Fred Brunel is a friend of mine. He used to be the software architect at IN FUSIO and back then I’ve been working with him on a daily basis to industrialize our Online Transaction Platform for mobile industry services. Not only does Frederic have a genuine passion for information and communication technologies, but he also has this rare ability to transmit the passion. In addition, he is not this type of techno addict that just develop features to enjoy the technology : Frederic always is business driven. Last but not least Fred has been pushing me to blog ever since 2004 !

Fred has joined XtraNormal in Montreal a year ago as Director of Product Development. He published on his blog the presentation XtraNormal did at Demo08 in San Francisco.

I have been amazed by their software application. (Note to Fidji : this is exactly the type of apps you’re interested in). Their product has a great interface to help creates animation and small clips from text entered by the user. These video clips can then be uploaded to social web apps such as Facebook, MySpace or Google. Awesome !

Check out the presentation here.

I am very glad to announce that, unsurprinsingly (considering the quality of their software), XtraNormal has won an award during Demo08.

Congratulations to XtraNormal, and great job Fred !

Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams.

Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by a QA department (QA = quality assurance) where professional testers run through thousands of automatized-or-not scenarii; documentation; technical support staff help the install base with potential regressions occuring during updates and coping with changing information system environments; localization project managers monitor translations of the software: and last but not least, application engineers actually parameterize the software at clients.

Now my question, how many technical staff should you account for every software development engineer? I figured out an average ratio of 1 to 4, that is to say, for every technical team of 100 there should be around 25 software developers actually hacking code.

I know there exists extremes but by and large, from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m too far from the reality with a 1:4 developer / all-categories-technical-staff ratio.

What do you think? Feel free to describe what the company does when sharing your experience, because, since there are very large discrepancies between, say, an SAP that manufactures ‘heavy’ enterprise software and any web application designer that may not necessarily run industrialized testing and that has no professional service department, we might not get nuances at first sight.

PS: the ratio will also depend on the maturity stage of the company: at Microsoft, [# of develops]/[develops + Microsoft Consulting Services staff + developer evangelists + localization engineers + testers (1 for each develop) + architects] approximately equals 1/4 (1 to probably 5 ot 6 adding documentation specialists; & 1 to much more if you consider the system integrator ecosystem that actually does the application engineering). But the company is rather mature and therefore can afford to focus on quality of execution rather than productivity in execution. Which probably wouldn’t be the case for an enterprise software startup for obvious resource reasons. Anything to share? Best and worse practices, per specific industry (Web 2 / UGC, Video Games, enterprise, affordable consumer traditional applications, etc.) most welcome. I need to test my own budgeting assumptions

I recently finished Al Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason, which takes a critical view of the current state of US democratic system and the systematic abuse against it by megacorporations, special interest groups and the system’s own executive branch. This book follows the same story of a good idea abused and turning against the people it was created to help as “The Corporation” and “Discontents of Globalization”.

While I felt that Gore was repeating his main points on almost every page, I think he is fighting a good fight. It did, however, get a bit boring to read on every page at least four of the following: ”The guys behind the constitution were geniuses”, “US was based on the finest principles of democracy”, “Media giants’ oligopoly on television and newspapers hurt democracy”, “Internet has potential to revitalise democracy”, “George W. Bush’s administration is destroying democracy”, “Corporations going unchecked cause havoc, not only to environment but to the society in general”.

The book is extremely US-centric, but in my opinion the issues are worldwide, not only because US position as “the last superpower” has effects globally, but also that the problems Gore points out are popping up in other western democracies.

What was missing from the book was solutions to the problems he describes. It was nice to see the last chapter in “The Corporation” by Joel Bakan dedicated to his solutions to better corporate governance and responsibility. Gore did however bring himself strongly into the book and clearly says what’s his take on the issues. He refers to studies, interviews, news articels and, naturally to his own experience, which brings a nice personal tone to the book. Some might argue that this book is just his manifesto for his upcoming presidential campaign, but in my opinion, the voice in the book sounds more like a guy who’s over that now.

