I think the book was distributed to everyone in Software Group Austria and while we also certainly have exciting technology in our WebSphere part of the SWG business I must say I’m now very excited about the opportunity Big Data offers.

The book starts with explaining the business challenges Big Data can help address and then talks about the technical solutions, toolkits, and capabilities IBM brings to the table to address those business challenges. It’s a quite entertaining and interesting read and while it’s not too technical it gets you excited about Big Data and helps you identify business challenges that might be addressed by using InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Streams.

After reading a bit more about this on various blogs I now realize that this change might have a negative impact on corporate deployments due to the fact that Firefox will discontinue security patches for those old versions, which makes compatibility testing and large-scale roll-outs a real hassle.

A member of the IE team, Ari Bixhorn, wrote on his blog that Microsoft offers a long-term support strategy for their browser. As much as I would hate going back to IE, because it would mean platform dependency, but is Microsoft now becoming the sane option? I hope Firefox will reconsider and change their release process. For a company to maintain their own Firefox fork is just not really a sustainable – or financially sane – proposition.

Update 6/30: Mozilla starts to think about how to support Enterprises.

Update 1/14/2012: Mozilla announces that it plans to make Firefox 10 the base for an Extended Support Release targeted at corporate users.

Update 2/1/2012: Firefox released its first Extended Support Release (ESR) today.

“Selling is a profession. It’s hard work. Ultimately, it’s rewarding, because the thing you’re selling delivers real value to the purchaser, and your job is to counsel them so they can get the benefit.

But please… don’t insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That’s great work if you can get it, but it’s not a career.”

“There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience.”

Task lists never really worked out for me. They often quickly morphed into a dumping ground for stuff I was never going to complete, anyway. For several months I’ve tried to take control of my task lists, but early this year I stumbled upon Rene Cunningham’s post about why task lists are broken.

He describes an approach in which each task is not written on a task list that will grow forever, but you record each task as a future appointment with a specific date, time, and duration on your calendar. This means that you immediately notice when you over commit or when you have a free slot to get some work done.

I’m happy to say that the results have been positive. It’s good to see my tasks directly on my calendar and to be very conscious about moving tasks, when you defer them. As an added benefit you immediately see the impact of additional appointments or tasks on your day’s schedule and you can decide right then if your new appointment might be more important than the task you wanted to complete during that time.

It’s certainly not a panacea, but it can be a great tool to get more visibility into your calendar and tasks and it might be worth a try if your task lists are growing without an end in sight.

Q. How do you achieve a work-life balance? How do you keep your professional life from dominating everything?

A. People get out of balance when they see their value as being able to respond quickly. If I see myself as a machine for answering email, then my work life would never stop because my email never stops. If instead I see my value as separating the important from the unimportant and making good decisions on the important, then I can go home at a reasonable hour, spend time with my family, ignore my email and phone messages all weekend long, and make sure that when I return to work, I am in the right mood to make the good decisions.

This might not be ideal for everyone, ignoring e-mails might turn out not be a wise idea in many cases, but it’s an interesting point of view and I think it’s important to realize that our primary job is not to answer e-mails quickly.

I don’t feel I have to reply to e-mails quickly, but it’s pretty hard for me to stop working when there are still unread items in my inbox, and I don’t even have a BlackBerry. I’ll have to keep an eye on that in the future.

Due to these structural changes in the US economy, many of the jobs lost in the downturn are not coming back. Companies are able to do their present work with fewer people, as a result of the growth in IT-based productivity. And new jobs are not being created at a fast enough rate, – because companies are postponing investing in the many new opportunities enabled by these same advances in technology, – until they feel more confident about the future.