Software Industry Analysis Archive

Change of Address

2008-02-06T03:13:00.000Z

I am moving this blog to Blogspot. If it works properly, all existing posts should be copied across. Archive copies will remain here on my personal website, but will not be updated.

The new location of the blog will be rvsoftware.blogspot.com.

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Depending on your feed settings, you may receive repeated notification of updated posts when the blog moves. Please bear with me during this move. Normal service will be resumed etc etc.

And then there were two ...

2008-02-05T00:39:00.000Z

So Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!, huh? The BBC describes this as a shotgun wedding - with Google wielding the shotgun. [BBC News, February 1st, 2008] And in a post entitled Monkey Boy's three-legged race, Fake Steve Jobs reminds Steve Ballmer of his previous disdain for mergers. When such mergers involved companies getting together to compete against Microsoft, maybe Microsoft could afford to be confidently superior. But now it seems it's Microsoft that needs a merger (with Yahoo!) to compete against the market leader (Google), and Ballmer's previous words may come back to haunt him.

(For another deal like this, think of Oracle buying PeopleSoft to compete with SAP.)

Google purports to be upset at the deal, with a pompous protest from its Chief Legal Officer entitled Yahoo! and the future of the Internet, and even the often cynical Fake Steve seems to take this protest at face value. But if Fake Steve's own analysis is correct, Google has no need to worry. Challenging the deal may simply be a way of making sure the Microsoft board can't back down without losing face.

Apart from Google, Microsoft and the Yahoo! shareholders, who are the winners and losers in this game? Bill Burnham thinks that this is a Bad Deal for Silicon Valley, because Yahoo! was one of the prime buyers of internet startups (notably del.icio.us and Flickr). But of course there are plenty other players. eBay is perhaps still licking its wounds after the over-priced acquisition of Skype, and NewsCorp (which has ruled out a rival bid for Yahoo!) maybe hasn't yet quite worked out what to do with MySpace, but that leaves TimeWarner (owner of AOL), Comcast (owner of thePlatform), IAC (owner of Ask and Bloglines) and a few others.

Oh yes, AOL-TimeWarner, that was a merger wasn't it? The $200bn company that was created by the take-over of media giant TimeWarner by the Internet upstart AOL, but the letters AOL no longer part of the company name, and AOL has now reverted to its ordained place in the corporate world, as a division of a large media company called TimeWarner. A number of the AOL local operations have been sold off, and Google currently has a 5% stake of the remainder [Press Release].

In the past, TimeWarner has got rid of many once-profitable divisions, including Atari, MTV Networks, and Time-Life. Some investors have demanded a break-up of Time and Warner, so perhaps a return to the good old days of Warner Brothers. That kind of thing seems to be normal ebb and flow among media companies. Companies can merge, but they don't necessarily stay merged.

But we haven't seen much of that in the software industry yet. To date, IBM and Microsoft have successfully defended themselves against regulatory break-up. (But the future demands of Wall Street may be more difficult to ignore.) The post-merger Microsoft will be a different kind of company, with new challenges. Maybe Steve Ballmer needs to take Larry Ellison out to lunch and pick his brains. (And I never thought I'd say that.)

Update (further commentary)

If apparently intelligent people/organizations do apparently stupid things, it is tempting to look for some secret conspiracy or hidden motive that will make sense of the plan. For example, the Economist thinks this might be a devious trap to get Google snared in antitrust action. [The Economist (Feb 5th), via Fake Steve Jobs]

Marc Andreessen agrees with me that there are plenty other companies acquiring Internet property, but Bill Burnham still thinks the overall effect is negative for Silicon Valley. Fred Wilson sums up: It's time to think long-term.

Meanwhile Fake Steve Jobs is enjoying himself. Some months ago he was complaining of boredom, pining for a really good train-wreck merger. A reader asks if the Microsoft / Yahoo deal qualifies for this description. FSJ's answer is a resounding Yes.

