In April 1975, Gary Dahl had an idea. A genius idea as it turned out, particularly when you consider that he made roughly $28 million dollars (adjusted for inflation) from something that was, to all intents and purposes, completely useless.
The Pet Rock was just that, a rock. No paint, no googly eyes, nothing, just a rock taken from Rosarito Beach, packaged up and sold for $20 each.
He sold 1.5 million of them.
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According to the Tinterwebs, to ‘recommend’ means to; put forward (someone or something) with approval as being suitable for a particular purpose or role.
So you might argue that this is exactly why you hire a consultant in the first place. In some professions I would absolutely agree. A doctor [for example] would not just recommend that you quit smoking, they would – and should – bloody-well insist. However, everyone on the planet already knows that smoking is stupid, so they are doing so with full knowledge of the possible consequences.
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Even 3 years later only 1 of these things is becoming [slightly] true (#1).
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In late 2020, the PCI DSS v4.0 will be released. And in what promises to be an even more significant change than that from 2.0 to 3.0 (released in Nov. ’13), there is, rather unsurprisingly, a great deal of interest in its contents.
So what’s in it?
I’ll be honest, I can’t tell you, or more to the point, I’m not ALLOWED to tell you as the draft version is currently in ‘Request for Comment’ (RFC) status. Yes I have read it, not only that, I have mapped it line-by-line to v3.2.1 and analysed the differences in detail. I have even written a brief on what I consider the impact of those changes will be, but it will have to remain unread until the moratorium is lifted.
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You’ve all seen the ads; “Service X is disrupting the Y industry!“, or worse; “We’re using Artificial Intelligence to disrupt…”.
At this point I will look no further at what you have to offer, because if your product/service could stand on its merits, why would you to resort to using tired and almost entirely inaccurate marketing drivel? And are you really to solve my problems or just make money?
Yes, that was a rhetorical question.
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