Stop shouting and start whispling
- Posted On: Thursday, December 15th, 2011
- Post Categories: Blog
Apologies for bloglessness over last two weeks; simply haven’t found the time. Would love to say I’ve been busy organizing Christmas parties for the homeless or touring orphanages dressed as Santa Claus, but it’s mainly been selfish “me-time”.
Two things to share with you: One the official launch of Whisple - a consortium offering cloud services. Replify are a founding member and we
look forward to partnering with global vendors like EMC, and local specialists like Novosco and Anaeko, to enable local companies to embrace the cloud as both a marketplace and an enabler for their own businesses.
More information about the launch at the links below.
http://www.businesseye.co.uk/news/article/196-local-it-companies-lead-the-way-to-the/ http://syncni.com/news/5707 http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/business-news/broker-agency-helps-realise-potential-of-cloud-computing-16090810.html
Secondly, I’m a reader of Techmarketview’s daily analysis of UK IT news by Richard Holway. He was commenting on the fact that, while he may look at goods in stores, even trying on clothes, ultimately he buys them all on-line. Snap. Apart from groceries I can’t think of anything I’ve bought in a store in the last six months. I was particularly struck by this comment, which I hope Richard Holway doesn’t mind me reproducing, since I’ve no means of linking to it:
Frankly I think the trend is unstoppable. But maybe suppliers should accept the inevitable. Why shouldn’t high street stores become showrooms? Why shouldn’t suppliers actually pay those shops to display their goods – irrespective of whether they sell them?
Now that sounds to me like the answer to the question that has bothered me for quite a while. I love books, music and movies, and I love the shops that sell them and have many happy memories of browsing therein long ago when that was the only place to buy those things. But now I’m a hypocrite – I don’t want them all to close (which they are surely doing) but I don’t give them my business – Amazon and eBay get it all. So those stores need to evolve into something else. By coincidence, George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company died yesterday (at the age of 98). Shakespeare and Company is a bookshop in Paris, dating back over 50 years, and a legend to book lovers all over Europe. Sure it sold books, but aspiring writers crashed there on cots, famous authors dropped in to give readings and people hung out drinking coffee. Even if you prefer to consume your books on a kindle, you can’t walk past the place without dropping in to hear the mad jumble of books whisper to you. Such places create and reinforce a love of reading which in turn drives the sales of books in whatever form – but probably mostly bought on-line. Something needs to fund these real-world portals and Richard’s suggestion really resonates with me.
And lastly, I’m still smiling to myself every so often as I recall a recent email from an entity with which I was doing some non-Replify related business. I was asked to email them three copies of a signed contract. After laughing aloud, I was curious enough to see whether Outlook even allows you to do something as stupid as attach the same document three times. It does. To be fair it’s possible that you could have three different files with the same name, but even so I would have expected some level of intelligence to be in play. Oh well, at least if you’re running Replify, the file will only cross the network once. I elected to send one copy with the suggestion that it could printed as often as desired.