Skype Skuppered

2007-08-28T09:19:00.001+01:00

It turns out that it was Microsoft that brought down Skype for two days earlier this month. Microsoft's monthly software update (known as Patch Tuesday) triggered millions of computers to reboot at the same time, which always puts an unusual strain on major Internet companies such as Skype.

Source: The Register, August 20th 2007.
See also TechCrunch August 20th 2007.

As Alex from RiskManagement Insight points out, this is equivalent to a form of DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. From a risk management perspective, it may not matter very much whether an attack is deliberate and malicious, or merely an accidental side-effect of some entirely innocent action.

Although Skype had survived previous Patch Tuesdays without incident, it seems that this month's Patch Tuesday triggered a previously unknown bug in Skype's software. As Alex points out, it is practically impossible to construct a test environment large and complex enough to simulate this scenario.

I haven't seen any figures, but I have little doubt that Skype's competitors (including Microsoft) must have experienced an unusually high level of new registrations during Skype's misfortune. Now that we have become accustomed to free voice calls over the Internet, it seemed outrageous to return to the almost mediaeval practice of paying real money for talking over the telephone, so my colleagues and I signed up to Yahoo Messenger.

It's an ill wind ...

IBM acquires Telelogic

2007-06-11T21:58:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the future of modelling tools over breakfast with Danny Sabbah, General Manager of IBM Rational Software. The modelling tools market is growing fairly slowly, and Danny made it clear that Rational was looking to increase its market share substantially.

So today's announcement [note 1] that IBM is going to acquire Telelogic makes a lot of commercial sense. Telelogic has an impressive portfolio of tools, especially since its acquisition of Popkin in 2005, and it has a strong position in Requirements Management (DOORS) and Enterprise Architecture (System Architect). Popkin contributed significantly to the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), and was closely allied to John Zachman.

Telelogic's tools and methods didn't suit every user company, and in the past I have sometimes had occasion to be mildly critical of Popkin, especially from an SOA perspective. The Popkin acquisition was billed at the time as a move into SOA [note 2] but this promise was only just starting to be realised with the announcement last month of System Architect for SOA [note 3].

If IBM had wanted to buy a pure SOA modelling company, there would have been other, perhaps worthier candidates. But Telelogic is undoubtedly more attractive to IBM, because of its other assets and relationships; IBM can be relatively unconcerned by Telelogic's weaknesses, and should have little difficulty reassuring the customers of both companies.

But growth by acquisition is only one piece of Danny's strategy for IBM Rational. Another important piece is a shift in focus - from selling tools and technologies to selling process and business value. This means selling to the business, not selling to developers. Instead of being billed as a software engineering methodology, RUP may come to be positioned as an industry model for the software development industry, which IBM should be able sell in the same way it sells industry models for banking, insurance and other industries.

Modelling tool vendors have always faced the problem of growth. If the tools are good, they may get a loyal community of keen developers, but that is not quite enough. Rational itself had reached a plateau as an independent vendor before its acquisition by IBM in 2002. Is there more consolidation to come?

[Note 1] IBM to Acquire Telelogic to Advance Global Software Delivery Strategy (June 2007), IBM beats HP in bid for Telelogic (June 2007)

[Note 2] Telelogic's Popkin Purchase Prepares the Way for SOA (April 2005), Telelogic looks to bring modeling to SOA (Nov 2006)

[Note 3] Telelogic Facilitates Service Oriented Architecture Adoption (May 2007), Telelogic Adds Business Process SOA Solution (May 2007), Telelogic tools tie software services to business processes (June 2007)

Difference of Opinion

2007-06-05T16:20:00.000+01:00

So much of what passes for software industry analysis is pretty bland and polite, so it is perhaps refreshing to see a fiercely argued difference of opinion emerging between Jason Bloomberg at ZapThink and Ron Ten-Hove at Sun Microsystems.

Jason views SCI and JBI as little more than vendor politics and hype [SearchWebServices May 31st 2007]. As a key player in the game, Ron is clearly offended by this opinion and insists that ZapThink should rethink SCA and JBI.

