We were supposed to travel to Charlotte, NC to meet with our dear friends there and spend the July 4th weekend, but on Friday morning I got the call saying that our flight was cancelled. The next flight they can book us was on Saturday, late afternoon. So, I took the option of canceling our plans and receive a refund. Well, the reservation was through Expedia for a United Flight, sort of. It is really a USAir flight. So, USAir person could not give me the refund. She could only add a note. I had to call Expedia. After 1 hour, they validated and agreed that I am eligible for a refund. I hope I will get it. Lesson learned: Whereas Expedia is fantastic in taking your money, they are not so good in giving back money that is legitimately yours. I guess one can change Expedia with any business name and the statement will hold true.

As a result of this cancellation, we had one of the most restful four days. I got an invite to join Google Plus, Google’s FaceBook. It looks and acts like Facebook with some nicer features, but also lacks some of the social networking tool integrations such as those with Twitter and Foursquare and such.  They will come in due course. But, the very fact that Facebook was the earliest and that many millions are already familiar with it poses a huge problem for Google Plus or any other FB wannabes.

I actually had written a fair amount here on the installed base issue – how we all get used to some products and then the inertia that comes along with this to make changes. It is such a boring topic, I just deleted everything.

It is indeed a rainy day and there are a few of us who have chosen to work today instead of flexing. I completed writing the performance reviews for my direct reports, which I had given them earlier verbally. I missed seeing the last shuttle launch. I remember seeing the challenger disaster in 1986 in New Hyde Park, NY. Some of these things are etched so much in your memories!

I am actually catching up to a lot of things.  Have sent emails to several staff inquiring about the status of various projects. We also had to make a decision on what to do with Luna, an image management solution because we have signed up with ArtSTOR for using Shared Shelf/Open Shelf. I think we have a reasonable plan for the upcoming year, though this is not something that I was looking at initially!

Our FirstClass to Google transition hit a snag last month and finally, the developers have found some issues and seem to have a fix – until there is a next hiccup. This is an example of companies relying on customers’ inertia to change. Tightly closed systems such as FirstClass, to some extent, rely on the fact that it is not easy to migrate their data to other systems as the reason not to move away from the software.

On a related note, Microsoft is paying money to get a large University to move to Office 365, their equivalent of Google Apps for Education. That is some news. Think about all those that just signed the contract – they will be asking “why didn’t I think about it?”

We can find several examples of such dependencies that make the cost of replacement or change so high that we all decide to stick with what we have. We have taken some really bold steps in avoiding this issue – move to Google for one and move from Bluenog to Drupal is another. I am happy with the progress we are making on the Drupal end. I keep hearing how easy it will be to use and more importantly, I see a sense of enjoyment from those who are dabbling in it and will be supporting our end users.

We need to really keep an eye on our budgets this year. Last year’s budget projections and actuals don’t give me much confidence, so we have been discussing better controls and communication. I am happy to say that we contributed significant amount of money to technologies in a few academic projects and we have reallocated funds so this year, we will be able to manage some of the academic software licenses and also do more in classroom technology.

Talking about classroom technology, we are seriously taking a look at the hardware we have been buying and there will be some changes in the upcoming year. This is along the same way as reducing the cost of a laptop by 25% by opting out of an expensive protective shell for it! I am beginning to see some light, literally, outside!