IT Journeyman

Got rocks in their head

2011-12-23T00:55:00.000-08:00

News today that the Nokia Lumia is barely selling shouldn't really come as a surprise. Supposedly for every 1 Lumia sold there are 100 Samsung Galaxy S2's sold. No matter what your thoughts on Windows Phone 7 (I'm fairly neutral on the platform) the fact that Nokia seem to think that people will pay as much, and indeed perhaps even more, for an unknown proposition that an iPhone 4S or Galaxy S2 tells you that the people in Espoo nead a reality check. And soon.

MS Office for the iPad 2

2011-12-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

More thoughts on the topic:

If MS had confidence in their Windows 8 tablet strategy surely they'd hold out the port of MS Office for their own kit. Wouldn't it be the definitive tablet killer app? Maybe, maybe not.

It would be the first time that MS were producing a major product for a platform they didn't control (yes I know that office for mac has been available for years - but it hardly counts). Scary new territory.

Wot no e-mail?

2011-12-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

On this day when the Entente Cordiale (sp?) definitely took a hit on the chin let me do my bit for Anglo - French relations by praising a French leader. No not sulky Sarky - who more than likely won't survive his bid for re-election in 2012 - but Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, who has decided to phase out internal e-mail over the next 18 months. Inspired leadership.

MS Office for the iPad

2011-12-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

A few posts back I speculated as to whether Miscrosoft would bring Office to the iPad. According to recent tech news Microsoft is indeed in the process of porting its Office suite onto the iPad. If true this is an interesting development. You would have thought that such a move was counter productive given that it could hold off and port Office directly onto the Windows 8 platform for both PC and tablets.

I wonder if they'll get round to doing an Android port?

You can't be sirious!

2011-12-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

When Siri was launched at the iPhone 4S product launch it was dismissed by both Andy Rubin of Google and Craig Mundie of Microsoft. The initial dismissal was along the lines of "people don't like talking to phones" which seams a bizarre statement when you think about it.

Now Microsoft seems to have rethought its objections and is now running a series of TV commercials about the voice integration that currently is in place in the Xbox 360.

I'm not going to get into the semantics of Voice Control versus quasi artificial intelligence but Micrsoft's lame TV commercials really don't do anything to help their case.

Size Matters 2

2011-12-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

In a tech interview the late Steve Jobs indicated that Apple had done a whole lot of research on optimal screen sizes before launching the iPhone and iPad devices. As per my previous post I don't think that there is much debate that 3.5" - 4" appears to be the optimal size for a mobile screen.

The debate for tablets, however, seems unresolved with devices between 5" and 10" being launched at various times over the last two years. To anyone following the tablet market it comes as no surpirse to realise that Archos, Dell, Blackberry and others have had no luck with the smaller form factors between 5" - 7". Indeed Amazon's much lauded 7" Kindle Fire has recently come in for some poor reviews to do with poor browsing experience among other complaints. So does this mean that anything short of Apple's 9.7" is inadequate? Well I don't think so and it wouldn't surprise me to see a 7.8" iPad3 - Apple has allegedly order a large number of these screens - released next year complimenting the existing form factor.

Why? Well rumours are that the 7.8" screen was a very close second to the 9.7" screen that Apple launched the iPad with. Also if you think back to the days when a lot of pressure was brought to bear upon Apple to enter the netbook market Apple actually responded with an 11" Macbook Air despite Job's earlier statements that anyting under their existing Macbook range of 13" screens was sub optimal. Anyone like me who previouly owned a late, great 12" iBook or PowerBook would realise the flaw in that statement.

Size Matters

2011-12-07T07:36:00.001-08:00

There was a time when manufacturers were pulling their hair out trying to make mobile phones smaller. Handsets like the Ericsson GH 337, Nokia 8210 were noteble for being the smallest handsets on the market when they were released.

With a new smartphone form factor established by the iPhone and followed by a horde of iClones that trend appears to be somewhat in reverse. Indeed many Android handsets are now being launched with screen sizes between 4" and 5", trumping the iPhone's screen which has remained unchanged at 3.5" since launch.

Recent reports that Apple has secured the supply of a large number of 4" screens has led to speculation that the iPhone 5, when it arrives next year will be bigger than it's predecessors. Will that be the case? Well I believe the answer is yes and no and here's my rationale.

Take a ruler to you current iPhone and measure the 3.5" screen diagonally. Now stretch that screen size by an extra half inch and its easy to see that a 4" screen could easily be fitted into the current form factor of the iPhone without compromising much. Effectively we'd lose some of the banner at the top (which houses the speaker) and/or the bottom (which houses the home button). Whatever happens I'm pretty sure that the mechanical home button - a component of questionable durability - will not find a place on the iPhone 5. Indeed there has even been speculation that the button will disappear totally. I'll leave Jony Ives and his team to do the rest.

And my new phone is ....

2011-11-22T06:41:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I speculated that when the time came to replace my trusty old iPhone 3GS I might well consider an Android handset. I like iOS but the allure of a new toy that does everything the same as my iPhone at a premium price might just tempt me away from Cupertino's finest. Lo and behold I have now chosen my new handset for the next couple of years of mobile service and it is ... my trusty old iPhone 3GS running iOS 5. So what gives?

Well after two years of reliable service my phone is still pretty much like new. I've upgraded two major iterations of the operating system and everything still runs and performs fine. Best of all since Apple are still selling the 3GS new it's going to be supported for at least another year or two. So go figure droidheads, do you think that you'll get 3+ years of service from your latest IceCream Sandwich munching device? No, I thought not

Behind the times

2011-11-21T06:46:00.001-08:00

I love technology but hate the way that it is highlighted and reported on the news. Here's an example. Back in June this year I wrote a blog about the smartphone being the ultimate convergence device. Low and behold the BBC's technology flagship show - Click - just ran a story about the same thing. Only true to form they sat on the fence when it came to the sum up. Typical.

Show me the money!

2011-11-21T06:36:00.000-08:00

I'm no Donald Trump, Alan Sugar or even a Jerry McGuire for sure but here's a fact that might just shock you. Sony have made a loss on every single television it has sold in the last seven years. This means that the best way to do harm to them as a company is to buy a TV from them.

So is this an isolated practice? Let's look at some others:

- Amazon are subsidising every Kindle Fire sold to the tune of $50. This kind of makes more sense when you understand that the kindle is a mobile portal to the Amazon shopfront. Nonetheless the fact remains that if it were priced with a reasonable profit margin it would most likely cost another $150 more. How would you feel paying $350 for a Kindle Fire? It doesn't look so tempting now.

- Google have not made a cent out of Android. Again Android is a loss leader (well a giveaway, actually) in order to ensure that the google advertising revenue stream is retained in the mobile world.

In this world of artificial stock market valuations, ipo's, market shares it's worth actually stopping once and a while to figure out that companies have to make money to survive and invest. And the only company I can think of that genuinely does this is Apple. I can't imagine Apple running a product for seven months at a loss, never mind seven quarters or seven years.

Every now and again it'll launch a device that doesn't meet expectations. Remember the iPod Hi-Fi and the G4 cube. However when these misses occur as a company it is ruthless in cutting its losses and focussing on products that are doing well. And that's just as it should be. Loss leaders and market share grabs are fine but somewhere down the somebody needs to show the money .. or else what's the point?

Flash in the pan

2011-11-09T03:42:00.000-08:00

For the last couple of years one of the supposed advantages Android holds over iOS has been its support for Adobe's Flash Player. The argument being that if you want the full web experience iOS just doesn't cut the mustard. The fact that devices that block flash have noticeably better battery life never gets much coverage.

Personally I've never missed flash on my iOS devices, indeed I've even installed a Flash blocker add-on to Firefox on my work laptop. Still this doesn't stop the Flash argument being trotted out every now and again. I wonder how that's going to sound in the future now that Adobe themselve seem to have given up on Flash in favour of HTML5.

Perhaps Steve Jobs was right after all in his open letter on the subject.

iPhone 5

2011-11-07T06:12:00.001-08:00

Earlier in the year I speculated as to whether we would see an iPhone 5 or a 4S. That question has now been answered and my hunch that we'd see the former was wrong. I also speculated that we might see an iPhone Nano or cheap iPhone. Again I was wrong. But the most interesting thing is that the iPhone 3GS which is now occupying the low end of the iPhone market is selling like hotcakes in the us *(if AT&T's figures are to be believed).

So droidheads ... I dare you to name a 2 year old Android hansdet that is comfortably running the latest OS and will be supported for at least another 2 years (the lifespan of contracts currently being sold). My 3GS is still going strong and second hand values are still good. As I've previously stated in posts about Mac ownserhip - the upfront costs may seem higher but as a total cost of ownership Apple gadgets are heard to beat.

Two trick pony

2011-11-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

I've had the misfortune to be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2010. IMO it's a horrible piece of bloatware that tells you all you need to know about what's gone wrong at Microsoft. It somehow manages to muck up the casual and power user experience - which let's face it is no mean feat. However, what it does have on it's side is legacy, legacy more legacy.

If we accept for a moment that we're about to begin a journey in the the brave new Post PC world then we have to accpept that one of Microsoft's two big ticket items - Windows - will also wither on the vine. This will place extra pressure on the Office suite of products. So my question today is how long will Microsoft resist writing a native port of Office for the iPad?

One trick pony

2011-11-07T05:16:00.000-08:00

Some people think that Google is a technology company. Some think that it's a search company. The truth is that it's neither. Google is the worlds most successful advertising company and the vast majority of its profits comes from just two products, AdWords and AdSense. All the rest - Maps, Streetview, Earth, Books, Docs, Android, Chrome, Picasa, TV, YouTube, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc is belly button fluff.

Google acquired Android as a defensive strategy to cover the bases and be able to offer advertising revenues from mobile search. In doing this we're led to believe that Eric Schmidt double-crossed the Apple Board and Steve Jobs. How do Apple respond? Litigation yes, but also product acquisituion. Siri for voice cuts Google out of the search equations and C3 3D maps will cut Google Maps from iOS.

Apple's blanket refusal to negotiate its iPhone/iPad intellectual property and patents to Android maybe high risk but if it comes off we may be wondering where Google will be in ten years time.

The Post PC era

2011-11-07T04:52:00.000-08:00

If you read back in this blog you will understand that whilst many people initially dismissed the iPad as a glorified iPhone without the phone, I predicted that it would be a hit. I now believe that iPad (or tablet computer) is primed to replace the PC as the default tool of choice by the information based workforce.

Why? Because for many employees a tablet, whether iOS or Android based, will meet most of the functions they now use their desktops,laptops and blackberrys for. Email, word processing, spreadsheets, voice & video conferencing, BI dashboards and reporting consumption, web enabled data entry, etc. can all now be done using an iPad style device. The tablet is also poised to become a collaboration device in the way that the PC and even laptop can't. More than that I believe that iOS will win out over Android.

Can you imagine software using NFC and SIRI to record attendance, minutes and actions of a meeting and then automatically update time recording/project tracking software of its occurence and cost. I can.

So here's what I'd be doing (and I have suggested this to my CIO).

1. Read the following http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/02/07/i-want-my-ipad-avoiding-it-consumerization-pitfalls/

2. Stop handing out Blackberry's. They are the dead man walking of the mobile industry.
3. Put your Windows 7 upgrade plans on hold whilst you evaluate a mobile migration.
4. Pick your mobile os of choice. Yes folks - It's just like the Windows vs OS/2 argument again. iOS or Android. My money is on iOS as it is more secure, less fragmented and Apple will most likely win the current round of patent wars.
5. Incentivise and support a pilot program of your chosen Mobile OS.
6. Encourage employee's to BYOD's to work.
7. Evaluate Mobile BI offerings.
8. Investigate a custom mobile development strategy. The question remains whether you want to develop generic HTML5 WebApps or dedicated native apps (Objective C for iOS or Java for Android)

The Network is the Computer 2

2011-11-07T04:26:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post I extolled my beliefs from 1997 that the Network Computer would be big. Of course it flopped and the PC carried on as the main business tool of choice but one of the revelations from Steve Jobs biography is that the iMac that Apple launched in 1998 upon Steve Jobs return to the company was originally intended to be a Network Computer. It's not surprising that given the closeness between Larry Ellison, the NC's father, and Steve Jobs and their shared ambition to take a chunk out of Microsoft that they will have discussed such things and shared ideas.

Of course the price of PC's plummeted and undercut the savings of the NC. So whilst I may have been wrong in my beliefs at least I was wrong in good company - namely Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

Technology meets Liberal Arts

2011-11-07T03:40:00.000-08:00

Anyone who studies the origins of the Qwerty keyboard will get the irony that they key layout was designed not for humans but for machine limitations of early physical typrewriter (i.e. to reduce interference between the 'typebars').

I've always felt that Apple might have attempted to change this legacy by coming up with an ingenious new way of interacting with a computer via a new sort of keyboard. And in a way they have - but not as I was envisaged. Note that as I've already stated in previous post I'm not suggesting that Apple have invented anything new here. Apple's strength is not innovation but lies in picking up available technologies, usually poorly implemented, and hitting the sweet spot of user adoption which Jobs described as the intersection between Technology and Liberal Arts.

This happened with the original Apple PC's (Keybaord/screen), then with the first Mac's (Mouse/GUI) then the iPhone/iPad (touch) and now Siri (voice). Let's just think about that for a moment. At the intersection of every one of these user interaction is Apple. That's an amazing track record.

So what's next - my money would be on thought interaction - but that's a long way off I guess. Will Apple still be there. I guess that will depend upon just how much Steve Jobs did or didn't control everything at Infinite Loop.

And now the end is near

2011-11-07T03:12:00.000-08:00

I've somehow managed to avoid owning a Blackberry all of my career ... until now that is. My current employer is still in the slightly delusional belief that Blackberry's are an essential corporate tool. So I now carry a brand spanking new Bold 9780 in addition to my personal iPhone 3GS which is still going strong.

I expected that there would be pros and cons between the two devices but I just can't get over just how bad the Blackberry is. Nothing is intuitive and the screen is truly awful. Indeed the one thing that should be great, and what Blackberry are reknowned for, is the keyboard. However, even that is crap. My old Palm Treo had a much better physical keyboard.

So if RIM can't make a great smartphone, can't make a decent touchscreen phone, can't make a decent tablet, can't keep their back end servers running then what can they do?

I guess not much - and judging by the latest reports (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/rim_market_value/) the market tends to hold that view also.

Calling Mr Ford, again!

2011-06-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

In the past I’ve made mention of my admiration for what Henry Ford did for manufacturing with the introduction of the production line. I’ve long been convinced that this sort of rationalisation of IT is overdue.

My question today is about infrastructure, hardware and software environments. An inordinate amount of time goes into the design, build and maintenance of these environments. Virtualisation, in theory should make this process easier but as always technology cannot fix what is essentially not a technology issues.

When I worked for a large investment bank they had a novel approach to this. They would size the production server and then buy six identical servers. These identically built boxes would cover the DEV, TEST, UAT, PROD, Failover and DR servers. This was an elegant but expensive solution to the problem.

My question today is why we cannot do something automatic with server offerings like Oracle Exadata. If you’re listening Larry why don’t you offer me a box where I enter some simple performance and sizing metrics, install a single pilot environment and then flick a switch and have my 3/4/5 or six identical environments built.

Come to think of it automated version control software migration would be nice. Now I am really dreaming.

An O/S too far

2011-06-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

For a long time I’ve believed that desktop operating systems are too complex and hampered by a legacy of DOS or UNIX underlying technology. I include in this assessment Mac OSX, Linux and Windows. A hundred odd thousand files just to manage and PC operating system just seems excessive to me.

Therefore I am interested by the recently released Google Chromebooks. Interested but not convinced. Whilst I would love to adopt a simple network based, dare I say cloud based, computer I’m just not sure that wifi and 3G services are reliable enough yet.

I am also perplexed by Google’s mixed messages on Android and Chrome OS's. When the iPad was released there was a lot of speculation that there just wasn’t space in the market for a new class of device. Maybe this will be true of the Chromebooks. Time will tell, but for now I’m not tempted to buy a network handicapped netbook clone.

