latoga's Box View

I've Moved

2008-02-01T11:01:00.001-08:00

This blog has moved to www.latogalabs.com.

If you subscribed to this blog's feed, you will automatically be fed content from latoga labs.

Why the change? I have started doing a number of side projects, which includes some independent consulting. latoga labs is the banner under which all that works is being done. And we all know how much fun it is to play around in the lab...

Microsoft Bids $44.6B for Yahoo

2008-02-01T09:33:00.000-08:00

I open up my morning reading and here is the first thing that grabs me:

Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

Of course, something of this magnitude the first place I went for comments was to the Scobleizer. After his stint at MS and his frustrated departure, I knew he would have some interesting thoughts (also a great link to all the buzz around this already).

My initial reaction is that this is a great business merger. Squeeze some huge operating efficiencies (aka, lay off alot of people) and give the combined entity a better chance to compete against Google...not say that they would be able to compete, as the result of that would be seen only a year out and there are a lot of decisions to be made between now and then that will impact the effectiveness of the merger.

I think actually making this work would be tough considering the cultural difference between the two. There would also be the potential for a large exodus of users who don't want to support MS. Maybe a better acquirer would be Google...as if that would get past the regulators.

The Future of Newspapers

2008-01-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

Close on the heels of my side box comments about NewCorp's influence being felt at the WSJ.com, I listened to an interesting discussion on KQED's Forum about the Future of Newspapers on Friday. It was an interesting discussion that included Phil Bronstein, the departing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The discussion about how newspapers make money and can continue to make money today was quite interesting. Especially when you extend the same concepts to online services and this mentality of free advertising supported services. My biggest complained about my recent visit to WSJ.com was that there were all these animated advertisements that started to jump out at me. It was very distracting and frustrating, I felt like I had to work extra hard just to find and to read the article I went to the WSJ.com to read.

We find ourselves in an interesting catch-22. Ideally, you create a product or service that others find valuable and willing to pay for. With advertising, you create a product or service that can attract a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising to support it. Who cares if the product or service is hard to use or requires you to spend more time on it than you should to accomplish a task...that's more eye balls, more clicks, more advertising revenue.

I have thought that mixing the internet advertising technology with the newspaper would be the best way to support that business. Have customer configured ala-cart services and advertise within those services that helps pay for these services. Customers get to read what they want and the advertising helps pay for it. But, how do you allocate the advertising resources out to pay for the content? that could lead to popular content thriving while the meaningful, but less popular, content being starved.

So then, how do you pay for the services that our society as a whole really needs? How do newspapers pay for the in depth reporting on social topics that are important (even if us readers don't realize it yet)? Is it enough to have the popular content pay for the not so popular content?

This is a constant battle that most founders and CEOs of web2.0 like startups are dealing with every day...pay for service or advertising paid service. The parallels continue...

Open Source Wifi

2008-01-24T20:37:00.000-08:00

A while back I learned about an interesting company that was working to blanket San Francisco with free wifi access. Meraki and their Free the Net San Francisco campaign are using an interesting method, similar to open source, to provide free wifi to San Francisco. Anyone can sign up to get a free wifi providing station that can be plugged and placed near a widow or on a balcony and you're instantly extending the base wifi signals that Meraki offers. So, rather than trying to build the complicated infrastructure needed with multiple stations providing the wifi signal, and coordinate leases for places to put these stations...they just give them away!

The stations appear to draw a small amount of power, so they shouldn't cost poeple a lot of money to leave on all the time. And, like any 'free' service, there is supposed to be small adds that get displayed. I say supposed to be becuase I haven't actually been in a part of San Francisco where yet where I could fine their network, but the Wall Street Journal article about them indicated the advertising.

Side Box: Speaking of advertising, looks like effects of News Corps acquistion of WSJ publisher Dow Jones is now evident. As I went to the WSJ while writing this article, I was litterally bombarded with advertising like I had never seen before on their site. Sad to say, that's not the WSJ online anymore...and I'll be sticking to the print version where at least the ads stay within their boundaries on the page...

Not surprising, Meraki is backed by Google. This could be Google's way of helping to provide the ubiquitous free network access that keeps coming up from them every so often.

Signs of Recession

2008-01-24T20:13:00.000-08:00

Today I overheard a strong indicator that we are in a recession. Listen to any economist and they will say that the one thing that has kept the economy humming along was the housing market. People were still spending money either on their houses or because of the equity in their houses. Once the sub-prime mortgage crises came to lite, we had various opinions on what would happen to the economy.

Today I learned that 3 Day Blinds will be closing 64 of their stores/showrooms. This is almost 40% of their 170 stores across the country. For those who aren't familiar with 3 Day Blinds, they make custom blinds with a 3 day turn around (as if you couldn't figure that out from the name). They do business via their website as well as their stores. Considering the nature of buying blinds, most of the time you want to see what you're going to get before placing your order, it makes sense that they would have stores. With the strength of the housing sector, they had good business and growth.

But, now with consumers spending less, even on their homes, they are shuttering stores. It will be interesting to watch the stock returns of the other companies that revolve around the home owner (i.e., Home Depot, Lowes) and see what their returns are from the last quarter. If the consumer isn't spending as much money on their own house...that's the strongest indicator that we we are in a recession.

VC Archetypes

2008-01-23T18:07:00.000-08:00

I came across a posting today about the 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want to Avoid and found it both hysterical as well as scary. If you have ever worked on starting up your own company, know any founders who have, been involved in raising money, or know a single VCs you will instantly recognize a few of these archetypes...a few rang clear and true for me.

The author's other posts on How to Work the Room and 8 Tips on How to Get Mentored are some other great reads.