It is often difficult to make judgements about abstract artefacts such as SCA and JBI. We need to have clear answers to four sets of questions, which Aristotle called the Four Causes.

Formal cause. What exactly is the nature of the artefact? Is it a (proposed) standard, an architecture, a layer within an architecture, a platform, or something else? (It doesn't help of course that each of these terms has multiple shades of meanings.)

Material cause. What has gone into its production? What are the constructs and principles on which it is based?

Efficient cause. What has been the process? What stage of the process have we reached? Who has participated in the process?

Final cause. What purpose does it serve? For whom?

It seems to me that Jason is basing his conclusions on the technical and political background of the SCA and JBI initiatives. He is therefore reasoning from Material and Efficient Cause to Formal and Final Cause.

Meanwhile, Ron is arguing from Formal Cause ("standard services model") and Final Cause ("the need for service composition"). If SCA and JBI fall short of these requirements, this is because the process isn't complete.

Ron avers there are lots of factual errors in Jason's interview. But it is not the factual accuracy that is really at issue here, but the fact that they are simply not talking about the same thing.

And it is only when people disagree that the basis for the disagreement becomes visible. This is why vigorous disagreement is much better than vague agreement.

Are we making progress?

2007-06-03T13:48:00.000+01:00

Twenty years ago, I had a Mac Plus that ran Microsoft Word. Loaded from a single 800kb floppy disc. (There were some utilities on a second floppy, but I don't think I ever used them.)

When I wanted to work on a document, I switched on the computer and there it was. I could start work from cold in under a minute.

Several computers later, I now have to wait several minutes while the computer loads all sorts of rubbish. Microsoft Word now occupies several CDs, uses up tons of disc space, and runs more slowly on a high-specification laptop today than it did in the 1980s.

This has now been confirmed by some detailed benchmarks reported on HubPages by Hal Licino (via Fake Steve Jobs). Update: Fake Steve Jobs (Thinking More About Microsoft) also reminds us that "Microsoft's ... rise to power came as a result of Bill Gates positioning Windows as smaller, cheaper, easier and faster than OS/2 Presentation Manager".

So much for productivity. So much for progress.

Does Telephony Matter?

2007-05-26T10:34:00.000+01:00

Avaya sends me a press release (May 23rd): their IP telephony solution has been adopted at a major concert venue.

Sometimes I have difficulty seeing anything interesting about the link between a given organization and a given item of technical infrastructure. Every organization has some kind of telephone system, and I can't see anything unusual about the telephony objectives of this particular organization - ‘state of the art’ customer service, advanced functionality, exceeding customer expectations, improved productivity, etc., etc..

So why should we be interested in this particular case study. Perhaps there is only one reason - because of an old Beatles song:

Now we know how many calls it takes to fill the Albert Hall ...

Questions, Questions

2007-05-26T09:23:00.000+01:00

Eric Schmidt is quoted by the Financial Times (May 22, 2007):

"The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and ‘What job shall I take?’ "

With something as outrageous as this, A-List bloggers such as BurningBird and Nicholas Carr hardly need to say anything themselves. They simply post the quote under a suitably provocative headline and get their readers to do the detailed commentary. Nice.

But what Schmidt actually said is clearly false, because Google users have always asked these questions. The problem has always been getting half-decent answers. Possibly Schmidt's real goal is that Google shall attempt to provide answers, or (even better) get some other company to pay for the opportunity. Or that Google shall influence the questions we choose to ask. Or even that we choose to channel every single question in our lives in Google's direction.

But it is interesting that Schmidt expresses his goal in this way, because it illustrates the way Google blurs the boundaries between itself and its users. In his own blog (Google is Me, The Joy of Personalization), someone called Maluke suggests that such blurring is commonplace.

"It's not specific to Google actually, it’s an instance of a common kind of delusions of grandeur for big software companies, media outlets etc."

