2008-04-09
2008-03-16
Ban All Cars Getting Less Than 35 MPG?
The former head of Royal Dutch Shell has gone way out on a limb and urged the European Union to ban all vehicles that get less than 35 mpg, saying it is the only way to significantly address global climate change and force the auto industry to build more efficient vehicles...
Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, who spent his career working for the giant oil company, says an outright ban is needed because so-called "gas-guzzler" taxes do not work - and aren't fair because they let those with the means to pay them skirt responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions...
Moody-Stuart, who is currently chairman of the mining group Anglo American, says he is a great fan of the free market, "but like most things, they have a failing. Without regulation to channel their power, markets will not deliver things which are of no immediate benefit to the individual making his or her choice, even though they may be beneficial to society."
P.S. I just worked out my most recent gas mileage (US gallons): 12.3 mpg. (And that's with spending almost as much time on a tow truck hook as driving.) Groan.
2008-03-10
It's the libraries, stupid!
Let's be clear. It is not the language, but the libraries that matter. Every time I hear developers talk about a new language and say it is by far the best one, I just shake my head. A new language is not going to be usable in today's world unless all of the libraries are in place. As the complexity of our software increases, so do demands on libraries. Microsoft learned it the hard way with years of set backs when it rolled out .Net. Had it simply embraced and optimized Java, it could have been years ahead instead.
Apple choose a different path. For the last decade Apple has been wowing the crowds and investors with its flawless and lightening quick execution. Every new Apple announcement, we keep thinking that they won't top it. But every time, Jobs and his crew pulls another trick out of the hat. Clearly, Apple is a well-oiled machine that has perfected the art of execution. But beyond that, Apple's secret sauce has been its software. While others have been inventing new languages and frameworks, Apple kept perfecting and building up its code.
Since the early days, Apple embraced a language called Objective-C - an object-oriented flavor of the popular procedural language. When Jobs returned to Apple, one of the early smart decisions was to ditch the old operating system in favor of Unix. This moved allowed Apple to instantly tap into serious programmers while retaining a beautiful and simple UI. When Java came along, Apple was unmoved, because it was just too slow. In general, over the years Apple has ignored new languages and just stuck with its platform. Smart, disciplined and mature...
2008-03-09
Lessons Learned at 37 Signals
37signals is a software company headquartered in Chicago that started as a interactive design company and has since become one of the leading software companies for personal productivity software. Currently over one million people and businesses use their productivity applications... They also are responsible for creating and then open sourcing the popular web developer language [sic] Ruby on Rails. Jason Fried is the company's founder.
Lesson 1: Ignore The Great Unknown
"...often as entrepreneurs, we worry about the impact of our decisions rather than just making the right decision. ...this is crazy, because decisions made today don't have to last forever - we 'must optimize for today.'"
Lesson 2: Watch Out for Red Flags
Red flags are ... words or phrases that end up causing problems in communications. For example: need, can't, easy, only, fast.
Lesson 3: Be Successful and Make Money by Helping Other People be Successful and Make Money
...This has become part of [37signals'] philosophy, looking for opportunities in the marketplace to "spot chain reactions and be the catalyst" around helping others.
Lesson 4: Target Nonconsumers and Nonconsumption
...The idea [from Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School] is that there exists an entire market of nonconsumers, or people who have a need but existing players aren't targeting these people. The advantage of targeting this segment is that you minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players.
Lesson 5: Question Your Work Regularly
- why are we doing this?
- what problem are we solving?
- is this actually useful?
- are we adding value?
- will this change behavior?
- is there an easier way?
- what's the opportunity cost?
- is it really worth it?
Lesson 6: Read your Product
"The biggest sin on the internet right now is bad copywriting ... paying too much attention to pixels and not enough attention to words."
Lesson 7: Err on the Side of Simple
...always "start with the easy way."
Lesson 8: Invest in What Doesn't Change
Lesson 9: Follow the Chefs
Jason called chefs the smartest business professionals. ...they are aware that you become famous and successful by giving knowledge away. For example, chefs have cooking shows and write cook books. Yet it doesn't stop their restaurants from being successful. In fact, he claimed they are probably more successful because of their sharing.
Lesson 10: Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity
Lesson 11: Road Maps Send You in the Wrong Direction
When talking about business plans, financial projections, or features for products 37signals believes road maps are bad, because "they lock you into the past." The only exception is APIs, because people are counting on it. ..."do the right thing at the right time."
Lesson 12: Be Clear in Crisis
At the beginning of this year, 37signals had some infrastructure problems that resulted in a few hours of unscheduled downtime. This was widely discussed on the internet. They quickly posted about what had happened and during the technical problems they kept their homepage updated with status messages. Through this experience, it reinforced their belief that people love you even more if you are open, honest, public and responsive during a crisis.
Lesson 13: Make Tiny Decisions
Rather than trying to make major decisions, when possible, Jason encouraged entrepreneurs to break problems down to the atomic level. In web properties, this is especially powerful because they've been able to break features down to the atomic level and then launch them one at a time. This is good because the team can gain momentum and celebrate little launches. However, it's also good because "when you make tiny decisions, you can't make big mistakes."
Lesson 14: Make it Matter
Jason ended his presentation by encouraging the audience to make sure their work was significant. He talked about how meaningful he felt the products they were creating were for individuals. ..."everything you do should matter."