Sun MySQL Acquisition Followup

2008-01-21T16:38:00.000-08:00

Since my last post about last week's acquisition spree, I have talked to a number of people on the topic of the Sun buying MySQL. While I haven't been running into Sun much lately in my enterprise sales forays it was largely because I have been dealing with SOA based development solutions, an area where Sun doesn't have a strong solution (even though I had partnering conversations with them at one point to help strengthen their offering). After talking to some people who have been tracking Sun more closely lately as well a few Sun Executives and CIOs, I have seen a different picture.

Sun has been working on this acquisition for well over a year. It fills a very nice hole that they had in their solution stack...the database. No IT Executive I have talked to would seriously consider replacing their Oracle or DB2 with MySQL, but they would consider moving 100's or even 1000's of edge databases over to MySQL. This gives Sun a leg up in their enterprise sales and "solution" providing. It also helps to round out their Open Source solution stack (the OpenSolaris/MySQL 1-2).

Additionally, I understand that Sun will hold MySQL as a separate entity and let it run as such. With the inevitable inclusion of a few Sun Execs and Sales connections, this should help ease concerns that the web2.0 companies who run their business on MySQL were having. It still remains to be seen if some of the performance enhancements that the user community has been begging for will be addressed or not.

Sun, Oracle, and Open Source

2008-01-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

Quite a day. I wake up to see announcements about Oracle completing their BEA acquisition, Sun buys MySQL, and an announcement about new capabilities from MuleSource. Following my concept of "stuff hapening in threes is the universes way of telling me something", I felt like these items were worth commenting on.

I know a number of people who are at BEA who are bit relieved that the entire acquisition process is over. There was quite the distraction hanging over the place with acquisition offer looming out there. And now you will see the exodus of people surge. Not many people that I know over there are excited about working for Oracle. But, from the Oracle perspective, this is a great buy. They removed a competitor in the app server market, get to cherry pick the Weblogic platform to integrate it into their own, and they finally get technology to make their Fusion product work. Hopefully there is no mis-understanding of the reality of this acquisition from the BEA user community...your BEA products will be going way...

Sun's purchase of MySQL will be something interesting to watch. Sun isn't know for their ability to acquire and not ruin technology. My understanding is that the Sun software business unit had a great year that they are wrapping up. But, Sun as a company still isn't known for their ability to create value for customers with business solutions. I know some people there who have been able to do that in their small area's of influence, but senior management still seems to be stuck in the hardware mentality that is part of the Sun DNA.

The bigger concern, is what does this acquisition do to all the SaaS and Web2.0 business that run on MySQL? While I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to Sun in the past few years, I have noticed them trying to surge ahead in the these two areas. It's almost like a rebirth of their luminary "We are the Dot in dot com" marketing campaign of the internet bubble era. I have had some recent first hand experience with their Solaris Zones virtualization technology and find it highly lacking (not to mention a pain to use in a number of ways) from other solutions. Thus, I don't hold a lot of hope out for them in the arena of virtualization. Hard to see much vision here...

MuleSources announcement of their 1.5 version with it's governance feature and BAM like capabilities is interesting. While I haven't had any direct experience with their offering, I find it interesting that they are not sitting on their hands and dealing with just integration but trying to add value to the larger enterprise. They show that they are not content to deal with just one small brick in the enterprise foundation. By taking on these two areas, they are now setting themselves up to be an annoyance to other larger players, most likely in the hope of widening their audience of possible suitors. (Too bad I didn't' get to know them better when they worked down the hall from me...)

Profound Basics of Leadership

2008-01-16T14:01:00.000-08:00

"A good leader has to understand the people that are under him. Understand their needs, their desires, how they think a little bit."

- WW II Veteran, Referring to his C.O.
Easy Company, 506, 101 Airborne
(Intro, Episode 5, Band of Brothers)

Mobile Payments Differentiator

2008-01-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

Today over lunch an ex-coworker and I were discussing the mobile payment systems that varous companies are working on. There is a set of initiatives within the mobile telephone operators as well as the credit card companies to deliver a infrastructure to enable micro-payments or even macro-payments using you cell phone. This isn't a new concept, it has been in use for a while now in Japan and a few other Asian markets. But it has been slower to take off here in US and Europe.

Side View: About 10 years ago I was working with a German company who had developed the infrastructure to do payments via SMS on the European mobile phones. I always wondered what has been taking to long to bring that to market. One thing I found out from my German ex-coworker was that there was a legal decision a while back by the EU that essentially said if a mobile phone company wants to do payments via the phone, the phone company needs to apply to be a bank. That process has lots of hurdles and expense involved. That is the primary reason why this hasn't taken off just yet.

At some point we started brain storming about features we would like to see in such a system. One idea was the ability to categorize your payments made via your cell phone. Some consumer credit cards automatically categorize your charges for you (i.e., automotive, groceries) and most business cards have offered this feature as a value add for a while. The idea form my ex-coworker, is to have the ability to provide one or two levels of customized categories that you could assign to payments.

Think of it as the ability to categorize expenses, like in Quicken or MS Money, but doing it in real time as the payment happens versus letting it pile up to the end of the month (or later) and never actually doing it. I'm a Quicken Addict and there are times when I have a few months worth of expenses to get into Quicken because I was too busy to do it; I end up loosing a weekend day or evening to get this done.

It isn't technically possible to do this with credit cards today (the Credit Card Terminals don't have a user interface you could customize to do this). But you could easily do this as part of a mobile payment service. Image the website you use to view your mobile bill would have an area to customize these categories. Then, when you use your phone to pay for something, on the payment confirmation screen you have those categories appear. If you're in a hurry, you just hit "Make Payment" and move one. But you could also take one or two extra seconds to categorize the payment and have that category flow down to your bill and into Quicken or MS Money down the line.

