I always keep an eye on Scoble’s rantings. I’m not really interested in most of his blog posts or links, but he does read a lot more blogs then me, so he does have an occasional gem I really like. Like this post by Guy Kawasaki and Robert even adds his own items to the list.
Now I work as a programmer for a large telecom provider, so a lot of the stuff on the lists don’t really make sense in my case, but a lot of them too. The problem for me as well, is that the internet-branch for which I work, is far newer then the old (established) data-branch (fibres and such) and the telephony-branch. And these latter two branches are the big money makers. That is, they still are, but that’s changing. This means that while the internet-branch is the future, we still don’t have that much to say. And that is problematic if we ever want to fight the bozo-effect. The other two branched work according to methods that have worked for them for decades and they aren’t changing them. I’m not asking them to change them either, but the problem (aside from the bozo-problem) is that upper-management wants the internet-branch to use these same methods. They don’t see the difference between installing a fibre optic and designing, building, testing en deploying a multi-server webservice solution.
Maybe it doesn’t belong on the list, but I think that is can be added to the bozo-effect list for the ‘old’-companies that suddenly find themselves in the internet of software playfield:
If your company insists on using old methods and processes that worked for a completely different market, because “it was succesfull there and we are the same company”, you might be in a bozo-explosion. Your company clearly doesn’t understand the new market and can’t possibly get the best value out of their (prospective) customers, because the will most likely not be able to meet the demand in time to deliver and features asked. If they bother to ask users what features they want at all, because old school thinking seems to entail that the company knows what’s best for the customers.
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