A good friend, teacher, grad student, and former hi-tech consultant, recently blogged about and eWeek article which noted that many executives think telecommuting is a limiter to career growth. I posted a reply over on Libby’s blog but also thought it deserved a bit more thought. I will try to describe my experience with telecommuting for a large technology company.

I’m not at Lotusphere2007 this year but a bunch of people (over 7000) are. Among those at the conference are a bunch of bloggers. A small group pulled off an amazing feat - they created a live blog solution. I’m watching them blog from the opening general session which started 30 minutes ago. For [...]

I’m traveling today (daytrip between Boston and DC) and the weather in the northeast is not cooperating. Thus, I have *lots* of airport time.
When I took this job, they told me to “get a Blackberry” because it’s what most of the team uses. Get lots of minutes and while you are at it, add the [...]

If you work from a home office - i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !
With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. [...]

The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with [...]

In Stephen O’Grady’s post titled “It’s the Network, Not the Application: Online Desktops” he describes an environment where the computer is always connected to internet.
Some day this may be true but it’s not true today - unless you use the internet in a sufficiently limited way that satellite connectivity is productive. For many in the [...]

Mr Antonio at the Washington Post recently wrote of the political debates “televised” on YouTube. The format for the debate was people posting video questions on YouTube and Anderson Cooper selecting a set of those questions, airing them and then getting candidates’ responses. He outlined five myths about the experiment. He makes good points with good [...]

This week I experienced the next generation of “customer service” - or should I say, dis-service. My first full Verizon phone/DSL bill came it a couple weeks ago and they had charged me full rate for the DSL rather than the special bundled deal I signed up for. So I called to get it corrected. [...]

Take away my MTV. Take away my VCR. Take away my BBC and my NPR. Don’t you ever mess with my connectivity!
I’m back on line with all the fidelity I had before the disaster “customer service”. Ironically, they called me at 6pm to tell me they were still working on it. I say “ironic” because [...]

The debate over “cloud computing”, “software as a service”, the “value of mashups”, and “free really isn’t free” will go on for a very long time but the reality is - sooner or later - it all comes down to money.
In a recent telephone interview with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, a [...]