This would be something truly revolutionary. From the technical capability stand point as well as from the fact that the mobile companies would be provided true customized value added services to their customers. In a time where most people complain about their mobile phone provider more often than they say anything good (and most of the time it has to do with poor customer service or the legacy long term contracts that the industry still uses), this would be the kind of mobile service that would add value for a change.

So there, the idea is out there...any mobile phone companies up to the challenge?

How to Live Forever

2008-01-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

"When all is said and done this business is nothing but a symbol, and when we translate this we find that it means a great many people think well of its products and that a great multitude has faith in the integrity of the people who make the product.

In a very short time, the machines that are now so lively will soon become obsolete and the big buildings for all their solidity must some day be replaced.

But a business which symbolizes can live so long as there are human beings alive, for it is not built of such flimsy materials as steel and concrete, it is built of human opinions, which may be made to live forever.

The good will of people is the only enduring thing in any business.

It is the sole substance.

The rest is shadow!"

The previous quote is from Herbert Fisk Johnson, Sr. (President, SC Johnson Wax 1919-1928). It was given during a SC Johnson Was 1927 profit sharing meeting.

This quote is hanging on a large plaque in one of the buildings of the Cornell Business School. As I was visiting Cornell, I sat nearby and watched 100's of business school students walk right by this quote (and probably have hundreds of times) without even noticing it.

How many companies today think (or act) with this level of understanding?

SaaS-ing A Recession

2007-12-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

I came across this interesting article a few days ago talking about how SaaS companies might be vulnerable in a recession. This was timely as yesterday I was having conversations with some entrepreneurs on a similar topic. These were all early stage startups and I was curious what their thoughts were about the current economic situation in the US and abroad.

This group didn't have much though about the the current economy (Are we in a recession? Are we heading toward one? Are we coming out of one?). Largely, this is because in an early stage startup, all your energy is focused on just getting stuff done. Recession or not, it's still a struggle for a startup to close those first few customers, build that buzz. One interesting bit that came out of the question was a sense that the cost of outsourcing will continue to go up over the next year. There are indications that outsourcing to Eastern European locations will catch up to the cost of outsourcing to India within a year. A rising tide raises all boats...eventually.

I find it interesting that this article focuses primarily on SaaS for the enterprise. If/When there is a recession, SaaS offerings for consumers would be the first ones to be hit. If a consumer is spending $25/month or $150/year for a SaaS service, they may start asking themselves if they really need it. And that is the beauty of it, if they don't or can't afford it anymore, cancel it.

The really interesting question is will consumers do that?

As the economy shifts, you will start to see the true management abilties of the leaders behind all SaaS offerings. How efficient is their operation? Do they have a cash cushion to weather the storm? What will they do during that storm? There was an interesting interview with the CEO of SaaS provider Zoho who boot strapped his company and continues to do so. I found an interesting correlary to the previous questions and how AdventNet (who own's Zoho) weather a few previous storms in their past. I find it interesting how they used downturns in their market and economy to spin up other SaaS based offerings. I also found the comment about the number of Engineers at SalesForce very interesting.

SaaS will be an interesting area to watch in the next 9-18 months.

My Google Reader Dream Feature

2007-11-26T21:57:00.000-08:00

A big Thanks You! goes out to Steve Lacey, a Google employee who used his Google 20% time to build the one feature that I have been asking and waiting for from Google Reader. Thanks to Steve, you can turn any one of your Google Reader tags into a blogroll widget.

I have been waiting for this feature for a while now. I am constantly updating my blog reading list and with this widget feature I can now put a blog roll up that reflects my current reading. As I change my subscriptions, my blogroll will change automatically. I love widgets!

You'll find two examples of this on the right hand side:

My SOA-Related Blogroll: Blogs I follow related to SOA
My SaaS-Web2.0 Blogroll: Blogs that I follow related to SaaS/Web2.0

If you use Google Reader, I think you will enjoy this new feature...make sure you tell Steve Lacey thank you!

The Zombie PC

2007-10-31T22:20:00.000-07:00

Ah, Halloween. The day that all the ghosts, goblins, and zombies come out. Unfortunately for a co-worker of mine, today was the day that his Windows laptop become a zombie. He flew across the country to spend a day working on a customer deliverable with members of the team that are based out here in San Francisco, only to spend at least 2 hours today trying to get his Windows XP laptop to work correctly.

I thought this was a timely, as this morning I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about the 50 Gigabytes of crash data that Microsoft can receive in a day from Windows users who click the "tell Microsoft about this problem" button when something crashes on their systems. Luckily for the poor Microsoft engineers who have to sift through this data, my co-worker didn't click that button at all today.

All of this made me appreciate my MacBook an the MacOS even more. Even with the reports of installation bugs in the latest upgrade of MacOS, I can't fathom going back to my old Windows system. While traveling, I don't even give it another thought as I sit down next to fellow business traveler on a plane and open my MacBook, have it wake from sleep, I login and start working in under 10 seconds while they are waiting for their computers to startup.

In the little over two months that I have been using my new MacBook--wow, it's only been just over two months, it feels like so much longer--I have not had it crash once. Ok, well...that might not be technically true. It did technical crash this morning...I was actually shutting the computer down to swap batteries when the system encountered some error and I got the "your system encountered an error, please manually power down" message. I don't count this because it didn't effect my productivity (I was already shutting down the system). This was actually during one of the zombie moments my co-worker was dealing with and I was rebooted, and back to productive work before he stopped his cursing...the system still wasn't working.