Maybe that's why Google are keeping it all very much low key!

When September Comes

2011-06-29T06:42:00.001-07:00

It’s no secret, if you've read this blog, that I am a fan of the Cupertino based company, together with their inspirational CEO. I love the design of their products and the simplicity of their product range. At home I choose to use a Mac and I also own an iPhone and an iPad.

Does this make me an Apple fanboi. Probably. Am I embarrassed about that fact. Definitely as I'm wasy too uncool. Fanboi for life though? Well no I don’t think so.

My current phone, a 3GS, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Time will tell whether iOS 5 cripples it but even so it is two years old. Therefore I will watch to see what Septembers iPhone announcement brings but just in case Apple disappoints there are certainly plenty of alternatives out there.

One friend, who I still think secretly harbours a grudge about the iPod killing off the MiniDisc, has recently got a Nexus S. Whilst it may not be superior to an iPhone 4 it is certainly close enough and came on a very attractive plan. Another friend has ditched his iPhone 4 and is raving about his new Samsung Galaxy S 2. I must admit it looks good and he is really enjoying the ‘freedom’ offered by Android over the closed shop that is iOS. Another friend is even raving about his Windows Phone 7 device so maybe when Nokia bring out some new hardware that may be worth a look.

I must admit that there are times when I’ve even been tempted by low end smaller 3.2” screen Android handsets like the HTC Legend and Wildfire or even the HP/Palm Pre. The long and the short of it is that there is a lot riding for Apple when September comes.

iPhone 5 & iPhone Nano

2011-06-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

The iPhone 5/4GS rumour mill is well and truly alive and most of the debate centres on whether this year update will be an iPhone 4S (i.e. a speed bumped iPhone 4) or whether we will see an entirely new model (i.e. the iPhone 5). There is also some speculation that we might see two new models – an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 5 Nano.

I don’t think it will be the first option. The Android market changes so quickly with new and better phones being released by the week and deals that undercut the iPhone. Apple cannot rest on their laurels and it is not in there nature to do so. The iPhone 3 to 3GS upgrade happened whilst there was a lot of activity in the original iPad. There are no such excuses this last year. Besides what have the iPhone hardware designers/engineers been doing for the last 12 months? The software guys have been busy with iOS5.

So will it be the second option or the third options? Who can say but what is clear is that Cupertino must offer a mobile device at a price point to be competitive with reasonably specified Android devices. Failure to do this will see them lose the battle like the original mac did to the PC.

The ultimate iPad?

2011-06-29T05:32:00.001-07:00

I have owned my iPad (first gen 32Gb wifi) for over a year now. By coincidence I just happened to be in San Francisco on launch day and just couldn’t resist getting one. I predicted that they would be a massive hit and so far they have been.

How is it bearing up? Well to be honest it has been a mixed bag. Part of the original justification for purchasing the device was for my wife to use it surfing the web and to avoid scalding her lap but also the long battery life would be a distinct advantage. In reality this benefit was never realised because she still prefers to use the laptop for web surfing. I have to say that I agree with her.

Browsing the web - Don’t tell Steve Jobs but the truth is that surfing the web on an iPad is a bit of a disappointment. I often hit links by mistake or whilst trying to pinch or scroll. This tells that either the device, or my finger, isn’t optimal or precise enough for web surfing. Roughly translated I imagine Cupertino speak for this would be ‘website design has some way to go to be great on a touchscreen device’ but that’s another point. And don’t get me started on Flash because in this case I’m with Jobsy here. The fact that RIM is heavily promoting Flash compatibility on the Playbook just shows how far off the mark they are. Anyway, here’s a rundown feature by feature.

Battery life – is outstanding. Nothing more to say.

Perfromance – I’ve never had any CPU or memory related issues so again all is good. Wifi performance has been poor compared to my laptop on the same network though.

Screen – Despite not matching the ‘retina display’ resolution of the iPhone 4 it is still great. The colours are vibrant for watching movies and playing games. The retina display is rumoured for the iPad3.

Camera - I bought my iPad with my eyes wide open knowing that a camara equipped version (iPad2) would be waiting in the wings. In fact I could never understand at the time why the original iPad didn’t have one. We now know that it was because of graphics limitations with the A4 chip which are now resolved with the A5 successor. Anyway, this is now resolved.

USB/SD Card – Being locked down by iOS to iTunes is part and parcel of the new paradigm of mobile operating systems. This will change to the new iCloud services later. Should we need a file explorer in the 21st Century. I would like to see an inbuilt SD card reader though in the next device.

Keyboard – The iPad’s virtual keyboard is surprisingly decent for typing but I remain confused as to the position of some of the more obscure keys every now and again. The lack of a numbers on the front screen is painful as they are often required for passwords. I ended up purchasing a Bluetooth keyboard which I use when typing on the iPad for any duration.

Design – Both the original iPad and the successor, iPad2 look a cut above any other tablet out there. Top marks to Jonny and the team.

Case – My official Apple rubber/neoprene case hasn’t aged well. It still does the job but looks tatty and I have to remove it when placing the iPad in a dock stand. All resolved with iPad2 and smartcovers.

Apps – Like the iPhone I’m still a bit perplexed by hundreds of thousands of iOS apps. Yes I have a few dozen but as ever these appear to be more about marketing than actual use.

Conclusion – so what more is there to say. The original iPad has been a runaway hit and the iPad2 fixes some of the first gen issues. The inclusion of a USB/SD card port might be my only bugbear but I could fix that if I forked out for the adapter.

The fact that we still prefer to use a laptop at home for web surfing and the fact that I often use a keyboard with my iPad however leads me to think that perhaps the ultimate iPad won’t be the iPad3. If Steve can lower the pricepoint of the next Macbook Air it might just be that.

Travel Happy

2011-06-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald there is an article discussing the relative merits of the iPad as a travel gadget. Of course the iPad was used as a hook and the comments descended into the usual pro/anti Apple rant.

I have previously discussed the merits of the iPhone as a convergence device but many of the same points apply to the iPad. After all it is just a big iPhone without the phone, isn’t it?

To recap my previous post: A few years ago I was used to lug away on holiday a mobile phone, iPod, PSP, DSLR, camcorder, point and shoot digital camera and occasionally a laptop with all the respective cables and power supplies. I resisted from adding a portable dvd player to this collection. After I got an iPhone I decided to gradually phase out all these devices with the exception of my DSLR.

I now travel on holiday with a combination of iPhone, iPad and DSLR. My phone generally stays switched off. There are obvious advantages of this approach in reduced weight and cost. Also I only need to carry a single charger (my SLR is AAA battery powered) and I invested in an Apple video display cable to which displays the iPhone/iPad video onto hotel TV’s.

As always with convergence devices there are compromises to be made. The pros - iPad battery life, screen quality and build are excellent. The cons - the keyboard is adequate for most tasks but surfing the internet I find inferior compared to the precision of a mouse. Maybe website design just needs to evolve to better satisfy mobile touch screen devices. I also refuse to pay for an SD-card reader that really should be built in as standard.

Am I an Apple fan. I suppose the answer is qualified yes but I’d happily consider the respective Android alternatives out there when the time comes to replace my iPhone and iPad. To avoid vendor lock-in I have so far resisted purchasing content from iTunes and have only paid for a small number of iPhone/iPad apps.

The only device of genuine interest to me remains the Kindle. The iPad is NOT a great eReader. Now only if Amazon would start selling eBooks as cheaply as paper ones.

Is that a computer in your pocket or are you .....

2011-02-01T18:13:00.000-08:00

One of my New Years Resolutions was to use Facebook a bit more. My wife is a facebook junkie and whiles hours away on it sat in front of the TV. I just don't get it but each to their own. Having started to use Facebook a bit more my question for today is where is facebook's strategy for tablet computers. The mobile app is fine but is a cut down version of the browser experience so why no app for the iPad for example.

I was intrigued at Mark Zuckerberg's definition of mobile technology at their recent Mobile press event which simply failed in any way to acknowledge the tablet computer as a mobile device. So according to him PC's and smartphones are important but tablets are not.

Link that back to Steve Ballmer's quotes recently about everything being a PC (including tablets and smartphones) thereby all being candidates for Windows (God forbid) and also the recently cleared up confusion from Google about where Chrome and Android sit and we can see that the Cupertino tablet has really caught the competition on the back foot. It seems to me that Job's vision and strategy is the only complete one on the market today.

So back to Facebook. Not only should people be asking why there's no app for the iPad but more importantly is where is the Facephone or FacePad.

Is Mark Zuckerberg a genius?

2010-11-22T18:38:00.000-08:00

I recently saw David Fincher's movie The Social Network and enjoyed the movie immensely. The question I feel that the movie didn't (and perhaps couldn't) answer was the title of this blog.

According to the movie the evidence for:

He turned down $2m from Microsoft for some music play-list software
He was at Harvard in the first place
He wrote Facemash in one night - when drunk!
He's the CEO of one of the most influential start-ups in Silicon Valley history

The evidence against:

He allegedly stole the idea for Facebook

The movie seems to suggest that because he was socially inept and a good hacker that he's a genius. Is that enough? Whatever the truth of the matter the fact remains that he is at the helm of one of the hottest companies in the world whilst still in his twenties. If not a genius then that is evidence of some exceptional talents. Genius or not? I'd say it doesn't really matter after the first billion.

Why do people hate Skyline?

2010-11-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

I saw Skyline a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was quite surprised to see the scathing reviews from critics and moviegoers alike.

OK the script isn't great but neither was it that bad either. The cast and characters were OK too but I found the story, direction and effects all above average. IMDB rates this movie at 4.7 (based upon 4000 ratings) when I last checked but I'd score it somewhere in the 7.xs and I'm a pretty harsh movie critic.

So why the discrepancy? Well maybe I had an off day and just enjoyed a crap movie too much, but the doubt at the back of my mind I suspect that there is something more sinister at work here.

It turns out that the Brothers Strausse (silly name I know) effects company Hydraulx Filmz is contracted to work on Sony's big budget alien invasion movie Battle: Los Angeles due for release in early 2011 and that the Strausse Brothers didn't declare their involvement in Skyline to Sony. From what I gather Sony wanted Skyline pulled until after the release of their film. All in all it sounds a bit hypocritical of Sony to me given the acknowledged dirty tricks they've employed in the past

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4741259.stm

but hey I wouldn't want to get on their bad side. Whatever the truth of the situation I figure that Skyline is a pretty good movie and when the budget is factored in it becomes a pretty amazing movie. Count me in for Skyline 2. And as for poor old Sony - don't worry - the trailers for Battle: Los Angeles look great too so I'm in for that movie too.

RED One

2010-11-22T18:03:00.001-08:00

I don't get the opportunity to go the cinema as often as I'd like so it's a minor miracle I've managed to see two movies over the last couple of weekends. One has been savaged by the critics and the other lauded. The tenuous connection between the movies - they were both shot digitally using RED One cameras.

The first is a sci-fi flick called 'Skyline' which has been savaged by critics and user reviews alike. The question I'm wondering is why? OK the script is a bit hammy here and there but I thought the cast, story, direction and special effects were all fine, even dare I say it good. There's no doubt that the film plagiarizes elements of a whole bunch of other sci-fi movies (War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, Independence Day in particular and to a lesser degree The Matrix and Predator) but then what alien invasion movie doesn't owe something to H.G. Wells original story War of the Worlds? Aside from The Matrix I enjoyed this film more than the others listed above and I think it's the movie that Cloverfield should have been. So why the scathing reviews? Maybe that's a question for Sony and the subject of another post.

The other interesting aspect is that this move allegedly cost $10-15m to make and that included 1000 effects shots. That's amazing as to me it looks like an $80-100m movie. Given that I'm currently working on a $10.5m IT project I find it amazing that a film that looks as good as Skyline can be made for the same money.

Best Scene: When the F22-Raptor takes out an alien.

Best Quote: Well there aren't any!

The second movie is 'The Social Network' and certainly nobody is complaining about Aaron Sorkin's wonderful script, David Fincher's direction of the fantastic cast. I found the movie interesting on a number of levels but mainly in its portrayal of life in a US Ivy League University (Harvard) - they have groupies? - and to a lesser extent the evolution of a tech startup in Palo Alto. What I felt the film didn't really address is a question that's burning in tech circles right now. Is Mark Zukerberg a genius or was he just lucky? Again that's a question for another post.

Best Scene: The Henley Rowing Montage

Best Quote:

Gage: Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?
Mark Zuckerberg: [stares out the window] No.
Gage: Do you think I deserve it?
Mark Zuckerberg: [looks at the lawyer] What?
Gage: Do you think I deserve your full attention?
Mark Zuckerberg: I had to swear an oath before we began this deposition, and I don't want to perjure myself, so I have a legal obligation to say no.
Gage: Okay - no. You don't think I deserve your attention.
Mark Zuckerberg: I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.
[pauses]
Mark Zuckerberg: Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

And the award goes to .... The Hurt Locker

2010-03-23T00:17:00.001-07:00

OK I know the Oscars are long finished but I just saw 'The Hurt Locker' at the weekend and I've wanted to tie it into a post for ages.

My two cents worth - I desperately wanted 'The Hurt Locker' to be a worthy winner of six oscars, especially as it won out over 'Avatar'. However, I was disappointed. Whilst it is a good film, it certainly isn't a great one. Best Film and Best Director - I don't think so. But this just reaffirms what I've always believed about luck and timing playing their part in awards ceremonies.

At my last ever Oracle Consulting conference I was led to believe by my Practice Manager that the project team I had lead was up for an Outstanding Performance Award. We had just finished a difficult 4 month project that was a great success. The client was happy and referenceable, the systems integrator couldn't praise us highly enough and was lining us up for more work. And we had achieved all of this with the minimum of fuss. OK, we'd worked a few weekends and late nights but nothing out of the ordinary.

So there I sat at the dinner at the final night of the conference fully expecting my team to be one of those to pick up an award. You guessed it though - we didn't even get a mention. I have to admit I was desperately pee'd off. The project that claimed the prize we'd been promised, by contrast, had been classic car crash IT. Badly managed, poor quality, late, over budget, all hands to the pumps, client threats, the whole lot. Some hours later my Practice Manager came skulking over with some lame explanation that the award was given as recognition for all the 'above and beyond' efforts put in by the other project team.

So my advice to you. If you want to win awards and get recognition go ahead and fcuk up your project and then flog your staff for 18 hours a day to correct your mistakes. Don't, whatever you do, just run a successful project without drama. I left Oracle a few months after that and the irony was that I got a posthumous award for another penultimate project I'd been on. Too little, too late.

Cheap at half the price

2010-03-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

Here at the Depatment of Hopes and Dreams we're having a lovely spat with one of our software vendors at present. The issue is that my boss is questioning the need to pay a quarter of a million dollars in annual maintenance fees when he believes we only use about $40,000 worth of the product.

The interesting thing is that the software supplier has recalcuted the maintenance bill twice now using different breakdown structures. Both breakdowns don't help clarify exactly what it is that we're paying for. In fact the only figure that remains the same is the invoice amount - $250,000. Funny that.

The wider question is that once you've implemented something and it is successfully bedded in why bother paying maintenance ever again? The software vendor will say that you're our of support and that you original software licence will be revoked but if you do the cost benefit anaylsis you might find witholding the maintenance over say 5 years might pay for the replacement software further down the line. By that time the software might be half the price anyway. It's certainly worth some consideration.

How much should you pay for software?

2010-03-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

I've always had a problem paying lots of money for software, which is odd when you think about it. I'll happily pay for hardware, or to see a movie or to listen to a CD. In fact, the only software I think I pay without much hesitation is a computer game.

Out of the twenty or so apps I've downloaded onto my iPhone the only paid one is the very successful game Flight Control which cost me the princely sum of $1.19.

So at Oracle I was working with a sales rep who was trying to land a $10m deal with a large australian multinational company for a global license I was surpised, given that this account made up about one third of his territory, that he was chasing a deal that would probably limit what he could sell in future years.

We had a discussion about what software was worth and it was illuminating to me. As he pointed out - to him the software was worth the cost of the CD - a few cents and nothing more.

