The Boom and Bust of Social Media

Okay, I’m predicting another mass dot-com die off within 18-24 months of this writing. This evolutionary catastrophe will pale in comparison to the scope of the dot-com era demise in 2001, but it’ll be just as bloody, quick, and meaningful. What I’m talking about is the consolidation, re purposing, demise, and afterlife of social media. [...]

A Magic Quadrant – Differentiation vs Cost Leadership Strategies with IT Spend

Business guru Michael Porter espoused for generic competitive strategies: industry-wide differentiation, focused differentiation, industry-wide cost leadership, and focused cost leadership. Let’s think about Porter’s ideas in the context of tech spending. Differentiation Strategy Companies that seek industry-wide differentiation have a competitive advantage in a broad range of industry segments. On the other hand, companies looking [...]

Press Release: Announcing a Google Apps Authorized Reseller in Vancouver, WA

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Russell P. Mickler, CISSP Principal, Mickler & Associates, Technology Consulting www.micklerandassociates.com MICKLER & ASSOCIATES, INC. EARNS GOOGLE APPS AUTHORIZED RESELLER STATUS Vancouver, WA – Friday August 14, 2009 – Mickler & Associates, Inc. of Vancouver, Washington – a technology services provider – has been selected as an authorized reseller [...]

Google Apps: Recommended Steps for Importing Mail

Hello Friend… If you’re reading this, some of you may have already tried what I did. When implementing Google Apps and using the Microsoft Outlook sync tool, you may have found that the mail import process either bombed or was incomplete. As a work-around to that problem, you were clever, and you imported a backup [...]

Education: Free for All

I’m taking a class with other instructors right now and we came across the issue of the future of education. My message wasn’t typical: the economies of scale afforded by online learning will make it the more desirable modality for teaching. Administration burdens will go down; the number of students self-servicing their education will go [...]

How to Enumerate Fields in an Access Table

Okay. Imagine you want to copy one record in a table to another record in a table. Difficult to do with a nested SQL statement because it’d want to over-write the autonumber Primary Key; Access would return an error. Also, at times, you may wish to perform some level of validation over the data you’re [...]

Googly Ambitions

You know, there’s nothing wrong with assertiveness. Or ambition. But sometimes, there comes a point to decide where you begin and where you end, what you’re good at, and maybe what you’re not good at. Even, perhaps, what you shouldn’t do, even though you can. I think Google is one of the most successful companies [...]

Online vs Onground Learning – A Comparison

Just some homework that I had to do this week for a class that I’m taking… What differences do you see between the online classroom vs. the face-to-face classroom? There are a number of different facets about online learning that make it distinctive from traditional onground settings (Gibbons & Wentworth, 2001). 1. Asynchronous Delivery. 2. [...]