And I don't even know how many times I have put this system to sleep during this period. I would conservatively estimate 100+ times since I receive it. As so many others who have made the switch, it just works. I could never say that about my old Windows system, especially with regards to putting it to sleep! This being said, I'm still taking the pragmatic approach of waiting for the next patch release of Leopard before upgrading...even thought some of the features like spaces will be just improve my productivity even more.

I haven't spent much time writing about my switch because, quite honestly, I've been too busy getting work done. It's gotten to the point where it just seems natural to rely and even depend on my computer just working. Today's events just reminded me of how fortunate I am (and surprises me at how foolish corporate IT departments are at undervaluing their employees time by not considering the Mac as a technology platform).

Love my Mac...and I can't afford to go back!

Side Box: One issue that is a bit annoying, mostly because of the battery drain it causes when I'm traveling, is the CPU over cycling that Firefox seems to have on the Mac. I used Firefox exclusively on my old PC and never noticed a constant CPU consumption issue. With Firefox on the Mac, it always seems to be using 10% or more of the CPU time on the computer. Even when Firefox is hidden from view and there is nothing running in the windows. Very frustrating as I always seem to have about 6-10 web site tabs open to various things that I'm working on or reading. So when I travel, this constant background CPU noise shortens my battery life by a noticeable amount.

I haven't had a chance to research this yet, so if any one knows a solution to this please share!

Beyond the Software Consolidations

2007-10-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Today I came across an interesting posting from Chris Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI, about Consolidations in the Software Industry. He makes some interesting observations about recent consolidations in the technology industry amongst the "next 40" (the largest 40 software/services companies after Microsoft). He also points out the next set of acquisition targets from that same set.

Predictions are always hard to make (and harder to look at years later). But out of Schneider's next acquisitions, I have my own set of thoughts I wanted to share.

Sybase, Tibco, BMC and CA - I actually don't see these companies being acquired. While there are some interesting technologies that they all own (BMC and CA have a diverse collection of tools...both old and new), at a cursory glance there is nothing immediately compelling within them to make them acquisition targets.
Cognos and Citrix - These could be acquisition targets from someone.

Citrix has application virtualization and acceleration technology that might be interesting to someone; as long as their other applications are of interest or could be easily disposed of.
Cognos is interesting to those who are looking to acquire customers in the BI space (maybe combining with Sybase?)

Red Hat and Adobe - I don't see these two being acquired (or wanting to be)

Red Hat - If Red Hat were to be acquired, I fear that the open source world might start to swing in a completely different direction. I don't see Red Hat letting that happen.
Adobe - They have an interesting mix of products that makes them much more unique than these other companies. Their combination of enterprise and end use solutions make them an interesting company to watch in the next few years.

Even more interesting than focusing on these acquisitions, is focusing on the companies that aren't getting acquired. These are the companies that we don't hear about that exist below the radar threshold. Small companies that are profitable, doing interesting if not exciting stuff in very focused or niche markets. I know of a number of companies like this that were boot strapped by their founders, grown to impressive revenue numbers, and still kept private and focused on providing value to their customers and their employees.

Some of these companies get acquired every now and then and pop up above the radar level. But the more interesting thing is how many stay down where they are. Perhaps this is part of the maturing of the High Tech industry that has been in process for a while. The development of High Tech business leaders that are in the business for something more than the quick buck or the big bang.

Whole Foods Teaches IT Customer Service

2007-10-03T18:41:00.000-07:00

Lately, in my discussions with IT executives as well as small and medium sized technology company executives the topics of Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS) customer services has been coming up. It seems that some Open Source ans SaaS providers have lost sight of the importance of the Customer. I have heard of SaaS providers that provide a level of self-support in the, now standard, form of Community Forums but fail to actively participate in the community themselves. I have also heard stories of Open Source users contacting the Open Source provider for support, even willing to pay for onsite consulting, but being ignored unless they purchase a multi-year support contract first.

It appears that the Technology business models may have changed, but many business are still operating the same. Regardless of their size or type, the executives behind these technology companies need to relearn a basic premise of business: you only exist for the customer; without the customer the business doesn't make money and you don't get paid. I might be a bit more sensitive to this than most due to my entrepreneurial spirit and constant contact with customers as part of a sales team. But some of the stories that I heard start to border on the level of astonishment in regards to how these companies have ignored their customers.

Maybe these software executives should take a lesson from Whole Foods.

Now before you think I've flipped, listen to this story of customer support that I experienced tonight. My wife was shopping at whole foods and when she got home realized that the checkout clerk had not given her the packages of meat that she purchased. When I ran back to the story to pick up the package at the Customer Service desk, the clerk who helped me was sincerely apologetic and also gave me a bag of chocolate chip cookies for my troubles.

When you look at this at the surface, you realize that this is the type of response one would expect from a business focused on keeping a loyal customer. All jokes about "Whole Paycheck" aside, I'm sure the clerk wasn't even thinking about how much money we spend at Whole Foods regularly or about the $60 we spent there that day. She wasn't thinking about the fact that the free bag of cookies (which costs $5.50) was almost 10% of the value of the groceries we bought that day. What she was thinking about was just keeping a customer happy and making amends when the business as a whole made a mistake.

Now translate that same thinking to the much more business savy technology industry. When an executive in an Open Source firm doesn't want to send a consultant out to a user of that company's Open Source software for a paid engagement (typical rates run between $2000 and $3500 per day) because the user doesn't have a support contract (which typically runs between $20,000 and $40,000) who is the executive focusing on? Obviously not the best interests of their company.

