Craig Bailey

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October 20, 2008

Leaving Elcom – looking for my next role

By Craig Bailey
6 Min read
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20October

Last week, following probably the worst IT downturn in the last 8 years I decided to leave Elcom. Crazy huh? Yeah, it may turn out to be foolish, but in this post I aim to explain why, and in the following post, what I‘m looking for as my next step. I thought I’d put this out there and see if it opens the door to any opportunities.   Have I resigned? No I haven’t actually resigned as...

October 17, 2008

Features, Benefits, Results (FBR)

By Craig Bailey
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17October

I thought I’d try to simplify my previous post on how to survive in tough economic times. Here’s how I see it: During the good times (eg when every second IT company is planning an IPO) you can focus on features. Features are really all about comfort and convenience, and in good times people lap them up. They are the equivalent of luxury extras on cars (eg heated seats). During the normal...

October 13, 2008

Finding opportunities in hard times

By Craig Bailey
4 Min read
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13October

You may recall my post ‘The Death of Gen Y’ back in May when I talked about the coming IT crash. In that post I also suggested attributes of companies that would survive during the tough times. And I think those points still stand. But let’s consider an additional area… First, let’s find an opportunity and analyse it. Take the following Gartner report for example. Last week Gartner...

September 30, 2008

Steve Ballmer and Sydney Developers

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
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30September

Fin has posted the news that Steve Ballmer wants to chat with developers when he comes to Sydney in November. Get ready for all those ‘Developers, Developers, Developers’ jokes. Seriously though, I think this will be a good thing – at the MVP Summit earlier this year, listening to Steve talk about his passion for the developer community was really inspiring (note: not to be confused with...

September 29, 2008

Windows Live Writer Beta

By Craig Bailey
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29September

I only just downloaded the new beta of Windows Live Writer today. I’ve been using this gem of a program for the last few years, and it just gets better and better. The UI is ever so slightly improved (especially the toolbars) but other than that it is essentially the same awesome program its always been. By the way I’ve finally started using the hot keys (I can’t remember if they were there...

September 29, 2008

Sydney ALT.NET User Group review #altnetsyd

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
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I went along to the Sydney ALT.NET User group tonight, and was well rewarded. This was the kickoff meeting for the group and was an excellent start to what is sure to be an extremely useful gathering each month. Richard Banks was MC for the night, and started with news. I was pleased to hear good discussion amongst the attendees, and comfortable interaction. There’s nothing worse than a meeting...

September 22, 2008

LINK: Image Composite Editor (ICE)

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
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22September

Microsoft Research have released the Image Composite Editor (referred to as ICE by some, including the installer). It is ‘an advanced panoramic image stitcher’. It’s only 3MB and does a very nice job. It’s also very fast. Here’s two photos from our trip to New York that I stitched together. Plus I used the perspective tool to add some interest. Just for fun I tried to stitch together...

September 22, 2008

SQL: SQL Server 2008 is a value leader (but in what?)

By Craig Bailey
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Benchmarks are like statistics – they are only relevant in context. Take this new TPC-E benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) as an example. If you were to read the gushing Microsoft Press Release you’d be forgiven for thinking that SQL Server 2008 topped out the list of all major database vendors in terms of price/performance. Here’s the quote: Of course what...

September 21, 2008

REVIEW: ClearContext

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
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21September

If I were a software company producing productivity enhancing tools I’d love to have a tag line of: Use ‘X’ – it’ll save you at least a minute a day! I think this would be interesting for a number of reasons: It’s believable People would be able to easily verify the claim (much better than that ‘improves performance by 39.8%’ tosh we get bombarded with) The claim is so tiny it...

September 16, 2008

ELCOM: Web Content Management

By Craig Bailey
6 Min read
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16September

Product good. Marketing… not so good It’s been an interesting exercise thinking about marketing at Elcom over the last few months. In my opinion (biased as I am) I think we have an excellent product. However, something we haven’t been very good at is the marketing side of things. Often people have heard of us, but they don’t really know what we do. We mention that we have  a content...

Craig Bailey

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