The funny thing is that a few years earlier I worked for a mainframe software house who when the annual results we're due and the numbers looked bad had a dodgy practice of cutting a few tapes bunging them in a storage cupboard and reporting the software as millions worth of assets. (They were later censured by the Stock Exchange for this practice).

I guess the old marketing saying is true - something is only worth what somebody else is prepared to pay for it.

Big time Brits to whom Apple are indebted

2010-03-18T22:19:00.001-07:00

In a previous post I spoke of my amazement at how the UK was the engine of innovation during the industrial revolution. Whilst the UK is no longer the powerhouse it used to be we still probably punch above our weight in certain fields given the we make up 1 in a thousand inhabitants of Planet Earth.

In this post I just wanted to pay tribute to two world renowned Brits who both have connections with Apple and with where I hail from in the UK. One who was born twenty miles away from my hometown and the other studied at Uni some 14 miles away.

They are Ridley Scott (born in South Shields) and Jonathan Ive (who studied at Newcastle Polytechnic). The Jony Ive connection with Apple is obvious as he is their SVP of Design.

The other connection is that Ridley Scott directed the Apple's '1984 Big Brother' Superbowl commercial that is still regarded nearly twenty years after its broadcast as one of the most iconic and important commercials ever made.

The question I'm asking is where are Microsoft's or Google's Brit, and indeed North East, connection?

Who would play Bill Gates in the movies?

2010-03-18T21:01:00.001-07:00

I loved the movie 'Wargames' starring Matthew Broderick and always felt that the erratic and reclusive computer genius, Professor Falken, was loosly based upon Steve Jobs. I had much less time for the film 'Verical Limit' although the ruthless & driven US billionaire character in it reminded me very much of Larry Ellison.

The funny thing is that I've never seen a cinematic incarnation of Bill Gates portrayed on the silver screen. I suppose that this is something to do with a perceived lack of charisma. I don't pity Bill, however, as no matter what your thoughts on Microsoft's innovation, style or business practices he and his company have been hugely influential for the last 20 years.

People who try to ridicule him for the infamous quite about 640K of RAM or the failed Tablet PC just don't seem to get that he is probably the most successful opportunist who has ever lived.

The Beast in the East

2010-03-18T20:55:00.000-07:00

The other night I was watching a TV show about Rivers (the BBC one with Gryff Rhys Jones) and apart from admiring the beautiful scenery a recurring point of the show is that rivers and canals were the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution, much in the way that roads were in the 20th Century and copper (for broadband) is in the Information Age. As such innovation flourised along these waterways. Indeed, something that always amazes me is just how much innovation sprang from the small island of my birth - the UK - and this is where the US picked up the during the early 20th Century.

The other day I was having a discussion at lunch with a friend who is an senior australian academic and the I questioned whether any of the emerging economic powers, namely India or China, was poised to pick up the innovation chalice from the US. For the record he has travelled and dealt with major research organisations in both the US and China. His answer was categoric and a little bit worrying.

Within a generation he believes that China will be the only engine of innovation that matters, something far removed from its current role as the world's factory. This makes me wonder what will become of Silicon Valley in twenty or thirty years time and I suppose bring the current spat between the US, Google and China into some perpective.

Monkey See Monkey Do

2010-03-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

I remember seeing a Rodney Dangerfield film in the 1990's which was pretty much forgettable except for one scene. The scene was set in a typical university ampitheatre with a lecturer and say 200 students. Over time as the weeks passed many of the students opted to skip the lectures but record them on a tape recorders, until finally even the lecturer himself failed to show and simply played an audio recording of the lecture to the non existant students.

So what's the connection with IT. I worked with some Oracle PreSales in the 1990's. They were always a pretty busy bunch responding to RFI/RFP's and doing demos. At the time Oracle has a graduate recruitment program and one of the grads I knew was on secondment to PreSales.

Chatting one day I asked what she was doing and she said that she was responding to an Oracle Financials RFP. I was impressed, actually more baffled, that given their lack of experience that they were entrusted with this work that would normally be entrusted to a senior Financials PreSales resource. Digging a bit deeper the answer became obvious. I found out that the grad was pretty much cutting and pasting answers from previous RFP responses into the new one.

How could they do this? Easily, really, becuase the RFP's at the time we being generated by grads sitting in the Big Six consultancies and contained a random subset of the stock RFP Financials questions they had.

The difference is that our grads were working for free (chasing new business). Somehow I don't think that the client would be paying the Big Six consultancy grad rates for their RFP work.

Stuff I'd like to see in iPhone OS 4

2010-03-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

There's lots of speculation about what's coming down the pipe in iPhone OS 4. Most of this is related to multitasking, which the current lack of I've never had a problem with.

Some minor features I'd like to see though are:

1) Location aware wi-fi setting. Unlike many world cities the wifi coverage here in Sydney, Australia is poor. For that reason I tend to have wifi enabled enabled at home and off when out or at work to improve battery life. This means that every day I toggle wifi on and off on my iPhone. Often I forget and am reminded when wifi asks me to join a new network when I'm using Safari. This is a minor annoyance. It would be great if I could make the toggling on/off of wifi automatic based upon a configurable location setting (using AGPS) to say my home or office locations for trusted networks only. When outside of those locations by say 500 metres it would be nice if wifi automatically switched off.

2) I'd like to see some integration between the Calendar and the Contacts in iPhone OS. For example, if I'm setting up an appointmemnt with my dentist currently I either have to enter a title or location but in reality that information I need for this appointment is already stored in my Contacts. If I could make a new appointment and just select a contact (or multiple contacts) rather than having to type in a title or location this would be great.

I don't pretend that either of these suggestions is radical but it is small eveloutionary steps like them that will keep iPhone OS ahead of the rest of the pack.

As previously stated longer term I'm obviously expecting the smartphone to morph into an identity based device that will integrate with my house and car security. I also fully expect it to morph into a credit/payment device. Long term I'd love for my phone to replace the wallet in my pocket (say within 10 years) but for now I'd be happy with the above.

But you can polish a Turd!

2010-03-14T22:33:00.001-07:00

A old friend of mine frequently uses the phrase "You can't polish a turd". Until this week I believed this to be true until today.

We're four years and $140m into a BPR project that has a major SAP implementation at its heart. The intesting thing is that ten days after Phase 1 go live, and 1,500 related service desk calls later, the message I'm getting in the crucial run up to the end of financial year is that large parts of Finance simply can no longer do their day to day jobs.

Funny that because the SAP Implementation Program Manager's status email today doesn't really correlate with what I'm hearing on the ground.

Oh well. I suppose someone's just found that special way of polishing.

The OS of tomorrow

2010-03-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

In my early days of computing at school, long before the dawn of Windows, most machines (Apple 2's, BBC Micros, Commodoore PETs, etc.) booted up directly into a BASIC interpreter prompt. This meant that you never ever had to interact with the computers operating system which was entirely hidden from view. Then I went to Uni and was introduced to the world of multiuser computer systems and compilers (namely VAX VMS and Pascal). Soon after PC's running MS-DOS and later Windows started landing on our desktops and the rest is history. The only thing is that I'm wondering if we didn't miss a trick here. For nearly twenty years we've been interacting with an Operating System (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) and a hierarchical directory filesystem and the question I'm asking is why?

I suspect that the reason is a legacy hangover. Devices like the Palm Pilot reverted back to the old model of hiding the working of the O/S from public inspection and this trend continues with the likes of iPhone OS, Android and Google Chrome OS. I guess that's one of the reasons why Microsoft are chasing clouds so much at the moment.

The programming language of tomorrow

2010-03-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

One programming language I never used was IBM's PL/1, which stands for Programming Language One. IBM billed this langauge as the only computer language you would ever need to learn. Obviously that never materialised but today's question is why PL/1 or another language has never become dominant?

For the record BASIC was my first programming language and all in all it wasn't a bad introduction. It had all the fundamentals that we still work with today (variables, constants, subroutines, expressions, loops, arrays, inputs, outputs, etc.). Then at Uni I learned Pascal followed by COBOL in the workplace. Since then there have been a plethora of 4GL's and GUI based IDE's and scripting languages have come and gone. The list almost seems endless with the only constant being native SQL.

I want to get back to my computing roots and learn a 3GL like language to start developing software as a hobby, but the choice of languages is bewildering. For example off the top of my head there's C, C++, VB .Net, Java, C#, Javascript, Perl, Python, PHP, iPhone SDK, Android SDK, etc. The list goes on. I suspect that just as the server and database business has rationalised over the last few years we are due for some pruning of computer languages. So long as they are archived for posterity - I'm hoping so anyway.

Where did it all go wrong?

2010-03-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

When asked about losing his fortune soccer legend George Best is quoted as replying "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered". I'd be asking similar question of a company called Palm Inc. right now - only I don't think the answer would be anywhere near as satisfying. Palm's recent results were below market expectations and according to reports they are in the red and burning through their last $500m at the bank.

Back in 1996 Palm introduced a revolutionary low cost PDA device - the Palm Pilot - and it sold like hotcakes. Palm OS was a revelation with its simple and intuitive gui and grafitti was a pretty good stab at handwriting recognition too. The Palm Pilots influence can still be seen in devices like the iPhone today (large screen, no physical keyboard, few physical buttons, downloadable applications, pc syncing, etc). In fact when you think about it the only real difference between the Palm OS and iPhone OS is the replacement of the stylus with multitouch.

Then things started to go wrong for Palm:

- The brains trust left, came back and then and left again.
- The Treo capitulated and added keyboards, aping Blackberry's success, instead of building on the Palm Pilots keyboardless form factor.
- Palm OS stagnated whilst a new Linux based OS churned in development hell. Palm even commited herecy and lisensced Windows Mobile on some of their devices
- The ill-conceived Foleo debacle

The real irony here is that after all the issues related to the stagnation of Palm OS is that they really do seem to have come up with a great successor in WebOS. I might have even been tempted by the Palm Pre it it had been sold here in Australia. I for one hope that Palm can survive and prosper but that seems an unlikely outcome. The best I think we can hope for is that one of the big handset manufacturers becomes disillusioned with Android and buys the company for its IP so that WebOS can live on.

Keep it Simple Stupid or Keep it Stupid Simpleton

2010-03-08T16:55:00.001-08:00

There's an urban myth that says NASA spend millions designing a pen that would work in space whilst the Russians got by with pencils. This is a perfect example of KISS. In reality the pen was developed cheaply by an independent contractor and sold to both NASA and the Soviet Space Agency.This myth and its ilk often used to be quoted when comparing the Cold War forces pitted against each other. By all accounts the MiG 29 is very low tech when compared to the F-15 Eagle for example and there was a time in the 80's when supposedly F-15's were only serviceable every 4 days out of 10 because of their inherent complexity.

This phenomenon has parallels with some of the choices we face in modern day IT. During the internet boom I was engaged bya dotcom to define a server architecture for their new revised classifieds website. The brief was that it needed to be scalable and have a very high availability. I provided the client with three options at the time which were:

- simple - a single highly resilient server with no failover capacity
- moderate - a hardware based failover cluster which required a hardware reboot to failover between nodes
- complex - a hardware/software based load balanced cluster which could handle a gracious soft failover

Being accustomed to having to cost justify these options I fully expected the client to select the simple or moderate solution. To my utter surprise they didn't blink an eyelid as went for the most expensive and complex option. They perceieved that the risk of an unplanned outage was so serious that they would literally spend millions to guard against the risk. They also explained that the sort of kudos they would get in the industry by following the likes of Amazon and announcing an infrastructure purchase in excess of a million dollars would enhance their perceived market valuation pre IPO.

In hindsight, I wish I had never proposed the complex option or that I should have been more vociferous in opposing it. Previously I'd had great success in applying the moderately complex model at previous sites. However, these were heady times and so long as the client understood the risks I was prepared to give it a go. The result, despite all my best efforts, was a disaster. We had severe performance issues from day one and our reliability was worse than it would have been had we picked either of the simpler options. It was humbling for me and a great reminder to me to always apply KISS.

The interesting thing though is that if we don't ever try to stretch ourselves now and again we'd all be building Mig 29's. For the record the F-15 supposedly has a 104 to 0 kill ratio.

The Big Six

2010-03-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

I have previously worked as a Consultant and in both cases they have been for software houses. I always felt that if you were going to pimp out yourself then you might aswell have the inside track and worked for the company that wrote the software. Despite the supposed prestige associated with them I was never ever tempted to work for any of the then so called 'Big Six' (now known as the Final Four) consulting firms as I don't believe that our personalities would have been compatable.

Why? If you had witnessed some of the things I've seen the Big Six get away with you'd understand. Some classics include:

- A 'Big Six' female PM lodging a sexual misconduct complaint against a male client PM who sought to challenge the success of a major project. I can't say whether the complaint had any grounds but it was clear that it would never have seen the light of day had the client PM kept his mouth shut.
- A Big Six firm getting a project I was working on shutdown because we were close to delivering more in 3 months than they had in two years and promising to finish out Project within a month. This one ended up in litigation I'm pleased to say.
- Rigging RFI scoring to pick the most expensive packages to implement rather than those that best fit the client requirements.
- Attending onsite training courses with the client staff and then advising the client on configuration against the advice of the consultant trainers.
- An Big Six 'oracle development practice' that was running around Sydney in the 90's developing applications. Only was that they'd never discovered what an Index was!
- Big Six consultants sitting onsite doing a online SQL training course whilst billing a grand a day.

I'm sure there are lot smore examples out there and I'm not saying that the consultancies I worked for were whiter than white but there's a long way between them and what I've seen of the Big Six.

More jokes at Larry's expense

2010-03-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

Don't get me wrong - I think Oracle are a great company and I enjoyed working for them immensely. It's just that if you're going to work for them you need to develop a pretty thick skin. Besides which I think Larry can weather a joke or two.

So here are the best two jokes that used to do the rounds when I worked at the Big O.

"What do you call an optimistic Oracle Sales Rep?". Somebody who irons five shirts at the start of the week.

"What's the best platform that Oracle runs on?". Powerpoint.

Thin is the new Fat

2010-03-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

Back in the mid 90's and arguably towards the end of the client server period there was a debate still being had on the relative merits of Thin versus Fat Client.

At the time Oracle Apps has just introduced 10SC (a gui fat client) replacing the previous green screen block character interface. I remember one PreSales technical slide from an Oracle Applications presentation in particular extolling the virtues of Fat Client over the three-tier Thin Client model that was used by SAP. The thin client was even given the derogatory label as a 'screenscraper'.

The funny thing is that just a short while later after the IT world had taken the browser to its heart I saw the same Tech PreSales giving the same presentation and giving exactly the opposite message with regard to Thin client after Oracle Apps has adopted the model.

So how do you know when an Oracle PreSales presenter is lying? Probably when their lips are moving.

My Year of Living Dangerously

2010-03-03T15:50:00.000-08:00

For exactly one year I gave up being technical and concentrated on the client relations side of the IT business. I remember the year exactly because FY96 (mid 1995-1996) was possibly the worst year of my professional life. FY96 was going to be Oracle's year of Customer Service.

I was picked out as having the prerequisite soft skills to work as one of twelve ambassadors within the customer base with the aim of improving overall referenceability. I was flattered as it meant reporting to a Director and I saw it as a great opportunity. Ultimately, however, the role came undone because:

- Halfway through the financial year it looked like Oracle Australia wasn't going to make its country numbers. Customer focus was dropped like a hot potato and sales targets re-emerged as the only real measure of success. My Director was given another portfolio related to Support Sales and given targets.
- Support and Sales could never agree on what our role was supposed to be about. Support (my organisation) wanted to us focus on the Tier 1 accounts and Sales wanted us to work as a Tier 3 Account Manager.

The long and the short of it was that whilst it was a poor year for me professionally I did gain a valuable insight into the inner workings of the sales organisation of a very successful software house.

It's easy to write of Salespeople as low, unscrupulous, pond life but that would be a generalisation and incorrect in many cases. The really successfull account managers were smart, driven and hard working. Were they honest? Well that's the 64 million dollar question. I prefer to think that they inhabit a world of greys rather than black and white. After a year of swimming with the sharks let's just say it was a relief to re-enter my technical world again. Binary, after all is pretty much a black and white sort of thing.

