December 14, 2009 – 3:08 pm
Cloud computing and analytics have jumped front and center. Gartner renamed Business Intelligence (BI) to Analytics.
On the analytics front, Gartner said in a presentation: “We have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs that we can afford to perform analytics and simulation for each and every action taken in the business. Not [...]
August 24, 2009 – 10:43 am
I want to apply the discussion of entropy to the features of a configurable product. But first we have to introduce the important concept of a “take rate”. In different industries this is called an “attach rate”, or a “penetration rate”. The idea is very simple: the take rate of an option is the fraction [...]
August 21, 2009 – 3:39 pm
A product is a collection of features, and each feature has mutually exclusive options. If a feature has only two options, then the choice is like a coin toss. The information contained in that choice is measured by entropy.
Entropy is a concept from classical thermodynamics that deals with the amount of disorder in a [...]
