John Taschek
Technologist. Communication expert. VP Strategy at salesforce.com, Editorial Director of CloudBlog.
Tempestuous Relationships
In what seems to be from the lower paleothic period but in fact was about a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about the Mean Girls phenomenon and Shakespeare. This in turn was not actually about mean girls or Henry IV, but about the interesting relationship of…
Ctrl – Alt – Social
In the tech world in which everything is recycled, retooled, and spit out like un-digestible gristle, one often comes across the phrases such as groupware is “dead” or “email is dead.” Oddly enough these are euphemisms or perhaps more correctly the opposite: dysphemisms – the substitution of a disagreeable word…
Bored of Directors
What new shiny object do we not care about today? And what do crown jewels mean anyway? Thus was the start of a conversation with the New Zealand provocateur – in human form, which was a follow up to a Gillmor Gang Enterprise show recorded live in real-time. Behind the witticisms that began on the [...]
Europe Sets Course for Cloud
There’s a perception that cloud computing has become a “mature” technology, a perception shared by few but anticipated by most everyone else with the exception of those trying to preserve their self-interests. I don’t blame them – each person inherently protects self-interests. They’re wrong though. Cloud is not mature. It…
Carrot Beats Stick
WooHoo: You’ve just unlocked the URL of Blogville Badge! With Hostess becoming as bankrupt as the nutritional information in a Ding Dong and Kodak redefining the Kodak moment of another kind of bankruptcy, I immediately thought of my childhood. Thankfully those cheerful marketing images that blanketed the store shelves were…
The Social Revolution Has Just Begun
Depending on whom you ask, 2011 was either the year of the iPad or the year of social. The truth is that they were and are equally weighted because they are catalysts for each other, and while each can exist without the other, imagining such a thing is like trying to imagine a world where [...]
do
Not that long ago but in a place far away, I came to the conclusion that devices that purported to help people manage their days in fact made the problem worse. I was taking aim at everything from the Palm to the Franklin planner. The problem as I stated in my long lost archives of [...]
Number 9 Dreamforce
For a Beatles’ fan and a fan particularly of John Lennon, the number 9 has an important meaning. It has enough meaning Lennon wrote a few songs referencing it, including Number 9 Dream. Perhaps I like Number 9 Dream because it seems to be, quite literally, calling my name on the background vocal track. But [...]
Cezanne’s Apple
Cezanne wrote once “With an Apple, I will astonish Paris.” Cezanne at the time was a notoriously sophisticated and gifted walking set of contradictions. He loved everything he hated and hated everything he loved. He approached painting with scalpel-like precision but with a scalpel to canvas nonetheless. He wanted the world to bleed – and [...]
Shrinking Balls
In my last post, I wrote about the sentiment analysis of the Super Bowl and how brands are impacted by the real-time stream. That stream stimulates a Mean Girls phenomenon that causes people to be more passionate and start to bully as they become more popular. I know some analysts…
