Pocket Tech & Beyond

Hi, I'm William Stanek. Most who know me know that I've been writing for 40 odd years now and that my work has been published and/or distributed by every major US publisher, including Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, Wiley, and HMH, and over 100 other publishers globally.  Of the 20 million words in my professional books, many were written for Microsoft, where they were translated and localized for use in over 150 of the more than 200 countries where Microsoft operates. This combined with world-wide readership of my work, written as Robert Stanek, and millions taught in training courses that used my work made me one of the most widely read and popular authors in the world for several decades, so it is any wonder this blog like several others I attempted to maintain fell by the wayside. :) Find news about my work and life at www.williamrstanek.com and www.robertstanek...

Between 1 in 3 and 2 in 3 product reviews on Amazon.com are fake. They are bought and paid for. They are written by friends and family. They are swapped and traded on Facebook. They are incentivized from readers. Talking about this problem as I have for nearly 2 decades now has made me the repeat target of the thousands who make their living writing reviews, the millions of sellers who benefit from the fake praise and the dozens of Amazon employees working the system for personal and/or professional benefit. Having reported problems with reviews to Amazon hundreds of times over decades and received repeated, direct retaliation from Amazon employees for doing so, I learned the hard way about the active involvement of Amazon employees in Amazon’s own marketplace, whether to ensure the success of themselves, family or associates or simply to ensure the failure of particular targets. This occurring repeatedly despite state and federal laws protecting those who report criminal activity, c...

Beware those who do evil in the name of good, those who build bully pulpits so they can target and victimize. I wish I was talking about some totalitarian regime or corrupt corporation, instead I’m talking about Absolute Write run by Victoria Strauss and others. Absolute Write is a platform for hate and abuse created by those claiming to do good for the writing community. A platform for hate and abuse that claims affiliation with Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) to extend the reach of its harm, victimization and abuse. For a number of years Absolute Write members and leaders indiscriminately targeted self-publishers as frauds, while membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America looked on and nodded their heads in agreement. For a number of years Absolute Write members and leaders indiscriminately targeted those who used print on demand as frauds, while membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America looked on and nodded their heads in agreement. For a...

Recently, a reader asked a good question: How do Windows Server 2016: The Administrator's Reference and Windows Server 2016: IT Pro Library differ?  The short answer is that they are completely different texts, written separately from start to finish, while both covering Windows Server 2016. An IT Pro could own both sets, or the individual books in each set, to round out and complete their library. More specifically, Windows Server 2016: The Administrator’s Reference provides over 250,000 words covering Microsoft's latest server operating system and includes the two IT Pro Solutions books I've written for Windows Server 2016: 1. Windows Server 2016: Essentials for Administration 2. Windows Server 2016: Server Infrastructure The IT Pro Solutions books are practical and precise hands-on guides with ready answers for IT professionals. You get fast answers and quick instruction. Windows Server 2016: IT Pro Library provides over 500,000 words coveri...

2016 was the year the music almost stopped. Quite literally. The accompanying image reflects some of the books I’ve released this year. These books need your support. Hope you’ll spread the good word about them and share because without your support the music really will stop. The publishing industry continues to change, requiring authors to continually adapt and retune or succumb and perish. The entire industry continues to be dominated by Amazon, where staves prevail and good authors all too easily get lost amongst the bramble. In tech, the changes over the past few years have been apocalyptic. Fewer and fewer readers get their information from printed books, requiring publishers to rethink their entire business and authors to sing for their supper. Those few who do succeed in the widening sea of change and detritus do so by staying ahead of trends or making their own trends entirely. In the early 2000’s when I started publishing electronically and using print on demand,...

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 third 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.  Whether your organization is already in the cloud or looking to make a cloud move, an important question that needs answering is which service provider to choose. If you’ve looked at the field, you know there’s a veritable sea of options. Amazon Web Services, AWS, is one of these options and a dominate player in the cloud space. Although AWS delivers a smorgasbord of services and solutions for many different types of cloud scenarios, AWS is especially well suited for Software As A Service (SAAS) and Platform As A Service (PAAS), making AWS a strong choice for mobile, app, and messaging solutions as well as platform development. AWS also is strongly positioned for use in implementation of ...

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...