This relates to an earlier discussion on Google and God from November 2003, where I wrote:

"Many believers say God is not sitting on a cloud somewhere, God is in ourselves, in our hearts. When Google is equated with God, we are supposed to interpret this equation as referencing not the Google software nor the Google company, but the Internet community as a whole - ourselves as Google users. And perhaps we geeks are supposed to be flattered by this."

A few short years later and the public mood about Google has certainly shifted hasn't it?

Does IT matter?

2007-05-23T17:50:00.000+01:00

There are two ways of interpreting the question: "Does IT matter?" These could roughly be labelled macroeconomics and microeconomics.

The macroeconomic question is about the global aggregate impact of IT on business or society.

Does IT (as a whole) make business (as a whole) more profitable?
Is there any evidence that businesses with more IT are more profitable than businesses with less IT? (If wealthier companies spend more on IT, does that just show they have more money to spend?)
If IT has any demonstrable impact at all, is this merely a short-term sugar rush (aka turbulence), or are there enduring long-term consequences?

See for example Andrew McAfee: The Shocking Processes of IT Impact.

The microeconomic question is about the extent to which differentiation within IT matters.

Does one kind of IT produce significantly better results than another kind of IT?
To what extent do the technical issues to which IT people pay most attention have any real economic significance?

For example, if two alternative technical solutions, competently executed and managed, both produce around 20% ROI, then the difference between them doesn't matter.

As some aspects of IT are increasingly turned into utility computing, then maybe some of the big questions of IT become small questions, and some of the small questions become irrelevant. At least from an external business perspective.

Does Open Source matter?
Does XML matter?
Does architecture matter?
... and so on ...

From an IT perspective, these kinds of questions are of course very interesting and important. But this is sometimes hard to demonstrate to an external audience - including business people and politicians. They want IT, or at least they want the benefits of IT, but they don't want to think about IT. Should IT matter in this sense?

To whom does IT matter? Does the vast amount of technical knowledge accumulated within the IT industry matter to anyone outside IT? Does IT matter?

Gordon Brown, Enterprise Architect?

2007-05-17T09:10:00.000+01:00

Listening to Vernon Bogdanor (professor of politics at Oxford University, and one-time tutor of Tory leader David Cameron) talking about a written constitution on BBC Radio Four yesterday [Today Programme May 16th], I was struck by two thoughts.

Firstly, the similarity between a written constitution (which Professor Bogdanor described as "an organization chart to tell people where they are and what rights they have") and an enterprise architecture.

And secondly, a strong sense that Gordon Brown will be much more sympathetic to this way of viewing the world than either Tony Blair or David Cameron. (Bogdanor has been critical of his former student's grasp of constitutional matters, and suggested he might need to return to Oxford for a refresher course. [Guardian, June 27th 2006])

In IT terms, Blair and Cameron are both business analysts - focused on addressing short-term piecemeal requirements in a convincing manner. Gordon Brown is an enterprise architect.

During Brown's tenure as Prime Minister, the UK might expect to see significant steps towards joined-up government, and perhaps even something like the US Clinger-Cohen Act. I don't think the UK IT industry has ever had such a good opportunity for reform at the highest level.

See also a post on the purpose of a written constitution on the POSIWID blog.

Website Metrics

2007-05-12T16:13:00.000+01:00

You get what you measure. And one way to influence behaviour is to provide an easy metric that is aligned to the behaviours you want to encourage.

This is as true in software as anywhere else, and is one of the reasons why software metrication is an important aspect of software quality.

In a post How to Misuse Google Analytics, Seth Godin points out that Google Analytics measures the success of a website from Google's perspective. Google's commercial objectives involve things like maximizing advertising revenue.

But as Seth points out, the quest for traffic can cause a website designer to make bad decisions. While many websites may benefit from advertising revenue, most non-spam websites have other objectives as well - for example, disseminating and championing new ideas. Google Analytics does not provide metrics relevant to these objectives.

