business

The intro/description from IBM's new Project Zero caught my eye right away: "We're building an agile development environment leveraging scripting runtimes such as Groovy and PHP, and optimized for producing REST-style services, integration, mash-ups, and rich Web interfaces. This is the community development site for IBM WebSphere sMash, offering users a chance to interact with the development team as we build this new product".

Generally, I don't believe in software frameworks that do not emerge off of a successful real-life project and are built "in-theory", around a vague idea. This attitude of mine is backed by facts: Spring came out of a real project, so did Hibernate, Erlang was heavily used at Siemens... even Drupal was initially built for a college website Dries was putting together. Nothing ever came out of just wanting to create a software framework and thinking you have enough experience ("more than others" is usually the feeling). At least, I know no real good examples.

But besides that, WebSphere and "agile"? :) If you ever had to work with WebSphere, you will understand and will have to forgive my natural sarcasm.

P.S. Nice domain, though. I wonder how much they got that for.

Fortune Magazine published a great article about the legend, the Steve Jobs:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/02/news/companies/elkind_jobs.fortune/index...

And while you are at that, checkout today's iPhone SDK Announcement Video, as well. Some AWESOME announcements!

http://sites.google.com/

One word - wow!

P.S. In the last years, Google has launched a number of mind-blowing services, built on top of the products from the companies they had acquired, but in most cases - failed miserably to gain user traction. IMHO, one bright example of this is Google Apps ("Google Office"), but examples are numerous. Will "Sites" be different?

Open-source, as a concept and a phenomenon, is quite special. What fascinates me in the Free/Open Source model is how efficiently it addresses several concerns at the same time: social, business and technological/innovative. Not to forget that it's been proven to actually work.

What is the major driving force behind the Open-Source model? A lot of people have tried to answer this question, with the different degrees of success. There probably is not a single correct answer. The Open-Source idea, like any other philosophical notion, touches aspects of human interaction, and the answer largely depends on the personal perceptions of an individual. I have changed my opinion several times, myself, through the years. Still, I dare give my two cents about the subject.

OK, I am not a marketing guy. I know how to use Porter's Five Forces analysis, and I always happily escape to it when I have no real idea about the subject matter, but that's about it. Being so ignorant in marketing, I used to share the general misconception that pretty, female face can sell products like a magic - anywhere, everywhere. Well, now I know better.

Our friends at the Development Seed published a very interesting blog post today explaining how sexy, female faces may not be effective for online marketing. Check it out - very nice reading.

You might have noticed that I have not been blogging quite so frequently, lately. Part of the reason has been that we were breaking nights launching BuzzMonitor. I am happy to report that it is live now at [buzzm.worldbank.org].

BuzzMonitor is a nifty Web 2.0 tool conceived by Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski that allows you to create dynamic, vertical views of the web.

Let's say, you need to stay on top of what's the current buzz about certain subject(s) on the web. One, simple way to do so is to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds filtered by the subject-specific keyword(s) in your RSS Reader. The problem with such approach is not only how to filter duplicate items brought by different feeds, but more importantly - inability to effectively share the aggregated information with other people, collaborate with them in making sense of it and building a community around the vertical views. BuzzMonitor was built to overcome a challenge like this. In time it acquired additional features supporting better aggregation and collaboration.

We and some people we showed BuzzMonitor to found it so effective that we thought it was worth publishing under an open-source license. That is what we did. You can freely download and even tweak or redistribute it for non-commercial use.

Your feedback is most welcome.

As far as Enterprise Architects are concerned, there is no other, single characteristic of a software system more important than the performance and scalability. Or, at least - there should not be. Sadly, in reality, performance is often an afterthought. Inexperienced development teams look at it in disdain and refuse to "waste" time on performance tuning. They amuse themselves with "feature enhancements" and only remember performance when things start to fall apart. That moment in time is usually before the champagne glasses, in celebration of the "successful" launch, get a chance to dry.

I am a huge fan of Linux. On most counts: code quality, cultural/social, stability, performance and security, I think it is superb. There is no other operating system that I would like to see on my servers. However, there is a huge issue with Linux as a desktop operating system. And it has little to do with programmers, to be honest and fair.

The issue is the look-and-feel of Linux and other free software that come with it. The dreadful graphics a-la Windows 3.0 from two decades ago is not just a minor nuisance but effectively daunts and depresses to the extent of making user less productive. Especially when you have the polished perfection of OS-X interface to compare with. Even Mac's inferior copycat - Windows looks much better than most of the Linux software. If they can't create, in Redmond, at least they try to copy.

Quite probably, you have seen more than a few companies bragging about being ISO 9000 certified. In the marketing materials it is usually presented as a doubtless proof of higher quality. However, what they don't necessarily want you to know, is that the perception has little to do with the reality.

ISO 9000 is a family of standards that specify requirements for a quality management system. The combination of "standard" and the presence of "quality" in the name is what creates the confusion. This standard is for quality management systems, not - certifying quality of systems. See the difference?

In reality certification to ISO 9000 says nothing about the compliance or quality of end products and services. It just certifies that consistent business processes are being applied.

If a company is ISO 9000 certified and their process is bad, it will be consistently bad. Pretty neat, huh?