Posts Tagged Microsoft

1st Place New Car, 2nd Place Steak Knives, 3rd Place “You’re Fired” : Yahoo embraces employee ranking #fail

bell-curve-hiring1So on the heels of Microsoft throwing their stacking system under the bus, and running as far away and as fast as they can from Steve Ballmer’ s lackluster rein Yahoo in their infinite wisdom decides to implement a grading system and forcing everyone into the bell curve so essentially, 3rd place “you’re fired”.  Now I understand poor employee hires are the bane of the workplace but assuming the bell curve and natural distribution in your workplace….I don’t get it.  In fact, NPR, “Put Away the Bell Curve Most of Us Aren’t Average,” and follow up from The Drucker Institute , Curve Ball for the Bell Curve, put the bell curve to task in business.  You can go straight to the source  THE BEST AND THE REST: REVISITING THE NORM OF NORMALITY OF INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE.  But boils down to that there are a few superstars and there is everyone else.  Superstars can be a product, a service, sales to a particular a client, an individual and then everyone else, and sure special care should be taken to nurture this superstars.  Jack Welch originally wanted GE to be #1 or #2 in each market it competed but then back off saying it was taken to “nonsensical levels” by an “insidious bureaucracy.” My experience on the small scale that it is is Organizational Behavior is like playing 3D chess in the 5th Dimension, what motivates people, how you inspire people, how you create a workplace people are fired up to be at and want to work hard to achieve common and uncommon goals.  It would seem to me either Yahoo is a bit backward thinking on this one, or is setting up a framework to clean house.  my bet, they clean house and then they get rid of the ranking system.   Read about the stacking system at Vanity Fair. and their lost decade.

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Pretty Sweet 3D : Nokia Launches Ovi : Wants be your new map destination. #GIS #3D #BIM

Thanks for Bruce Lang for bringing this to my attention.  Browser Plug In to Navigate the Earth, many cities are in 3D, I quickly browsed the East Coast and both Boston and New York look pretty sweet.  Utilizing technology from C3 and from their blog:

C3 uses modern camera equipment to capture as many as one image per second of the same object from up to 100 different angles. The images are then used to automatically reproduce the shape of the objects with very high accuracy. After that, an image processing software automatically drapes each shape with the texture chosen from the pictures of each object. The same process is being applied for all objects – buildings, houses, trees, and hills – the result is a seamless canvas of 3D-data where the resolution (8 to 12 centimeters per pixel) and quality is consistent over the entire model. This is the secret to C3 maps’ realistic look compared to competitors’ hand-made and cartoonish appearance.

You can get the plug in here. Understand that the photo is screen shot from the product, you can spin it around change perspective, go around the building to the other side, sweet.

However, Why? Think of it this way, how many times do you use google maps, or live maps, in a week, in a day, to navigate, to check something out and then think of all the ways I can sell you stuff if you are using/looking at my map?  So if I have better eye candy to get you in my store, so be it.  Not like Nokia is a small company but certainly like to see people swinging at the hegemony.  And did you notice the comment ‘competitors handmade cartoonish appearance.’  Who you talkin about Nokia.

 

 

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