Thanks to Google Analytics and related mechanisms, Google provides a positive feedback loop that reinforces its own commercial agenda. Systems thinker Donella Meadows identified the provision of such positive feedback loops as one of the ways of exerting power and influence over a complex system. (Wikipedia summary, original paper), and anyone who wishes to counteract this kind of power and influence should study her paper carefully.

IT Security Industry

2007-05-11T15:03:00.000+01:00

Lots of people (e.g. Gunner Petersen, Pete Lindstrom) are attacking Bruce Schneier for asking Do we really need a security industry?

Obviously Bruce doesn't expect the IT security industry to disappear any time soon. He points to some of the structural reasons for the economic viability of stand-alone products and services for IT security (including legal liability - or the lack of it), as well as the vested interests of software companies.

In some ways, the global security situation is getting worse with the increasing fragmentation of functionality and responsibility, and the increased interconnectedness of human and automated systems. This phenomenon isn't just an IT problem: it exists in other domains as well.

Bruce's argument is that security should be (increasingly) embedded into the infrastructure. This is the logic underlying the acquisition of Bruce's own company by BT last year. (See my comment: BT enters the Blogosphere.)

Pete is scornful, and and there are some similar comments on Bruce's own blog:

"The notion of 'natural' security in the face of an intelligent adversary is so fundamentally ignorant that the whole thing must be a charade. It isn't even a pipe dream - it is an impossibility. Throw in the fact that IT resources are increasing in value and function and there is no doubt of that impossibility."

Gunnar's criticisms are more moderate. He also questions the notion of natural security, but acknowledges the problems with the present situation:

"The way the IT security industry is presently constituted, is not effective, focuses WAY too much on network security instead of app and data security, and is incredibly reactive and tactically focused."

For my part, I think it's always useful to ask provocative questions. Questions like "Do we really need X?" (or the equally provocative "Does Y matter?") shouldn't be dismissed with a simple Yes/No answer. Such questions call for an exploration of the true actual or potential value of X and Y, and perhaps a search for better (more innovative, more intelligent) alternatives to the current state-of-the-art.

Do we need an IT security industry? Probably yes, but not the one we've got at the moment.

Executive Emails

2007-02-11T14:29:00.000Z

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both issued public statements last week.

Jobs: Thoughts on Music
Gates: Enabling Security Anywhere

But here's the curious thing. According to del.icio.us, the Jobs letter has been saved by over 1300 people, while the Gates email has been saved by 6 people.

In searching for an explanation for this difference, we need to consider a combination of content and context. Jobs is making a dramatic intervention into a controversial topic. Whereas Gates doesn't seem to be saying anything particularly remarkable.

But why is that? Has Gates lost the power to startle the industry? What is really going on?

Problem-Solving

2007-02-11T10:37:00.000Z

There are two contrasting patterns of problem-solving behaviour in the software industry.

Solving problems on a one-off basis
Solving an entire class of problems in a single move.

Many of the important innovations in software have resulted from successfully tackling major classes of problem rather than isolated instances. And there are many people in the software industry for whom this way of problem-solving has become an ingrained habit.

I therefore find it odd that some classes of recurring problem continue to be tackled on a one-off basis. For example, the industry still doesn't seem to have found a reliable way to eliminate software code "overflows" - even though this is a regular cause of software bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Another common example of this pattern occurs in user support. When a user reports a problem, this probably indicates that a number of other users have a similar problem. And it is probably not good enough to fix the problem only for the users who report the problem. In fact it may be more important to fix the problem for those users who haven't noticed that there is a problem at all.

But if the response is to solve the problem as if it belonged to a single user, then this seems to deny the existence of a broader problem.

Take blog feeds for example. A couple of times recently I've noticed problems with blog feeds, and I've gone to the trouble to notify the blog author. What I'd expect the blog author to do is fix the feed. What happens instead is that the blog author sends me back a helpful email telling me how to redirect my newsreader. Actually I can work that out for myself thanks.