It was also a bit appaling to read how Gore painted saints out of the founders of United States and how the founding documents are sacred and works of genius. Gore also seems to have trusted the new Democratic majority in US to cause bigger changes in the way the country would be run than the recent history shows. What was odd was that Gore didn’t criticise the two-party system itself at all. He did, however point out other pecularities of the US legislative and judical branch. While he compared the current state of all three branches to what the “founders had visioned”, he doesn’t compare the US system to other countries. I think this is a big mistake, as I have hard time believing that the US democratic system is without peers – especially when Gore reminds that pretty much all other democracies are based on the ideas first put into practice in US.

As this is IT oriented blog, I think I should talk a bit more about Gore’s points about Internet and its relationship with democratic ideals. Gore quickly talks about the issue of “net neutrality” and shows that he knows what his talking about by pointing out that the issue is practically the same as the pratice of “nondiscrimination” telcos were forced to accept before.

Gore also believes that internet, unlike television he says only exists to sell stuff, is more like printing press in its availability involve people in discussion and reasoning of ideas. I’m not at all that optimistic, as it seems that pretty much everything on the web is supported by advertising. I agree that internet has the pontential for two-way communication that television lacks, but in my opinion, the media giants are doing their best to turn internet to yet another enterntainment channel. In this regard, it would be vital to keep the internet as free as possible, a point Gore talks about a couple of times, but in my opinion should’ve gone in more detail. In this way, this book was more like Joseph Stiglitz’s “Discontents of Globalization” without its sequel – again, Gore could’ve talked more about the problems’ solutions.

While reading the book, I was somehow reminded of the intro of Dune 2 – just that “spice” was replaced with “information”. For European Union citizens, this book shows what things we should look out for and fix in EU before they become widespread problems. For everyone, this book shows that democracy doesn’t work if the people feel disconnected from the decision-making. For readers of this blog, I hope this book shows that everyone needs to do his/her bit to keep Internet free and open. We can’t afford the Internet turn into a new television.

Dear readers,

Just a small meta-update.

Bloggers’ spotlight

As you may have noticed, we added a nice BIG box on the right with a spot-light on all our bloggers—geeks from various disciplines . You can click on their names and see all the posts they’ve written on Tech IT Easy.

The reason we did this is because a blog needs a voice, and we realise that the sometimes-chaotic diversity of topics that we write, may not always correspond to your expectations. So now, you can just look at Jeremy’s posts, mostly on software, the lovely Fidji, often on e-commerce topics, or the equally lovely Georgia, with a strong communications-focus in her first post on TIE (don’t forget to welcome her!), as well as works of the other 12 bloggers.

More info about individual bloggers can be found by clicking on the ‘info‘ links, or on the about-page.

(Note: sadly individual rss-feeds do not work. That is a problem that Wordpress has architectured for unknown reasons and really frustrates us. You can send them a hate-mail here) Matt Thomas added a valuable comment, explaining how to enable rss-feeds per author.

Tech IT Easy News-service

Another box you’ll find on the right is the Tech IT Easy news-service, where we add stories from the media that we find interesting and are hopefully of added value to our readers.

Presence elsewhere

In case you missed it, Tech IT Easy is also on Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook !

The first two are essentially rss-aggregators of what we write about here. Jaiku also collects individual bloggers’ twitter-feeds and the news-service bookmarks (which we may introduce to Twitter also). Facebook is not doing so well, but that’s probably because it sucks (haha).

Roughly half of the crew are also on Twitter! You can check them out here: Cecil, Fidji, Jeremy, Kari, Leonard, Matthias, Remy, and Vincent.

For the rest

You can always write to us via mail. If you want to send feedback, feel free. If you want to join us as a blogger, send us a nice mail, impress us with your comments and writing, and we’ll be happy to have you on board.

That’s it! Wishing everyone an enjoyable, productive, and lucrative 2008 !

Signed,

The Tech IT Easy-crew.

It’s over.

Analog US tellyvisions are being thrown away, liberating long-desired spectrum that calls for reallocation, today.

Chicken or egg, we need air, so let there be plans, people & co, actions and an auction to start with, auction 73 for the 700Mhz spectrum. Rounds last 10minutes to set an equilibrium position among the different degrees on openness of the mobile industry. Tough.

