Category: Travelblog

A chance conversation yesterday with @rolandharwood, and a bit of serendipity with the part of the book I'm currently reading (Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, which comes highly recommended) has got me thinking about the role that optimism has in innovation and creativity. I flippantly remarked to Roland that in my view nothing ever got changed … Continue reading ITDF Captain’s Log 3: Mindful optimism

An interesting day aboard MS Aurora: A good reception to my session first thing, with a group of senior IT folk grappling with the challenges that consumerisation and raised expectations are having on managing technology in a corporate environment. There aren't any easy answers, but there certainly seemed to be appetite for change. Susan Greenfield … Continue reading ITDF Captain’s log 2: consumerisation, neuroscience and black swans

I'm spending the next few days with a few hundred IT Directors on a boat in the English channel, sharing thoughts and ideas at the IT Directors' Forum. I've realised that over the past year in my time at Microsoft I've put increasing focus into the world of consumer technology and software development in that … Continue reading ITDF Captain’s Log 1: all aboard

Everything in the US is big. The cars. The roads. The servings of food. The conventions. This is the second US convention that I have attended in the past few months, and the scale of them is just colossal. Thousands of people attended hundreds of talks over a few days in buildings that could on … Continue reading TravelBlog Build: The US Convention experience

I'm off this week to attend the Build conference in LA. Whilst I won't be talking much about the conference content (there are far wiser people to do that on my behalf), there may be some reflections over the course of the week as to the experience of a conference at the gates to Disneyland...

It's been a busy week in Denver. Presentations in a sports arena, sessions in a conference centre the size of your average airport, frequent networking opportunities, and the odd drink here and there. A few years ago, I went to New York in early December. I was expecting to hate a whole load of Christmas … Continue reading Travelblog MGX

Tomorrow I'm heading off to Denver, Colorado to attend the Microsoft Global Exchange (known, inevitably, as MGX). MGX sees the gathering of 15,000 Microsoft employees from around the globe. That many people requires a sports stadium, and so it is that the plenary sessions will be being held at Denver's Pepsi Center. Quite frankly, there … Continue reading TravelBlog MGX 1

An interesting afternoon. I formed part of a panel with three other Google Apps customers - a sports goods retailer, a company producing fabrication tools for chip manufacturers, and an ERP consulting firm. There seemed to be some common themes - a general consensus that using Outlook as a front end for Google Mail is … Continue reading Travelblog SF48 – 3

So here I am in San Francisco, just up the road from Silicon Valley and the centre of the world's tech industry. And as a result, I find out about Steve Jobs' departure from the front page of a newspaper pushed under my door in the hotel this morning. Oh, the irony. I guess it … Continue reading Travelblog SF48 – 2

So one of the crazier things in my life so far... San Francisco and back in a little more than 48 hours. I have been invited to take part in a customer panel at the global Google Enterprise sales conference. It was too good an opportunity to turn down, but family and other work commitments … Continue reading Travelblog SF48 – 1