Perhaps some blog authors assume that their subscribers are all fluent in RSS. Because I'm the one identifying a problem, they might imagine I am positioning myself at the incompetent end of the spectrum. And the problem is my problem.

Actually, it's precisely because I'm not at the incompetent end of the spectrum that I can see there is a problem. And it's not my problem if the blog author loses some of his subscribers because his feed is broken. It's his problem.

Wikipedia 2

2007-01-31T01:02:00.000Z

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

2007-01-23T14:39:00.000Z

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

2007-01-18T14:14:00.000Z

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

2007-01-16T04:46:00.000Z

[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?

2007-01-14T11:55:00.000Z

[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

2007-01-08T09:55:00.000Z

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.

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.
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.

PowerPoint slides

2006-11-28T12:51:00.000Z

If you have sat through as many poor presentations as I have, you will find it easy to believe the quote in the Washington Post last week from a US Major.

"I thought I understood Iraq and the history because I had seen PowerPoint slides, but I really didn't." [Washington Post, November 21st, 2006 via Duck of Minerva].

Of course it is not Microsoft's fault if the Pentagon makes inappropriate use of the available tools. Loads of stupid documents have been written in Word, and loads of bad accounts produced in Excel. But it is PowerPoint gets most of the criticism.

Part of the problem is that people use a general-purpose tool like PowerPoint when they should be using a special-purpose tool - such as a planning or analysis tool. PowerPoint may often be good enough for communicating material, but it is not good enough for developing material.

There is a vast array of special-purpose tools out there for developing material. Analytical tools, modelling tools, requirements analysis tools, planning and scheduling tools, risk analysis tools, simulation tools. I have little doubt that there must be some pretty bright people in the Pentagon who are adept with these tools. So why on earth did they use PowerPoint for planning the US-led intervention in Iraq?

The recent book Fiasco reports a number of senior US military personal who were highly critical of this:

"... reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld's amateurish approach to war planning." [Further extracts quoted in Arms and the Influence. See also Presentation Zen.]

Do you sometimes use PowerPoint when you should be using some other tool? Do you sometimes use Powerpoint just because it's there sitting on your laptop, and because loading/learning some other tool is too much trouble and expense?

I don't mind admitting that I often use PowerPoint when I could (perhaps should) be using some other tool. But only on small low-risk tasks, and never when there are lives or billions of dollars at stake.

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BT enters the blogosphere

2006-11-14T00:40:00.000Z

Two popular bloggers have recently joined BT, the global telecommunications company.

In September 2006, JP Rangaswami became CIO of BT Services Division in September 2006. JP blogs about enterprise software under the name "Confused of Calcutta". See commentary by telecoms analyst Martin Geddes.

Then in October 2006, BT acquired Counterpane Internet Security, the company founded by cryptologist and security expert Bruce Schneier. Bruce remains as CTO. See BT press release, comments by Bruce and his readers, and comment by Counterpane investor David Cowan.

I have long argued that the software industry needs to take telecoms more seriously. Many years ago the term "Information Technology" was introduced to denote the convergence of computing and telecoms, but quickly became treated as a synonym for computing alone. (So we had to invent yet another term: ICT.) Many recent innovations in software have been funded by telecoms. (Where would computing be today without Bell Labs for example.) And the foundations of SOA were developed as much by telecoms companies as by computing companies.

Meanwhile, I hope that these two high-profile bloggers within BT will encourage more blogging from telecoms insiders.

Cheap Technology Officer

2006-11-09T15:28:00.000Z

James Governer has just posted something on his blog Introducing the Cheap Technology Officer. He picks up on an item from Nicholas Carr, who bids us Welcome Back to Frugal Computing.

One of the reasons why cheap/frugal is back in fashion is that companies are spending staggering amounts on building data centres, which then consume more electrical power than a small town. Gartner reckons that electricity costs could rise to as much as a third of total IT costs [source: Silicon.com, November 2006]

These data centers also take a long time to build. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz makes a simple comparison, between (1) a large financial institution taking nearly three years to build two data centers each costing over a quarter billion dollars and (2) YouTube incorporating, building infrastructure and getting bought by Google in less time.