What no disk?

2010-03-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

At the tail end of my time working for the big O Larry introduced the Network Computer. From memory it was the talk of the town at Oracle Openworld 1997. I remember being in a client briefing with a senior Oracle Marketing VP telling the client that in two years time they would have replaced their PC's with NC's.

I have to say that I bought into the concept of the NC and so did Sun and IBM (with their respective Javastation and Netstation). I'd recently finished a site visit for a large telco who had basically locked down their SOE PC build so that the PC barely used the local C: drive anyway. The logical extension of this was to produce a computer that would boot directly from the network and store eveything on network drives.

Funnily enough it wasn't any theoretical limitations that did for the NC but more than when it was released the price of PC's dropped from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars undermining any potential cost savings that Network Computers may have introduced. Shame really becuase I still think the idea had legs.

Electic dreams

2010-03-02T21:47:00.000-08:00

The early days of personal computer in the US may have been dominated by the likes of Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80 the Commodore Vic-20 but in the UK there were a number of other suppliers that preceded the days of the IBM PC. These were the likes of the Sinclair, Atom (BBC Micro), and Research Machines (making early CP/M based PC's).

Of these the first computer I ever owned was a second hand Sinclair ZX81 and I wish I had perhaps persevered with it a bit more. My problem was that I had no way of storing any programs I'd written, something at the time which was normally done on cassette tape. This meant that I had to type each and every program in fresh every time and anyone who ever struggled with the ZX81's rubbery keypad would understand just how frustrating this could be and just how limited the results for 20 minutes of typing could be. Having said that I still have fond memories of the old ZX81 and plugging away writing simple BASIC programs.

The most remarkable thing about the machine was it's low cost - about fifty pounds. Just imagine if the personal computer had evolved more along the lines of the ZX81 instead of the expensive beiges boxes costing thousand of dollars than invaded our desktops and homes instead.

In a recent Guardian article it came to light that Sir Clive Sinclair, the UK's personal computing pioneer, does not actually use a PC as he believes that they are wasteful (in memory and CPU cycles), take ages to boot and that he'd rather pick up the phone than communicate via email. Funnily enough these are thoughts I've already expressed in previous entries in this blog.

Anyway, hat's off to Sir Clive. A real thinker and a guenuine innovator.

Madness in the Method

2010-03-02T21:20:00.001-08:00

In the UK there was a famous 80's TV commercial for British Telecom starring Maureen Lipman (http://centuryads.blogspot.com/2007/01/you-got-ology-1987-launch-of-bt-beattie.html). She plays a stereotypical Jewish grandmother who upon discovery that her gransdon has flunked all his exams except Pottery and Sociology replies "He gets an ology and he says he's failed... you get an ology you're a scientist." Maybe, just maybe, Andrew (the grandson) didn't become a scientist but got another ology ... a methodology instead.

This would tie in with how many methodologies are used (and abused?) in today's IT. From what I seen methodologies are used as a crutch by below standard IT consulting organisations/individuals to present a veneer of professional competency and mask the lack of any real ability.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently wrong with a good methodology as far as they go, but don't for one minute believe that an ology will somehow replace common sense, experience and good judgement.

Back to the Future

2010-02-28T21:26:00.000-08:00

Back in the post 'The IT Wars' I referred to an RDBMS war that was fought between Oracle and Ingres. In reality competition in the RDBMS space has always been a little more complex than that.

The Oracle/Ingres battle just happended to be the main one at play when I entered the fray. FYI - my first RDBMS was Ingres and I have to say that from the developers perspective it was a far superior product to Oracle. Ultimately it is recognised that Oracle won out because of superior sales and marketing prowess, although this simplistic argument undermines the fact that Oracle was the more reliable and scalable database (row vs page level locking anyone?).

In reality Oracle has seen off the following RDBMS competition over the years:

- Ingres in the late 80's
- Sybase in the early 90's
- Informix in the late 90's

Along the way the big O has also also gobbled up Rdb and MySQL databases.

The interesting thing is that when I worked for Larry in the mid to late 90's Oracle always saw the following two as being their major database rivals:

- IBM with DB2
- Microsoft with SQL Server

So it comes as no great surprise that with the acqusition of Sun Microsystems and the plans that Oracle has for its Database Machine that the likes of IBM and Microsoft are scathing in their response calling it a return to the bad old days of the 1960's.

So how does the combination of software/hardware affect the big players:

Microsoft - SQL Server runs on any platform so long as its Windows/x86 so no change there.
IBM - The various forms of DB/2 run on various hardware platforms - so long as they're IBM that is. Again no change.
Oracle - I'm struggling to see a downside here. Larry has picked up Sun at pretty much a rock bottom price and with the new capability can attack integrated hardware/software threats from IBM, Netezza and Teradata who have all espoused the integrated harware/software solution. The combination of hardware and software is not unlike that taken by Apple, but it doesn't preclude Oracle's regular business of selling database on pretty muuch every major platform out there.

He's also picked up Java which was the lynchpin of Oracle's development platform anyway and moved a long way to removing the potential threat from Open Source by picking up the most successful of the Open Source databases in MySQL. In short, it's a win win because it's unlikely that he will alienate any of the existing hardware partners as they know that they cannot ignore Oracle.

Does it herald a return to the heyday of the 1960's, however, or for anyone following this blog, does that mean that we can look forward to fully integrated corporate data model as I've referred to in a few prior posts. Not likely. When Larry refers to an integrated server platform I think you have to look deeper than the marketing blurb to understand that apart from improvements to the systems management space and perhaps better performance integration there really isn't anything new here. Im not saying that the Database Machine is a bad concept, but I'd be wary in thinking that it herald's a return to when life was simple.

Check, check, check and check!

2010-02-25T19:46:00.001-08:00

Part 3 of a 3 part post on the role of the modern smartphone

In the previous two posts I've explored the impact of the smartphone on our lives. The first post explored my hopes and aspirations for a convergence device ten years ago and how the current smartphone vastly exceeds them. The second post explored what devices it has definitely replaced or is likely to replace in the near future. In the final post I wanted to explore what's left for the smartphone to achieve. Now I'm not pretending to be a futurologist and the potential applications for the smartphone are almost limitless. Why else have Google and Apple branded themselves as mobile devices companies when neither was their core competency less than a decade ago?

The focus of my smartphone predictions won't be around the likes of location services, enhanced reality, advertising and mobile TV as many are predicting, it's something far more mundane but essential to our daily lives.

Before I do this lets explore something that I do, and I'm guessing I'm not alone here, every day before I leave the house and go to work:

Check, check, check and check!

- Have I got my wallet? Check.
- Have I got my house keys? Check.
- Have I picked up my loose change? Check.
- Have I got my mobile phone? Check.

(Note that in my case I don't drive to work but if I did I'd obviously check for my car keys too).

So could the smartphone change things here? Well when you examine all these things they resolve down to two fundamentals of life: identity and money.

In my wallet is my drivers licence (a defacto identity card), my prepaid bus ticket (currently anonymous, but in other cases not so like the London Oyster Card), my work entry card (identity), some cash (money), credit and debit cards (money) and a lottery ticket (potential money). The other items in my pockets: loose change (money) and house keys (identity) and car keys (identity). Yes I know the keys don't strictly identify me but there is an implicit assumption that because I have the key I'm authorised to use it.

So can the smartphone morph and replace the above devices. Well technically yes. There's nothing revolutionary about the concept of using a smartphone for a payment device. Nokia were talking about this sort of stuff 10 years ago and I believe that many others are working on this technology right now. Lets also not forget that I can access our bank accounts never mind ebay and paypal on my phone and that we also already access our mobile phone accounts (either pre or postpay) every time we make a call or send a text. In short it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to believe that smartphones will become payment channels in the near future.

Looking at cars we are already starting to see keys be replaced by 'dongle-based' access devices. Is it such a stretch to see your car iPod/iPhone integration extending to cover car security too? The same could be said for home security too.

This leaves us with the rest of identity. For example can you imagine your driving licence being stored on your smartphone (or a cloud server accessed by your phone) If so what about your passport or even some future DNA based identity scheme? This is where I'm probably stretching the limits of how we will use smartphones in the future but not because of some inherent technical limitations, but bureaucratic ones. Could you imagine government departments accepting smartphones for ID. And I can already hear the din from the civil libertarians.

However, if the smartphone is going to evolve in these directions then we're going to need a pretty secure way for the device to identify us. Biometrics would definitely be required in the handset for this. We're also going to need some pretty secure encryption technology to ensure that nobody is hacking our accounts through the ether.

But the important concept here is that nothing mentioned in this post is beyond the bounds to reasonable technological advances in the next few years. Considering how far the smartphone has come in such a short space of time I'm beginning to see why Apple and Google are so interested in them.

How many devices does your iPhone replace?

2010-02-24T22:14:00.001-08:00

Part 2 of a 3 part post on the role of the modern smartphone

In the previous post I reflected on how far the smartphone, in my case the ubiquitous iPhone but in reality it could be any smartphone, had come and how it had not only superceeded the mobile phone and the pda but also a plethora of other functions/devices. So lets look at personally what it's replaced or is likely to replace in the next few years in my scenario:

- PDA - will I ever buy another decicated PDA. Don't think so. Sorry Palm.
- iPod - again, I'm not sure I'll ever buy another dedicated music player nor an MP4 player. Bye Apple.
Sat Nav - Would I ever buy another dedicated Sat Nav device - probably not, although for true replacement technology I'd likely buy Tom Tom for iPhone. If I had a Google or Nokia smartphone this wouldn't be the case. Sorry Tom Tom.
- digital camera/camcorder - I'm not sure we'll replace our compact digicam when it dies. Maybe not the camcorder either. Sorry Sony and Canon. The digital SLR is, however, safe for now.
- Portable games console - The PSP barely get's any use and could well end up on ebay before the month is out. Sorry Sony.
- Portable DVD player - My better half wanted a portable DVD player so we could take the kiddie dvds with us when we travel. I've ripped and encoded this stuff onto my - iPhone and got a iPhone Composite cable for Christmas so we're pretty set on that front now too.
- Watch and Alarm Clock - this is probably not typical but for a few years I've stopped wearing a wristwatch and have relied on my phone for timekeeping.

It's amazing really that all this stuff has been or is likely to be replaced by the phone in my pocket. I'm not saying that the iPhone is better than any of these devices but in most cases its certainly good enough to replace many of the dedicated devices.

The other advantages are that it's always to hand and charged, unlike most of the other stuff which is in the cupboard most of the time out of battery.

Lets see how far we've come

2010-02-24T21:45:00.000-08:00

Part 1 of a 3 part post on the role of the modern smartphone.

Back in the late 1990's I really wanted a mobile phone that was a true convergence device, something that meant I didn't have to carry around a mobile and a pda. At the time I had an Ericsson GF768 flip phone and Palm Pilot 3. Ultimately the single device that I wanted would be able to make calls, manage a consolidated contact list, scribble a few notes and maybe just maybe write an e-mail. WAP was the next big thing then so maybe access to the WAP web would be a nice to have.

These days any half decent smartphone will more than meet these needs and more but lets just consider how much more they can do. Today my iPhone gives me all of these incredible devices and applications in my pocket: phone, calendar, web browser, contacts, camera, video camera, audio recorder, texting, messaging & skype, IM & chat, access to social networking, email, music, movies, photo album, books, gps & maps and games. Oh and access to an almost unlimited suppy of applications too.

I may have had to wait ten years to get it but when it arrived my convergence device really did exceed my expectations. As Ferris Bueller says 'Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it'.

Six Degrees of Preparation

2010-02-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

Over a coffee the other day with a friend we were discussing what qualifications were most appropriate for a 21st Century IT professional. Obviously you would assume that a BSc in Computing or equivalent would rank highly, maybe even a BA in Information Technology, although at my Uni this were regarded as a soft option in IT degrees. Other studies related to New Media and Communications may also be relevant.

(FYI I studied on a Combined Sciences course of which one of my majors was Computer Sciences).

The funny thing is that when I got my first job in IT I was already COBOL trained so productive from pretty much day one. Not so for a couple of my new starter colleagues who read History and English Uni degree respectively. They embarked on a 6 month programming course.

IT is pretty unique in that way as it has alway been open to all comers. This is something that would be incoceivable in most other professions unless you had a relevant degree (i.e. Law, Medicine and Engineering) or even new fields like Biotechnology.

Back to the original question - what is the best degree. Well my mate believed that it would be a Law degree, followed by an MBA, because as we to oursourcing and cloud computing he believes that the only relevant skills for modern IT was drawing up and managing contracts.

That's a real shame.

Dark Days at 1 Infinite Loop?

2010-02-16T16:17:00.000-08:00

According to some recent techpress articles it's been a week to forget for Apple. Firstly, Redmond launched what appears to be their first viable alternative in the mobile devices space with Windows Phone Series 7 (catchy title, eh?) and then the rest of the also rans (excluding Google, RIM, Microsoft and Nokia) in the mobile phone industry announce the WAC as an alternative to the App Store.

Take this into account with some lacklustre reviews on the iPad and should we be calling an end to the Apple Renaissance?

Well, time will tell whether the Microsoft gamble will succeed but many pundits are already writing it off just like the Zune. Steve Jobs has used the Wayne Gretzky quote 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' and I think Microsoft as skating at where the iPhone has been.

And as to the WAC check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/16/app_stores_szzz/ for some thoughts. Also if the OviStore has to resort to giving away the Nokia Maps Application for free to get some traction then how will the WAC fare any better? Nokia reported that there were 3m dowloads of its Maps application last week. This compares to Apple's overall 3bn App Store downloads and 10bn iTunes downloads to put some context around these numbers.

The much more serious threat to Apple in the mobile space comes from Google with its Android platform, despite Eric Schmidt's low key address today at MWC. Android, and a plethora of mobile phone makers, could challenge the all-in-one hardware/software philisophy that Apple has today, just like like Windows and a plethora of PC makers did for the original Macintosh computer. However, there are real differences between the early PC days and the current smartphone wars. Namely:

- different pricing models are at play - Back in the 80's everyone agreed that the Mac was superior to the PC but cost twice as much. Most mobiles are bought on the back of network contracts so unless Android sets start significantly undercutting the iPhone then that doesn't apply here. Indeed given that the mobile phone is something of a status symbol a market awash with cheap Android clones may even be counterproductive.
- Smartphones are as much fashion statements as a utilitarian devices meaning that design of the handset, operating system and application softeware is crucial. Here is where I think Apple have the edge. The key principles at the core of Apple are superior design and controlling the entire end to end user experience.

Will Android overtake the iPhone - almost certainly, but will that be at the expense of Apple. I don't think so. I suspect that it will be Nokia, Microsoft and RIM have more to fear from this weeks announcements.

I think I need an App for that

2010-02-15T22:01:00.001-08:00

You may not know it but we are now in the middle of a new tech land grab as established iPhone developers desperately scramble to get native iPad versions of their apps ready for the new platform. This land grab has been measured by the incredible uptake of the iPad SDK.

And before you say it - yes I know that the vast majority of the existing 150,000 iPhone Apps will upscale and run on the iPad but that's a stopgap at best. No doubt new iPad owners will want shiny new iPad apps.

The land grab is underway because the smart developers know that there's a narrow window of opportunity before the AppStore becomes awash with tens of thousands of iPad apps.

No here's the thing I find most interesting. Viewing the AppStore today on my iPhone I can basically flick through 20 categories and about 300 apps per category - give or take, assuming I have an hour or so spare, that is. That's 6,000 apps I can access before I have to resort to a search strings or the genius recommendation.

This is tip of the iceberg stuff. There are another 144,000 apps out there that it's highly unlikely that I'll every find, unless they're featured in some way. Hence my problem how do I know that these apps exist if they're not featured and I can't easliy access them?

Maybe I need a better way of searching for the apps. You know what - I think I need an App for that!