The auction house is the Federal Communications Commission and the most desired item on the catalogue is the “C Block”, a fine 22Mhz segment assorted with the capacity of enabling deployment of national scale projects to its collectors: nationals and locals, operators and WISPs, new business people, some opportunists and an artist (Office of Spectral Ecology)

The majority of big Mobile Network Operators (aka MNOs) have shown up only to be shown the door out during the prequalification phase, in a sort of witty joke or creative telco analysis challenge.

As today was approaching, no more jokes, FCC doubled the panel of qualified bidders to reach 214, re-including the MNOs, who can reconsider themselves as “home”. (AllTel, AT&T Mobility Spectrum, Chevron, Qualcomm, Verizon Wireless)

On the “guests” side I was delighted to find the haute couture of creative business modelists. (Google, Spectrum, LLC/ Bend Cable Communications and other Sillicon Valley based companies)

buzz abouts

If you hate theories and concepts skip next paragraph and just suppose the iPhone being created by Banana Ltd instead of Apple. And then imagine it, because you couldn’t be holding it right now: AT&T or Orange don’t partner with Bananas, they milkshake and invite Banana’s to participate. The fuzz is Bananas laying on the street to claim their right to please consumers (ideally).

Next Paragraph

buzz abouts

Apparently “homes” seek simply to preserve their status: their prescription power over mobile phone manufacturers, over content management, their regulatory influence…

On the other hand, runner-ups are challenged to prove that they can enter the supply chain and change it, having pretty good chances to do so: they have already marked a point, with Google resisting AT&T’s bullying ( !!“put up or shut up” !!) and lobbying the way into:

• Open devices: through the “Wireless Carterphone” condition, which stops bullying against manufacturers.
• Open services: through non discriminatory wholesale network access conditions

So the Googlephone might be on his way! (hurray!) along with long desired network neutrality, openness, disconcentration, innovation and regulatory repositioning. In simple words when mobile networks are neutral and open to all technologic standards and functionalities, ideas can find their way easily, and parental controls have less role to play. Tim Wu explains so well the environment of neutral networks in “Wireless Carterphone” that he even bothers to post a real picture from the 60’s version, along with his excellent insights.

Flip TI

I want to flip it: using my mobile I want to talk for peanuts, to access any site on internet, command my computer, camera and coffee machine and do whatever engineers are amused implementing to amuse me. As a professional I want the evolution mechanism to function again, cleaning up the confused telcos environment. It feels strange to complain about traffic on my way to work and when I am there just smile awkwardly in front of bottlenecks that squize ideas, and set up useless and expensive jobs.

I search no solution, it seems that exists already in network neutrality but until now our problem in the mobile industry was ignored and thus not treated. On predictions I am sure you have some great ideas to share, please do…

What intrigues me and made me torture you with this auction is NOW,

what is happening and HOW it is happening.

Method: Let me first express some sympathy for the “guests” as they have to play in a tough procedure that mostly reflects the MNOs structure. The Auction Method (73) puts utmost pressure on buyers, forces them give up any sense of negotiation, pumps up prices and favors existing capital value over project potential value.

Principles: Price should not be the only criterion, it could be rude (and silly) to ignore deployment projects and profitability potential.

Timing: Since the long-term objective is market stabilization and consumer centric profitability these values could apply early. Sooner or later consumers will finally decide if they like MNOs choosing content for them or they’d rather put up with libertine spam while  producing and distributing their own.

So how could it be sooner? How can we implicate this market feedback on this starting point? How a weighted voting system could apply? Can we group people that compose the market by expertise, consumerism, technology awareness, implication will and make a mature decision on airwaves ?

And funding? Come on, it’s simple, funding could be tailored to winner’s logic and the associated business model:

If it is for MNO’s the supply chain can stay as is: Winner pays now and consumers pay later.

If it is for alternatives, funding gets creative as well: Consumers can be taxed now and being rewarded later with free/gratos/tzamba mobile products, funded by advertising and paraphernalia the other way up.

Fair enough?

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I can only guess what the man on the right picture is doing here. I guess he makes our new blogger, Ms. Georgia Psyllidou (left), look good. I’d like to spend some time, introducing her to you.

