Tag Archives: Microsoft

Microsoft Office is now free for mobile devices

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

With relatively little fanfare, Microsoft has made Office for mobile devices free.  Faced with a minuscule software market share in the fastest growing device markets, Microsoft decided that they needed to make Office — their biggest money-maker after Windows — free … Continue reading →

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Beware Institutional Mimicry

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

One of the most common management pitfalls is the trap of institutional mimicry. Companies that are falling behind, or otherwise need to reinvent themselves, look around at the competition and other relevant benchmarks, and try to copy “what works”.  But instead of … Continue reading →

Posted in Fixing Big Pharma Research, Management | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Los Angeles County is Moving All Employees to the Cloud

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

All 100,000 LA County employees, including 20,000 police are moving to Office 365 for their business work environment. Besides the savings from consolidating various department installations into one contract, cutting maintenance costs, and only paying for active employees, security was … Continue reading →

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Not just Microsoft: All companies need a data culture

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

What Microsoft needs is a “data culture”, according to Satya Nadella, their new CEO and former head of the Cloud and Enterprise group.  As reported by Adam Lashinsky: In Nadella’s world view, data generated by, living on, and enhanced by Microsoft’s software is the … Continue reading →

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Rigid stack ranking of employee performance and pharmaceutical research is a bad combination

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Alexander Szewczak

Microsoft’s recent decision to abandon employee stack ranking is just the latest example of the growing skepticism around stack ranking performance management schemes, especially ones that force bottom 5-10% distributions.  Sadly, some pharmaceutical firms still use the method. The major arguments against stack … Continue reading →

Posted in Fixing Big Pharma Research, Management | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Age of Free Software is Upon Us

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Alexander Szewczak

Apple just announced that their latest version of OS X, “Mavericks” is available now, for free.  Both Apple and Google now offer free operating software, subsidized by hardware, advertising, or other software sales.  Can Microsoft continue to charge for Windows? … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments