Negative Approach

The price of money vs greed: BEA and A-Rod

I'm not really a huge sports guy but I do peripherally pay attention when something entertaining is going on, especially when a beloved star like Alex Rodriguez gets taken to task for unconscionable greed.

Rodriguez and Boras botched this thing from the very beginning. They alienated Yankees fans with their greed and indifference. They angered the Steinbrenners with their arrogance (and that takes some doing, considering how the Steinbrenners handled the Joe Torre situation). And they created a scenario where absolutely no one would want to root for A-Rod's success. If anything, you rooted for the Yankees, which … Read more

Feeling technically frisky? An explanation of SaaS, composite applications and SOA

Rob Schneider (not the one from Deuce Bigalow) explains how SaaS (software-as-a-service), composite applications and SOA (service oriented architecture) all work together to make the enterprise more efficient.

Each has a key role to play and will continue to gain in importance. To begin, SOA design principles will increasingly serve as the standard by which well-run IT organizations measure themselves. These concepts will impact all areas of the IT lifecycle, from enterprise data modeling through application development and integration. Meanwhile, SaaS-based applications are on a meteoric rise. It's not too hard to envision a time when IT executives will … Read more

Alfresco makes Facebook part of the Enterprise

Over the last few weeks I have been connecting with more and more people on Facebook (against my better judgment, of course) and started to think that it was nothing more than a time waster. I found myself clicking link after link to see who updated their status, what movies they watched and who was a Zombie. As it turned out, it was I who had become a Facebook zombie and I needed to detach immediately.

The team from Alfresco has come along and created something very useful--easy content integration from their Enterprise Content Management product to the Facebook … Read more

Vista's biggest problem is Windows XP

Computerworld reports on a recent survey of nearly 600 U.S. and European companies that have more than 1,000 employees; the study says 84 percent of all those companies' PCs now run Windows XP, up from 67 percent the year before."

That sounds pretty good for the Windows monopoly, right? So, one could assume that Vista should start to creep into those numbers.

Nearly a third of the polled businesses--32 percent to be exact--said they would begin deploying Vista by the end of 2008, while another 17 percent said they would start in 2009 or 2010.

Still good, … Read more

Salesforce.com-as-a-platform maybe not a great idea?

As much as I like open source, there is something to be said for not having to install or maintain applications. But that doesn't mean it's smart or realistic to move all the applications in your enterprise to on-demand delivery.

As Gary Rivlin writes in today's NY Times "few software companies make the move to platform status" let alone the ones that have no footprint on the desktop. This is something I noted back in September after the Dreamforce event which reinforced my belief that enterprise software isn't going anywhere--at least not infrastructure software.

In the case of infrastructure (like networking and integration), and desktop environments (like Windows) it's hard to get excited about doing everything through a browser. Not that it?s a bad idea, but as I learned on my trip to Japan last week it's not entirely feasible at this point to do everything via the internet. Rivlin writes:

And yet for Benioff, the company's chief executive, that is not enough. He wants to turn Salesforce into a platform like Microsoft's Windows operating system, a product so popular that it is the foundation for a veritable ecosystem of software developers.

If you at the on-demand subscription offerings from Microsoft and SAP, both mediocre by comparison to Salesforce.com or SugarCRM (also available open source) the main advantage they have is that the existing user base is tied to a set of desktop applications which reinforce the desktop computing paradigm. … Read more

Off-topic: Japan jetlag and how to practice your writing

Back in 2005 when I was still in business school our MBA program took a two-week trip to Hong Kong, China and Thailand to try and understand how you do business in Asia (I blogged much of it here.) One of my fellow students on that trip worked for a big pharma company and gave some new sleeping pills to take on the flight back from Bangkok->HK->SFO, which seemed like a good idea...except I never fell asleep and basically was up for about 30 hours before I got home and passed out so badly that I didn't feed the dog for almost 2 days (he's still mad at me.)

My recent Tokyo trip was severely lacking in sleep and now I am wide awake and totally jetlagged after about 4 hours of shut-eye this evening.

It's painful.

So, on to some random notes... … Read more

Huge amounts of open source development in Japan

Who knew there was so much open source development going on in Japan?

The photo is from the Seasar Seminar that I attended today after the SOA (service oriented architecture) seminars we did with our partner OGIS-RI earlier this week.

Seasar is a *hugely* popular open source Java framework that simplifies J2EE applications. I have to admit I was shocked at how many people attended the event on a Sunday and just how many open source projects are being developed in Japan. In our Mule session alone there were guys from 6 different open source projects. Very cool.

There are … Read more

Off-topic: My kingdom for wifi, and how to get a Japanese mobile phone

I know everyone has a mobile phone here (keitai) but they all have laptops too and there is no easy Wifi in this whole city.

One of the most frustrating things this week was the fact that none of our mobile phones worked. In my attempts to get a prepaid phone or a short-term or whatever we discovered that you have to have a Japanese passport to get a phone since they are subsidized by the phone companies. That and the fact that they really don't want to sell you just the phone.

However, we learned that there are … Read more

Facebook decides to bastardize its community

Facebook on Tuesday announced its new advertising offerings. They seem pretty cool from a marketing perspective but have an underlying creepiness that should make users feel uncomfortable.

As CNET New.com's Caroline McCarthy writes:

Called Facebook Ads, the new program is threefold: Advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them.

Sounds good right? Who wouldn't want to target that active, young user base?

Additionally, Facebook has unveiled targeted advertisements that will allow marketers to target by any information inside Facebook profiles, from relationship status to favorite television shows.

Yikes, this is the part that freaks me out. Wasn't it just last month that we all enjoyed the Facebook privacy scandal? Kinda makes you wonder how it was able to develop algorithms for advertising that sound so detailed, doesn't it? … Read more