Here is a chance to show a prospect the level of support you can provide...while getting paid for it...and earn the right to sell the customer a support contract. It's earning 10% now in order to earn 100% later...who wouldn't do that? It's possible that there were absolutely no one available who could provide this consulting. Possible...but customer focused companies always seem to find someone who can wear multiple hats or be re-prioritized to earn a new customer. So, if the executive wasn't focusing on what's best for their company or what's best for the customer...who or what were they focusing on?

Maybe some of the software executives behind some Open Source and SaaS companies should step out of their offices and into the real world once in a while. They could start out simple, lets say Business 101, by actually going out and visiting a customer and learning what's it like in their customer's environments. And if they really want to challenge themselves by taking Business 201, they could try working for a while at Whole Foods...

Welcome Back Old Friend

2007-08-24T01:31:00.001-07:00

It's been a long ten years, and oh how you have grown...

A few days ago, I welcomed back into my life the Mac. It was time for a laptop upgrade (what does it say when you have worn half the lettering off your keyboard?) and I was ready for a change. Like most, I wasn't that excited about a laptop with Vista on it. And my existing laptop--an IBM ThinkPad which I absolutely admire--was starting to show it's processor age as well as strange OS level behavior (like at times it wouldn't be able to resolve DNS names which essentially made it useless online...after hours of trying to fix that, I finally just gave up and rebooted it when it occurred!). It was time to make a change for the better...for the betterment of my productivity. I bought a new PowerBook Pro.

Since I had it customized (maxed out the memory and added the larger/faster hard drive), I had to wait a few weeks for the computer to arrive. That wouldn't have been so hard if it wasn't for the fact that the software I ordered with the Mac (Parallels and MS Office) kept arriving at my door in separate boxes. Finally, I got an email saying that my new laptop had left the factory. Like a kid waiting for Christmas Eve, I kept checking back to the FedEx tracking website to keep tabs on my Mac. There is something perverse about watching the delivery progress of something built half way around the world:

Then, the same day I'm to leave for a business trip, I see that my Mac has been loaded on the truck. Oh, the pressure! I don't have to leave for the airport until Noon, if the laptop arrives at 10am, do I have time to get it functional so I can take it on my trip? I sure was going to try!

So after about an hour and half (I had a half hour interuption to deal with a work issue), I had the Mac booted up for the first time, configured, installed my needed software, and connected to my mail account to start syncing my mail. I don't think I would have been able to do that with a PC. In the end, I wanted time to get re-aquanted with my old friend (my first laptop was a PowerBook 510 which I bought 12 years ago and replaced 10 years ago). And what better time than on a 4 hour plane ride? So I ended up packing up both laptops and headed off to the airport. So, seven hours after it left FedEx's Oakland facility, the MacBook Pro was back within sight of it's arrival point.

I brought the ThinkPad along as a backup and to transfer over my work documents. That night at my hotel, I set up a peer to peer wireless network between the two machines, connected the Mac to my shared documents folder on the ThinkPad, and copied over all my files in an hour. I have tried many times to get a peer to peer wireless network to work between two Windows laptops and was never successful. Worked first time with the Mac.

I plan on documenting my experiences transition from the PC back to the Mac over the course of the next few weeks. And I'll start off by stating a few of my first impressions:

Apple definitely has the entire user experience down! From unpacking the laptop from it's briefcase like box, to the bare essentials presented to you when you remove the styrofoam. The laptop itself even came in a nice protective sleeve. It is quite an experience.
The small usability things that Apple focuses on do make a huge difference. Something as simple as a well designed power supply seems so trivial, until you have one. I was expecting to have to buy a second power supply--I have 5 for my ThinkPad and they are strategically placed around my entire house--but the design with the unfolding prongs which can be replaced with a longer power cable is ideal. I leave the power cable plugged in at my desk at home, and just take the brick and the unfolding prongs on the road.
The lack of the Intel Inside sticker was something that I completely overlook until I saw this article today.
The fact that the machine comes out of sleep mode in under 5 seconds is amazing. I was getting jealous stares from other windows users on the plane tonight as I opened the laptop and started typing within 5 seconds! It's shocking how much time you loose waiting for the windows machines to come back to life. I does take longer for the Mac to go to sleep, about 20 seconds. I think that is due to the 4 Gigs of RAM in my machine that have to be written to disk (I used a 2 Gig model that did go to sleep faster). Regardless, this is still about half the time or less that it took my Windows XP machine to go to sleep...and about 20-30x faster than waking an XP machine up!
So far, I have not encountered any issues with any of my documents from the PC. Since I have office installed (needed that so I could connect to my companies exchange server for email), all the docs that I have needed opened right up. I'll be watching this closely over the next few days.
It has taken a few extra moments here and there to figure out how to do something that was second nature to me on a PC...like right clicking on a mis-spelled word to fix it! But, after a few seconds of experimenting with the FN, CTRL, and OPTION keys on the keyboard, I figured out the right combination to replace the right click action on the PC. There are a few things that I already think will take me time to get used to, like the lack of a dedicated page up, page down, and backspace key.

All in all, I'm glad I spent the extra money and moved back to a Mac. Cool factor aside, I can tell already that I am able to be more productive with this machine. The learning curve isn't that great. And I doubt my previous experience has much to do with that since a lot has changed in the past 10 years. I'll continue documenting my experiences here on the blog over the next few weeks.

I used to roll my eyes back a bit when I heard other people say it, but it's true.. the Mac OS just works. What a novel thought!