2008-03-04
Application Development in the "Cloud"
...Although it is difficult to come up with a precise and comprehensive definition of cloud computing, at the heart of it is the idea that applications run somewhere on the “cloud” (whether an internal corporate network or the public Internet) – we don’t know or care where. But as end users, that’s not big news: We’ve been using web applications for years without any concern as to where the applications actually run.
The big news is for application developers and IT operations. Done right, cloud computing allows them to develop, deploy and run applications that can easily grow capacity (scalability), work fast (performance), and never — or at least rarely — fail (reliability), all without any concern as to the nature and location of the underlying infrastructure.
Taken to the next step, this implies that cloud computing infrastructures, and specifically their middleware and application platforms, should ideally have these characteristics:
- Self-healing: In case of failure, there will be a hot backup instance of the application ready to take over without disruption (known as failover)...
- SLA-driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered...
- Multi-tenancy: The system is built in a way that allows several customers to share infrastructure, without the customers being aware of it and without compromising the privacy and security of each customer’s data.
- Service-oriented: The system allows composing applications out of discrete services that are loosely coupled (independent of each other)...
- Linearly Scalable: Perhaps the biggest challenge. The system will be predictable and efficient in growing the application. If one server can process 1,000 transactions per second, two servers should be able to process 2,000 transactions per second, and so forth.
- Data, Data, Data: The key to many of these aspects is management of the data: its distribution, partitioning, security and synchronization...
2008-02-28
Six Principles for Making New Things
Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.
I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person.
As with contrarian investment strategies, that's exactly the point. This technique is successful (in the long term) because it gives you all the advantages other people forgo by trying to seem legit. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.
...
Reddit is a classic example of this approach. When Reddit first launched, it seemed like there was nothing to it. To the graphically unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved the real problem, which was to tell people what was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a result it became massively successful. Now that conventional ideas have caught up with it, it seems obvious. People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it; now it looks like they're merely floating downstream.
So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.
37signals Featured in Wired (March 2008 issue)
Myth: Whoever spends the most wins
What’s more, 37signals’ ideological objections to outside funding could make them less able to withstand competition. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, says companies like 37signals won’t have the resources to fight should larger firms with huge economies of scale and backend infrastructure decide to take them on. “They’re going to have a very tough challenge,” he says.
We continue to find this argument flawed. First of all, a few rounds of VC millions won’t put us on equal footing with bazillion dollar giants like Google, Microsoft, or other masters of economies of scale.
Second of all, we’re not in the winner-take-all software world of the 90’s anymore. Thanks to the web, there’s plenty of room for lots of companies, ideas, and products to flourish. The behemoth model isn’t the only game in town. There’s plenty of opportunity, success, and profitability to go around.
Lastly, we think our biggest competitor is habit—people using the phone, email, paper, pencils, post-it notes, and fax machines. These are the people we want to win over. We believe the simple software we’re building is the best way to do it.
Technology Populism: Risks & Rewards
According to a new report by Forrester Research, Inc., Technology Populism is defined as "an adoption trend led by a technology-native workforce that self provisions collaborative tools, information sources, and human networks — requiring minimal or no ongoing support from a central IT organization."
For the layperson, this definition can be boiled down to this: more and more people are functioning as their own IT department at work.
Google ‘Not-Office’ Finally Completed
"The lightweight cloud application", eh? Hmm.......Soldiering on in its quest not to compete with Microsoft’s (MSFT) core office-productivity software business [ha-ha!], Google (GOOG) last night [27 Feb 2008] added another component to its Web-based productivity suite–Google Sites. Created from JotSpot, the hosted wiki platform Google acquired back in 2006, Sites is essentially a lightweight version of Microsoft’s business-collaboration program SharePoint. It offers organizations a means of instantly creating a wiki-style group workspace, in which employees can collaborate.
It’s another powerful addition to the Google Apps suite, which already includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and Spreadsheets and Page Creator. And it’s free. And if you think of “free” as a euphemism for “not robust enough for enterprise use,” you best think again. At least that’s what Google says, anyway. “The so-called lightweight cloud application isn’t for the non-power user,” Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, told News.com’s Dan Farber. “It’s actually for the power user. Today’s power users aren’t writing macros. They are ‘power collaborators,’ grabbing content from six different places in the cloud and putting [it] on a site and sharing it.”
2008-02-18
"Crackpot Technologies" That Could Shake Up IT
- Nanotechnology
- Optical computing
- Pervasive computing
- Wireless power
- The $100 laptop
- Direct brain interfaces
- Enterprise supercomputing
- Virtual worlds
From Infoworld
2008-02-16
And the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century Are...
- Make solar energy affordable.
- Provide energy from fusion.
- Develop carbon sequestration methods.
- Manage the nitrogen cycle.
- Provide access to clean water.
- Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
- Advance health informatics.
- Engineer better medicines.
- Reverse-engineer the brain.
- Prevent nuclear terror.
- Secure cyberspace.
- Enhance virtual reality.
- Advance personalized learning.
- Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.
2007-12-23
Technology Quotes
- "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
- "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." Rich Cook, author, best known for his Wizardry series of books.
- "UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs, creator of the C programming language and key developer of UNIX.
- "The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential." Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.