Georgia is actually an acquaintance of Jeremy’s, though she caught my attention by some of the comments she’s been leaving on this blog, which I felt showed inspiration, style, the ability to build up an argument, and an understanding of matters of technology (no pressure, G.).

Georgia’s from Greece, though she’s been living in Paris for three years, where she’s been studying management and telecommunications, and is currently employed by Orange Business Services, as a solutions engineer in areas including data access services, VOIP, and security. She also has a background in computer- and electrical engineering.

I’m not allowed to say too much about her professional dreams, as those are still “in progress,” but I can tell you that they involve transforming natural paradises into technological utopias, hopefully without stepping on too many fish…

Her ambitions for this blog, so she told me, are to discuss themes that she comes up with during coffee-breaks, showers, supermarket-queues, and routine code-monkeying. Which is fine, as I think we can all identify with that. More specifically, she wants to discuss anything from internet practices and behaviours, business, and whatever else pops up in her mind.

So her tech-credentials are all covered then! Concerning her style, Jeremy calls it “inimitable” when she writes in French, and I have faith she can replicate it in English also.

Oh, and she’s never blogged before. So be gentle, and above all, join me in welcoming Georgia to this blog !

A warm welcome, Georgia!

P.S. you can hook up with her on LinkedIn here.

I’ve seen a steady stream of visitors finding their way to my last year’s post about ITIL service catalogues. At one point I had to finally close the comments, because some people felt it was a correct place to advertise their solutions. Even after leaving the company I did the project for, I’ve been approached by a certain vendor on how that project is coming along and if their software could be of any use – to my personal e-mail address.

So, vendor’s are really interested in selling their wares – and for a good reason. The steadily increasing page views show that more and more people are interested in creating their service catalogs. The other reason is that a big number of available solutions either totally suck and/or are extremily expensive. Of course, developing one’s own solution is also insanely expensive. The software vendors can ask for any amount of money and it can be too easy to think the software will solve their ITIL problems. Unfortunately, things are not that easy.

My advice for making a good service catalogue is rather simple. Read the chapter about in ITIL and understand it. The mistake I made in my project was focusing on the solution. A static HTML-page might be just what you need. Seriously, it’s enough for Google. In my opinion, their page fulfills the needs of their customers.

Understand that your IT department is not Amazon selling all the world’s books to people around the world. Your scope is much more narrowly defined.

Your customers want to do their work and not shop around for stuff they only need to do their work. Yes, they will spend weeks to choose the optimal mobile phone or printer for their home use, but, at work, they will be satisfied with whatever. This is why ITIL makes so big thing about talking in “customer’s language”. For example, you’re not selling them a Lenovo Thinkpad X50 with 2 GB RAM and 80 GB HDD with Core 2 Duo with AC adapter and all the necessary Software installed. As the IT department, you’re providing them with a Laptop. The guy at Accounts Payable is not looking for Nokia E61i with 1GB SD-card, FM tuner, 3G connectivity and PC Suite to sync all their stuff with their computer. He needs a Mobile phone with E-mail (and with great probability, delivered today).

You might be tempted to give all the SLAs, shopping baskets, delivery tracking, and all these maginficient features to your customers and many vendors remember to tell that their software makes this easy. Well, yeah, if you have that information to begin with. As a modern IT departement, yours too most likely has outsourced most operations to many providers. You really shouldn’t try to fantasize giving your customers more information than you yourself have.

Anyway, I think the authors of that section in ITIL should add “Keep it simple” somewhere there.

Another challenge in implementing ITIL service catalogue is that many managers might feel that it’s not important like the other stuff there. If I remember correctly, ITIL promises user satisfaction gains, but not much more. For budget-constrained IT departements, that’s not enough motivation to do it – unless their performance bonuses are tied to user satisfaction index. Even if that is the case, they are interested in it in so far as their bonuses are concerned.

ITIL service catalog is only about making things easier for the user. And there lies the problem, because it is still wide-spread sentiment in many IT units that user is the problem and in many IT projects the user perspective is summarily forgotten about. Interenstingly enough, many of these projects are doomed to fail exactly for this reason. So, above anything, keep your users in mind when developing your service catalog. Take a look at the Google one again.

