“Too often we focus on “control” as the starting point, where we should actually be focusing on “engagement” as the starting point. Control needs to happen in the background without the user being aware of it.”
—From “Control vs Usability” by Rob Gray
September 2010
17 posts
“I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon”
—Google CEO Eric Schmidt
“Bring together the problems with the solvers. It needs to be collaborative. It needs to be made simple for everybody. You need to be able to express your problem immediately. You need to have a wealth of ideas,”
—Dave Williams, Head of application delivery at BankWest
“When one considers entities like the White House, you don’t expect someone to actually be sitting there refreshing the Twitter home page and mousing over links from whoever they’re following. I guess regardless of power or fame, on the internet you have to be as careful as everyone else about security risks; this is one of the few areas that affects everyone on an equal scale.”
—theage.com.au: Melbourne student Pearce Delphin, 17, triggered the Twitter scare by testing computer code that opened alert boxes in web browsers saying “uh oh” when a user hovered over infected messages or tweets, with their mouse
“There’s a huge opportunity to leverage skills and expertise you already have in your company, but the problem is finding it.”
—Rick Hutley, VP Internet Business Solutions at Cisco
“If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to rediscover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough.”
—Charles Handy, “Trust and the Virtual Organization” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1995).
“We have to undo a one hundred-year-old concept and convince our managers that their role is not to control people and stay ‘on top’ of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.”
—Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric (Fortune, March 26, 1990)
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What about the city the day after tomorrow, say the year 2000?
I think it will be completely different, in fact it may not even exist at all.
Oh, I’m not thinking of the atom bomb and the “next stone age”…I’m thinking of the incredible break-through made possible in the development of communications.
A world where we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we might be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don’t know their actual physical location.
It will be possible, in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.
In fact, if it proves worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, many physical skill, could be made independant on distance.
One day we may have brain surgeons in Edingbourgh operating on patients in New Zeeland.
” —Arthur C. Clarke, predicting the future in 1964