I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Tackling the AI market: more than just a product
My Dad used to enjoy buying things. Or, to be more accurate, he enjoyed the process of getting ready to buy things.
If we needed a new washing machine, or a microwave, or, best of all, a car, he would break out his graph paper and pencil, and a big pile of Which? magazines and other literature. He would make a list of criteria, and he would go through all of the candidate products, scoring them out of ten, adding the scores up, and adjusting them if he wasn’t convinced by the answer. And then we would tour the shops, interrogating the sales staff to a level of detail they were not always prepared for.
Your Moonshot doesn’t have to be a Moonshot
In 1962, NASA faced a difficult technology procurement choice.
They needed a guidance computer for the Apollo Moon missions. Did they go for a design based on new technology, working with researchers at MIT, or a design based on proven technology from their existing suppliers?
They chose the new technology: rather than discrete electronic transistors, they would use silicon chips, which combined multiple transistors into a single component. These chips weren’t like the chips of today, though: rather than millions or billions of transistors, they contained just a few transistors, each representing a single logic gate. Thousands of them were needed to build the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
Software is not an asset
Which side of the balance sheet does your software sit on? Is it an asset or a liability?
When people enter the technology profession, they often expect to spend their time solving coding problems – and are surprised to find that they spend much of their time solving accounting problems. It’s an especially shocking revelation when they realise that money comes in at least two flavours – opex and capex, or revenue and capital, or whatever terms are used to distinguish money spent on continuous running costs and money spent on the purchase of new assets. And they thought that regular expressions were difficult to understand.