or "Any" for people in search of the Any-key.

The German spelling reform joke

I need to congratulate Edmund Stoiber and Jürgen Rüttgers, Ministerpräsidenten (Governors, sort of) of states Bavaria and Nordrhein-Westfalen for delaying the infamous spelling reform of the German language. Demonstrates guts and is the right thing to do. The spelling reform is a huge waste of time, energy, money and every other resource and pretty much DOA. Whoever came up with this idea in the first place must have been smoking something. To make a language “easier” is a nice idea, but at what cost? I, for one, will not adopt it. Period. Luckily, I don’t get grades anymore, but our kids are nothing but suffering from this idiotic project. Maybe it’s a German thing to make it “easier” for everybody else, and forget about our heritage, our own people, those billions of books that suddenly contain misspelled words, and the fact that adults and seniors wouldn’t simply switch to new spellings. Let’s compare this with our neighbouring countries and “allies”? Would the British or French (parbleu!) even think about changing their language, because non-English or non-French speaking people would find it easier to learn or pronounce? NFW. (Right, Dale?)

Case in point (French): Can you say 98 in French? Quatre-vingt-dix-huit. Four (times) twenty ten eight? Oh hell. The funny thing is, the French don’t even notice this ridiculous arithmetic formula. BTW, the Swiss make it a lot easier by saying “nonnante huit”, ninety eight.

Case in point 2 (English): Consider the word ending “…ough”. Now that’s a candidate for reform, given that there are so many different ways to pronounce this. For example, thr-ough, thor-ough, pl-ough, r-ough. All different, yet nobody would think about making these words pronounced in a consistent way.

Resistance is ... umm ... fertile

There are a few interesting discussion threads at the Armageddon blog and at GartnerWatch. Being a Gartner analyst, I thought why not disecting some of the comments and claims there. Here we go...

First, I'm delighted that at least one Gartner Analyst is working well with Gartner Consulting
Good observation. I'm the only analyst that does that. Or could it be, that we fail to inform the world that someone from the research organization has worked with a peer from the consulting organization?
Also, I'm delighted myself that Joe Guralnick from Mountain View signs his postings with his full name. I'm sure it's pure coincidence that there is no J Guralnick registered anywhere in Northern California.

However, until we hear this more broadly from other Gartner analysts the sentiment remains
You do want analysts to debrief you on their consulting engagements? Come on. I'm curious what the point here really is. Some analysts work with Consulting, others don't, and it's independent of the company.

For eons the analyts have held the consultants in low esteem so puhleeeese let's see some tangible evidence of change before changing our minds.
I'm sure there are analysts like that. Always were, always will be. Why? Because we're dealing with people here (yes, I know it's hard to believe, drones like myself belong to that species, too). Anyway, to generalize that all analysts don't like consultants, is complete baloney.

Also, regarding anonymity (or hiding behind a fence as Andy calls it) the reason is simple and I suspect he knows it.
Yes, I do: anonymous posters fear the consequences and don't accept responsibility.

The reason is that no AR person wants to risk the personal and business risk of publicly criticising the Borg (Andy, thanks for the correction by the way)
Exactly. However, nobody takes anonymous postings half-serious, even if the content was fair. Of course, there is also the other option that those anonymous postings (which are mostly negative in tone) are really not from an AR person, but Gartner's competitors. Far fetched? ... oh, and you're welcome.

The key point to my mind is that Gartner has no real interest in open debate - if they did they would have a public forum.
Who in Gartner are you talking about? Analysts? Peter? Gene? Also, what do you mean by "open"? Open as in "Gartner is in the open, and the rest hides behind the bushes again"? That's what we have already. Lastly, what would you like to debate, particularly something that is suitable for a public forum? You surely can't expect Gartner to discuss internal issues, or would you expect DaimlerChrysler to share details about the new S-class in a public forum.

Gartner blogs are all moderated (censored?) so that doesn't count.
Uh. Every blog is moderated by its respective owner. In fact, yours, too. What kind of blog would you rather have, maintained by the United Nations? And censored? Again, another unsubstantiated claim. Have you seen any postings or comments removed from any Gartner blog? By the way, Joe, your own blog doesn't even allow attaching comments to your posts. Isn't that some passive form of censorship?

Bottom line: I believe Gartner would have a strong interest in talking about real issues, but nobody spends any time discussing platitudes and cliches.

