We have not talked a lot about managing your time yet on this site. There are sooooo many resources out there that the best thing I can do for the readers of CTRL + SHIFT + K is to aggregate this information and present it to you in bit size chunks.
Me? I subscribe to the David Allen school of thought. Getting Things Done, or GTD for those in-the-know, is just about the best personal productivity system for today’s knowledge worker. It has quite a fan base within the technical crowd and many would say that this is where the system really picked up pace and started it’s path towards stardom.
Here is a great primer video from the man himself. In it, David Allen waxes philosophical about his system. More (much more) on GTD during future posts…
In my best Dr. Evil voice: “350 MILL….I….ON DOLLARS!!!”
That’s right, folks. The web office application space is really starting to come to a boil (it was already pretty hot). Yahoo! just picked up Zimbra for a cool $350 mil.
And then…..
Google announced their debut of Presently or “Google Docs with Presentation“ Those engineers sure aren’t the best marketers but with a market cap like that, do you really need to be?
But wait. There’s more!
IBM also announced a free, online suite of office applications. Just last week IBM announced that they had joined the OpenOffice.org team. This is so reminiscent of their Apache strategy (which worked by the way) that it’s scary. IBM really understands how to leverage the open source community and still manages to earn a buck or two at the same time. It’s really amazing. Here’s an article from 2004 that sums it up pretty well.
Where is Microsoft in all of this? They are not bowing out. Far from it. Yet, my impression is that they are still stuck with an old guard mentality. The web office applications that I have been trying over the past year or so seem really light and natural on the web. Microsoft is simply trying to adopt their office suite to a web medium. Is that the best approach? My instinct tells me no and time will tell us whether or not I am correct.
Reference articles:
Yahoo! buys Zimbra
Google launches Presentations
IBM offers online suite
Again, about the PowerPoint thing: Please help all of us have a better experience at work and don’t abuse your visuals. Here’s some great advice to live by when giving presentations.
Looking for stock photography for presentations and such? iStockPhoto is the best resource that I have been able to find.
If you struggle (and believe me, you struggle) with how to give a quality presentation then try taking some advice from Garr Reynolds. No offense Microsoft, but the single worst thing to ever happen to our ability to effectively communicate to a group is PowerPoint. Tell me again why it is considered effective to read [...]
