Category: Software in General
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When the right tool is not a standard tool.
Phil Simon (@philsimon) tweeted a link to an article in the Harvard business review that talks about the dangers of being “overly tool standardized” within an organisation that I thought was very interesting. Now, of course, standards are needed, and for a broad range of tools its counter productive (and horrifically expensive) to let everyone…
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Twitter and Microsoft Business Intelligence- talk about tweet share
I’m only just starting to use twitter for Datamartist, but discovered twitter search, and did a search for Business Intelligence. Well, people are twittering a lot about Microsoft Business Intelligence if twitter sheep, a really cool cloud visualization for twitter is to be believed. This is what I got when I searched for “business intelligence”.…
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Build vs Buy the Allure of Out of the box business intelligence
The big software vendors claim they can sell you an “out of the box” data warehouse including reporting that installs onto your Oracle, Microsoft or SAP ERP package. Are these things really that easy? Is it actually cheaper to build it yourself? How do you determine if a given product is a good fit for…
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The Microsoft Version Skip- XP Mode
Microsoft has announced that they will include a license of XP, running on a “seamless” virtual environment that can be run inside Windows 7. It’s being dubbed “XP Mode”. They have decided not to include a “Vista mode”, citing lack of demand. This is a very smart move on the part of Microsoft. Aside from…
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Facebook valuation 2 Billion or 4 Billion Really?
Venture capitalists must know some math that I don’t know. There is lots of discussion right now about the valuation of facebook. Lets review what we know; Lots of people use facebook. LOTS. More every day. The people do not pay for this. The people do not want to see advertising, and don’t click on…
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Microsoft Business Intelligence Full Court Press?
I’m certain that many in the business intelligence profession have noticed a significant increase in the volume from Microsoft’s marketing team, particularly in the business intelligence area. My inbox seemed to be full of Microsoft offers to introduce me to their BI solution. I was talking to a friend, and mentioned this, and he said…
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Excel auto formating is getting into your genes
We often give Excel our data, and trust it to do the right thing. There was a link posted on meta-filter today that sparked some lively discussion amongst the crowd. The Excel auto formating “feature” loves to scramble common genetic nomenclature. It turns out that in the genetics field, common codes get converted to incorrect…
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The wonderous resistance to CHANGE
Its not easy to get good figures on just how many people have switched to Excel 2007, but from what I’ve been able to find its sounding like not more than 20%- this figure a near random guess based on complex methods such as random Google searches. (There are of course power user, or early…