The Google Apps Security Hole

2007-08-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have been using Google Apps for some of my work. Started off with mail, moved to calendar, and then to docs. The hardest part of this before today was getting used to the limited capabilities within Google Docs. Today, I realized the that Google Apps has a huge security hole it it that scares the hell out of me.

There is no configuration option (that I or others have found) to force all interactions with Google Apps to be secure!

Sure, Google Apps will encrypt your password as you login in. But if you are passing sensitive information via GMail, or storing sensitive information in Google Docs, all that information will be passed over the internet in the clear! Google Apps lacks a configuration option to "encrypt all access to Google Apps". (I'm letting the security aspect of encrypting the data on the Google servers to slide for now...one thing at a time.)

Sure, you can manually change every Google App's URL to be encrypted (to use https), but expecting users to do this is a fallacy, users are the weakest link of the security network...they will forget and information will be passed unsecured. And some people will say that "encrypting everything is too much over head", but that is the smallest price to pay for security. Most people don't think of security until it is too late. If Google wants Apps to be taken as a serious service, then this is a needed price to pay.

If you are a corporate user of Google Apps, send Google a message that this hole needs to be filled! Even if you're not a corporate user, but are a user that takes their security seriously...send the message!

In the mean time, make sure you install one of the following plug-ins in your web browser:

Firefox: The CustomizeGoogle Add-On - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743
Internet Explorer: The CG4IE utility (CustomizeGoogle for Internet
Explorer) - http://www.cg4ie.com/

I now use the Firefox add-on on every computer I use. When configured properly, it will automatically change all the URLs going to Google Apps to encrypt them (to use https). I disabled all the other features of the plug-in (which I didn't see value in).

These add-ons are not a solution to this problem. Again, they require action by the user and can also be disabled by the user (remember: weakest link in the security chain!). Google needs to add the previously described feature to Google Apps ASAP in order to provide adequate security to the users of Google Apps.

First 8 Things to Do with LinkedIn

2007-07-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

While helping a colleague out with LinkedIn today and I created this short list of immediate things to do with LinkedIn to start getting the most from it right away.

Clean Up old profiles: You should only have one profile on LI, If you have more than one, invite people from your old profiles to re-link on your new profile. Then Contact LinkedIn support to delete your old profiles. In the future, as you change jobs, emails, etc., just update your profile, don't create a new profile.
Flush out your profile with quick info about past positions. This helps you connect with others who you might have worked with there who are on linked in and helps them find you. How far back you want to go is your choice. Just be honest! This is the backbone of networking. If you totally lie about a position, someone will find it and it will hurt you.
Add all your current active emails addresses Under Account & Settings > Email Addresses. This allows others to send you linkedin requests and for LinkedIn to find you in the network based on any of your email address. Choose one as your primary address, this is where LI will send all notifications to (like when someone wants to connect)
Set Your Privacy Settings (IMPORTANT)

Account & Settings > Advertising: I set this to no, there is enough blind info about me being passed around already. No reason to make the advertising companies jobs easier (Kuddo's to LI for giving you this option!)
Account & Settings > Connection Browsing: Set to no. Your network is your asset, no need to share it openly with everyone. People can still search and find people in your network through you, but they can’t go to your profile and see a list of everyone you know.
Account & Settings > Profile Views: this controls a new feature of LI that shows you who has looked at your profile. This setting controls how LI shows you when you look at someone’s profile. I choose “anonymous profile characteristics”. (Another Kuddo for the LI team!)

Install the LI Toolbar on all systems you use (both work and personal). Most importantly, this will put an icon in the upper right hand corner of all your emails telling you if the sender (or others on the email list) are members of LI and are in your network. Secondarily, it will scan your mail to create a list of people you might want to send LI invites to based on your email correspondence.
Start sending out invites to those you want to link with

Decide how you will use LI. There is one school of thought to link with anyone and everyone to build as big a network as possible. Another is to link with those who you have actually worked with and know you in some fashion. I choose the later, as I feel it’s important when requests to make introductions come along that I actually know one of the two parties involved. Otherwise I feel it starts to erode your networking value…
Always personalize the LI Invite text to increase the likely hood of a link (and it’s just polite)

Under My Contacts check out “Colleagues” and “Classmates”, to have LI search for other LI member who you may know through companies you were at or where you went to school. Even if you don’t know there email addresses, you can send a LI invite to them and re-establish some old connections.
Consider upgrading to a Paid account. This will give you more access to the LI network for searching as well as more ways to reach people (introductions and InMails), as well as greater reference search capabilities. (I upgraded to a Business account back when hiring for a position so I could do more searches based on companies and key words and could then contact them directly. This is essentially what most of the no-value add recruiters today do...and the business account costs were much less. (Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with LI in any way other than being a happy and enthusiastic user!)

Hope this helps others as well!

Stop Me - Something Cool from Microsoft?

2007-07-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

When you think about the "cool companies" in the technology space that are working on "cool things", Microsoft is usually not the name that first jumps to everyone's mind. And yet, yesterday I learned about something Microsoft is working on that made me say "Wow, that's cool".

My colleague William Henry mentioned Microsoft Surface in a recent blog posting; I hadn't heard of Surface before and checked it out based on William's recommendation. The concept behind it was quite impressive and I agree with William that this is the type of thing that I would expect ot see from Apple, not Microsoft.

Image an entire table top (about the size of a coffee table) that is a touch sensitive computer screen. What ever gets displayed on the screen can be interacted with in a iPhone sort of way. If there are photos on the screen, they look like a bunch of photos just tossed on a table. Grab one and it moves to the top of the stack; drag your fingers at opposite corners and resize the photo; grab a corner drag in a half circle to rotate the photo to show to your friend sitting on the oppose side of the table; touching the photo and flicking your finger tosses the photo aside.

