Rui CarmoAfter a weekend of moderate rest and some shopping, I’m now reviewing my schedule for next week. 3GSM begins in Barcelona tomorrow, which is likely to make it a somewhat quieter work week for me due to the absence of some folk.
Like last year, there’s more to be gained by staying at the office and getting some actual work done, even though this year the number of invitations for both formal and informal meetings there skyrocketed (a definite side effect from it being held in Barcelona, which is also a welcome change from Cannes).
Meanwhile, the local grapevine is buzzing with excitement regarding the Sonae takeover bid for Portugal Telecom, although I would hardly call the excitement positive in any regard - for being in what is a neutral camp where it regards the bid (please check out my Disclaimer), I am aghast at the way things are being done at some levels…
There were never many people working in the telecommunications field in Portugal - even less if you counted only the “pure telco” types, and an order of magnitude below that if you considered only those folk who work in the mobile field.
Which basically means it’s a very small, tightly knit group of people indeed - we pretty much know everyone else, even if not personally, and some even moved from one camp to the other more than once.
Now techies aren’t the most socially gifted kind of folk, so I wasn’t surprised to hear about some of those on the buying side bullying and publicly dissing their counterparts. A few friendly jabs are fine, I guess, but when tech folk start harping about how vastly superior their company is when they’re not winning by technical merit (nor actually winning at all, because the process is still just starting), things get ugly really quickly.
(Sonae has undisputable business merit in launching the bid, but business acumen and merit should be bestowed on their management team, and not hijacked by their minions to serve their own petty purposes in a different - personal - context…)
But hey, that’s human nature for you. I suppose pontificating on this topic wouldn’t get us anywhere (and is likely to incur biased comments regardless of my Disclaimer), so I’ll stop at saying that people ought to know their place a bit better and change the topic to two other trifles that caught my attention:
- Courtesy of Clint Checketts, there’s a new GTD TiddlyWiki out there: GTDTIddlyWiki Plus. Based off TW 2.0 and a few selected plugins, it is sure to be of interest to a lot of people.
- Adrian Holovaty has published a Python interface to Microsoft Outlook Web Access (aka Exchange webmail), which I will be looking into some day.
And now, back to the stack of books that have been piling up by the sofa…