MBET Blog
Let's talk about Word
An excellent post from MS's Chris Pratley on the history of Word. Lots of good stuff on product management there but also on being a
disruptive technology. WordPerfect got disrupted by the GUI & Word. They got stuck trying to please their existing customers when they should have turned around and started leaving them behind... which of course is idiocy. Which is why disruptive technologies are so cool...
2004 Manning Innovation Awards
So the Center for Innovation got a table for the 2004
Manning Innovation Awards dinner and I got to go last night. Interesting stuff. Checking out the past winners of the awards provides a real ashowcase for Canadian innovation.
Groupies
Someone asked me to post a link to a MBET Yahoo group:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/mbet_uw/.
Not surprisingly, the current class also has a Yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/uw_mbet/. This is the group the current class is using and upcoming MBET students are welcome to do so as well. Membership is restricted and only to approved people, but I'm sure we can figure things out and get moderation privledges passed on to the new class. Or use the new group. Whatever floats your boat.
Neven also set up a web site using
SnipSnap which is quite cool but the site has fallen somewhat into disuse. It is useful to have a list of phone numbers, email addresses and IM handles because you'll have a heck of a time trying to keep them all straight and it makes the M-to-N problem of handling contact info into a much simpler N-to-1 problem. A mailing list is also useful as there's a lot of info that needs to get distributed to everyone (like when assignments or classes get moved) but there's no way you're going to type in thirty-odd email addresses each time.
Hubris
Why don't hubris and debris rhyme? Anyway, for those who follow my writings April may be a slow month as we all have the month off... the first three weeks of April are usually exams (which we don't have this term) and the final week lets the facutly and staff collect their collective wits to prepare for the onslaught of co-op students stuck in class for the summer.
I do need to make one correction though - I am neither the oldest student in class nor have I had the most senior job position prior to MBET. But I'm still the tallest damn it and that has got to count for something!
And speaking of jobs, if you want to recruit a very competent product manager with a record of successful new product developmnent and a mind for strategic thinking, leave a comment and we'll figure out how to get in touch. Or heck, just email me - how much more spam could I get anyway - ehenry at magma dot ca.
Product Development
Murray Gamble from
C3 is back, this time going through case studies of actual products that have gone through C3's development process. He's showing how their
stage-gate system evaluated projects in a really interesting way. I don't like stage-gate, but my experience bias leans towards small companies. For large companies and potentially very expensive product development projects though, I think you need discipline and stage-gate is a good way to enforce it. A great real-world example of how to use the process.
Don't Try To Stop Me!
So this morning I had breakfast at
Ground Zero. Why? Because I could! Someone stop me before I eat again!
For those of you who remain unimpressed with my rather pedestrian act of gastronomic rebellion, both Ground Zero and the
Davis Center Library are closing the summer. Ground Zero is
becoming a 24-hour Tim Horton's . Today was their second-last day of business. The renovations will take all summer. The DC library is becoming something a little more 21st-century and a little less 19th-century. Back when I started undergrad, the issue of supporting laptops in the library didn't exist... back then PCs were big. And we liked it! And there was no internet - well, no massive awareness of it. I remember learning about this "ftp" thing in about 1991. It was slow and clumsy... and we liked it! Anyway, it shows how much the internet has become the primary application and how mobile computing is the real thing. It also shows that Waterloo does have some vision to keep up with the current technology trends, not just in the classroom, but in the entire university experience. The library change will be nice too.
So for those of you starting in the fall, you'll get some brand new spaces on campus while those of us here in the summer have to make due with a little less.
