There is a lot of debate these days about whether or not the technology behind a product matters. Does it matter whether you choose C# or Java as your programming language? Does it matter if it’s on Windows or Linux? Does it matter if it’s MS SQL or MySQL? The conventional wisdom is to view [...]
Recently, I got a link to The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. This is an amazingly well done 20-minute video about how stuff is made, sold and disposed. She does a phenomenal job of putting the Story of Stuff together and selling the viewer on the importance of being Green. If you only have [...]
The company always has a substantial incentive to ship. Usually, it’s financial. If you don’t ship the software, you can’t sell it. If it’s an internally used tool or a line of business application, then the company’s incentive to ship is to increase user productivity (again a financial incentive). To the company, shipping the software [...]
Here is a simple question: What is the business of Seagate and Western Digital? If you confidently answered “Hard Drives!” you’d be wrong. Unfortunately, it’s clear that both Seagate and Western Digital themselves define their business as the “hard drive” business. How short-sighted. It’s highly unlikely that I will continue to own a hard drive [...]
Let’s get one thing out of the way fast: There is no possible way to build and ship quality software on a tight schedule by outsourcing the development, period. If you are in the business of software, then be in the business of software and suck it up and build a team that can write [...]