technology

Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher, writing at GigaOM, describe the top five reasons technology executives fail. The short form:

• Failure to build a world-class team.
• Failure to execute.
• Failure to lead/motivate/inspire.
• Failure to manage operationally.
• Lack of financial acumen.

Abbott's and Fisher's explanations focus on technology executives -- for example, the admonishment that "your senior technology officer does not need to be the brightest technical mind in the business." Their logic, nevertheless, also applies to other kinds of executives, from creative leaders up to CEOs.

Anyone else had issues getting into LinkedIn the past few days? I've received a couple of invitations I wanted to act on this week, and both times, from two separate places, with access to other sites working fine, I've been unable to get there.
That includes attempts in the past few minutes (writing this Friday afternoon at 2:55 p.m. Eastern time).

Maybe I should be thankful, but LI is the only social network I've ever felt met any practical expectations.

CNET reports the folks at AT&T (I was about to say "the eggheads" or "the boffins," but the spokesman quoted is from legislative affairs) claim the Internet will hit its capacity by 2010 if big bucks aren't invested in infrastructure.

At their worst, I'll admit, open-source software communities can breed flame wars, ugly breakups and needlessly forked development roadmaps. But at their best, you have to admit, open-source crowds share ideas, solve practical problems and tip hats at each others' successes.

Witness the Drupal community's post congratulating the developers of Joomla -- arguably Drupal's biggest competitor for mindshare -- on their new release.

Advocates of Web standards now warn that a heavily used technique for switching between standards-based browser rendering and, well, everything else -- called the DOCTYPE switch -- is broken.

OK, so that last sentence is meaningless to you if you don't work often in Web design or development. Even more meaningless would be any attempt I make to explain it for general audiences.

So, my advice:

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, reminds us that fancy trick plays in site development don't always bring the same great benefits as good old blocking and tackling.

Nielsen calls out Ajax, rich interfaces, mashups, so-called "user generated content" and online communities -- noting they can be valuable in proper context, but can also distract Web teams from more important user experience objectives. One example: