Software Companies are the Wild West

Between the 1600s and the late 1800s, thousands of people set off from the edge of the new American civilisation and headed West. Driven by vision, stubborn determination or maybe just a pinch of peer pressure, they travelled across uncharted territory, forging new paths, discovering new places and dying in

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Orienting Teams around the Axis of Change

Tech is a very fluid and changing world, but one of the most lasting truths in technology is Conway’s Law. Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. “How do committees invent?“, Melvin Conway What does Conway’s

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How Reliance Jio Disrupted Digital India

On a recent business trip to New Delhi, I was out for lunch with colleagues when conversation turned to the price of mobile data. Us foreigners at the table bemoaned the price-per-Gb in our home countries, meanwhile, the locals could barely contain their laughter… Overnight Success An overnight success in the

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Swatch Internet Time on Your Desktop

I’ve spoken before about Swatch Internet Time as an option for solving the horrible problems of cross-timezone collaboration. But nobody is adopting it. There are good reasons for this: it’s not overly difficult to work out timezone differences, there are more intuitive alternatives such as using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC),

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A Quick Rant about Capri Sun

I couldn’t help noticing how close Capri Sun is to trending on Twitter and I had to say something: Capri Suns are a sadistic experiment to see how much shit consumers will put up with. Fact.   YOU HAD ONE JOB! Things that are wrong with Capri Sun: It’s a

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