Wikipedia 2

Looking at the Service Engineering Vendor category in Wikipedia, I noticed that there was no entry for Cape Clear, so I added one and was immediately challenged by one of the Wikipedia editors - was Cape Clear "notable"? A quick Google search produced a handful of newspaper articles and independent analyst reports, which appears to be enough to satisfy the notability criterion.

Several other SOA companies were challenged, including IONA. Some are still under threat, and two companies (Polar Lake and Layer 7) have been deleted from Wikipedia altogether. At least for the time being.

A number of SOA companies have disappeared in the last couple of years, through merger and acquisition. But the small companies often yield interesting and exciting innovations, and it would be a great pity if Wikipedia is biased towards the large companies .

Update: the Service Engineering categories have now also been removed from Wikipedia.

Competition 2

Should Steve Ballmer be more positive about the i-Phone, or is it okay to diss the competition?

I posted something here a while back about badmouthing the competition. Ballmer didn't say anything exceptionally bad about Apple, but there was a contemptuous laugh that conveyed disrespect.

In the past, executives were careful with their words, but would often convey additional or contrary messages through non-verbal clues. Thanks to YouTube, this kind of non-verbal behaviour can now be widely disseminated and discussed.

In a post entitled love thy competitor, Garr Reynolds sees this kind of laughter as poor presentation style.

"Frankly, Ballmer reacted pretty much like I expected him to. ... I would have been flat-out blown away and quite impressed indeed if he had been complimentary of Apple. ... But it is the reaction to Ballmer's comments that I find so fascinating. It is the big response to Steve Ballmer's little comments got me thinking: Should you say "nice things" about competitors?"

Tom Peters made a similar point recently - Love Thine "Enemy"! It's Good Business!

Perhaps the real question for the IT industry is whether competition is a zero-sum game. And that depends where we are in the product lifecycle. For a new or emerging class of product, it makes sense for a vendor to collaborate with its competitors to encourage adoption and grow the market. For a mature product, on the other hand, the incentives for collaboration are smaller, and the vendor's strategy may be to gain the maximum market share or the most profitable niche, at the expense of its competitors.

But this is where it gets difficult for the relationship between two major vendors, such as Apple and Microsoft. There are many different product areas in which they compete - from operating systems (OS-X versus Windows) to MP3 players (iPod versus Zune) - as well as some in which they cooperate - and these are at different points in the product life cycle.

If Ballmer were a devious hypocrite, he would have spoken neutrally or even positively about the iPhone and then paid other people privately to dish the dirt. Perhaps we should be thankful that he doesn't try to conceal his true feelings about his competitors.

On Being The Right Size

My son brought a reading book home from school yesterday, called My Friend Mr Leakey, which turned out to be by the eminent scientist J.B.S. Haldane. I didn't know he had written any books for children, but I did know he had written accessible books for grown-ups as well as professional scientific papers. One of his most widely-read works is an essay called On Being The Right Size.

According to myth, Thomas Watson of IBM once predicted a global market of perhaps five or six computers. (There is no documentary evidence of this prediction.) Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, now makes a similar prediction: The World Needs Only Five Computers. (See also interview with Greg by Stephen Shankland.)

We're talking pretty massive computers here. Think Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Yahoo, each with thousands of servers linked together into massive server farms. In order to make sense of Greg's prediction, we have to regard the Google grid as a single computer. And there is a plausible scenario in which all the computing power in the world is increasingly consolidated into a handful of massive global grids.

And of course Sun Microsystems has long been associated with the slogan "The Network is the Computer", coined by John Gage in 1984.

So what is the right size for a computer?

Wikipedia: John Gage, J.B.S. Haldane, Thomas Watson sr

Look Back in Ingres 2

[Updated]

In my earlier post Look Back in Ingres I discussed Mark Barrenechea, who moved from Oracle to Ingres via Computer Associates (CA). Ingres has been spun off from CA, and is now funded by Garnett & Helfrich.

The latest issue of Business Week (Sweet Revenge, January 22, 2007) has a lot more back-story about Terry Garnett himself. Garnett, a former senior vice president at Oracle, had sworn revenge on Larry Ellison after being fired. Hence the drive to recruit loads of ex-Oracle people.

Fake Steve Jobs is sarcastic: "Here's to you, Terry Garnett, O master of revenge! O skillful manipulator of the press!"

The popular press (and joke websites) like to depict this kind of corporate battle in personal terms, and there may well be an element of truth in this case. But this is not just a battle between two individuals.

The Business Week story describes Ingres as a startup, but this is misleading. Although its corporate vehicle has been reconstituted, Ingres itself has a long history of rivalry with Oracle. Indeed, they started at around the same time with almost identical names. Oracle (founded 1977) was once Relational Software Inc; Ingres (founded 1980) was originally Relational Technology Inc. Ingres was less commercially successful than Oracle, and was acquired by Computer Associates in 1994.

