Industry

Optimizing for what?

So why are we taxing cooperation and coordination and subsidizing technologies that decrease rapid exchanges between workers?
— Stephen Dulaney: Blogging Alone

2:22:36 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Messaging

Heisenberg and Phone Bills

My mother-in-law is an accountant, so every now and then I read things I wouldn't normally read, like The CPA Software News. An editorial there by Gregory L. LaFollette, "Too Cheap to Measure," asks "Do you have an old "per hour" pricing model that could use an overhaul?" Or, based on my experiences at consultancies, does it take longer to fill out your timesheet than it does to do the work?

He asks this after observing that the telephone industry has a per-minute pricing model that could use some work.

The result is that many industry analysts and observers believe that the costs of MEASURING AND BILLING now approach 80% of the total costs of providing telephone service

It costs eight (8) times as much to bill for the service as it does to provide it? So, MCI WorldCom, noted for some issues with its billing systems, charges a flat-rate for everything. Verizon's variation on this is much more confusing — you can't get a straight answer on the price from their website. Must be the Uncertainty Principle at work there as well.

12:29:01 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Planned Obsolescence

/. has a brief discussion about an article in the Economist claiming that Sun's N1 vaporware will make system administrators obsolete.

Yeah. Right.

We've been trying to do this to ourselves for years and it ain't happened yet. Someone has to clean up after the developers. You can call it system integration if you want to, but to me, I'm just a mechanic, keeping the car in fine tune.

9:24:26 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry, System Administration