Steve Jobs - the End of an Era

Steve Jobs has left us.   I was never an Apple user, due to my corporate customers’ use of the Microsoft operating system.  But as an entrepreneur, I have always been a curious observer of his career.  He’s one of the original Pirates of Silicon Valley who revolutionized the convergence between corporate technology and the consumer.

Steve not only brought to the consumer the original widely adopted PC, the Apple II, but created a home computing revolution with the introduction of the mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) with the Mac, which was co-oped from Xerox’ PARC research center. He had famously said about his taking of PARC’s discovery “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.’”  But Bill Gates and Microsoft one-upped him by co-opting the MAC’s mouse and GUI in the Windows operating system that went on to dominate the market and drive Jobs and Apple to a point of irrelevancy.   “It’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it” said Gates.

When Jobs returned to Apple in his famous second stint, be gave birth to the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, essentially creating the portable music store/player, smart phone and tablet markets.  He allowed consumers to enjoy and customize their entertainment while also keeping an eye on their corporate happenings through email, blogs, and other sources of information.  Thus he helped create ‘convergence’, a term that started cropping up around 8 years ago.   It refers to the blending of the line between corporate technology and consumer products (see my blog “The Technology Just Crept Up on Us…” http://bit.ly/jNLt9k). 

The impact on our lives is amazingly life changing.  Work life and personal life have blended together so subtly that we hardly noticed, mostly because of Steve Jobs.

The end of an era......

The Land of Opportunity No More - Indian Tech Workers Go Home

We have now come full circle on the outsourcing situation.   A recent poll from a tech-job portal states that 69% of technology professionals from India intend to head home, with 57% of these professionals being US citizens or permanent residents (http://bit.ly/jC8svA).   Read that again - that is over two thirds of the Indian IT professionals in the US.  We are no longer the land of opportunity for the world’s technical community.  In the late 1990’s and throughout the 2000’s, workers from around the world, and more specifically India, would come the US to work for our blue chip firms and learn the ways of corporate IT from America.  Many would hope to get their green card and then citizenship in hopes of striking it rich during the technology boom and live “the American dream”.  Based on a survey of over 1,000 Indian IT workers, many feel that the opportunities are better in India than in the US.   Another reason some are heading back is they believe their children will receive a better education in India.    

So there you have it.  The “land of dreams and opportunity” for Indian IT workers that once was the US is no more.  And we did it to ourselves.  Big tech firms and CEOs from corporate America talked out of both sides of their mouths.  From one corner they would say there were no tech jobs in the US and from the other corner would lobby the government for more H1B visas.  Why?  Cheaper labor and therefore lower costs, of course.  Their short-sightedness regarding quick quarterly profits never took into account the damage that would be done to the US workforce.  

According to the Department of Defense, there has been a 43% decline in computer science graduates over the past 5 years (http://smrt.io/m4w9SB). Adding to the shortage is the pending retirement of baby boomers.  And although there is currently a high unemployment rate among American workers, knowledge workers experience only a 3.7% unemployment rate.   So, America, get your kids to stop drinking Espresso and start learning Java.  Supply is down and demand is high for young IT workers, meaning increased opportunity and increased wages.  While the Indian labor force has had its fill and corporate America has helped cause this dilemma, there may be something to be gained by this for the US labor market. Time will tell…

A Social Commentary on Social Networks

Social networks have been around for awhile now, or at least when measured in in internet years (Friendster launched in 2002, MySpace and LinkedIn in 2003 and Facebook in 2004).  I get LinkedIn and I like it.  It is a great way to perform virtual networking at a speed and volume that would not be possible before.  It also is a great resource to share targeted information with people in your industry, to look for jobs and to keep in touch with colleagues present and past.

I only dabbled in MySpace to check it out but found myself joining Facebook to, primarily, keep an eye on my 14 and 11 year olds.  But the longer I was on Facebook, the more people tried to “friend” me.  I understand why, on LinkedIn, someone who I may not know, but is a contact of someone I know, may want to expand their network.  And I do this also.  But I do not understand why someone who either barely knows me or never was a friend of mine would want to “friend” me on Facebook. Why would they want to read posts meant for my friends or look at pictures of my kids?  Why would they want to see posts from my kids or my friends?  Is Facebook creating the ultimate voyeur environment that was started by the reality shows like MTV’s ‘The Real World’ and has sunk to new lows with ‘Jersey Shore’ and ‘Keeping Up with Kardashians’?  Am I too old and don’t get it?

 What’s your opinion?

Software Firms Gorge at the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

What is it with HP, IBM, Oracle and others gobbling up companies? They remind me of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island on the 4th of July.

Since 2009 these 3 firms have been on a binge - gobbling up companies like Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut swallow hot dogs (FYI - the record for hot dog eating is 68 in 10 minutes). A partial list of firms acquired are:

• HP has acquired EDS, Lefthand Networks, 3Com, Palm, 3PAR, ArcSight and Fortify. This does not include previous purchases of Compaq, Peregrine, Mercury Interactive, Spy Dynamics and Opsware.
• IBM has acquired Guardium, Lombardi, NICS, Initiate Systems, Intelliden, Cast Iron Systems, Sterling Commerce, Ounce Labs, Coremetrics, BigFix, Storwise, Datacap, Unica Corporation and OpenPages. This does not include previous purchases of PricewaterHouseCoopers (PWC), Rational Software, Candle, FileNet, ISS, Cognos, SPSS, Watchfire, and Telelogic.
• Oracle has purchased Silver Creek, Sun Microsystems, Convergin, AmberPoint, Phase Forward and Secemo. This does not include previous purchases of Seibel, PeopleSoft, Hyperion and BEA Systems.