Now take that same table and integrate it via bluetooth with you cell phone, iPod (of course on the Surface website they use that Microsoft music player...), camera, or other portable device of choice. Lay the device on the table, and the table now displays options for interfacing with the device and accessing data on the device. If it's a camera, the photos display as in the example above. If its an iPod...er...music player, songs are displayed from your collection as well as from the phone. Dragging the songs from your collection to the music player transfers the songs.

The other example Microsoft gives is in a restaurant where your menu is displayed on the table. After you order via Surface, the table changes into some hip night club psychedelic screen savers. Or, as more apt to happen in our modern age, it might start displaying advertisements.

The concept of Surface is intriguing and has a lot of potential behind it, some that aren't even imagined yet. It completely removes the interface device aspect of working with a computer. The interaction has the potential to be much more humanistic and nature. Has the potential. There are some aspects about Surface that are a bit ahead of their time. Like how quickly photos could be transfered from a phone to the Surface via wireless connection (it takes me many minutes to transfer my photos to my computer today via a high speed USB port). Not to mention the interoperability issues with all the different phone, camera manufacturers.

If Surface ever becomes a reality, the key to it's success will depend on the development community. The iPhone has been out for just about two weeks now, and there are already a rush of new software applications coming out for it. Someone was smart enough to have a iPhone developer boot camp the weekend after the phone was released (sad thing is that it appears that Apple wasn't smart enough to sponsor or get involved in it). This type of network around Surface would be sure to generate some really amazing things. Of course, when it is actually released.

To really appreciate Surface, you gotta check out the demo movies on the Surface website. Regardless of how real the technology is right now, the concept is killer. After the last movie, I got bit by the sci-fi aspect that Surface could have. How about placing a stack of documents on it, having them get absorbed into the surface and digitized. Then send those documents to another Surface user half way around the world only to have the stack emerge from that Surface so the receiver can pick them up and walk away. Might be a bit too Star Trek for now, but we're getting there.

Side Box: Actually two really cool things from Microsoft. The other that has recently come out of Microsoft in conjunction with some research conducted at University of Washington is Photosynth. This is an amazing fast and unique way to interact with photos and view associated photos as they relate to the real world. You are given a 3-D view of something and can zoom in and out of photos of that thing taken from different angles. The killer aspect is that those photos could all be from a public archive like Flickr and taken by different people. The best way to understand Photosynth is to watch a killer demo of this from TED2007 and play around with a demo from Microsoft Labs.

Ohloh: Insight into Your Open Source Projects

2007-06-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about Open Source software development is, well, it's open-ness. Sort through your list of Open Source packages that you are running in your organization. You can go in and look at the source code for each one of them, right? But what's behind that source code? Or Who?

I recently found a very interesting open source directory called Ohloh. Ohloh (oh, what a name!) takes a very interesting 'bot' approach to open source. They employ a legion of software bots to crawl through the major open source repositories and collect information about open source projects that you may never have known.

For example, did you know that the Firefox project has over 3 million lines of code? More importantly, how fast has the code base been growing? (or is it shrinking?). All you have to do is check out Firefox's Code Statistics on Ohloh. You can see a breakdown of how many files within the Firefox code base are licensed under which licensing scheme. A trended history of code lines. And a breakdown of what percentage of Firefox is written in what programming language. When deciding on an which smaller scale open source projects to use, you can use this information to make a better decision. Do you have programmers with experience in the languages used within a project?

You can also look at an open source project's list of contributors and how long they have been with the project as well as how often they submit code. The system even gives a heuristic on each contributors experiences level with various languages based on how many submissions have been found in each language and over a given period. There is even a social network aspect to the site where programmers can rate their peers (which needs to be taken in context of any social network site...). About the only thing that is missing is the one click ability to see if there are other projects that a contributor is also involved with (you can do this by doing a search for a contributor on the main page of the site, but this is so obvious I'm surprised the site's developers didn't include that on each developer's project page).

Of course, what would a website with social features be if you couldn't have an account and provide your own feedback on projects. Ohloh has that, as well as the ability for members to define the stack of open source software that they use. Which gives viewers the ability to see how many people are using a projects.

Ohloh provides a new twist on evaluating opens source software projects. However, there were a number of projects that I use which were not on the site, some of those missing projects surprised me as Ohloh has been around since 2004. Guess no one is perfect...

Jott Your Thoughts and Reminders

2007-06-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

It's not too often that I find a really useful and free service that I can see myself using almost daily. Today I found one. Even with the wide spread use of mobile email, at times it still not practical, safe, or possible to take down a quick note on your smart phone and email it out. Wouldn't it be great if we all had a personal secretary that we could call to transcribe our note and then email it out? But who could afford that...right? Now we all can!

Jott is a essentially a note taking service that allows you to call a toll free phone number, record up to a 30 second note, reminder, idea, or whatever and then have it emailed to your inbox...fully transcribed! Even better, set up other people in your account and have the note emailed to them instead (or sent as a text message to their phone). Group people together and send a note to the entire group. And if you can't wait the few minutes for the message to be transcribed, send it as an audio attachment! Jott even makes it easy to pull in your contacts from other services.

Jott is so simple, it's brilliant!

I also love how the "Jott in Action" section on the website simply explains how the system works. If you know how to use a phone, email, and web browser...you can use this service.

Jott has been around for about a year now, and have a great service up and running in that time. The current restriction is that it's available only in the United States. But I assume that this restriction won't be there for too much longer.

I will definitely be using this service almost daily!

