Network Television mirrors IT Technology Cycles

/ / @Mike_Colson, Cloud, IT Cycles, vSpecialist / Leave a Reply


There were 2 maybe 3 Golden ages of network television. The first was the initial couple of years that TV existed with shows like the Honeymooners and I love Lucy. The second came in the 70’s – 80’s with shows like the Love Boat, Knight Rider, and the A-Team (plus sweet cartoons like GI-Joe, Transformers, and Thunder Cats). I digress; the third Golden Age was 1989 – 2000 with shows like Seinfeld and Friends netting the networks loads of money. The thing that broke up the golden ages were disruptive technologies. While I wasn’t alive for the first golden age I certainly saw the episodes in re-runs and I saw the second golden age end because of cable networks and the third one come to an end because of better programming on those same cable networks.

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Anti-FUD Campaign

/ / @Mike_Colson, Anti-FUD, Anti-FUD Pledge, vExpert, vSpecialist / Leave a Reply
Remember the movie Miracle on 34th St? For those of you who live under a rock the movie is about a little girl and her mother meeting the real Santa Claus. Santa for reasons still somewhat unclear went to work at Macy’s during his short offseason between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and did something crazy, he told customers where they could find specific toys for their kids at the competition. At first Mr. Macy was beside himself until he realized that the method built life long customers out of those who heard about it. In the movie the idea was more about the Christmas spirit than smart advertising, but in reality this method works really well. Take for example Progressive insurance who shows customers competitive pricing, before doing so they had annual sales of $3.4 billion and since implementing this tactic now have annual sales of $15 billion.  Amazon uses similar tactics, that’s why they sell advertising to their competition. [1] In our industry even VMware uses this technique in vCAC integrated ITBM to show you what your cloud costs would be for AWS, Azure and vCHS.
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Feed it Forward

/ / #FeedForward, @Mike_Colson, vExpert, VMUG / Leave a Reply

Pretty sure I haven’t written about the honor of vExpert and having received it for the last two years. There are many ways to obtain vExpert one of the key methods is community involvement, that means participating in and presenting at VMware User Groups (VMUGs). Think of VMUGs as a support group for VMware admins and business users, as well as a toastmasters training course. If you have ever wanted to learn to be a better public speaker and want to talk tech in doing so then speaking at a VMUG is a great opportunity. You can share your experiences or even your problems and get immediate feed back and help.

To that end Mike Laverick has helped to create the FeedForward Program to help mentor those interested in speaking at VMUGs. You can sign up as a mentor yourself if you wish and help others or sign up to be a mentee. The program is new and has some great potential and backers. In the end who knows once you start speaking you may love it, and in the next couple of quarters you may find yourself on the list of vExperts.

More info on FeedForward can be found here http://vmugvoice.vmug.com/2014/February14.htm