Object Blues

2010-02-14T21:47:00.000-08:00

One of the key differentiators between Mac OSX and Windows, according to quotes attributed to Steve Jobs, is that Mac OSX is Object Orientated. He places this fact at the heart of a key productivity advantage allowing Apple to turn a major release every 18 month or so. Redmond seems to take a lot longer than that for Windows. It's also enabled them to turn out the respective iPhone and iPad OS's relatively quickly.

That's fine as far as it goes but I personally have always had a bit of an issue with OOP (Object Orientated Programming) in the real world in the fact that it isn't exactly consistent with the RDBMS view of the world.

- OOP is Function Centric whereas Relational is Data Centric

IMHO OOP works well when you're writing things that are function centric (like operating systems, flashy web sites, computer games, graphics packages) but is less successful when writing large data handling systems (like data warehouses etl's, high volume transaction systems).

When we have to merge the object and relational world together we have three options. The first is to use an Object Relational Bridge technology or secondly we store Object datatypes inside an RDBMS. Both of the represent the RDBMS is an OO friendly format.

Then of course there's the third way which is to use a OOP language (like Java) and write code that doesn't conform to OOP basics negating all the benefits of Object Orientation. Guess which option I've mainly seen in my travels.

Slumdog Billionaires

2010-02-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

Congratulations are due today to Larry Ellison and his BMW Oracle Racing team for bringing home the Americas Cup to, err, America. Back in 1998 I was working as one of Larry's minions when he came down under to win the ill-fated Sydney to Hobart so I know how important this win will mean to him.

What is of interest to me, however, is that the Americas Cup has essentially become a massive ego contest between some of the world's richest billionaires. In this case between one Lawrence J Ellison, 65, US software billionaire and 4th richest man on the planet versus Ernesto Bertarelli, 44, Swiss Biotec billionaire and 52nd richest man.

Checking a list of billionaires on wikipedia I wasn't surprised to see that the computer industry contains more than its fair share including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen from Microsoft. Not present was Steve Jobs but at a rumoured $5bn and with Apple's remarkable growth he can't be far off joining that list.

Fortune has shined on Bill, Steve and Larry as some point, aside from dropping out of college, they were at the right place (Silicon Valley) at the right time (early 1970's and the advent of the silicon chip) with the right idea (hardware and/or software for the PC, or database for client server).

My query for today is where and when will the next set of billionaires be sourced. Obviously Larry and Sergey are the real winners from the Internet boom, but it looks like they are the exception of their age rather than the rule.

With hindsight it becomes clear that the early days of the personal computer and client/server computing presented opportunities for hobbyists working for love not money in their garages and with like minded friends in clubs (like the Homebrew Computer Club).

My suspicion is that this was a one off and it is unlikely that the next set of billionaires will be from the hobbyist fold. They will be from the likes of the Biotechs and it's more likely that they will complete their studies than drop out from the likes of MIT or Stanford.

I don't know why but I,for one, find that quite sad.

IT Nirvana

2010-02-11T21:47:00.001-08:00

Over the last few posts I have raised the unfulfilled concept that was prevalent in the early days of Open Systems - namely the Corporate or Enterprise Database. This concept was where corporate data would be stored and accessed centrally from a central managed place. Of course the central database never happened and there are lots of reasons for this, but I like to think of the Corporate Database as a kind of IT Nirvana. Twenty years ago if we could show IT managers what their systems landscapes would look like today I think this idea may have taken off and just possibly we could have a achieved that blissful IT state.

Instead we face the following issues:

- Systems complexity - get your local IT architect to print out your current systems landscape. Even better get him to walk through all your interfaces.
- Data Warehouses - Often the holy grail of the data warehouse is the search for a single view of the truth. This is because your multiple systems will all have different versions. If the data was kept in one place then we wouldn't need to build expensive and complex data warehouses.
- Master Data Management - The Corporate Database is the MD solution
- Enterprise Data Bus - Why would we need a bus if all the data sits in the same location?

So are we likely to find spiritual enlightenment in IT soon? Well not so long as we can't see past the next quarter, or FY budget for that matter.

Luddites Unite

2010-02-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

When I first started in IT I was a COBOL programmer and the database I mainly used at that time was IDMSX. We had a large powerfull mainframe that supported over 250 transaction processing applications. The interesting thing was that at a conference my boss got talking to his equivalent from a similar sized organisation. They had the same mix of systems and same sort of user community - only their mainframe had less than half the grunt of ours.

Why? Well they had rejected database technology and kept everything in flat files. I can't vouch for how responsive they were as an IT team but it makes you think.

This highlights something we've all seen happen in IT over time - huge advances in chip, bus, memory, disk and network technology are soaked up by software bloat. OK this is a simplistic argument and in reality corporate IT is doing a lot more than it did 20 years ago, but it still makes me wonder just how those flatfile systems would perform on todays equivalent platforms. I think they'd scream along.

Suspect Packages

2010-02-11T21:11:00.001-08:00

In the 70's and 80's companies used to write bespoke software for all their needs. Everything from payroll to financials to core business systems would be written inhouse in COBOL, RPG, PL/1, Pascal and the like. Then in the 80's and 90's the concept of packaged applications became popular. The rationale was that it was better to purchase and implement off-the-shelf packages rather than develop from scratch. This made perfect sense and much of my early IT work was involved in package implementation. Ideally a package could be implemented in months rather than written in years.

Software selection became vital as the business would often need to assess how flexible that package was and how easily it would fit into the existing processes. Working on the Technical Pre-Sales side it was always important to try to get a product fit of 90% or better. Inevitably though there was never a 100% product fit and in these situations there were two potential solutions:

1) For the business to adjust its way of working (sometimes called Business Process Reengineering)
2) For the package to be changed or modified (i.e. mods)

In the vast majority of cases the latter option was chosen as the business was reluctant to take on change. In one scenario I worked on a customer site where 70% of the programs had been modded making you wonder why they had ever selected the package.

The one exception to this model has always been SAP. They have always insisted that BPR is a fundamental principle of their implementations and as far as I know SAP implementations are never quick. Here at the Department of Hopes and Dreams we're currently 3 years into a SAP implementation and the frustration it is causing the business is unprecedented. Makes me wonder whether the advantages of packaged apps are still there.

Master Data Blues

2010-02-11T20:52:00.001-08:00

Master Data Management is currently one of the hot topics doing the rounds of Enterprise IT. For those unaware of the concept MDM is basically the storing, either physically or virtually, of all corporate reference data in a single MDM repository. Consultancies love to sell MDM solutions for two reasons:

1) They are quite easy to justify
2) MDM technology, whilst expensive, is available

So in theory we should all be swimming in MDM's by now. I don't know about you but I'm not. In fact a friend of mine became the first and only person I know to land a successful MDM Project.

So if we agree that it's the correct thing to do, and that the technology is available then why don't we see MDM's all around.

Simple really - the business side of MDM is very, very hard so before you begin you'd best make sure that the business understand what they are biting off.

Of course, if we'd kept a tight rein on our corporate IT systems in the first place then we wouldn't need MDM would we!

Benson - 9th Generation PC

2010-02-11T20:29:00.000-08:00

I was a huge fan of Paul Woakes' groundbreaking 'Mercenary' computer game, which is probably best remembered for its smooth 3D vector and polygonal graphics. What is perhaps less memorable about the game was that your character was guided through the game by a wiseass sidekick called Benson, a so called 9th generation PC. Benson would alert you when you were under attack, communicate with the locals (the Paylars and Mechanoids), etc. At the time I imagined that Benson was some sort of wearable PDA like device - maybe strapped to your arm, for example. I certainly didn't believe that a 9th generation PC was some beige box, screen and keyboard that you lugged around an alien landscape.

So this has got me thinking - what would the ninth generations of PC look like?

1st - Well a first generation PC is easy - your probably still using one on your desk today
2nd - That would have to be the laptop
3rd - I'm figuring that would be a PDA (Palm Pilots, Psions, Windows CE) or smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) - If I'm honest these are pretty close to what I imagined Benson would be twenty years ago - only perhaps wearable.
4th - Is it the tablet? Time will tell.

What the 5th - 9th generations are still open for the likes of futurologists and sci-fi fans to debate, but here are some candidates:

I'm thinking that 5th generation PC's will be devices like an augmented reality e-paper displays as seen in the movie Red Planet. Alternatively they could be wearable PC's that display augmented reality information onto a HUD style goggles/spectacles, or as some have proposed, contact lenses.

Further afield is impossible to predict but if I had to have a stab at it then genrations 6-9 would adopt technologies proposed in many sci-fi movies (Firefox, Strange Days, Existenz, The Lawnmover Man, The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, etc.) which interact directly with our brains via some digital thought bridge, as scary as that might seem.

The one thing I can be certain of - that the existing first gen PC won't be around forever.

Home or Away

2010-02-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

In the previous post I touched on working from home. Many of us have PC's at home or work laptops on our desks so in theory many of us could be doing the same job from home. In the main, however, we don't and I believe that there are a number of reasons for this:

- Communication - I think face to face communication is great and by working from home we'd lose this. However, as I've already touched on in "The Great Lost Art of Communication" I think this is becoming less relevant in today's workplace. If we're emailing each other arcoss the office floor we might as well be emailing each other across the city.
- Management vision - I don't for one moment think our management have seriously sat down and debated whether they should contemplate offering work from home options for large parts of their workforce.
- Measuring how we work - Easy enough for Sales guys and call centre workers but what about the rest of us. Performance is usually measured on hours and perception of our abilities, etc. at our annual reviews. These can be difficult to assess when you work from home. If we effectively want to measure how our home-based workers are doing then we would need to put a lot more effort into assessing how long tasks should take. Perhaps we even need to a system of paying not based upon hours but based upon achievements!
- Trust - If we still measure by hours then this brings the question of trust into the equation. Often work from home is abused.

None of the above is insurmountable, but they do require management vision and an ability to think outside the current way in which we allocated work and measure our success in achieving our goals.

Congestion Blues

2010-02-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

My average work commute speed is about 8mph*, which is just better than the average London rushour car journey at 7mph - worse than the horse and cart achieved at the start of the 20th Century.

Cars are great so what's went wrong? Well the problem is the tarmac and the fact that we all want to use the same bit at the same time. So if that's the problem then what are the possible answers?

- Build more roads - yet studies have shown that new roads encourage people off public transport and into cars with no net benefit to congestion.
- Build great public transport - yet most governments are too bankrupt to fund the sort of public works programs required to make major infrastructure improvements here.
- Work from home - the best commute is the one you don't have to take. With boadband and mobile technology we have the infrastructure and tools that enables us to really embrace this solution, but so far it's only a minority solution.

So what's this got to do with IT? The answer is below:

- Build more roads - is the equivalent of building more interfaces between our systems. Except that in our case each road is made from different materials, using different construction techniques, different traffic lights and different road signs.
- Better public transport - is the equivalent of building an enterise bus architecture. A great potential solution but still very costly and complex.
- Work from home - back in my earlier post "Redundancy Blues" I lamented the lack of the single corporate database. Imagine if all the data our company held was in one database. We would ensure that it ran on the best hardware, backup and recovery would be easy, we wouldn't need to build data warehouses to try to discover a single version of the truth. In short,if we had realised the potential benefits offered to us by Open Systems we'd be in a far better place than we are today.

Oh, well, must go and get my pick axe. I'm building a new road today.

*Please note that I consider myself very lucky that my commute is only half an hour. Across the world many, many people spend about 2+ hours per day commuting to work and back - that's about 25% of the time that they are actually there!

ROLAP smolap 2

2010-02-08T15:00:00.001-08:00

Years ago at ungodly hours BBC2 used to broadcast TV lectures on behalf of the UK's Open University. Many of the films date from the 60's and 70's and are usually quite funny to watch because of the dubious haircuts and fashions prevalent in academia at that time.

I remember one such program caught my attention because it focussed on the SQL language. The lesson extolled the virtues of putting an english like query language in the workplace, implying that your average office worker would be comfortable using it. I suppose compared to the pointer driven databases that were prevalent in the 70's I can understand why they might have thought this way. However in practice companies never let their users loose with SQL and it remains very much an IT development tool. There are a number of reasons for this (cartesian products, anyone?) but one of them is NOT because SQL is an inherently complex language - it isn't - but rather that the data that we work with often is.

This led to the development of simpler dimensional data models which would format the data in a more user friendly manner - mostly with the Star Schema and to a lesser extent the snowflake schema. Fundamentally all OLAP and ROLAP technology is built to utilise these dimensional models.

So what's the problem? Well in a couple of projects recently I've had end users who have rejected the Star Schema as being too complex. In both cases they wanted a single denormalised view of the world - kind of a denormalised fact and dimension all-in-one superset.

Why did they reject the star schema? Well the reasons varied from not wanting to undertsand the complexities of the Star schema (i.e. surrogate join keys, current flags, effective dates, etc.) to a misguided belief that querying a single 'all-in-one' table would outperform a star query.

It gets worse as on one of the BI Managers had come up with the construct of a daily snapshot, such that every day the full denormalised snapshot dataset would be inserted even if only there were no changes to the source data.

In both cases I fundamentally disagreed with the customer and argued on behalf of the star schema. One battle I won and one I lost. Funnily enough though the battle I lost wasn't because of any inherent objection to the star schema - it was lost because the users had built a Visual Basic front end application through which to query and report their data. What they were able to achieve in VB had my Business Objects developers heads spinning. For those reasons I state again. ROLAP is old hat. If you want to keep your BI consumer happy you'll need to start building them some nice apps.

Avatar and the Real Time Data Warehouse

2010-02-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw a feature on the making of Avatar. What caught my attention about this was the way in which they had created a 'virtual camera' through which James Cameron could observe the live action of his actors morphed into their avatar bodies and displayed in the CGI generated world of Pandora - in REAL-TIME.

In my business world, which is about as far removed from Pandora as you could get, I build data warehouses and have been doing so for many a year. From time to time the concept of Real-Time Data Warehousing has arisen and largely been dismissed for the following technical reasons:

- Data Dependencies
- Slowly Changing Dimenions
- Complex Transformations
- Updating Aggregate/Summary Data and Cubes

All of the above are still valid, and there would still need to be a valid business reason to go to the extra cost and expense of building a real-time data warehouse as opposed to a cheaper batch one.

However, I'm sure the technical hurdles that the Avatar movie makers overcame must have been a whole lot longer than my sorry list. Maybe it's time for a rethink!

What goes around

2010-02-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

Every wondered how over the last 20 years or so popular culture has begged, borrowed and stolen everything from the past fifty years or so. I think we're currently upto in 1983 in this playback. Goodness knows where we will go after we've revisited grunge because I don't think anything original has been created since then.

Strangely Enterprise IT has it's cycles to:

Centralised IT - Mainframe and green screen dumb terminal
Client Server IT - Midrange UNIX boxes and desktop PC's. Custom built GUI Applications.
Distributed IT - n-Tier applications, middleware, web and application servers and browser delivered applications.

The problem with this model is that every time we've added something we've also taken away.

Green screens were great for data entry but try viewing a BI dashboard on one. GUI Apps were much prettier than browser apps but required all those installation and network overheads. Browsers are great for distribution and access from anywhere but often have a woeful user interface.

I've been waiting for the last 10 years for the next cycle to arrive. One candidate was the advent of Rich Internet Applications like Ajax, Flash or Curl but frankly I'm still waiting for these to arrive in Enterprise IT.

If the iPad get's picked up for the Enterprise them maybe all that will change and well start to see Apps being developed that are user friendly yet easy on the infrastructure. Isn't that a little bit like a return to the Client Server model.

Netbook Blues

2010-02-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

Here at the Department of Hopes and Dreams one of the key strategic initiatives underway at present is Kevin Rudd's Digital Education Revolution (DER). In essence this plan involves providing all teenage school students with a netbook computer. Over time elements of the curriculum will hook into the equipment transforming the education experience. I'm no expert in this field but even I can see the potential here so in one sense hats off to Kevin and Julia for the program. More about that later.

