Report writing – second edition
Imagine my surprise when the day after writing this post on my frustrations with the existing medium for writing and delivering reports, I see a very similar post on the subject of writing books and insightful comment. Although in this case the frustration is not so much with the paper medium (which has worked and continues to work pretty well) but with the fact that we have not exploited the electronic medium. The following extract talks to the lost opportunity, without which Joe does not believe eBooks will really take off:
The biggest barrier I see is this recognition that an e-book needs to be developed with the delivery platform in mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could introduce the concept of a hyperlink to a printed book so that someone could just touch a phrase they don’t understand and they’re magically taken to a definition of that phrase or the first place it appears in the book? Instead, you have to flip back to the index, look it up, and then jump to that page. Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to keep a thumb on your original page so that you don’t lose your …
I am just blown away by 
I have speculated before on the subject of Microsoft’s options concerning competing with Linux, but it seems to receive little serious debate, so I thought I must be off track, either technically or commercially. In my view Microsoft would extend its Services For Unix product to comply with the Linux Standard Base requirements and would therefore support Linux applications. For many corporates this would be a dream come true, access to all of the Open Source applications that support either Windows, Linux or both, and of course it would also benefit both users and developers. However Microsoft have told me they have no interest in doing this (but they would wouldn’t they). So in that context it’s interesting to see this article by John Dvorak, 
I have spent probably 30% of my working life writing reports and presentations, and now the thought of writing them fills me with dread. At this point those who know me probably think I am going to write about arthritic hands, but no, its the medium that’s the problem. Having started to write a blog it’s difficult to contemplate another medium for writing, and having started working with mind maps and concept maps it’s difficult to go back to sequential presentations. I would happily accept wiki’s for collaborative authoring as an alternative to blogs, but blogs have the amazing benefit of providing the author with full control of content and presentation, and allow the author to build not just on their own knowledge but on the knowledge of others, “on the shoulders of giants” and all that. On the subject of giants 
I have worked in desktop computing for many years and promoted the need for different desktop capabilities to meet the needs of different user communities. I have always sought to address this with my corporate customers, whilst also trying to ensure some common enterprise application delivery capability was shared by all, in my company we call this a 
I am being bombarded by information and initiatives that relate to thinking from all directions. I thought it would be interesting to list the main ones and try and identify the many different perspectives.
Momentum is building around forms. At a recent panel discussion Bill Gates was asked about all of Microsoft’s different forms technologies and indicated that the InfoPath technology was the best long term bet. Here is the 
As a person who likes to research it’s always worried me how rapidly some people make decisions. At the same time I have also found that my gut feel and instinct is very accurate and so that has given me some comfort. There are a couple of books that address this topic and 
Me and some of my friends have been debating the subject of “how to” support, which represents a significant amount of a service providers costs. We have tried the approach of centrally managed knowledge bases, but they only take us so far. My view that the virtual Internet community and the internal intranet community of peers will become increasingly important. Also the richness of the support experience will increase as well. 