@scottalanmiller said:

The speakers don't even get in for free

Really?

@scottalanmiller said:

Don't forget that the MSPs provide the bulk of the content that makes them their money. MSPs have always "paid" by giving away valuable content.

MSPs equally could ask why they aren't being paid to participate. Until recently it was symbiotic. MSPs give content in exchange for a minuscule amount of advertising. MSPs give way more than they gain. It was not the MSPs getting the free ride. The benefit was almost all one sided then then tried to take even more.

I would guess that most MSPs are very geographical. I mean an MSP in Texas can advertise to me all he wants, I'm not got employ him when he's five thousand miles away. Whereas most vendors sell all over the world.

The geography is what I love most about SW. My boss asks me how I fixed the server last night, and I'll say "Oh, some guy in Montreal sorted it out for me. For free."

@alexntg said:

Internally, if you're having regular meetings on something, something's wrong with your processes.

Good point. I was watching a program about Amazon last week. Sometimes, Jeff Bezos would get a customer complaint about something, and he'd forward the e-mail to one of his staff and simply add "?" to it.

"?" didn't just mean sort out this one customer, it mean't fix the processes so that this type of complaint could never occur again. The staff member would have to refine Amazon's processes, then e-mail Bezos back telling him what they'd changed.

If Bezos was happy with the reply, he'd simply e-mail ":)" to let them know.

? and I just love that minimalism. Compare that with some bosses who talk and talk for hours in meetings. Too often in meetings we discuss the symptoms of an issue, and not the causes.

And I'm a big believer in stand-up meetings. I'd also like to have walking meetings. Steve Jobs used to conduct many of his meetings walking around the block. There's a park next to our office and I'd love to go for a 30 minute power walk with a colleague whilst discussing a particular issue. Unfortunately, leaving the building is likely to be frowned on or colleagues would just think I'm a nutter. I sometimes arrange to have meetings in a bar, with predictably limited success.

UK working today. Bank holiday is on Monday. A fair few are likely to be down the pub right now having an extended lunch hour though.

One thing about meetings, and life in general, is that if you say something enough times then it eventually becomes a fact. So I repeat myself over and over again, which may initially appear a waste of time, but eventually it serves to convince my bosses that I am, in fact, correct. So in the first meeting, you might claim that everyone in the company should start wearing green ties, because you believe green ties increases productivity. Initially, no-one will be convinced. But if you say it in the next meeting, and the meeting after that, and the meeting after that, eventually the CEO will announce that everyone has to start wearing green ties because it is a well known fact that green ties increases productivity.

So I use meetings to groom my bosses in the ways of Carnival Boy. <evil laugh> <strokes cat>

@scottalanmiller An eight-page resume? Wow!

@Bill-Kindle When I hire, I love to see that people are active in forums. What a great way to find out how good they are at interacting with others and solving problems. If someone linked to their Spiceworks profile, or any other IT forum, I would definitely read it and would definitely consider it a plus over other candidates. If you're only applying to large firms, then maybe @scottalanmiller is correct and they don't recruit like that, but I really don't understand why they wouldn't. I can only talk about SMBs and startups, which may not be your thing.

I'm not alone. If you look at the job listings for VisualDNA (http://www.visualdna.com/careers/vacancy/?p_id=829), a hip London startup, you'll see that they actually request that applicants give details of where they can read more about you (forums, blogs etc etc). I think this is the future of IT recruitment. Resumes alone are just too limited. I definitely think you should drive people to those sites. I would definitely employ you based on your Spiceworks profile and your blog.

What does ML think of meetings? There is a good Oliver Burkeman post here:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/may/01/meetings-soul-sucking-waste-time-you-thought

The article is slightly frivolous. I don't think meetings are bad per se, rather there are good meetings and bad meetings, and bad meetings tend to be far more common. I've recently got into agile software development, and in particular scrum. If you're not familiar with this philosophy, the basic principles are listed here http://agilemanifesto.org. One of the key principles of scrum is to hold a daily, 15 minute stand-up meeting with all team members, called "the daily scrum" or "daily stand-up". On the one hand, you could say "Woah there! We're expected to have a meeting every freaking day?". On the hand, it addresses the key weakness of most meetings by keeping it very short, having a fixed agenda, and making everyone stand up to keep the meeting focussed.

When I'm doing project work or software development, I prefer lots of short, regular meetings with users and team members to irregular, long meetings. I prefer 15 minutes every day to 75 minutes once a week, or 4 hours once a month. And whilst face-to-face collaborating is essential, I prefer it to compliment rather than replace electronic collaboration tools (like e-mail, Sharepoint etc etc), as writing stuff down often beats just talking.