I usually don’t ’steal’ posts from others -especially without adding any value-adding comment, but I couldn’t help sharing this one – found on Richard’s blog thanks to Twitter (follow him). Here’s a very inspiring slideshow by Index Ventures VC & founder of Open Coffee Saul Klein:

[slideshare id=58242&doc=nextweb2007-saul-1518&w=425]

The slideshow speaks for itself, doesn’t it? And even if you don’t chose to become an entrepreneur yourself at this very moment, in Europe or elsewhere, my take is that you should join an early-stage startup. Let me tell you a quick story about this.

The first time I thought of leaving MS to start a startup (a thought that never occurred again, believe it or not, before I actually walked out to either join another company or take the big plunge), I hadn’t even joined Microsoft. I was at Capital IT, a major VC forum in Paris, as a Microsoftee although I was due to join the company a few days later. There I met, for the first and last time so far, Pascal Mercier, a French fundraiser whose firm Aelios Finance is pretty successful at matching the best entrepreneurs and smart money (to my knowledge both angels & VCs). I was introduced as a recent graduate and the second we met, Pascal Mercier asked: “Why didn’t you choose to join a startup rather?”. The best answer I found was: “but I do work for startups!” Which I thought was true since 1) MS is just a damn successful startup (you would be surprised to see the easy-going startup atmosphere within the company); 2) I was part of the team that took care of emerging ISVs in France. Acknowledging reason #2 only I guess, Pascal nodded and we parted ways. I later realized though that working for startups, and working in a startup, are clearly two different things. When you represent Microsoft, you may call whoever you want and the door will be opened the next day. Your brand power is so strong that at the end of the day, you never know whether you achieved great things because you’re damn so good, or because your company is so powerful in its industry. As an entrepreneur, and I’ve been facing this issue already, you need to fight like a pitbull to get passed through the right person on the phone, and fight again to get an appointment. I should also mention that you’ll need to deliver the best pitch of your life, after waiting for an hour in the lobby without even being served a cup of coffee, to actually get to the point where you may pretend to try and sell your solution. This struggle for survival is real life and that makes entrepreneurs fully accountable for their success or failure.

The same rationale goes for early-stage startups, without a brand name yet: life will be tougher for sure than if you worked for a big name, but the impact you can have on such companies is huge (eg double revenues in 6 months, etc. something unachievable in an 85K-strong corporation like Microsoft – or even at Google, a 20K-strong company & definitely not a startup anymore). Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or join a larger group later in your career (or both), an unknown and yet ambitious startup is where you should start your career to acquire the right survival toolkit. By the way, did I mention the stock option plan?

My two cents…

Addendum 11am: check out comment #3 to discover how to spot startups that will pay you better than large corporations and resign from consulting, banking and Fortune 500 companies to join them!

I’ve only got a few minutes to write this post, so pardon me if I’m sketchy on the details.

A blogpost at GigaOm covers some of the iterations that social networks on the internet went through over the years. Pretty interesting, though incomplete. The author also warns that it is dangerous to predict the next wave, based on the past, and I’m not even going to try.

But what I am certain of is that Facebook will eventually fail. Why?

Because what Facebook lacks, and this is a flaw in the whole digital ecosystem, is c o h e s i o n. While it allows me to contact any friend on there at the touch of a button, it does not actually bring our lives much closer together. Instead we live our lives in parallel, sometimes continents apart, and all we see of each other is what we choose to publish online.

It operates on a very superficial level, and soon becomes quite monotonous to follow the twitter-like life-stream of what are essentially caricatures of a distant memory of friendship. And because it is the nature of things that people become less and less involved, it will not take long before Facebook becomes a stale contact-list, with the only blips of life coming from “those youngsters” that think that anyone actually cares to read their status. And when it reaches that state in the mind of its users, it won’t be long before a new, fresher “contact list” comes along.

We are still not at the level where a social network online is the same what it means offline. In the real world, a network is a chemical thing, where people interact on many different levels, stimulate each other, anger each other, change each other, etc. And this is just as applicable to personal networks, as it is in business.

I’m not sure if it will ever be possible to reach that same level of involvement with an internet-app. I’d like to think that at least the social network on mobile-phones both overcomes the geographic and the psychological barriers that exist. So technology can definitely be compatible with chemistry to some extent. But text, which clearly has advantages in other areas, is a different matter.

