You’re full of shit, you’re fired!
Last night on the apprentice saw the departure of the ‘now-wise 22 year old’, Stuart Baggs with a field of ponies. Now I wouldn’t usually blog about a TV show but something rather interesting happened…
One of Lord Sugars Aides clearly proved that he knows as much about I.T terminology as a farmer does about plumbing. Usually I’d let such an easy mistake slip but when you’re named Bordon Tkachuk and you’re the CEO of Viglen Computers, it turns into something else.
While giving Baggs a grilling over his ‘fully-licensed’ telecoms business which actually isn’t so fully licensed, he says:
“… I know what an ISP is – Internet Service Protocol”
and he talked of it allowing
“…internet connection over bandwidth”
If the man doesn’t know such a simple thing about I.T then how and why is he the CEO of Viglen Computers? Beats me. For those of you not in the know, ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.
The second this was aired, tens of thousands professionals jumped on Twitter and began to shoot from the hip:
“#WhatIsAnISP? Internet Sugar-Panderer? Internet Service Plonker?”
None of this would matter if Bordon hadn’t been hammering into Baggs about whether he really did own a telecoms company. Bordon insisted he didn’t – Baggs insisted he did.
Bagg’s company, BlueWave, offers wireless hotspots and has an IP microwave link to the UK mainland to provide IP datacomms to businesses on the Isle of Man. Now I don’t know about anybody else, but to me that’s definitely “telecoms”.
Bordon Tkachuk – you’re fired?
In all fairness a CEO doesn’t need to have a great understanding of technologies, but just a good hand at managing the company.
Carol Bartz has worked with numerous tech companies but you’ll find in an interview she did she admitted, she gets it, likes it, but doesn’t understand it. All she knows is how to manage it, sell it, and make it work in a business model