Pocket Tech & Beyond

I’ve been a writer for 30 years, having finished my first novel in 1986, and I’m no stranger to the ups and downs that come with the business. Heck, even though my work won awards in the interim, I didn’t truly break into publishing until 1995 when my first full-length work of nonfiction catapulted its way onto bestseller lists. That work was followed by a dozen other bestsellers, nearly all of which were published by Macmillan and distributed to the world by Simon & Schuster, that is until the business turned and I found myself at a crossroads. The year was 1998 and I turned away from full-time writing for a short while to work for a Seattle-based startup. Around the same time, I jumped ship from Macmillan and an opportunity to write for Microsoft arose. Microsoft was working on a new series of books called Pocket Consultants. They needed writers who could write fast, clearly, concisely, authoritatively and just as important meet crazy timelines not just once or a few times b...

This is the fourth in a series of articles based on the popular Cloud Matters lecture series I’ve been giving to executives and their top staff at global Fortune 100, 500 and 1000 companies since 2012. These articles are for working pros at all levels and are delivered without icing and sprinkles.  Cloud Matters lunches happen, so do Cloud Matters lectures. Before a lunch or lecture with management and their teams, someone usually introduces me to everyone. I’ve only been introduced one time as “that guy that wrote all them books that are sitting on your desks,” but I kind of liked it. Much better than the usual about how I was Microsoft’s top author for nearly twenty years, wrote a hundred plus authoritative books, or how I’m one of the world’s leading authorities on Microsoft enterprise and cloud technologies. The numbers aren’t why I write or lecture, but people really seems to like the numbers. Ten million "William Stanek" readers. Check. Twenty years of "William Sta...

This is the second in a series of articles based on the popular Cloud Matters lecture series I’ve been giving to executives and their top staff at global Fortune 100, 500 and 1000 companies since 2012. These articles are for working pros at all levels and are delivered without icing and sprinkles.  The title question is a zinger, delivered with a grin when I’m told a client has gone with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and states they are paying X dollars for Y number of servers with Z discounts (or whatever other arrangements they’ve made). Of course, to be fair and honest, I do the same when clients tell me they’ve gone with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, VMWare, OpenStack or whatever. Because clients paying X for Y with a side of Z are getting gouged every day. As an outside advisor, I don’t negotiate deals or terms for my clients, though I probably should. Companies like Cloudyn and its many lookalikes are charging a commission of 2 to 3 percent of the cloud-bill for the same, and mi...

This is the first in a series of articles based on the popular Cloud Matters lecture series I’ve been giving to c-suite executives and their top staff at global Fortune 100, 500 and 1000 companies since 2012. These articles are for working pros at all levels and delivered without icing and sprinkles. Whether your organization has moved, is moving, or wants to move to the cloud, odds are your management is congratulating themselves over all the money they are or will save now that they have or can fire all the IT staff, decommission all the servers, stop having to pay for so much tech training, etc. Just today, in fact, I saw another sky’s the limit graph in my LinkedIn feed showing the copious cloud savings for enterprises. The graph showed a partially submerged iceberg. On the old school side of the graph, the iceberg was half out of the water, representing all the money enterprises were spending on IT staff, servers, training, etc. On the new school side of the graph, just a little t...