Fix Your Risk

There was an historical merger of the two software giants today.  Despite being well respected in their own industries, they knew that to survive and stay relevant, as well as profitable that they would have to join forces to be able to stand a fighting chance against their rival, Google.  It remains to be seen how this merger will effect the world of search engines, but it goes to show what is possible when two competitors align themselves against their biggest competitor.

In today’s contractor landscape, who is “your Google”?  Who is the contractor that is taking 87% of your jobs?  Who could you join forces with to try to topple them?  Sure, you’d have to reorganize your company, probably lay some folks off, but in the long run would you rather keep playing it safe and be out of business before the economy rights itself, or would you like to be the company that emerges in the new contractor landscape as the hybrid of two competitors who put their differences aside and their strengths together to beat a common enemy?

Came across an article this morning in the Seattle Tribune that describes the “deep dig” that Seattle is about to dig into to decongest their cities transportation system.  Shouldn’t have waited this long to start blogging again.  That decongest line would have killed during allergy season!

At $4.24 Billion Dollars, this project is a massive one, and construction itself isn’t expected to be underway before 2011.  Which gives the contractor that wins the bid, quite a bit of time to build this behemoth

Notice the forklift in the bottom right, which gives a decent idea of the scale of this thing.  This comment was made in the Times article about the size of this pile of bolts “

The tunnel boring machine will weigh 5,000 tons, about the same as a jumbo ferry, Paananen said. Its power plant will be 400 to 500 feet long, about the same length as a jumbo ferry. The diameter of the “drill bit” will be almost 55 feet.

Industry experts say it will take 18 months to two years to build that machine, at a cost well over $50 million.

“It would be one of the biggest machines ever made,” said Craig Bournes, product manager for Lovat Inc., a Toronto-based firm that manufactures tunnel boring machines. Lovat built two of the machines for King County’s Brightwater, a project that eventually will carry sewage in underground pipes from an inland treatment plant to a discharge point in north Puget Sound. Those machines are much smaller – less than 19 feet in diameter.”

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of spending 2.5 hours of my life watching the new Transformers movie, and all I could think about when I saw the picture in the Times is that that machine looks a heck of a lot like this one…(the Decepticon that was responsible for destroying the pyramid in order to uncover the machine used to blow up the sun, ANYWAYS… This “transformer” is made up of a combination of construction vehicles, see the movie if you have absolutely nothing better to do and really like terrible plots and explosions.