A few years ago I gave a hand me down PC to my Mum as she showed interest in getting on the internet. Despite my Mum attending a few computer courses she's still a technophobe at heart meaning that the PC is effectively used for solitaire, skype, e-mail and a little bit of internet. As we now live 9,000 miles apart Skype Video has become by far the most important of these applications.

A few months ago she got a virus ultimately requireing a complete PC reinstall, a new ISP software CD, etc. Long story short is that the outage lasted about 3 weeks and was only fixed by using the services of a PC repair man.

Now back to the DER. Here in NSW some 500 Technical Support Officers (TSO's) - effectively glorified PC repair men - have been hired to support the program. Maybe it would have been better just to pick a better device than an underpowered PC running windows that wouldn't crash so much - say an iPad or a Google Tablet running Chrome perhaps?

Speaking of which, when Steve gets round to putting a front camera in the iPad I figure it'll be just the deveice for my technophobic Mum.

The next iPhone Killer please stand up

2010-02-03T21:50:00.001-08:00

In the movie 'The Right Stuff' there's a scene where the wannabe test pilots enviously discuss Chuck Yeager and how every time a challenger comes along he just suits up and pushes the flight envelope a little bit further.

I think the following list of phones must feel a little bit like those wannabes as, at product launch, each one has been dubbed as a potential iPhone killer:

- Nokia N95
- T-mobile G1
- Blackberry Storm
- HTC Magic
- Palm Pre
- HTC Hero
- Nokia N97
- Motorola Driod
- Google Nexus One

The important thing to understand in their own way each of these phones has had something to offer that was better than the equivalent iPhone it was pitched against, whether that be a improved camera, physical keypad, multitasking, push email, etc. All have tried yet so far none have even come close to usurping Cupertinos touchscreen miracle. You can speculate yourself as to the reasons why.

What must be particularly exasperating for their competitors is how little Apple has actually had to do to stay at the top of the pyramid. In the 3 years since its launch we've seen one case redesign, a couple of processor speed bumps, extra storage, a slight camera improvement and evolutionary software improvements. That's it.

They always say that true greats make everything look simple. I guess you could say the same for Apple and the iPhone.

The Price of Everything, The Value of Nothing

2010-02-03T16:09:00.001-08:00

Back in the days when I wore a proferssional services hat the T&M (time and materials) contract was prevalent. T&M was good for a consultancy as it loaded most of the the risk on the client. I also think it did a good job of focussing the client minds as the last thing they wanted was expensive consultants sitting idle whilst they provaracated over making a decision.

Over time clients more often moved to a Fixed Price model for their consulting engagements which helped control their costs. It also shifted the risk to the consulting firm and for that I know that my consultancy would add a margin of 30% to offset that risk. What the clients failed to understand in the shift from T&M to Fixed Price was how that would change the mindset of the consultancies that they engaged.

Back in the T&M world we really focussed on doing things right. We knew we were expensive and we knew we had deadlinesto meet. I can honestly say that when I worked on site I believe I acted in the clients best interests. The problem with Fixed Price is that the consultancy focusses on doing as little as possible to cover its contractual obligations.

Hence the client may think they're getting a better deal by fixing the price - but you know what - I'm pretty sure they haven't figured out how to measure whether they're getting good value or not.

The MobCon War

2010-02-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

A little over a month ago in my post 'The IT Wars' I decried the lack of a current IT War. Like it or not wars are the engine of innovation hence the old quote that in 300 years of peace the Swiss invented the Cuckoo Clock whilst in the Second World War the protagonists invented the Radar, Rockets, the Jet engine and the Atom bomb.

My earlier assessment was that the following IT Wars had been fought and the victors had prospered.

The desktop wars: Microsoft Windows vs IBM OS/2
The server wars: Mainframe vs midrange
The RDBMS wars: Oracle vs Ingres
The browser wars: Internet Explorer vs Netscape
The Search Engine Wars: Google vs Yahoo

In my defence the focus of my original post was commercial IT but rereading the post in light of the second reading, and also that fact that on occasion my blog has strayed into the MobCon space I figured it was time to put the record straight and comment on the current war at hand.

To paraphrase the Excapite blog: The MobCon Wars. If you want to understand the MobCon I'd recommend some essential reading at http://excapite.wordpress.com/

There are lots of protagonists originating from the technology, telcos and media fields but I believe that this war will be fought most bitterly between Apple and Google. Up until a couple of years ago these two tech giants seemed to be peacefully co-existing and focussed more on attacking Redmond. Eric Schmidt even had a seat at the Apple high table. There are even rumours that the two companies has a no poaching of staff agreement.

Judging by the recent second hand quotes attributed to Steve Jobs in a recent Town Hall meeting it would seem that relations are somewhat strained between the two tech goliaths. He appears to be somewhat aggrieved that the Mountain View mob have strayed onto his turf with the Nexus One and potential Chrome based tablet whilst Apple to date have stayed out of the Search Engine field. Nothing like a bit of siege mentality to get the minds focussed and steel your troops for combat.

You can place your bets on the eventual winner but if I was a betting man I'd have to put my money on Apple. After all they're a company I choose to spend my hard earned cash with. When's the last time you bought anything from Google?

ROLAP smolap

2010-02-02T21:45:00.000-08:00

One of the first ROLAP tools that I came across was Oracle's Discoverer product. As one of Larry's consultants I lead a Data Warehouse Team that delivered our reports using it when it was a brand new product. So new in fact that the client didn't realise that the paint hadn't dried on it and it was actually pre production software. They assumed that Discoverer 3.0 had been preceeded by versions 1.0 and 2.0. and there's another story in there about trusting Oracle Sales and Marketing, but I digress.

Some 12 years later I came across Oracle Discoverer again. To my suprise very little appears to have changed. The EUL and full client looked almost identical. I'm sure that under the hood there have been some changes for intranet, pdf's and web delivery but I'm still a bit amazed about the lack of innovation in the ROLAP world.

Business Objects finally seem to be getting things together with BOXI R3 and I have to admit that I haven't seen Cognos's stuff for a while so for them I can't comment.

The only real innovation I've seen in the last few years was ProClarity, before they were swallowed up by Microsoft, but that's OLAP and not ROLAP offering.

A few years ago I started to believe that the Reporting tools were stagnating and that cubes - whether OLAP or ROLAP weren't the answer. I hoped that the move into RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and tools like Curl would fill that gap but as yet nothing seems to have developed there.

Maybe new platforms like the iPhone and more importantly the iPad will spur the sleeping Reporting giants into a new series of innovation. I hope so.

Apple's BusinessAppStore

2010-02-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

With the launch of the iPad, Apple will have three content based online stores. These are:

- iTunes
- AppStore
- iBookstore

What I'm wondering today is whether they need a fourth store dedicated for Business? What I mean by that is that could be potentially hundreds of thousands of business apps that companies might want to deliver internally but not make available to the world at large.

For example, what if I wanted to develop a front end dashboard application for my EIS? As I've already stated in a previous post we are being pressured to deliver pdf reports to our CFO's iPhone which breaks our Warehouse Security model. The potential could be enormous but then so would be the challenges.

For a start - how would Apple charge for a BusinessAppStore. Currently they take 30% of the revenue from all paid iPhone Apps. Security would also be an issue to, of course. But I think the idea has legs.

Just out of interest I noted the other day that there was a SAP Business Objects App for the iPhone so it's obvious that not only Game Developers see interest in Apples devices in a business context.

Expand this concept wider and hook it into Apple's cloud platform, MobileMe, and we really could see something of interest.

My Online Doppelgänger

2010-02-02T20:49:00.000-08:00

It seems that a few months after I started my IT Journeyman blog that I have an online doppelgänger. That's OK because I'm not the jealous type.

Having skimmed said blog the following post http://www.itjourneyman.com/2010/01/16/data-warehouse-2nd-time-is-a-charm caught my interest and it's essentially a rehash of a few white papers on "pitfalls/mistakes to avoid when building data warehouses". The long and the short of the post is that your first data warehouse will be a failure but don't worry because the second one will learn from those lessons and succeed.

I love to say that this was true but imho its just not that simple. In my travels I've worked on first stab data warehouses that have been blinding successes and also third tries that have had no more luck than their predecessors.

There are lots of elements that go into making a data warehouse project succeed or fail and often the initial expectation setting exercise is crucial. We have to be very careful in determining the criteria of what makes a data warehouse work and what doesn't.

It's a bit like marriage and divorce. Most people would assume that definition a fifty year marriage must have succeeded - but what if the husband and wife were at each others throats for the duration. Likewise divorce after 10 years is seen as failure but what if you've produced a couple of wonderful and well adjusted kids and went your own way amicably. Expectation is everything.

What I can say is that in my experience Data Warehouse projects are difficult and that's why I choose to work in that field and not implemeting somebody elses off the shelf package.

Data Warehouse Projects are voyages of discovery and it's what we learn along the way and not necesarily where we end up that's really important. The problem is that most organisations and most PM's just don't understand that yet.

7x24

2010-02-02T17:05:00.001-08:00

If you've been around in IT for a while you've probably come across the term 7x24 meaning 100% system uptime.

I was once employed in London by a Investment Bank as a DBA where we were developing a mission critical global options trading system. Luckily the data volumes were small, the servers and environments stable and I'd had plenty of time to work through a reliable hot standby failover solution with an excellent UNIX Sysadm. All was good in my world.

Then during the preparations for go-live the topic of Availability arose. The Project Manager threw into the mix that we had to guarantee 7x24 availability.

My response was that we could aim for 100% uptime excluding planned outages but that we couldn't guarantee it. This resulted in a bit of table-thumping, as was quite often in IT projects in an Investment Bank.

Suffice it to say that when I explained the costs and complexities involved in guaranteeing high that availability from a solutions side and the human side it the PM became a bit more reasonable, especially when I threw in the fact that neither Scott McNealy nor Larry Ellison could guarantee 100% uptime on the configuration of Solaris and Oracle that the solution was constructed.

So the lesson is that before you start discussing High Availability the metric that needs to be understood is the actual cost, either in dollars or reputation, to your business of the mission critical app being unavailable. Until you have that there's really no point in discussing the HA requirements of the system. The funny thing is that when I was consulting I designed lots of Technical Architectures and never once could I get that fact out of the client.

Kindle Surprise

2010-02-02T03:45:00.000-08:00

Today I saw my second Kindle on my commute home. Unlike my first encounter I didn't feel that it was a LOL moment, but neither did I come away with any sense of envy regarding the device. I probably categorise it as an interesting piece of technology but one that I will pass on.

Assisting the Police with their inquiries

2010-02-01T21:29:00.000-08:00

Back in 1998 I was doing some Pre-Sales Consulting for an Account Manager trying to sell a Data Warehouse solution to a local state police force. I badgered the salesman to let me use the above title as a tagline on the demo but unsurprisingly he didn't see the funny side.

During the demo the thorny question of Metadata came up. More precisely - Consolidated Metedata. As I'd just come off a project where I'd defined the Metadata Architecture and Solution I was well qualified to answer the query.

At the time we had three sources of metadata for our solution. These were:

- The Database Data Dictionary
- The CASE/Data Modeling tool in use
- The ROLAP Semantic Layer

Note that this we didn't use an ETL product that would have been a fourth source of Metadata.

Now the interesting thing here is that all the software was written by the same company in the same software labs so one would hope that some level of shared metadata would be possible. Alas no. Not only did the metadata in each repository overlap but there was no easy way of combining it into a single source of consolidated metadata repository.

I answered the question honestly that nobody had a good story here, not us nor our competition. I think the client appreciated my honesty here. The account manager obviously not wanting to leave a bad impression did what all account managers are prone to do and started promising vaporware with some cock and bull story about the software labs in California working on that problem.

The interesting thing is that here we are over a decade later and I've still to see a good answer to this problem.

Taking the Mountain to Mohammed

2010-02-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

I've been working in the field of Data Warehousing for some 13 years now. Actually my first every data warehouse was a Reporting System I did back in 1992 long before I'd ever heard the terms DW & BI but that's another story.

The interesting thing that, so far, has been a constant in all that time, no matter what style of Data Warehouse (from full blown Inmon Corporate Information Factory to Kimball Federated Data Marts), is that we extract data from source systems and move it and load it into a data warehouse (be it an EDW, Data Mart, ODS, RDS, whatever). We'll use terminology like ETL, OLAP, ROLAP, Cubes, Star Schemas, Metadata, Slowly Changing Dimensions, etc. along the way to baffle the business and make ourselves seem clever but fundamentally any data warehouse or data mart involves moving data from a source system into target reporting system.

Back in the 90's this made perfect sense because it was inconceivable that we could slap resource consuming queries on reports against the mission critical core business systems.

Nowadays that just not the case. There are many technical solutions out there that could enable us to place a large and significant batch query and reporting load against our production data that would have zero impact on the core business systems. Technologies that spring to mind include Server Virtualisation, Disk Replication and Mirroring, O/S and Database Parallel Server technologies, etc.

The question is why don't we employ these technologies? I suspect that in the field of DW & BI we're in a stuck in a Kimball or Inmon rut and that for the time being we will continue to Take the Mountain to Mohammed.

Ah, but what about history I hear you ask? Well yes it's true that we often capture history in the data warehouse that we cannot keep in our online systems but often the need and justification for history is overstated. Besides another way in which we could keep all the history we'd ever need (and we probably already do this to some degree anyway) is to ensure that all PDF reports that are produced are kept online in some fashion. There are alternatives if we are creative.

Maybe within the decade well see a shift away from this and let Mohammed walk to the mountain for a change.

Where is the Henry Ford of IT?

2010-02-01T19:43:00.000-08:00

I can only imagine that Henry Ford was an amazing man. His invention of the production line is probably the greatest commercial achievement of the 20th Century. Here's my question for today - Does IT need its own Henry Ford?

If we compare the production line analagy to IT development we will traditionally end up with something based upon the SDLC (System Development Lifecycle). That's fine as far as it goes but as always the devil is in the detail. In all my 20 years industry experience I've never been able to use the same development process unchanged between sites. Think about that for a moment. Every IT Development Team has had different processes, standards, tollgates, etc. but we're all effectively doing the same thing. I should be able to move from one job to another and technology aside be instantly productive. However, as a new developer to a site we spend longer dancing our way through the process minefield than we ever do in writing code. Something just isn't right there.

Rancid Aluminium2: 26 billion smackers down the gurgler

2010-02-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

In a recent report it was stated that the UK Govt under NuLabor had wasted about GBP26bn on failed IT initiatives. That's about $2bn for every year in office with an ROI of zero. Just think about that for a moment?

Maybe some of that money was wasted on building 1,700 websites of which only 431 will remain by the end of 2010 after recommendations that most be culled in a recent audit.

Meanwhile James Cameron spends about GBP180mn making 'Avatar' over 4 years, whilst pioneering new technology and gets an ROI of over GBP1bn in less than three months.

Honestly, the UK would have been wiser investing this money in Cameron's Lightstorm and Peter Jackson's WETA and conservatively could have made a profit of GBP100bn which is half the money that the BofE has printed with its policy of Quantative Easing to bail out the banks.

OK it doesn't work like that and we know that when UK Goverment money finds it's way into the arts (via Lottery funding) we end up with films like 'Rancid Aluminium' and not Cameron's smash hit.

What puzzles me is that the government still tries to run large IT projects anymore because everyone know that it's just a licence for government approved suppliers to print money.

I don't know how much the US has spent on intelligence related IT projects post 911 but what I do know is that they failed to stop a known terrorist suspect from boarding a flight on Christmas Day.

So what's my point?

Over the last decade I've had the pleasure to work with two managers who successfully defined how they would structure and govern large projects in order to avoid the wastage so profligate in government IT spend.

The first even wrote a thesis about how large projects are inherently more difficult and risky to land than smaller ones. The second built an IT governance framework that consisted of a few simple groundrules:

- all projects to be sponsored by the business without exception
- no project to last more than 9 months. Any piece of work identified larger than this would be broken into phases less than 9 months in duration.
- no project to cost more than GBP2m

Sounds simple and yes it works, but what about when you need to do the big projects? Well I guess we probably need Project Managers of the calibre of James Cameron for that otherwise you're better off saving your pennies for a bailing out a bank or two.