Signing off.
Borg Drone #26022

The end is near ... for many IT vendors and markets

Looking back a year or two, many small (and not so small) vendors in the data quality space and data integration space were gobbled up by larger entities: Acta, Sagent, Trillium, Group1, Avellino, Dataflux, Vality, Enosys, Nimble, Venetica, Avaki, Evoke, Mercator, Striva, Ascential, Data Junction... add to that the M&A activities in the larger business intelligence and performance management market: Crystal Decisions, Adaytum, Frango, Brio, Data Distilleries, OpRisk, and (as of 5 minutes ago) SRC Software.

If this continues (and it's likely that it will), this market will look very different in a short while. The big BI/CPM vendors are expanding into lower layers, where they'll meet with the incumbent infrastructure vendors. Looks like B.O., Cognos, SAS and friends will eventually face IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP on many fronts. That's when it gets real interesting. In the meantime, stand-alone vendors in the middle, ie. the E4 markets (ETL, EII, EDI, EAI, plus EIEIO) and the data quality technology providers find themselves between a rock and a hard place and will eventually move into niches or disappear altogether.

Sounds about the same as what happened in the automotive market: Audi, Volvo, Chrysler, Seat, Citroen, Jaguar, Rover, Mitsubishi, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Maserati... all under someone else's roof.

Data Quality is important. Do companies ever get it?

In my job, I spend a considerable amount of time watching the data quality and data integration markets, including user adoption, best (and worst) practices, and major blunders by large organizations. Right now, I'm struggling with my bank, because they keep sending me marketing stuff although I'm already a customer. Now, the problem is, they don't understand that their data entry people added the names of the account owners (joint account of my wife and myself) in a way that makes zero sense.

Typically, you have a field for first name and a field for last name (forget middle initials). Works well for single account owners or maybe joint account owners with the same last name. Does not work for couples with different last names. For example, if Joe Bloggs is married to Jane Doe, they would enter "Joe and Jane Doe" under first name and "Bloggs" under last name. Or "Joe and Jane" "Bloggs and Doe". And that's just silly. Because any such combination would not match the real name of the person, plus it looks really stupid on the address field of a letter or bank statement: "Dear Joe and Jane Bloggs and Doe". Yeah right.

Trying to change it to a single name poses major difficulties in the bank, because "the system doesn't allow it". Geez. So I ask them to drop me from the marketing list, and they say they can't find me on the campaign list. Duh. If it wasn't such as hassle to switch banks, I'd do it (again) in an instant. Bad data quality is a clear indicator for incompetency.

Tetris blocks send a message

A friend has just sent me this image. Can you figure it out? If it doesn't work for you, move away from the screen and try again. OK now?

The KLM experience - Act 2

I hate flying KLM. There is simply no other way to put it. I’ve flown them 5 or 6 times in the past few weeks, their airplanes suck, business class is a joke, and every single flight was at least 45 minutes late. I’m writing this post from Schiphol airport (yes, it sounds like something else) and I’m sitting here at baggage claim number 5 for over 45 minutes. 45 minutes! To get my bag from the gate to the caroussel. They got to be kidding. It took me as long to fly from Hamburg to Amsterdam in the first place! Not including the one hour delay taking off because of rain and Amsterdam. Rain. Not an earthquake. Not a tornado. Not a civil war. Rain.

So here I am, instead of attending a session on Indigo at the Microsoft TechEd event, I’m watching a monitor that updates the planned arrival of our bags every 15 minutes. Shortly before the allotted time the baggage handling folks delay the arrival time by adding another 20 minutes. When I arrived at the belt shortly before 2pm, it already said 14:15, which was fairly unreasonable since we had used a tiny Fokker 100, not a 747. Anyway, at 14:15 they switch the time to 14:35. At 14:40 still no bags, but the monitor says 14:55. I raise hell at the counter and all I get as a response is “we can’t help you, the bags will arrive when they arrive.” I hate flying KLM and I hate Schiphol. Forever, they had a reputation for being grossly inefficient and very sloppy with baggage. Today is another proof. According to another passenger, our container with about 8 bags was apparently put into the transit area instead of arrivals, and now somebody (hopefully) is trying to trace them. Typical for Schiphol. If I can help it this was the last time I came here.

Update: My bag is lost. They don’t know where it is.

Firefox memory leak

I noticed some obscure Firefox behavior recently. When using multiple tabs and switching between them, eventually Firefox becomes less responsive, the disk starts spinning like crazy, Firefox keeps eating memory and the page file grows at about 5-10MB per second. I have once had Firefox block over 1GB of swap space. At the same time, the CPU doesn't seem to do much and only killing the Firefox process in the Task Manager gets the system back to normal. I hope there will be a patch for post-1.0.4 versions.