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According to Fortune Magazine, Adobe is the 5th best place to work in the US: Adobe Systems No. 5

Camaraderie is the byword at this Silicon Valley stalwart known for its graphics products: frequent all-hands meetings, job rotations, Friday night beer bashes. Three-week paid sabbaticals every five years.

My comments: Adobe’s history has cemented a dichotomous industrial/company culture. It is a technology oriented company that has a strange mix of “sales orientation” (results are important) and “innovation culture” (smart engineers making cool products). Out here in the boonies (that is, not the US) we do not have beer bashes, cannot job rotate and hope to last 5 years to get that sabbatical! That said, it’s still a great place to work.

I posted the following on Thursday, 18 July 2002. In light of today’s announcements by Apple: Keynote, Safari etc its interesting to see that this is starting to come true.

Thursday, 18 July 2002: Something I remember thinking, if not saying, was that the whole NeXT heritage of easier software development tools was going to give Apple a significant competitive advantage with software. We are seeing a plethora of MacOS X based “digital hub” (or digital lifestyle) mini-applications tied to a web-services style backed (.mac) I am sure all of these, being MacOS X native, use the Cocoa (alias Yellow Box, alias NeXT frameworks) environment. The key to the volume of application production.

It is not surprising that Apple has “created” a new browser, it wants to control its own destiny. A browser should be a part of the operating system and are commodity applications. Created is an interesting comment, when in fact they have coopted some Open Source (Konqueror) HTML rendering code. Expect the browser component to be a part of the Cocoa framework, too. Developers will be able to place a robust HTML rendering element into their applications that is supported and maintained by Apple.

Whilst IE still has a bulk of the browser public (95% hitting this web site are from IE5 or greater), there is a fragmentation of the “last 5%” into micro-marketshare browsers such as Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and now Safari. Since the browser wars of the late 1990’s, there has been stagnation as far as browser innovation is concerned.

MINI

Back at work after 2 weeks off. Strangely enough, exactly 17 years ago today I started work at an Apple reseller in Adelaide.

MINI Cooper: North American Car of the Year. It is such a shame that the journos at Wheels in Australia had to give the Car of the Year to a mere Ford…

Go and see the documentary-movie Bowling for Columbine. Whilst Michael Moore has chosen footage and interviews to promote his point of view, it is an interesting take on guns and violence: especially in the US.

Aluminium Foil

Nick’s Christmas Tip: Wrap your presents in Aluminium Foil (Alfoil). I have more than halved my gift wrap time this year. No sticky tape, just wrap. And it looks cool. Thanks to Jack Osbourne for this one!

Froogle

The gods at Google have added another service- Froogle. This is a web-product purchase web site – that works. Apart from a highly appropriate name, it has the same quality as the other Google services. I wonder how they make money out of this? The product I just searched for, and purchased I might add, was a yahoo site.

Amazonian Piano

The Piano Two years ago, an eccentric explorer John Blashford-Snell delivered a baby grand to a remote Amazonian tribe who’d had little contact with ‘civilisation’. Late last month, he and a team returned to tune it – and to see if they had learned to play it. Andrew Brown, one of the tuners on the expedition, reveals what they found.

Apology

Anyone from Melbourne who reads this: a humble apology. Yes, I was meant to be in Melbourne today. Due to an error in the first email that was sent out, I read and therefore assumed* (there’s that lovely word) that the PDF: Beyond the Basics event was scheduled for Thursday. It wasn’t. I am in error. Thankfully, we can still hold the event on Thursday 12th December at the Holiday Inn. If you were caught up in this confusion and have been inconvenienced, please email me.

*assume - 1436, "to receive up into heaven" (especially of the Virgin Mary), from L. assumere "to take up," from ad- "to, up" + sumere "to take." Early pp. was assumpt. Meaning "to suppose" is first recorded 1598. In rhetorical usage, assume expresses what the assumer postulates, often as a confessed hypothesis; presume expresses what the presumer really believes. From Online Etymology Dictionary

This is getting scary. Now there are Starbucks appearing overnight. Corner of Miller St and Pacific Hwy North Sydney, near the office in Westfield Chatswood and York St in the city near Wynyard. According to their web site, there are 36 stores in Australia. Surprisingly, they’ve invaded the heart of high quality Italian-Australian coffee – Lygon Street in Carlton Melbourne. Even the smallest storefront in Australia already serves great coffee – why are they bothering? Who wants to pollute their caffeine in hot water with cinnamon?

MBA!

After leaving Year 12 (that is the final year of high school and matriculation in South Australia) my plan was to work fulltime and study accountancy parttime. A few lectures into the degree, I soon learnt I didn’t have the required attention to detail of an accountant. I dropped out. This has to be the stupidest decision I have ever made.

Fast forward to 1993. I signed on to the MBA (Technology Management) course through APESMA, and have completed 8 out of the required 12 subjects. In 1997 after completing 6 subjects, I received a Post Graduate Diploma in Technology Management from Deakin University.

The aim in 2003 is to complete the final 4 subjects pronto to get the qualification. This, along with other things going on at Adobe, will certainly make next year a very busy year. If you have a technical background, and feel the need to round out your managerial knowledge (theory, not practical of course!) and qualifications – I can highly recommend the APESMA program.