My point is that this takeover of niche players or players in single verticals is a trend that is gaining momentum and speeding up. There is a convergence of markets and all three are trying to become a one-stop-shopping place for the F500. All are beefing up for the fight in spaces such as storage, security, computers, operating systems, database software, middleware and applications.

This gorging will continue as the big 3 try to fill their stacks. My question is: which one is Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, which is Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi and which is Patrick "Deep Dish" Bertoletti?

Stay tuned...

The Cloud as a Metaphor

The term "cloud" is appearing everywhere recently. It is an interesting phenomenon, since hosted computing, remote computing and shared computing have been around for as long as I have been in technology (don't ask!).

So as we all rush to brand our services as cloud services, i became interested in how many different types of cloud metaphors have been used. I tripped across a blog by Lenny Rachitsky where he identified the 7 most used cloud metaphors. He identified weather patterns such as "partly cloudy", "dark lining", "dark side", "bursting", "rain", "clearing the air", and the always optimistic "Silver Lining".

Have a look and enjoy it.

Software Development Goes Agile

Change is in the air, and it is everywhere. The recession has caused companies - from the enterprise to small firms - to re-evaluate the cost of hardware, software and to look for efficiency of processes.

Back in the day (I am familiar with current 'young people terminology'), we were all taught about the software development life cycle (SDLC), which was a euphemism for the Waterfall process. Big and cumbersome, extreme in documentation and low on flexibility, the Waterfall was perfect for developing on the mainframe (or so people believed) for operational software targeted at internal use. The applications changed little and their functional direction was driven by the "powers that be".

Then came client/server technology and the iterative process, where the mantra was "code a little, test a little" and where the dominant process was the Rational Unified Process (RUP), led by the Three Amigos at Rational Software - Grady Booch, Jim Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson. Incredibly innovative, incremental and highly automated, RUP focused on both the management and technical perspectives of software development. While revolutionary in its approach, RUP was still a very bloated process that required much training and documentation (vision doc, use cases, etc.) and provided much more information than most projects needed, and required a 'pick-and-choose' effort by the software team to decide which parts of RUP they would use and which would get discarded.

With the advent of wide-spread use of the web (especially now with web 2.0), many applications are client-facing and require shorter product cycles and multiple releases. This has led to the 'age of Agile' or adaptation of the light-weight processes such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. Around since the 1980's, Agile methodologies have really taken off in the Web 2.0 age, as the highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early ad often delivery of software. Characterized by requirements written on post-it notes, short, daily 'scrum' meetings and 2-4 week 'sprints' or releases, the Scrum methodology works extremely well with SaaS-based applications that need to constantly improve their offerings to stay relevant.

I recently read about an interesting survey of 900 developers in InformationWeek magazine. Some interesting statistics:

- 45% of developers who say they use a formal process use some form of Agile (Scrum is the most popular)
- 20% of Agile developers say it's a key part of their success (as compared to 12% of those using iterative and 8% of those using waterfall)
- 27% of developers using Waterfall feel this methodology creates a significant amount of busy work (as compared with 2% of Agile users)

We currently use a version of Scrum internally to develop our software and have found that as we get more familiar with the process and modify it to suit our needs, we are becoming more efficient at producing builds that are targeted towards our clients' needs than we were before. And as we speak with clients, we find that more and more of them are adapting an Agile methodology for their software development efforts. It is quickly beginning to dominate the landscape.

What are your thoughts?

Business Intelligence Goes Mainstream

The ‘new new thing’ that is growing at a rapid pace is Business Intelligence (BI). It’s white hot and all of the big boys in enterprise software are racing each other to get there. IBM bought Applix, Cognos and SPSS and is incorporating these technologies (specifically the Cognos engine) into its’ other software brands. SAP bought Business Objects and is doing the same. Oracle bought Hyperion. SAS Institute built its business around it and Microsoft is big into BI. And HP is doing a dance with Informatica, as seen in their recent partner press release.

According to Wikipedia, Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies (and people and processes) used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. BI really started in the realm of data warehousing and data marts, but is moving rapidly into any data store that can provide critical information to your business. We have already seen this upfront and personal, with IBM’s new Rational Insight product, garnered from the Cognos purchase, already making its way into products like ClearCase, Rational Quality Manager and MS Project, along with XML data sources.

So why now? What is driving this? That’s easy. Businesses are always looking for real-time information that can consolidate metrics and provide analytical data that make it easier for them to determine the direction they take, and thus, provide a competitive advantage. And in the past, most software vendors were pretty poor at performing this task. Ask anyone using enterprise tools what they think of the reporting and analytics and they will roll their eyes, curse and then tell you about the cool stuff they have done in Excel. Well, that’s all about to change. BI is rolling out to an enterprise tool near you and your competition is either getting ready to utilize this information or already is using it to gain a competitive advantage. So either get on the wagon or get run over by it. Either way – it’s (main) streaming down the road….