Clearly Schwartz was being provocative in suggesting YouTube as a benchmark since a data centre for a financial institution like that is going to be incredibly complex and expensive. But the ROI is crucially affected by "time-to-market" - this is the same financial logic that drives knowledge-based companies like chip-makers and pharmaceuticals - if you are spending a quarter billion dollars on something, the sooner you can start getting a return the better.

For chip-makers and pharmaceuticals, the most important capital investment may be developing the next generation of chip or superdrug. But for many service companies, the biggest capital investment is going to be these enormously expensive data centres. Google and Microsoft are spending staggering amounts of money on hardware.

In his comment to Jonathan's blog, Jon Collins questions the economics of scale of monolithic data centres. There are probably some significant diseconomies of scale involved if it's done wrong. Centralizing hardware only makes sense if you can switch some of the distributed hardware off - and in many organizations that isn't going to happen. And there's no point in outsourcing half your functionality to some SaaS (software-as-a-service) provider if you still have to run (and cool) almost as many boxes as before.

So what are the characteristics of the Cheap Technology Officer? As well as the characteristics identified by James, I'd like to identify a few more.

Sense of Urgency. There can be little doubt about the link between economics and speed. But there will be some things that have to be done more slowly, so the Cheap Technology Officer must be able to operate tectonically as well - this means the capability to make progress at different speeds in different layers.

Bricolage is a form of improvization practised by some engineers, using whatever resources and repertoire come to hand, in order to perform the immediate task. A person who practises bricolage is called a bricoleur.

and finally (which I'm including because it echoes the "cheap" meme) Avoiding Cheap Adjectives such as “revolutionary,” “Web 2.0,” “huge,” “change the way you’ll use the Internet,” and “disruptive.” (See Guy Kawasaki on How to Get In TechCrunch.)

Forthcoming Meetings

2006-09-18T04:39:00.000+01:00

Lots of the emails I receive include notices or invitations for forthcoming events. I am on the mailing lists of various groups that meet regularly, but I don't get to all the meetings.

So what to do with these emails? I could copy them into my diary straight away. I could put them into a "forthcoming meeting" folder and forget about them until it's too late.

What I really want is some way of aggregating these forthcoming events into a calendar. Each of these groups maintains a webpage, with details of its forthcoming events. If I can subscribe to this webpage, and others like it, all I would need is for my news reader (I use Bloglines) to show me (in calendar view) all the forthcoming events from all the eventpages I have subscribed to, perhaps filtered by city. (So I can see all the London events, but not the Washington events, unless of course I am going to be on a business trip to Washington next week.)

The word "freedbacking" has recently been coined as an identifier for a consumer providing free feedback to providers. Bloglines has announced that it will be picking up all blogs containing the words Bloglines and freedbacking, so let's see if this works.

Standards 2

2006-08-09T11:07:00.000+01:00

In my recent post on Standards, I said that "while there is a lot of debate about individual standards, or the choice between apparent alternatives, there is little rigorous debate about standardization as a whole".

So I was happy to see the announcement (via John Gøtze) of the latest issue of MIS Quarterly, a Special Issue on Standards-Making, guest-edited by Kalle Lyttinen and John Leslie King.

"The introductory article by the editors Kalle Lyytinen and John Leslie King, Standard Making: A Critical Research Frontier For Information Systems Research, is freely available, as are abstracts for all articles, but you need access to a research database to get online access to full-text articles."

I have known (and been impressed by) Kalle for many years, and I am delighted to see the latest product of his researches. But I infer from his article that rigorous debate is going to be limited to those who can master a range of interacting intellectual disciplines, including some difficult areas of economics and sociology, as well as the technological aspects.

So we are still a long way from having decent answers to the questions I posed earlier.

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