But this is just an opinion. What do you think? Is Facebook enough? What characteristics do we need in a technological network for it to become a true social network?

Vincent

Last week, the unsexy world of lower software layers witnessed some significant consolidation moves: Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB, and Oracle Corporation acquired BEA Systems.

I know you guys browsing the blogosphere want to hear about Paris Hilton (this one keyword to boost visits from search engines), and most of all Twitter, Google, Apple, MS-bashing (which I won’t do unless deserved & today I believe it’s not the case), Facebook, and all that jazz. So I’ll make it quick, although I think this topic is more strategic anyone else, especially when it comes to applicative platform decisions – amongst them web apps.

• MySQL’s acquisition by Sun Microsystems

One thing that’s pretty sure is that 1bn$ (800m$ cash, 200m$ in Sun stock options) for a flagship asset like MySQL is dirt cheap. MySQL enjoys a very large developer community, a well-deserved strong brand awareness amongst web and SaaS application developers & DBAs – as well as geeks of all sorts, and most of all references like Linden Labs (the publisher of Second Life), Flickr & Facebook that have proven wrong those, like me (although I still think the TCO of MySQL is a lot larger than with MS SQL Server or Oracle 10g technologies), who doubted MySQL could handle massive loads (see this interesting slideshow by John Allspaw from Yahoo! on Flickr’s architecture) despite it’s very nice and simple administrative console. To me, MySQL will be to Sun what Flickr, MyBlogLog and del.icio.us are to Yahoo!: the jewels of the crown. 

So, from a price standpoint, I’m buoyant. However, it’s hard for me to say whether Sweden-born MySQL is a good or a bad acquisition for Sun, strategically speaking. The move looks a lot like a vertical integration effort by Sun to push its application server SunONE against Apache to run with MySQL, and its server-side OS Solaris against Linux server distros when it comes to running a MySQL database. This is where since may get mixed up, as Sun has been engaged in a very fruitful partnership with Oracle to almost bundle Solaris & Oracle 9i/10g. The same goes for Postgre SQL by the way. Therefore, my take is that a lot in the success of the acquisition will depend on how Sun’s management positions MySQL databases against Oracle.

A quick last remark: in Europe, it’s become very trendy to pretend you’ll IPO to actually get acquired by an American corporation. Anyways, I’m glad there’s one more financial success story in open source: MySQL AB wasn’t in business to be open source, but had chosen to be open source to actually do business. Open source ayatollahs pretending to developer communities hacking code in their spare time for the greatness of mankind are fools treating others like likes – that is to say fools: open source is one more software business model. Period.

• BEA’s acquisition by Oracle

This very aggressive move is one more confirmation of Oracle’s market share-acquisition strategy. Oracle is now at loggerheads with IBM Software Group, the world’s leading middleware vendor. Websphere 6.0 and Weblogic Server 9.0 + Aqualogic BPM, alongside with Software AG’s Webmethods, have been competing for a while in the business infrastructure middleware market – & I suspect Oracle anticipates Microsoft’s upcoming marketing effort to generate adoption of BizTalk Server amongst large accounts. Hence the fact that I believe that this time, Oracle’s acquiring a little more than juste market share: with Weblogic, Aqualogic, Oracle Databases and BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Oracle has a broad enough catalogue of good products to compete with Websphere, DB2, Cognos on the IBM side, and BizTalk Server, SQL Server and PerformancePoint Server & ProClarity Analytics on the Microsoft side. 8.5bn$ was therefore the price to pay to win back Weblogic Server + DB2 or + SQL Server accounts as well as afford not to loose the everyday larger account base willing to go through one software vendor, and one only, to get equipped in infrastructure software. Moreover, Oracle kills two other birds with the same stone by 1) isolating SAP whose catalogue, although enriched with BO’s acquisition a few months ago, lacks heavy weight munitions in lower layers; 2) harming Red Hat whose JBoss Application Server has long been embedded into Weblogic. It may look like gambling, but I doubt Oracle will let Red Hat support Weblogic too long.

It’s not the end of the middleware war yet, but we’re getting closer to it since the entry barrier for a potential new incremental-innovation entrant has become very high in the recent years. 

