A sobering thought allows me to riff on Scoble when he talks about what he deleted when he left Microsoft. Thousands of emails – knowledge that a successor wouldn’t have to time to sift through. It’s kinda cool that I still have some mbox files from when I was in Nortel and we moved from COCOS to Netscape Mail – we had the choice for a couple of years to go to Outlook and that would therefore mean that old mail was simply lost. After those couple of years, the choice was removed. It was Outlook or nothing. Of course, those of us in the know made sure we could still use Mac OS X Mail….(which brings me to an argument that PC admins are more likely than UNIX admins to be lazy….but that’s a blog for another day.
I wondered aloud the other day about the knowledge in my head that wouldn’t transfer if I was hit by a bus. What passwords do I keep in there and not share with the team. What knowhow is exclusively mine and isn’t replicated by the other guys. When you consider the value of such information and the damage it could cause to the company if the worst happened, then I guess it’s time to start doing things about it. Business Continuity Planning is not just for big companies which have too much budget and not enough consultants wandering around.
Anyway.
Scoble and his wife Maryam each have a post about their new gig at Podtech. Both of them comment about how Patrick, the mini-Scoble was a little surprised at the Podtech offices (2000 sq ft in a office park) when he was used to the massive Microsoft campus.
Maryam spent a little time talking about her sleek silvery love – no, it’s not Robert in a futuristic catsuit – they gave her a new MacBook Pro.
Robert blogs about how working at a startup is exciting. I couldn’t agree more. He mentions using GMail and Google Calendar (because it’s smart to outsource functions like that which aren’t your core business) and also mentions running out of places to sit because their people have now exceeded their space for seating.
He should try being Bedouin 😛