Month: November 2011

By Wendy Sanacore
Warren Buffet has a history of letting his disdain towards technology be noted. Bu this shifted dramatically last Monday when it was announced that Buffett has been slowly building up his stake in the technology giant over the past 8 months. He now owns about a 5.5% stake in the company which could easily make him the largest shareholder.
So what made the mogul change his mind in regards to investing in the IBM stock?
Buffett examined the way IBM conducts its business and liked what he saw. The services IBM provides allows them to be indispensable to their corporate clients in a way that many companies just aren’t anymore.
I have often spoken in my blog about the way to do business and make your company indispensable to your clients. You want to be provide services in a manner that make you a strategic business partner, not simply a vendor.
This is the nugget of gold that Buffett apparently sees in IBM. He was quoted as saying, “It’s a company that helps IT departments do their jobs better….I don’t know of any large company that really has been as specific about what they intend to do and how they intend to do it as IBM.”
Here at TxMQ, we like this news a lot! We support the IBM spectrum of Middleware and Software products. Any good news for IBM is good news for us. Buffet backing IBM proves to us that our niche market is going to be one to stand the test of time, which just means we have more and more time to get even better at doing what we already do great!

By Wendy Sanacore
We have weekly Monday morning meetings here at TxMQ. The whole group of us get together via face to face meeting and conference bridge and we discuss the previous week, progress on job openings, and what can be expected for the upcoming week.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Chuck Fried, you don’t know then that he is the metaphor king. He has certain…call them…catch phrases that many of us have heard many times over. So we always sit back and wait for him to drop a new one.
This past Monday, he did not disappoint. In the not so humble words of Chuck Fried, Monday’s nugget of gold was, “The internet has made us all functional morons.”
I jotted it down, because it made me think. Without dating myself too much, I remember being in my junior year of high school and being tasked with the “dreaded” research paper.
We tackled it the same way students year after year had tackled it before us. We went to the library and scoured encyclopedias and microfiche data of newspapers and magazines for historical data.
But then we were introduced to something else. This really cool thing called the Internet. And I honestly think this is the first time I had ever heard of the Internet. My search engine? Alta Vista dial up. We all had to sign up in the library to use the two or three computers available with Internet connections. I think we blocked off like 20 minutes to use the computer…10 of which were comprised of the Internet trying to connect.
The one thing I do remember is that it opened up a whole new world for me. They taught classes on how to use the Internet. Then I went home and was able to teach my mom and dad.
One of our part time employees is a freshman in college. According to her, her research was almost exclusively done via Internet in high school.
And the technology progressed so quickly. It’s amazing to think that it was just 12 years ago.
Now I work for an IT staffing company that our bread and butter is the advancement of technology. That aside, his Monday statement rings true. And it isn’t just the Internet.
Quick question…what’s your best friend’s phone number? And don’t grab your phone to check…
See my point?