Last week Thursday, I had to fly down to Cape Town the morning and flew back to Joburg in the evening, this time I flew with Kulula.com, my previous time I flew I flew with Mango.
So basically I was very impressed with the service, and on-time flights of Kulula, except for one thing. As Kulula is a private company trying to survive in the aviation world, they must get their funding from somewhere. When boarding this particular flight, there was advertising on the in-flight luggage holders(above passengers heads) with stickers advertising the Kulula credit card. After a while getting bored on the flight, I had a look at the little magazine provided in the flight, where I also was bombarded with advertisements of Kulula partners and other ways to just take my money away from me. Before we landed the hostesses went on about you can now go stay in this group hotel and can go hire a car at this car rental institution. All the hard marketing started to really irritate me after a while.
In contrast, Mango is funded partly/indirectly by government, and they don’t have any of the advertising during their flights. I’ll fly Kulula again(they really make good jokes during the flight), but I just have to ignore all the marketing and advertising campaigns which is just too in your face.
I’ve been in the Software Development realm for about 5 years, and it has been along time since I’ve actually looked back at the theory behind the whole life of Software Development in general. Every now and again you just go back to the books just to check yourself and make sure that you are still on track.
The reason why I did not post for a few days is cause I’ve been busy at a client site installing some of the products I’ve been working on and fixing some performance problems.
Anyways, one of the main servers I worked on was a Dell with 8 x Intel Xeon CPU’s,with strangely enough 4GB ram …
When performing operations you almost don’t even see a bump on Task Manager, but it is always a pleasure working with effecient equipment instead of the once-in-a-while “desktop”-servers.
I found the following YouTube video, where Eric Schmidt and Douglas Merrill talk about how they are using the same applications which are available to everyone else in the world internally to store all their documents, handle collaboration and use it for all internal running of the company.
Could this be something that could grow bigger and maybe into other enterprises and companies ?
I see it as it is all right that they use it for themselves, as they are in control of the servers and data, but for a 3rd party company I still see the risk of an external company being in control of your data. What do you reckon ? Will Google Apps be feasible for large corporates out there ? It could work for small startups though …
since I’ve actually looked back at the theory behind the whole life of Software Development in general. Every now and again you just go back to the books just to check yourself and make sure that you are still on track.
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