Those of you who know me, also know that I am not a friend of Twitter. Not yet! But this medium for micro-publishing seems to grow and grow. Swiss blogger Nico Luchsinger has counted some 800.000 users. So there is quite a good track record and the only thing missing is the business model.

But a call for advertising is not really funny: In my opinion the short message like style of Twitter would suffer a lot from advertising. Twitter simply is not made for it, besides the fact that in a commercial consisting of one sentence there is not much to tell. So Twitter needs something very different. Why doesn’t a company like IBM buy Twitter? They could continue the service without any changes. In financial terms this idea looks quite stupid. Why to buy a business where there is no revenue stream at all? Well, first of all, Twitter is a brand. And a very well reputated one, too. A company buying Twitter would invest into branding and image.

But that’s not all: My german blogger friend Marcel Weiss reminded me of the fact, that Twitter is an open plattform offering an API for developers. And that’s where things start to get very interesting: Twitter as a market leader in its segment can be seen as an exchange place and not all services made along the API would have to be free.

One example: Imagine the “twittersphere” would be scanned by semantic software in order to obtain or extract clue words, ideas and trends from it. Who is talking on Twitter? It is a global elite that is far ahead concerning technology, social media and general information. So following Twitter is market research 2.0. The data mining could be used for trend reports or aggregated publishing on websites which would not be free of advertising. All this would not hurt or disturb the twittersphere. And my opinion, that services like Twitter never will be a sort of mass media, fits very will in our example. Twitter as a tool of a relativly small but focused user group creates a homogenous market segment worth watching. The value would be exactly the opposite of what it is for Facebook or MySpace.

Finally there is the question of prize and worth of Twitter. If we take the level of Facebook as a sort of benchmark we would end up with a prize of aproximately 300 million $ (calculated on the number of users). Ok, that’s a lot of money but it would not be expensive for one of the market leading companies in IT.

My new office. The picture was taken a few days ago when I first visited the place (a former women garment warehouse), and since then, we moved in. Btw, any design or furnishing tip? Budget = roughly zero.

I seriously want to make of it the coolest place for software developers & beautiful minds of all sorts to work in Europe. Trust me, despite appearances we’ve already got some extremely strong bearing points in this respect.

+ we might rent out some office space (250€ / desk included wireless Internet w. visitor access, electricity, security alarm, water & paper toilet, located in the very center of Paris). Give me a buzz if interested and I’ll answer when we do it if you’re early enough.

Addendum: answering several emails at the same time, yes, I’ve left Microsoft. Made the decision a month and a half ago. Enjoyed the company a lot though. Tough decision but no regret, it’s a lot of fun out there. More on this some day soon.

Addendum 2 (should’ve added that in the initial post maybe): it’s very exciting to move in your own place. The only thing is, we now have to keep cash coming in the door or we’re OOB before we can wink.

In last night’s (in European time) Keynote, Steve Jobs unveiled a batch of new products, though the rumored MacBook Air was the only that was truly interesting. What really surprised me, though, was Time Capsule. But not in any positive way.

As a Mac OS X Leopard, laptop and external hard drive owner, I was hopeful for a solution for wireless Time Machine back-ups. Apple had earlier implied this would indeed be feature of Leopard’s Time Machine when it was to be launched in October 2007. The feature, for unknown reasons, was dropped. Later, some hacks to do this sprang up on sites like MacOSXHints.com, but back-ups are the last thing you want to mess around with improvised hacks. Some sites were hopeful that this feature would be brought back in a later update to Mac OS X 10.5 or to AirPort Extreme.

Well. That didn’t happen – at least not in the way everybody expected. I’m also not going to believe that the reason is accounting-related like iPod Touch upgrade’s $20 price-tag. Of course, one could assume that the natural evolution for AirPort Extreme was to include a built-in hard drive (because of Time Machine), but why the name change? Why, all of a sudden, Apple’s WLAN-base station is called Time Capsule? It is 3 cm longer and wider than AirPort Extreme and it’s got a silver Apple logo on top, but otherwise it’s an AirPort (Extreme). They could’ve as well called MacBook Air the iPhone Air, because [they share the same kind of hard drive]. Are they killing off the AirPort brand? (Well, then again, where can you go from Extreme?)