So there is an element of corporate revenge here as well. Is the new Ingres likely to do serious damage to the old Oracle? I somehow doubt it; the old Oracle faces many challenges, but Ingres probably isn't the biggest threat at present.


The Ambassadors of Agamemnon Visiting Achilles 1801. (By the painter Ingres of course.) Achilles sulked a lot, because he didn't get the rewards he thought he deserved. He'd have gone down a treat in Silicon Valley.

Wikipedia: Ingres (database), Ingres (painter), Oracle (database company)
Technorati Tags: CA Computer Associates Ingres Oracle

i-Phone or wii-Phone?

[Updated Jan 25]

There are apparently two reasons someone might want a mobile phone, which can be summed up by the contrast between the Apple prefix (i-) (pronounced I) and the Nintendo prefix (wii-) (pronounced we).

The Apple prefix suggests private consumption. The iPhone appears to be an elegant cross between a top-of-the-range iPod and a Blackberry, designed for people that want to look cool while cutting themselves off from normal social interaction. Ever since the launch of the Sony Walkman, those tiny headphones signal "don't talk to me, I'm listening to something". And many people seem to use their mobile devices as a way of disengaging from their immediate surroundings.

The iPhone has been extensively reviewed, and I don't want to do a detailed review here. I just want to point to a few comments that suggest the iPhone isn't radical enough:

• "Call me crazy, but I think Apple have overdone the technology innovation, and undercooked the business model innovation." (Martin Geddes)

• "What it doesn't do is actually re-invent the very thing that makes cellphones magical: how you connect with other people." (Seth Godin)

• "But something is missing, something important drowned in this flood of f(x)." (Rikard Linde via Seth Godin on Web4)
  

The wii-prefix, on the other hand, suggests a shared experience. In a post Disappearing Telephony from January 2006, Martin Geddes made an excellent point about conversation and presence ("humans are sophisticated social animals, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if our conversation tools need to act intelligently too"), which I followed up in my post on Coffee Shop ("Forget LinkedIn, let's have EspressedIn"). It now seems Seth Godin and Rikard Linde are thinking along similar lines.

As far as I know, Nintendo has no plans to launch a mobile phone. But there are some good precedents for social interaction in the latest games consoles, and it would be interesting to see a communication device based on the wii- prefix rather than the i-prefix.

More ...

I have found some rumour pages from last year about a possible wii-phone, plus a German cartoon.

• Wii-mote to be Wii-mic and Wii-phone? (May 2006, Seth Bland)
• Wii-phone blog (Sept 2006)
• Cartoon (January 2007) via Andreas Schaefer

Technorati Tags: Apple Nintendo wii phone

First Post 2007

Happy New Year to my readers.

One of my new year resolutions is to reorganize my several blogs. Currently my two most active blogs are the SOAPbox blog, which concentrates on SOA and the service-based business, and the POSIWID blog, which concentrates on system thinking. Shall I continue with the less active blogs, such as InnovationMatters and TrustBlog, or merge these into the SoftwareIndustryAnalysis blog? And what about the BusinessOrganizationManagement blog, which I started when I was teaching a business module to computing undergraduates? Please let me know what you think.

Meanwhile, I want to respond to being tagged (by Masood Mortazavi). As you may know if you read other blogs, this is a game that involves providing five pieces of self-description, followed by tagging five new bloggers.

1. James Governor introduced me to LastFM, where my moniker is NotWallpaper. However, as a world music fan, I prefer Calabash. My favourite radio programme is LateJunction.
2. Like Robin Wilton, my first degree was in philosophy. (Readers of my 1992 book on Information Modelling may have spotted references to Frege, Quine and my fellow-student Timothy Williamson. Although when I was a student I spent more time reading Bateson and Elster.)
3. Like Nick Gall, I started programming at high school. (We used to code Fortran onto punched tape, and send them to a local firm for processing. My first program was a simple loop to calculate square roots by Newton's approximation, my second program, which not surprisingly I never finished, was going to construct poetry from randomized wordblocks. Nearly ten years later, as a postgraduate student at Imperial College, I started to write a Simula program to construct computer music using interacting agents. But when I discovered that someone at MIT had already done this, I decided it would probably be better to spend the summer completing my dissertation on semantics instead.)
4. Like Kathy Sierra, I like questions better than answers. (That was one of the other reasons I didn't last long as a programmer; I kept asking awkward questions of the systems analysts, so they called my bluff and made me join them.)
5. Like Tim Bray and Tim O'Reilly, I am uncomfortable about perpetuating a chain letter. But this one seems pretty harmless, so I invite Michael Fasosin, Andrew Johnston, Michael Platt, Roman Rytov and Graham Shevlin to participate if they wish.