140,499 Reasons why the iPad will be a hit

2010-01-31T14:55:00.000-08:00

I wanted to give it a few days before commenting about the iPad in order to let the effects of Steve's Reality Distortion Field to abate. Now that it has, here's my take on it.

Most of the tech journoblogs were underwhelmed by the device - and it's hard to argue against the technical critiques of the device. The iPad does have some serious technical deficiencies including, but not limited to:

- no front camera
- no flash support
- no multitasking

Ultimately I believe that none of this will matter and the iPad will be another big hit for Apple. Why? The following numbers are crucial:

- 140,000 - the genius of this device is that pretty much all iPhone Apps will run out of the box on the iPad. The iPhone and iPad SDK's are complementary meaning that anyone who has invested in building iPhone Apps can easily convert to building iPad Apps.

- 499 - the low price point is crucial especially when establishing a new category of device. Would you spend a grand on an iPad when you can get a netbook for half that. Probably not. Reduce the entry point to $499 and the answer will probably be different. I know where I'd be putting my cash.

As to the technical criticisms of the device I'm mainly in agreement with the tech press about their nature, but don't think that this will seriously dampen demand.

- No Front Camera - This is a curious one because I can see no good reason for the omission. There also seem to be some hooks in the iPad SDK to a camera indicating that if not present now a camera will be included in a future update. Maybe its a cost thing or maybe the software wasn't up to scratch. I suspect however that the lack of inclusion may be that the Apple A4 chip just might not have had enough grunt for something like Skype video. I know that my MacBook Pro runs pretty hot when running Skype so that may be a factor.

- Multitasking - Not an issue on the iPhone this may become a real bugbear for the iPad. Time will tell. I suspect that at the heart of this is a philosophical debate about how we will use mobile devices in the future and where we as humans need to multitask in the same way we do with a PC.

- No Flash Player - There seems to be a real spat between Apple and Adobe at the heart of this. Essentially the lack of flash hasn't detracted from the iPhone internet experience. Does anyone imagine that consumers will balk at the point of purchase because there's no Flash support?

Other observations, and what I find most curious about the iPad launch, are the following in no particular order:

- Lacklustre - For me it was one of the lest effective Apple product launches of late. At times they were almost apologetic "you have to hold the device in your hands to understand". Maybe Apple are correct that the real effect won't be understood till people are holding these things for real but compared to the iPhone launch I though this one lacked punch. However the free marketing and hype machine has been in overdrive and for many consumers the soundbyte and image of an iPad in Steve's hands is enough to guarantee sucess.

- To consume or create? That is the question. The PC has always suceeded because it is a flexible creation device. The Walkman, Gameboy and iPod likewise worked because they are great consumption devices. To look at the iPad specs you'd probably think it's more a consumption device (a big iPod Touch) and that would be fine. However then Apple throw in iWork at $10 a module but also leave out iLife. This is interesting because iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand) has always been bundled free with Macs. It's obvious that Apple cannot bundle iLife into the iPad and keep the price point low so why develop iWork for the iPad and sell it for a few bucks? My thoughts here are that Apple has big ambitions for the iPad in the workplace but won't agressively market it as such. They will let private individuals champion the device in the way the iPhone is in the workplace today. In a year or two from now I can see iPads cropping up on desks next to PC's and being used for calendar, email, internet together with the usual office suspects (word processing, speadsheets and presentations). They won't instantly replace the desktop or Microsoft Office but over the next decade I believe we will start to see the use of PC's diminish as they are replaced by tablet computers.

- Limitations? Remember the original iPhone? It was panned by the critics for being 2G. People were suspicious about touchscreen phones and the lack of a tactile keyboard. I suspect that we will look back at the first generation iPad in the same way. It's a placeholder for the main event if you like.

- MultiTouch - There was nothing new here really on the UI front, but again the beauty of the software keyboard and touchsceen means that any new developments can be introduced over time.

- The new Goldrush - What's interesting that Apple used the term "goldrush" in their hype when describing the iPad AppStore. If I remember from North American Goldrushes of the 1800's it was the merchants and traders selling pick axes that got rich and not the prospectors.

To summ up - Is the iPad all it could have been - probably not, but has Apple done enough to establish a new type of device. Definately.

Open Source meets Closed Minds

2010-01-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

Maybe I've learned a few things over the years. Then again maybe I haven't. In the previous post I've tried to highlight how I bought into the concept of Open Systems, especially the aspect of portability and how twenty years later we've somehow failed to fully exploit all the potential benefits.

The second Open concept that came along was that of Open Source. Basically, this is the idea that a bunch of sad geeks sitting in their bedrooms with nothing better to do with their time will develop a bunch of software for free that will be as good, if not better, that commercially available software.

There are thousand of Open Source software products out there (Linux, MySQL, Apache, Firefox, Open Office are just a few) and the best part is that they're absolutely free. You'd have thought that this would have turned the IT world upside down - but no. Somehow we, and by that I mean corporate IT, have failed to embrace Open Source as perhaps we should have.

I'm sure there are lots of reasons for this but fundamentally I suspect that we just don't trust something we don't pay for. Here's a quote I heard the other day from the Enterprise Architect I'm currently working with. "I don't trust Linux or Apache. I'd much rather have something (in this case from Microsoft) that is properly supported".

The guy is delusional if he believes that because he pays liscence fees and maintenance he will somehow get better service. I know - I've worked in a couple of software houses. This just shows that no matter how Open the software it that it will fail when it meets with closed minds.

Where did my Open Systems go?

2010-01-17T21:25:00.000-08:00

Early in my career I bought into the concept of 'Open Systems' in a big way. I'd been working on proprietary mainframe systems for a couple of years and figured that 'Open' had to be the way to go.

For those unitiated in the world of Open Sytsems it effectively was a euphamism for UNIX and RDBMS technology. The 'Open' basically mean that systems could be developed on one platform (say Sun) and ported to another (i.e HP or IBM) without much effort. Portability was the key to keeping your vendors sweet and it was also ensure that cross skilling your staff was easier. The same was theoretically possible with SQL based databases.

So did this happen? Not really. I used to work in a software porting team for a UNIX/RDBMS based product and because we applied strict standards to keep our code open we managed the transition without too much effort. This was not typical though. Most IT guys out there will tell you that porting from one server or database to another is a major undertaking.

That has resulted in the vast majority of IT shops out there often selecting a particular flavour of UNIX or RDBMS as its system of choice and that kind of defeats the whole argument of Open Systems if you think about it.

Wag the Dog

2010-01-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

Here at the Department of Hopes and Dreams we never used to support iPhone as a corporate platform. That was until the CFO got one and demanded access to his pdf reports on his handset. For two weeks our support desk has trotted out the offical line "best efforts but not officially supported" whilst scrathing thir heads and wondering why anyone would even want to view an A4 PDF on a 3.5" screen. Well the CFO has got his way and it has been mandated from on high that iPhone is now a supported platform.

I just wonder in how many companies similar discussions are being had right now. A friend of mine works for a large government organisation and they have officially supported Blackberry for a number of years. Anecdotally, he's told me that many of his peers are replacing these with iPhone's, even though they are not yet offically supported.

In our case supporting the iPhone was a fairly straghtforward technical exercise that consisted of configuring VPN on the handset to connect to the server hosting the PDF's. Case closed, asccording to my bosses. We'll not quite as I think they still haven't grasped the full ramifications of this. The problem we have is that the quick and dirty fix that keeps our CFO happy bypasses all the security models that we currently have in place for our data warehouse (normally controlled through Business Objects). What my bosses haven't yet grasped is that if we really wanted to service the customer properly then we should be developing an iPhone App dashboard for our data warehouse.

In all my years of IT I've never seen the likes of what is happening today. Private individuals buying mobile devices and then demanding IT support is unheard of. I can only imagine that it will get worse with the arrival of the Apple's Tablet Computer later this month because that's a device that will actually be worth viewing a PDF on.

Welcome to the Social .... (Social Security that is!)

2010-01-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

When I started in IT the dominant player was IBM. It's mainframes were just starting to be challenged by the likes of AS/400's, also from IBM, Dec VAX machines and the UNIX upstarts from the likes of Sun, HP and, you guessed it, IBM.

Big Blue dominated the IT landscape in a way that is unimaginable in today's market. PC's were referred to as genuine IBM's or inferior clones. Disk was often called DASD (Direct Access Serial Device), Errors were referred to as Abends. Job ads like "COBOL retrain to RPG/400 or PL/1" were commonplace. All IBM speak.

So what happended? Well nobody came along and built a better mainframe so IBM's fall from the top perch wasn't through like for like competition. It dominance was eroded on all fronts by the arrival of client server computing whose winners were the likes of Microsoft, HP, Sun, Oracle, Ingres, etc. For the record IBM didn't die, it adapted and is still a very successful IT company - but it doesn't dominate IT like it used to.

Many portray Microsoft as the natural successor to IBM and to my eyes Microsoft has started is downward decent from Top Dog to Also Ran. It still dominates the desktop OS and office productivity suites but apart from this its hits are thin on the ground. It does well with its RDBMS offering, SQL Server and the Xbox has made them a few quid. Where it has failed spectacularly was its inability to leverage its market dominance in the internet and now mobile internet. Bing, Zune and Windows Mobile are hardly destined for greatness, are they? Microsoft's great cash cow has always been Windows and Office software, mostly sold by default on the back of new PC and Laptop sales.

My question is that if we accept my previous assertion that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of mobile computing driven by smartphones and especially tablet computers then what happens to the PC. If it goes out of fashion, initially in the home and laterly in the workplace, then what will become of Microsoft once its cash cow is slain? I suspect this is the question is keeping the lights burning in Redmond right now. And Cupertino and Mountain View

Avatar, FingerWorks and MultiTouch

2010-01-12T17:02:00.000-08:00

Judging by its massive box office takings I wasn't alone in viewing James Cameron's Avatar movie over the festive holiday. I'm happy to confess that I was blown away by it, even on second viewing. What I'm still not quite sure about is why?

The story and script are fairly predictable and whilst performances are good the characters are a little cliched. However, none of that really matters because the movie engaged me in a way that few others have. Part of this may be down to Cameron's attention to detail in creating the alien flora, fauna and language etc. and the way they've improved the facial expressions capture technology.

However, what I suspect is that on some level the 3D effect (or is it really 2D steroescopic?) has had a large part to play in the level of engagement I felt. Has James Cameron pulled off a mass delusion and transformed a good film into a real gamechanger? Certainly the movie industry is buzzing at the prospect with news of 3D re-releases of LOTR, Star Wars, etc. I also just read that the new Bond movie will be in 3D.

What I'm more interested in though is the fact that prior to Avatar's launch 3D had been doing the rounds for years without gaining any traction outside of a novely IMAX movie. Before Avatar the idea that audiences would wear some dodgy 3D goggles for more than two hours in your local multiplex was almost unthinkable. In the space of a month Avatar has changed all that. It is a real paradigm shift for the movie industry and its director has been rightly been hailed a visionary.

So what has this to do with IT. Well if we move from a visionary director to the visionary CEO of the tech world, namely Steve Jobs, what can we expect with his next release? If the tech blogs are correct it's all but certain that Apple will launch a new tablet computer at their press event later this month. Beyond the tech specs of the device there has been much speculation about what the focus for the device will be and what will be its killer app? So far none of the predicted features of the new tablet (e-Reader, Web browsing, Media Player, Video conferencing, VOIP calls, etc.) aren't already available on your average notebook. So what we're talking about here is a new form factor but the same old applications. If that the case why do I believe that the Apple tablet will succeed where Bill Gates tablet computing strategy failed.

For me the only answer can be that what will make the Apple Tablet a huge success isn't a killer app as such but it will be how the device engages the user. What I'm saying is that I think the killer app of the Apple tablet will be the the way we interact with it. It's no secret that Apple have been beavering away for years and filing patents related to multitouch technology that go far in advance to what we see today in the iPhone or MultiTouch mousepads on our Macbooks.

The recent withdrawal of the FingerWorks domain that Apple owns may provide some clues, together with speculation that iWorks, Apple's office productivity suite, has been rewritten for multitouch. Let's also consider what may be waiting around the corner for iPhone OS 4.0. If Apple get it right and somehow come up with a vocabulary of getsures then this could be the biggest breakthrough in user interaction since the arrival of the mouse.

Why? We becuase for over a hundred years the western world has interacted with keyboards adopting the QWERTY key layout. The QWERTY layout was chosen because it helped prevent mechanical typewriter keys from jamming, something I think we will have little need for today. The challenges I can think of that the QWERTY keyboard has faced in its life are:

1) the adoption of the mouse, which was a complementary not replacement technology
2) Palm's Graffiti script language for its PDA's because QWERTY was deemed unsuitable for handhelds until Blackberry came along
3) Interesting technologies like the Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe which to date are let down by poor handwriting recognition software
4) Graphics pens and tablets, which have a limited niche market
5) Voice recognition software, which to date people are reluctant to adopt as they feel self conscious talking to machines

I think we can agree that none of the above have seriously challenged the dominance of QWERTY.

So here's my big prediction for the new decade. I believe we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift that will see the way in which we interact with devices and I believe that we will get our first glimpse of this new world when Steve takes to the stage on the 26th. Whether the multitouch vocabulary announced them will kill QWERTY or complement it remains to be seen but I think the world will look a little different after the 26th. Just like the movie world does now thanks to James Cameron.

In, out and shake it all about

2010-01-11T16:36:00.001-08:00

I read the following article with some amusement especially given that an insurance company I used to work for has recently decided to outsource its IT development function to Accenture. Some good friends I know, many with long service to the company, are being made redundant in February.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/01/11/239898/Barclays-takes-application-development-back-in-house.htm

There are a couple of juicy quotes from the article that I just cannot resist:

Bringing development back inhouse was "the most efficient model that supports our business" according to a Barclays spokesman.

"Over time you have many services added to original contracts and the total bill rises so much it is better to do it in-house." Claude Roeltgen, CIO at Luxembourg bank BayernLB.

So here we are on at the start of a new decade (technically 2011 not 2010 but lets not be pedentic) and after six years a leading global bank is effectively conceding defeat on its outsourcing model.

For those new to IT this might come as something of a shock. Not to me. Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon. Back in the early 90's it was called Facilities Management. It didn't work then and if you're to believe Barclays it isn't working now.

Building Tommorow's Legacy Systems Today

2009-12-22T21:49:00.000-08:00

I started this blog with the aim of sharing my views and anecdotes regarding the world of IT with anyone out there who might be interested. There isn't any great masterplan or strategy in operation other than I aim at least once a day to post something. As I'll be on holiday until the New Year I figured I'd write this last post of the noughties and pick up the emerging common themes from the last few months?

The most obvious one is the "wasn't everything great in the old days?". That's a real shame because nostalgia shouldn't have a meaningful place in today's IT. As technologists we surely should be looking forwards not backwards. Mostly though the realisation dawning on me is that we've lost a golden opportunity in IT to do something significant. A similar theme is explored in a friend’s blog http://excapite.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/is-the-iphone-really-the-avatar-of-mobile-phones/ which compares advances in cgi technology as compared with IT over the last 15 years.

Why? Lots of reasons I suspect but my endearing hope for the next decade is that we can rediscover just what it was about the world of IT that made it so fresh and exciting twenty years ago. To do that we will have to unload some of the legacy baggage that it holding us back (at a recent expo I saw a quite that some 80% of IT budget was spent on keeping the lights on!). Maybe that will be the real benefit of outsourcing and offshoring. I certainly hope so because I for one am getting a little exasperated "building tomorrow's legacy systems today".

Billion Dollar Brain

2009-12-22T16:43:00.000-08:00

In a recent post I speculated about the concept of Apple making a television. In part it was a flippant post but interestingly enough this article on techcrunch treads a similar tangent about Apple's intentions in the TV space. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/apple-tv-kill-cable/

The real standout fact that hits me is that Apple is building a $1 bn data center. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/26/apple-planning-1-billion-idatacenter/

To date I've always considered Apple a design and device shop - but spending $1 bn on something to support iTunes and MobileMe - I don't think so. You'd have to sell lots of singles on iTunes to fund that (well a billion I guess!)