SOA Decoder Ring

2007-05-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

One of the toughtest aspects of the SOA industry is trying to keep track of all the acronyms. It seems like the IT Industry's Acronym-izer is running at full capacity. Well, a few days ago I came across this article on InfoQ that helps you Make Sense of All These Crazy Web Services Standards. It's a great article that describes all the standards within the Web Services arena as well as goes into a concise description of each of them. I've been looking for a list just like this for way too long...so a big thank you to Michele Leroux Bustamante for creating this article!

How to Make SOA Happen

2007-05-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

[ I've been a bit distracted over the past few weeks and haven't been able to post much. Who knew that just coordinating to put a new roof on your house could be so time consuming (that doesn't make me look forward to the actual 'put on' process). ]

It's a common notion that things happen in threes. So when I see the same theme three times in a short period I see that as the universe telling me something. Recently, it was telling me about how to make SOA happen.

First, William Henry, a colleague of mine at IONA, found an interesting article that talks about How Sun Sells Its SOA Dog Food To Its Own Employees. While that article is a bit confusing with regards to it's spin on Sun's SOA solution (hard to tell if it's author is positive or negative about Suns JCAPS) the real intent is to talk about how to present SOA to the end user. The article quotes a Senior Manager for Integration Services at Sun regarding how he talks to his internal customers about using the Sun SOA solution to enable re-use within Sun's IT infrastructure and remove stove pipe applications. The key take away from this article is that even within a large IT Vendor, the people that own IT systems can't always see the value of SOA. And when they do see the values (i.e., reuse, lower costs, agility) it's hard for them to want to do SOA.

Second, another IONA colleague and I were talking about funding models for SOA. There are a number of customers that we are working with right now who are in the early stages of a SOA deployment or reaching the first release of a SOA infrastructure. Each of these customers tend to use a hybrid funding approach for SOA. A combination of 'corporate money' given to a centralized IT organization to jump start a SOA initiative as well as 'project money' or 'LOB money' that is used to fund the growth, maintenance, and ongoing support of the SOA initiative by the centralized IT organization. However, even with a funding model in place, a common theme across all these customers is that you need to have a top down driver for SOA within an enterprise to really gain enterprise wide adoption and receive enterprise wide value from any SOA initiative.

Third, today I read a great writeup on the Momentum SI Service Oriented Architecture blog about Talking to the Business about SOA. Jeff from Momentum SI provides a good overview of the fact that when talking to businesses about SOA, you need to talk to your current audience. Any SOA initiative at an enterprise level will cross multiple business areas within the company. Jeff does a good job of describing the differences of key business areas and how you need to keep these differences in mind when talking to them about SOA. I do see one interesting theme underlying all of the business areas discussed...a corporate drive for SOA.

To me, all three of these items point to a single fact: that there needs to be a corporate level driver for SOA in order to truly see the long term value and benefits of a SOA initiative. That doesn't mean that SOA initiatives can't be done in small incremental bites, but those bites will only happen if the mid-level person driving them has the political clout over peers to make them happen. Without a high level executive (or corporate) initiative saying "Thou Shall Be", these small SOA bites will never grow into enterprise returns. The internal politics will eventually stop them dead in their tracks.

SOA In the Enterprise Lives

2007-05-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

(Disclaimer: I currently work for IONA Technologies)

You hear a lot about departmental adoption of SOA and how most SOA deployments are not happening at the enterprise level (see SDTimes article about Will SOA Become The New Siloed App?). While this has been the historical status of SOA—and one of the smartest ways to migrate to SOA in a cost effective manner—there are some enterprises who are forging ahead with SOA, enterprise wide.

For the past two months, I have been working with a large financial institution on an enterprise SOA project. The goal of the project is to increase re-use within the enterprise which will help rein in the IT spend on duplicate application development and migrate code off of legacy systems through the construction of a new services based platform for the enterprise. What do I mean by large? Phase 1 has over 200 external facing services (akin to legacy "applications") within the project and each service is composed of multiple internal services.

IONA was brought in during the middle of a development cycle to help identify and address various risk areas that were being bantered around by the various development teams. This was accomplished through the use of our Value Assessment Program that I talked about earlier.

One of the interesting things that we found was that there was a problem of trying to do integration testing of all these services. The issue was less about the services themselves and more about the Interface Agreements that governed how a service was used. Since the project was leveraging services based development that had happened in the past as well as service-enabling vendor provided applications, the aspect of service interfaces was a lot muddier than the ideal SOA implementation talked about in books.

The service providers were not creating a services and saying “here’s how you access it”. There was very complex business functionality and message passing that already existed and needed to be migrated to this new platform (which in its own right is an topic for a few discussions). So both the service provider and service consumer were working together to define the interface to a service. And then business happens: new regulations come about, improvements are thought of, changes need to be made. But there was no process or governance behind those interface changes. One side would make a change without consulting the other side. The net effect: a massive service based platform that wouldn’t work the first time it was plugged together and turned on in QA.

This is where the fun starts: internal discussions and finger pointing at where the problem originates. Since there was no process for defining and governing the interface agreements, the environment was ripe for momentum freezing politics which leads to slippages in delivery schedules.

IONA had seen this before while working with similarly scoped projects in global financial and telecommunications companies. We have developed a customizable solution framework composed of IONA IP, best practices, and industry experience that is capable of providing the process and governance around the creating of the Interface Agreements during the requirements stage of the SDLC as well as governance of those Interface Agreements during development and testing. This framework was designed to solve just this problem.

With everything being tracked and reported on within this framework, the status of service development team's development is visible to everyone in the organization. When politically induced tensions start to drag on the project, transparency can be one of the best solutions.