What’s your skill? Good with people, good with words? Good for you. But what could you do with a second skill? Great coders are in demand — but there are a lot of them. Writers graduate from college and swarm like ants across the job market. You need one great skill. But one is no longer enough. First off, demand…
In mid-2000 I get a phone call at my desk at Forrester. “This is Jay Kernis from ’60 Minutes,’” the caller says, and that’s the beginning of an experience that will teach me a lot more about how television actually works. I’m a pretty prominent TV analyst at this point. I’ve predicted the future of WebTV…
Don’t back down from the truth. Even if you disagree with people, your integrity will win them over in the long run. So, it’s 1996 and my bosses at Forrester have insisted that I write a report about non-PC Internet devices. I’m so dubious about the idea that the original title of the report is “The…
A Forrester Forum, like any big event, is quite a production. As part of it, you interact with powerful people in industry, people like Peter Chernin, and that doesn’t always go exactly as planned. I’ll take you behind the scenes at one of these events that included an unexpected moment of terror. It’s September 2004,…
It’s not about what you’re building. It’s about who you’re building it with, and how it feels. It’s the hot summer of 1985 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve left Software Arts, the company that created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. After Software Arts lost focus, a new competitor called Lotus 1-2-3 came along and crushed it. I’m still…
Television nearly killed me. Here’s how it happened. For several years in the 90s in Boston, I ran a group called the Multimedia Roundtable. It was a little developer group that eventually swelled to a lively 300 people. It met monthly at 6:00pm in a big room in Cambridge in the building of Course Technology, where…
Do you choose your path? Or are you making choices with consequences you can’t imagine? I was thinking about the choices that got me hired at Forrester, a 20-year job that determined my career and my future as an author. I’d like to tell you it was a deliberate and intelligent choice, but it’s way stranger than…
In the year 2000, when I was the top technology analyst in the television industry, I began to see the outlines of the transformation of television. TiVo had delivered a big shock to the television schedule. Video on-demand was another tremor. I could see the whole edifice shaking. I wrote a piece called “The End Of TV (As We…
For 20 years, I did the same thing, mostly. I was a technology analyst at Forrester Research from 1995 until last month. If you do one thing for a long time, you should learn from it. My job at Forrester molded my ways of thinking more than anything else I’ve done (save becoming a parent). Perhaps…