Whatever the plans Steve Jobs has for this datacenter I suspect that the ambitions are considerable.

The IT Wars

2009-12-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

The history of IT is littered with lots of technical, idealogical and mindshare wars. A few examples are listed below:

The desktop wars: Microsoft Windows vs IBM OS/2
The server wars: Mainframe vs midrange
The RDBMS wars: Oracle vs Ingres
The browser wars: Internet Explorere vs Netscape
The Search Engine Wars: Google vs Yahoo

My question today is: Where is todays IT war?

I just can't think of one. Yes, there's lots of competition out there, but I can't think of a really big battlefront that is dividing IT departments right down the middle. Years ago lots of committed IT people were passionate about their decisions and allegiances.

I suppose the answer is that IT has matured to the point where everything is pretty much a commodity. I saw evidence of this when I was recently interviewed for a Data Warehouse Architecture role for a SME software house. Idealogically I hit it off with my potential boss and I know that it could have been a great opportunity for both me and the firm. However they were at that point of selecting a BI technology stack to develop their products and had correctly concluded that technically it was pretty much of a muchness out there. The selection therefore was made on commercial and not technical grounds, which didn't go my way. No hard feelings as I totally understood and endorsed their logic of their decision.

My issue with all of this is however, is that each of these wars have been fought out in an emerging arena that changed the face of IT. Using the examples above there are:

The adoption of the PC as a business tool
The challenge to mainframes from lower cost midrange computers
The move from flat file and hierarchical database to SQL
The internet explosion

So if there isn't a war being fought then I'd derive from that the fact that we aren't on the cusp of a new technological revolution - which for me is a great shame.

Uncommon Sense

2009-12-16T13:46:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure not so long ago to work with a fantastic Program Manager called Declan. He had coined the term "Uncommon Sense" in response to the fact that "Common Sense" seems to be something of a rarity in todays IT landscape. Here's a point of example.

In this weeks development team meeting we had on the agenda the issue of Disaster Recovery Planning. To cut a long story short our Data Warehouse Manager does not have confidence that our Tech Support colleages on level 2 can reliably backup and recover our data warehouse databases.

I'd like to say that this is the first time I worked in an IT site where confidence in backup and recovery was low but especially in these days of outsourcing I'm afraid that I can't, but that's a topic probably best explored in a separate post.

Because we cannot trust our backups the data warehouse manager has insisted that we keep in our staging database effectively every row that has ever been applied to the data warehouse as an insurance policy. FYI our warehouse contains, in parts, data over 10 years old.

There are lots of reasons why the DRP strategy will fail which I won't bore you with now but the part of the discussion that really tells me that the lunatics are running the asylum is this.

Our staging server is in the same data center as our data warehouse server. So please Qantas, can I ask you that when one of your badly serviced 747's falls out of the sky onto our data center can you make sure that you land on the data warehouse box and not the staging box or vica versa - but please not both. Cheers.

The Kids of Today

2009-12-15T22:11:00.000-08:00

I travel to work by bus. Today I sat near the back. On the back seat were three school age teenagers. I'd guess about 15 years of age. I couldn't help but listen to their conversation as they were, as is the nature of groups of teenagers, quite loud. They chatted about the usual teenage stuff. Who's seeing who? who fancies who? who's dumped who? What caught my attention wasn't what they were talking about. It was how they communicated. The conversation consisted almost entirely of short sporadic staccato-like sentences. Just like this post so far.

Okay, enough of the silly stuff but if you've read anything from this blog to date you'll realise that I don't write, talk or think in this way. I'm much more verbose which I'm sure that to a teenager equates to very, very boring. I don't think that I used to talk like the teenagers of today so what's changed?

MTV? SMS? Sound bytes? Short attention spans? Directors like Paul Greengrass using an average shot length of 2 seconds in the Jason Bourne films? Well all of these I suppose, but the one that interests me most is SMS. Personally speaking I never really liked SMS'ing until I had a phone with a QWERTY keyboard. I just couldn't get past the frustration of three letters on a key in an unfamiliar layout. That didn't stop it becoming a massive global hit. Even my mum wanted to learn how to text. It's another one of the accidental heroes like UNIX that was never designed for adoption by the mass market. However as the world's desire for Smartphones, typically adopting QWERTY hard or soft keyboards, booms I wander what the future holds for the short attention span generation. Will they be a passing phase? Probably not, but I live in hope.

The Great Lost Art of Communication

2009-12-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

An Italian ex-colleague once told me that in his country it was impolite in the business place not to spend twenty odd minutes in conversation with a colleague before getting round to discussing work. For example "My mother made some great gnocchi last night? How hot was Berlusconi’s latest starlet? How bad were Inter this weekend? Oh and by the way can I just get those cost centres from you?" sort of thing. Actually he told me it was 50 minutes of chat for 5 minutes of business not 20, but I just can't bring myself to believe that. Whatever the duration this may go a long way to explaining Italian productivity relative to Northern Europe for the last thirty years. Whether this practice remains true today or not I have no idea and whilst I'm obviously not suggesting that it be adopted as a business model per se but there are things we can learn from this.

Why? Because somewhere along the line we've I think lost sight of what it is that makes us productive and cooperative in the workplace.

Real Human Communication.

Read any book on the subject and they say that 90% of communication is non-verbal (i.e. body language, facial expressions) so it seems mad to me that the default communication we now find in the workplace often isn't face to face. It isn't even voice to voice. Much of the time it's email.

Here's some stuff to ponder:

How many times do we fire off an email when we could easily pick up the phone?
Have you received a one to one email from the person sitting less than three yards from you recently?
Have you every kicked off a unintentional sh!tstorm when an email you sent got misinterpreted or only half read?
Do you need to know that the hot water in the kitchen on level2 is not working/working/not working again or the white Toyota Camry has left its lights on?
Let's not even mentions the infamous Claire Swire email?

It gets worse. I once had a boss who managed by email. Every day he'd walk into his office, barely acknowledging his team's presence, only to commence a day long stream of email dialogue.

I'm not suggesting that we abandon e-mail - it is a vital business tool after all - but what I am suggesting is that we think more carefully about how we use it. For example, I once worked with a very successful and organised sales rep who configured his email to refresh every two hours to reduce the disruption. The fundamental problem with email is that it is perceived to be 'convenient' and 'free'. The reality is that they often it isn't and until we find a way to measure the metrics of lost productivity because of this inferior form of communication I think we will suffer.

What if we followed the sales rep's example on a corporate level and say configured two email deliveries per day. People would argue about those vital high priority emails but that's missing the point. Collaboration tools and document management tools exist outside of email that could better serve those needs anyway. Making this small change I believe would drive behavioural change and perhaps we'd end up picking up the phone or even, shock horror, actually having a face to face conversation. When in Rome ...

The Paperless Office

2009-12-13T19:26:00.000-08:00

In the early 90's, before PC's and email were widely adopted, I remember seeing a news report about a company that had adopted a 'Paperless Office' policy. As such the company's Post Room was the only place that would handle 'dead tree' technology. All incoming mail was scanned internally emailed to the respective employee. The original document would then be archived or shredded. The Post Room also had the only printer in the office which was used for generating outgoing correspondence.

The report predicted that this was how we would all soon be working which obviously didn't happen.

In fact pretty much the reverse has. The Post Room has effectively been bypassed by e-mail and in the main we still print out most of the documents that we're expected to read, most of which are generated internally by co-workers.

I just can't help wondering, however, if we didn't miss a trick somehow. Wouldn't life be better without paper. Maybe I've been too harsh on the Kindle with my earlier post and there is a place for an e-reader. It's probably a better reason for adoption than being able to read Jackie Collin's latest knee trembler on the bus.

Margaret Thatcher: My Part in Her Downfall

2009-12-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

The title of today's post is a parody of the Spike Milligan book "Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall" hopefully for reasons that will become clear. My first real job in IT was to implement a packaged application for a County Council. That application, COMCIS, stood for Community Charge Information System. The Community Charge is better remembered by its informal title - The Poll Tax - and it was the countrywide deep seated unpopularity of this tax that ultimately led to the Tory party deposing Margaret Thatcher. Therefore I like to think I had a hand, albeit very small, in the removal of Maggie T from power.

I'm also going to introduce a movie quote into this post, this time from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. "Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

The connection, tenuous though it may be, is as follows.

At the time COMCIS was the largest single system in the County Council. We used 13Gb of disk, give or take, which was enough to hold all the account information required to manage of about 300,000 people and 100,000 properties. That's less storage than I currently have in my iPhone. Okay, so times change and technology marches forward as anyone familiar with Moore's Law will tell you. Or so you’d believe.

I recently had to get an estimate from a supplier of how long it would take to develop and deploy a reasonably simple ROLAP report. Two weeks and $20,000 was the answer they came back with. The funny thing is that back in the heady days of the Poll Tax I remember I used to knock out a COBOL based report in about 3 to 4 days. If we could apply something like Moore's Law to productivity then today surely I should be able to knock the ROLAP report in minutes, maybe an hour at the outside. So what's gone wrong? We'll I have my suspicions but for now I think it's best to leave the question hanging there but in respects to Ferris’s quote I'm wondering what we've missed.

Paper Chase

2009-12-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

I saw my first Kindle the other day. I must admit I found it hard not to laugh out loud. Amazon, and to a lesser extent Sony, obviously hope that e-Readers will become the iPod of the printed media. I don't and here's my rationale.

1) It's a one trick pony - eReaders use clever technology to make the screen easy on the eyes when reading for long periods. Unfortunately this means it takes a second or so to refresh a screen. That's fine if your turning a page but not for other media content. The soon to be released tablet computers are multifunction and whilst technically inferior for reading printed material their multifunction nature will win out.
2) It doesn't improve on the original - The iPod was a great device becuase you could carry your whole musical collection in your pocket. This is great because based upon mood and whim you can select music. This accessibility advantage was big enough for people to accept inferior music quality over the CD's that were replaced. Do we want or need to carry out libraries in the same way. In my opinion no.
3) Welcome to the 1950's - Black and white may be fine for books but it just doesn't pass muster for online content. Maybe if this Philips technology had been around it would have had a chance -
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/10/philips-develops-color-e-paper-wants-to-skin-your-gadgets-with/

Maybe I'll be proved wrong, but I don't think so.

Accidental Heroes

2009-12-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

UNIX (in its many variants) is the OS at the heart of modern IT. It also is behind three of the four top desktop OS's (MAC OS X, Linux and, when available, Google's Chrome). It is the foundation for iPhone OS and Android. In short it's everywhere.

I like UNIX and have been working with it for nearly 20 years. You may already know that UNIX originated as a small reseach project of at AT&T in the late 60's. But what you probably don't know is that one of its creaters is gobsmacked that it became adopted for use as a commercial OS - for that was never the intent of the project. How do I know this - well I worked with one of the creators relatives and she told me.

Now let's look at Java. I don't have the stats but it is one, if not the, biggest language in use in enterprise IT today. Unlike UNIX however, Java, was written as a commercial product. It was a language developed for appliances - yes appliances. TV's, fridges, washing machines and the like. It was never intended for use in enterprise IT.

So what's the common denominator - well there are two that I can think of. Firstly both were given away free at some stage of their life, but more significantly they grew out of projects of somewhat humble origins and expectations. This is a phenomenon that is not uncommon in Research Science in that some of the greatest discoveries and developments have been accidental, for example Fleming's discovery of penicillin. So my point is that when somebody tries to sell you the future of the IT they're probably wrong. They can't know because the next accident may not yet have even occured.

If Apple made a TV

2009-12-10T00:42:00.000-08:00

OK I know Apple makes the AppleTV media box but what if, as some have suggested, Apple actually stepped up and took on the Japanese and the Koreans and made a full blown 32/40/52" TV set. What could we expect?

Well obviously Mr Ive's team would deliver another fantastic industrial design. It would certainly be thin and maybe have an aluminium unibody construction. I'd expect it to be true HD and I think they'd bypass plasma/LCD technology and move straight on to OLED. I'd obviously like a built in DVD or Blu-ray Drive, built in wifi and a hard disk.

So what's the special about that? Well so far nothing of course. However, if you think I'm heading down the internet TV route now - and yes I'd expect all the sort of stuff you can get already using the AppleTV, photos, buy/rent movies from iTunes. But no. That's not where I'm headed with this post. Beside all of this functionality is offered by media boxed like the AppleTV already and the TV world as yet hasn't changed.

Lets look at what Apple could do if it played to its proven strengths - the UI and Simplicity. Apple would look to differentiate, innovate and improve. Where could it improve the current TV experience? We'll when you look at it pretty much everywhere.

Look at your current TV and examine something that has hardly changed in the last 40 years - The remote. OK so it has a lot of buttons - mine has 55, my cable remote (Foxtel) has 40 and my DVD player remote has 50. How many of these 155 buttons do I use on daily basis? Perhaps a dozen. Of course I can buy an all-in-one programmable remote - I did once - but ultimately that was just as frustrating.

Examine the TV further and ask yourself what are the key functions I will want to do all the time?

On/Off, Change channels, search for channels, set reminders or record programs, mute and volume and change inputs (i.e. Cable/DVD/Game console).

Let's say I want to select a channel. Currently I have three options. If I know the channel number I desire I can key it and presto. This was fine in the old days when there were half a dozen or less channels but now there are hundreds of channels. So I resort to channel hopping which apart from driving my wife to distraction is a pretty inefficient method of selecting (it's essentially a sequential scan). Not very clever. Ah, but what about the EPG. Well yes, it's an index of sorts but its still rubbish really and only partially help solve the problem. The EPG will typically show me about 10 channels for the next 2 hours in the default window.

But I'm still missing the point here. Why should I want to find a channel? Do I care whether I'm watching Channel 9 or Fox 8? No. What I should be searching for is content. As I stated I can use the EPG but they really are pretty useless. So let's imagine we could search for programs instead of channels. Well you can on Foxtel but have you tried it. It's rubbish. I can search by category or by A-Z. That's it.

The basic limitation that kicks in is that the UI is fundamentally based around a 10 digit numbering system, or a series of four coloured buttons, of one of four selections of arrows. Yes that's right. Here we are deep in the digital age and were selecting what we watch with 1970's remote control technology. Crazy isn't it. So how about if we could have a remote control and UI that was neat, friendly and allowed us to search content in a more meaningful way that Program Title. Let's say I wanted to watch something starring a particular actor, or something by the a known director. What if the remote resembled something like an iPod Touch or iPhone. Imagine a programmable remote that utilised the easy to use interface Apple bring to their consumer devices. Hey wouldn't that be cool.

That's just the start but I guess you get the idea. Apple has shown that it can enter a mature market (mobile phones) and shake things up a bit. I wonder if the TV is the next target in their sights - after the launch of the Tablet early next year, of course.

Six Sigma

2009-12-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago during an RFI an offshore software vendor presented indicated that their software labs were 'six sigma' certified. Essentially this was offered as a guarantee of quality. They won the business essentially becuase they were the incumbent and they were cheap. So I ask you - how can a six sigma company submit software that has allegedy been system tested that doesn't even compile. Funnily enough the vendor bid for some more business recently and dragged out the same six sigma powerpoint slide. Some companies have no shame.

The Safety Hat Dance

2009-12-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

There are studies that show that cyclists who wear helmets are more prone to accidents than those who do not. It is believed that the perception of protection offered by said headwear encourages the wearer to take more risks.

In the old mainframe days, owing to costs and limited machine resources, often there were only development and production environments. This meant that before you promoted a piece of code into prod you have better be very confident that it was kosha. Nowadays its not unusual to find 5 or so environments (Dev, System Test, Acceptance Test, Pre Prod, Performance Assurance, Prod, Continuation of Business, etc.).

On a recent project we raised over 200 severe software defects. That would be unthinkable in the old mainframe days. My point is that the more layers we add in an attempt to improve software quality and reliability has exactly the opposite effect and made us all just a bit less rigorous in our testing regimes. After all why do I need to test it when someone else will do it for me later on before it makes it into Prod.