November 30th, 2006
I was in a business meeting a few days ago, listening to a senior executive present his company’s strategic plan for 2007. One of his goals is to establish a new and interesting division of the company as a “thought leader” in its market segment.
Even though it’s a somewhat fuzzy phrase, most of us would […]
November 29th, 2006
I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one on the planet being driven crazy by what I call the “hand-held dilemma”: trying to decide whether to fill my pockets with five different devices that perform various functions very nicely, or consolidate them into one “übergadget” that does everything in a tolerable, but nevertheless sub-optimal fashion. […]
November 26th, 2006
I posted a review of Bruce Taylor’s new book, Working Among Programmers, on Amazon’s web site this evening, and it occurred to me that people might find it useful to see the commentary here, too. And since Amazon’s primitive user-interface for creating reviews apparently doesn’t allow images, HTML formatting, or hyperlinks (c’mon, guys, get with […]
November 24th, 2006
CIO Insight has published their list of predictions of the 30 top IT trends for 2007. There’s no explanation, justification, or discussion of their list — so I don’t know what kind of thinking, analysis, surveys, or other mumbo-jumbo formed the basis for their predictions. Indeed, I’m not even sure what some of them — […]
November 21st, 2006
I don’t usually blog about politics, especially when the subject is Iraq. Unlike several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers (not to mention soldiers from Britain and several other countries), and several million of the country’s citizens, I’ve never been to Iraq. I don’t speak the language, I know relatively little about Iraq’s history or culture, and […]
November 19th, 2006
A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog article entitled “Why Hasn’t Software Development Gotten Any Better?” Hank Heath and Moshe Gotesman posted some thoughtful comments on the blog, which I encourage you to read; and I’ve also gotten some interesting offline comments sent via email. For example, a long-time colleague, Becky Winant, wrote to […]
November 14th, 2006
It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Web 2.0 mind-map, and lots of things have been happening; I’ve presented a two-day seminar on Web 2.0 in Rome, attended the big Web 2.0 “Summit” conference in San Francisco, and download several more articles and blog postings. You can find the latest version of the mind-map […]
November 10th, 2006
I’ve had three relatively bizarre interactions with online e-commerce systems in the past couple of weeks, and it makes me wonder whether corporate databases are far more screwed up than I thought they were.
The first problem occurred about a week ago, after I had ordered a luscious new 30-inch display monitor from the Apple computer […]
November 9th, 2006
I participated in a software “best practices” conference today in Jersey City, and listened to several speakers lament the mediocre state of software development today, with ad hoc development processes, lack of metrics, and various other poor practices leading to schedule slippages, budget overruns, and poor quality. Someone in the audience interrupted one of the […]
November 9th, 2006
I’ve now finished two full days of the Web 2.0 Summit conference, and unfortunately have to catch a red-eye flight back to the East Coast without having the opportunity to participate in the third and final day of the conference. And before I get overwhelmed with a whole new set of meetings, deadlines, and other […]
