On the Fahrenheit scale, do 0 and 100 have any special meaning

The story of a mixed up metric.

At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee - New York Times

Monstrous $20k coffee brewing system for fanatics, err, I mean, purists.

Five whys - Joel on Software

Incredible blog on system uptime, SLAs, rdiculousness of "Six 9's", black swans, and how superbly FogCreek Software handles customer service issues.

Browser History Timeline

Chronicle of the lives of six popular Web browsers.

We don’t tend to agree with Microsoft when it comes to data analysis and presentations. In fact, we’ve even been critical of them for misrepresenting data, excessive visual “flair”, missed opportunities to improve Excel, forgetting their power users, subpar presentation tools, and wasteful slide masters.

With all these past differences, I was a little surprised to find that we do share some common ground. Check out the comments (from an article in Internet News) by Peter Klein, CFO for Microsoft’s Business Division in describing the world of business intelligence:

“I’ve talked to a lot of customers about business intelligence and the one thing that they tell me is it’s really hard to use,” said Peter Klein, during at the Credit Suisse conference.

“‘I’m not getting the value out of the investment that I made,’” Klein said customers had complained. “‘I have invested a lot in my back-end systems, and today 10 percent or less of my employees actually touch it, or get access to the data. I’ve got six different BI solutions across multiple different departments, none of which talk to each other. And they’re hard to use, so I’ve got to send people to training for two weeks to learn how to use it.

Finally, we are speaking the same language. Now, I’m curious to see what they are going to do about it.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who put things into two categories and those who don’t. Maybe this isn’t the best representation of the complexities of the human race, but it does give me a cheap lead-in to compare two types of problem solutions: “high tech,” focused on tools, and “high touch,” focused on interpersonal communications.

I was reminded of these two approaches by a recent interesting article in Wired that expresses an opinion about why America’s performance in Iraq has been disappointing. The basic premise of this article is that America has entered into this engagement in a “technology networked” fashion, drowning it in technology; the more, the better.

The article suggests that the US forces would make more progress if they were to spend more time on a “socially networked” approach. For instance, instead of remote controlling a drone from 100 miles away, spend more time drinking chai with local leaders. Not the absence of technology, but the incorporation of technology into a socially based environment.

“If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can’t connect with the local population.” This was a quote from one division commander. Change a couple of words and you end up with a statement that many of us would find all too familiar:

“If I know where the inefficiency is, I can fix it. My problem is I can’t connect with my data.”

Aren’t we witnessing this in spades right now in the BI space? There’s no lack of number of tools and number of features in these tools. The challenge is figuring out who the real insurgents are and how you deal with them. If you’ve been reading the Juice blog for very long, you have a pretty good feeling for how we approach what we believe is a social problem (high touch) and not a technical one (high tech).

The good news is that the US forces are changing their approach to socialize more with the Iraqi people—hopefully leading to a better Iraq. Is there good news for the BI space? We’d like to hear from you on how you’re making sure you focus enough on the social “high touch” aspects of our space. What’s your insurgent data? How can you get to know it better?

Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code

Beautiful stuff, particularly the Venn diagram.

Align Journal - BI Worst Practices

We often see articles on BI "Best Practices" here is an article telling us what NOT to do.

flot - Google Code

Attractive Javascript plotting for jQuery.

ongoing · On Communication

Interesting blog post about how different forms of communication rank for immediacy, lifespan, and audience reached.

The Excel Magician: 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to help you make Excel Magic : Codswallop

SlideShare

Source for presentation ideas.

Last week, Google released Presentations to fill out their portfolio of online, collaborative document types (they already offer text documents and spreadsheets). The Google folks were kind enough to include us in a round of beta testing a few weeks back, giving us a chance to preview this application, find bugs, and offer feedback.

If you give Google Presentations a try, you may be struck by its limitations. It doesn't offer much flexibility in creating presentations, especially when compared to Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. The best you can do is create simple text slides on a few predefined templates. On the other hand, it offers unique capabilities you don't get with desktop applications. In particular, we were impressed with how easy it was to share a presentation live online.

I have started to wonder whether calling Google Presentations a "web-based competitor to PowerPoint" or "a PowerPoint clone" was simplistic and misguided. Lumping together software tools is a natural reaction to long lists of features and techno-terminology. Software vendors don't make it any easier to distinguish the differences when they attempt to convince us that their solution is the complete, do-everything tool to satisfy all your [presentation/data analysis/communication/networking] needs.

So, we assume our software tools fall into neat buckets. We assume the tool we are using today do everything we need "well enough." And we assume any new tool is a direct competitor to what we use. As a result, we are severely limited in what we can achieve.

For a long time, I was a fan and a heavy user of PowerPoint. It did what I needed. Perhaps I told myself that what it did was all I needed. A while ago, I had to break off this exclusive relationship.

Now, I find myself using a bunch of different tools to communicate information. On the one hand, this has made my life more complicated. There are new applications to learn and the hassle of moving documents around. But in other ways, it's easier. I use tools designed for the task at hand. And I have opened up a whole new realm of what is possible in terms of organization, polish, and audience engagement.

The table below shows the activities involved in business presentations. For each activity, I have a rough assessment of how well PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Presentation perform. I also list the current Juice toolset.