So, what happened? Is the reason as cynical as what Yellow Swordfish says and this was Apple’s plan all along and we’ll never see a firmware update enabling this, well, for the rest of us?

I could believe the reason why the feature was initially pulled as explained in the RouglyDrafted post. I think quite many Airport Extreme users are really, really disappointed right now as this new “Time Capsule”-thing is exactly the product they though they bought a long time ago. One would expect a $20 firmware upgrade to be in order, but hopeful dreams aside, this doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

This all, of course, is nothing new to the owners of AirPort Express, who have seen the support of AirTunes waning (Leopard’s Front Row doesn’t support it, for example) after the launch of poorly-received Apple TVs.

Macbook Air components:

• 13 inch screen – same size as Macbooks
• Harddrives – compatible with either iPods or iPhones/Touches (SSD)
• Intel-CPU – possibly compatible with future portable devices

There’s a lot of overlap here with other devices that Apple is selling. And probably under the hood too.

Even if demand for the MBA is low, which I expect (certainly for the $ 1000 solid-state drive), Apple wins as production-capability is geared up and costs eventually fall.

What is that called in logistics, cross-fertilisation?

Vincent (sorry for the short tweet, no time for much more at the moment)

Great posts by Vincent in December of last year investigating the ‘High Tech’ nature of Software. Click here and here to read those posts. It got me thinking and I decided to post my thoughts. Before we can answer the question – Is Software High Tech, we need to ask a more fundamental question – What is ‘High Tech’? According to Wikipedia’s entry, High Tech is the most advanced technology that is currently available. Now, any innovation first starts as high tech but turns into low tech gradually over the period of time. I guess when the paper was invented, it was quite high tech. Today, from Post It to tissues – paper is ubiquitous and no one gives another thought asking if that product is high tech anymore. Same is true with telegraph, radio, TV etc. Yesterday’s high tech is today’s low tech. Once it becomes low tech, it’s a matter of time before it becomes a commodity product.

How fast it dives into the depth of commoditization depends on how profitable the product is going to be. These products are so out of the box that most of the people don’t see how that product is going to be useful. Here is classic example how IBM’s CEO Thomas Watson once quipped that there is “need for 4 or 5 computers in this world”. You can also read how Telephone and Telegraph were first dismissed as some fancy non useful applications. Just few years back Craig Barrett the then CEO of Intel said that at $100 Computer (OLPC) proposed by MIT Media Lab was a ‘toy’ and not going to be useful. When people figure out the product’s usefulness, the innovators that had the audacity to have the vision for that product will end up make lot of money. Bill Gates’ vision of ‘computer on every desk’ ended up making a lot of money for Microsoft. But those hefty profits will attract more competition and the profit slowly erodes.

Andy Grove, the ex CEO of Intel made a poignant point when he said “He who commoditizes last wins”. This was in the context of intense competition of Semiconductor industry. So, even a very ‘High Tech’ microprocessor will some day becomes a commodity. Same is true with respect to Software. At one point, Microsoft Office was the cutting edge application that dramatically improved office productivity. Today, software by itself is no longer high-tech.

If software is low tech, is it commodity yet? Some people belong to the camp that contends Software has already become a commodity. This is where Nicholas Carr created furor when he called software (IT in general) a commodity (just like electricity) in his infamous Harvard Business Article ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’. I strongly differ in my views.  In fact, I dedicate my personal blog writing on how to align IT with Business Strategy (a shameless plug!). Even though software is low tech, it does need some qualitative intervention to create differentiation. Think of Google and its Search Engine. Not only it’s search and indexing algorithm are unique (somewhat), it has created an entire ecosystem of advertisers bidding for keywords, search engine optimization techniques, and a new way to market online. Another example is Apple. With its ingenuity aided by unique combination of software and hardware, it had redefined mobile phone (which has begun to become a commodity product) to create a very differentiated must have product.

Some day when Intellectual Protection is no longer an issue, when every innovation is shared and distributes seamlessly, only then software will become a commodity. Until that day, in my humble view, even though software by itself is not high-tech, it’s far from being called commodity product.