Unfortunately, the top brass at my company absolutely love meetings. I've never been in a meeting with my bosses that last less than an hour, and they often last longer than 3 hours. Often with no agenda, no goals, no chairman and no minutes. What a drag. We also have meetings with more than ten people, which is way too much to achieve anything. I also get annoyed that there is always at least one person who turns up late, so you spend the first few minutes hanging around waiting for the meeting to start. If the meeting is supposed to start at 10 then I want it to start at 10, not 10.15. Then you wait whilst people get coffee from the machine and chat about last night's football game.

So, meetings....love 'em or hate 'em? And any tips for making them better?

My opening thread has disappeared!. I'm going to have write it all over again.

@DenisKelley said:

That looks good. Where can I find the recipe?

It's more or less based on this one by @Richard :
http://www.factorytwofour.com/recipe-white-pizza-with-rosemary-and-broccoli-rabe/

@Bill-Kindle said:

I have a webinar coming up with SW regarding GPO's in about 45 minutes. Doing a joint Q&A with another community member, Jimmy T.

I'm hoping the focus stays on GPO's and not Active Directory design.

Cool. I'm gonna watch.

I think SW is awesome. As someone running a one-man IT department, I can't tell you how great it is to connect with fellow pros in the same position, and I've had great replies to pretty much every thread I've started over there. The craic on here is ace and without wishing to sound too cheesy, it feels like you're all my friends already, even though I've never met any of you. As the forum gets more members, that will inevitably decline, sadly. I don't hang out on SW any more. I ask specific questions, or I add "spiceworks" to my Google search term to get specific answers to a problem I have (because I think SW has better answers than any other website out there).

The difference between ML and SW is that almost everyone here seems to work for an IT company (apart from me), so the conversations take a slightly different route. In my job, I'm not paid to be an IT expert, I'm paid to ask IT experts dumb questions and be able to understand their answers and make decisions based on them. So I value the expert advice I get on here, even though I suspect my lack of expertise annoys a few people (having said that, I think I generally hold my own around here). Having a few more newbies around here wouldn't go amiss.

I love debating, even about subjects I know little about. For example, I'll happily start an argument with @scottalanmiller about virtualisation, even though I'm not qualified to do so and it's a David versus Goliath battle. And debating really improves my understanding of an issue. I'm sure I annoy him at times, but I love that he's never patronising or condescending to anyone, no matter what dumb things they say. I often get accused of being a contrarian, and I guess there may be an element of truth in that, but playing devil's advocate is how you learn and I hope it keeps threads lively and interesting. As someone said to me recently, every discussion needs someone to ask the idiot questions.

tl;dr: Keep up the good work everyone! I love you all!

@david.wiese said:

I like that there are no points here. I always felt like people just wrote up how-to's just to get the points, and those how-to's did not have any value to them. They were just doing it to get points to get to the next level. I always approached the points as one that shows how knowledgeable someone was, boy was I wrong about that!

There's "reputation". As someone with an embarrassingly low posts to reputation ratio, I'm sensitive to this!

@scottalanmiller said:

@Hubtech said:

that's okay. seems to be the culture in forums. Get to the top (or close) of the mountain, get big britches, start upsetting the very folks that carried you to the top...branch off, small new forum with a high density of originals, tech talent, etc. Heck, this is going on in one of my automotive forums as we speak! it's funny the similarities, just the parts/pieces/lingo are different.

Agreed. Which begs the question, how do we guardrail ML from doing the same?

You can't. All forums are like Animal Farm in the end.....

Does Mango Lassi intend to have secret groups for high ability members then? Sounds a bit cliquey to me.

Sadly, I'm sure that even though thousands of people are killed by human driven cars a year, it will only take one death by a Google car for campaigns and politicians calling to ban them.

I love this. One of my biggest fears is having one of my kids get run over. This will dramatically reduce road accidents. I can't wait. Genuinely life changing technology.

Yes, UK. And we couldn't afford any relocation fees. I guess it would be tricky to get a work visa anyway, our current political leaders are all very anti-immigration at the moment, sadly.

@scottalanmiller said:

Hosting prices will never go up. Not for the big enterprise players.

I'll have a bet with you on that. Microsoft and Google's basic package is $5 per month. We'll see if that has gone up in five years from today (in real terms). Winner buys a beer. Deal?

@scottalanmiller said:

Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.

I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK anyone can become a gas and electric supplier, and there are a number of smaller competitors entering and leaving the market. Other companies own the physical infrastructure (National Grid), and utility companies effectively pay for their use - this is similar to Google and Microsoft operating on the internet, despite not owning the internet. The problem is, in order to get a decent price in the wholesale market, you need to place a huge order of gas. And in order to do that, you need a huge number of customers. It's lack of market share that acts as the barrier to entry, not physical resources. I see similarities here with hosted apps as Microsoft and Google grab more and more market share and smaller players find it harder and harder to compete on price.

@Carnival-Boy said:

we're likely to see just two companies "competing" in the IT utility market in the future (unless Apple and Amazon get more involved).

Although this is better than the end of the 20th century where Microsoft had a monopoly on e-mail, office apps and operating systems.