Those bright guys at Gartner are back with more conventional wisdom based analysis - this month, it's the death of the traditional workplace. Hey - they only lag the weekly news rags on this by a decade or two:

Gartner argues that three of the four traditional pillars of work -- the living wage, long-term relationships with loyal employers, and government- or company-provided pensions -- have already gone the way of the dinosaurs, leaving only the 40-hour workweek.

Here's what I'd like to know - when was the "golden age" when people had it so good? This kind of analysis usually ends up pointing at the 1950's and 1960's, which were economically good times for the US - you have to bear in mind that much of the rest of the world we compete with now was still recovering from the utter destruction of WWII though.

I wonder if they would select the 1930's as a golden age? Or the 1870's? Analysis is so easy when you don't know a thing about history.

It's refreshing to see that the software industry isn't the only place where Gartner has no clue - listen to them on the Wii:

The newly published article cites Van Baker of analyst firm Gartner suggesting of the Wii: "Its appeal is primarily to casual gamers, and there's a serious question about how long casual gamers will stay engaged with the platform... It wouldn't be surprising to see them lose interest after a relatively short amount of time."

I suspect that Baker has never used a Wii, or attended a party where one is around. The Wii gets everyone engaged - serious game players and casual audiences. The Xbox and PS3 pretty much hit one demographic: the hard core.

The last time I looked, the hard core gaming crowd wasn't as big as the casual one, but hey - that's a complicated thing for a Gartner guy to wrap his head around - he might have to engage with the real world, or something.

Technorati Tags: games, wii

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the Multi-Time Profiler - which lets you profile all running processes in the system for a period of time. It's a great way to find out what your code is doing when it works off multiple processes.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, profiling

James Governor makes another excellent observation:

What are the implications for the enterprise? If you think you can succesfully run your business as a top down fiefdom, a command and control structure, then by all means encumber all your documents and files with DRM. But if you want to enable your employees to innovate then a little more freedom might not be such a bad thing. That’s the thing with command and control - its inefficient and so bound to fail in the long run.

Outfits that don't trust their employees to do the right thing are just going to have problems. Better to trust and weed out the bad apples than to treat everyone like a suspect.

For those of you who want to bring up various regulations surrounding various businesses - bear in mind that the classification scheme used for documents by the US government has managed to get by without DRM for years.

Technorati Tags: DRM, enterprisey

James Governor cuts through the fog surrounding the "free evaluation laptop" issue, and gets at the real problem - which is something I really wish I had thought to notice:

Check out the specs… “an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4″ widescreen. It also has a 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera.”

That’s some pretty heavy specifications. The message I take away is not that Microsoft has an ethical problem but that the hardware upgrades required to run Vista smoothly are going to delight PC manufacturers most of all… If you need a Ferrari to have a decent road experience then Redmond, we may indeed have a problem. 2gig2gig…

Unless you're a serious gamer, you probably don't have a system anything like that, and it is telling that they sent out such high end systems as part of the evaluation. Sure, they didn't want the OS to crawl for the people getting them, but that's pretty far up the scale to go in order to ensure that. The Thinkpad I'm using right now has 768MB of RAM and the HD is small (just 35 GB). Yes, I always want more disk, and I could certainly use more memory - but XP typically runs fine on this hardware. I can only imagine how Vista would operate on this system...

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista