The Integrative Stream

And while we’re on the subject…

Joel Spolsky has a few words on wild-eyed enthusiasm for Web 2.0, along the lines of this earlier post.

Architecture Astronauts

Helpful Interview Hints

Stupid Interviewing Mistakes. Obvious things, which people nevertheless manage to forget.

I’ve certainly interviewed more than one person whose resume turned out, under slight probing, to be little more than an exceedingly thin tissue of lies. I could generally tell from the phone screen, if the resume itself wasn’t a giveaway. I bounced at least one person who was probably qualified for the job at hand, but managed to blow his credibility by trying to make himself look qualified for every other job at hand, too.

The moral, at least for technology job applicants, is to not list experience on your resume if you don’t have it. Sure, an extra buzzword or two might get you an interview, but they won’t get you the job if the person doing the hiring is even half-way competent.

Design for Users

The lead designer of GMail had a post on the Google Blog yesterday, commenting on the “birthday” of email (Guess what just turned 34?).

The history stuff is nice, but the interesting bit is the technology vision for the GMail product itself:

Of course that wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail. I rely on email, a lot, but it just wasn’t working for me. My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn’t notice the earlier replies. I couldn’t always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email – to build something that would work for me, not against me.

He’s right. This is exactly how one should go about building good software: create something that works with the users, not against them. I couldn’t sum it up better. If you want to create software that people will use, this is the mental framework to use.

The post goes on to mention that Google’s philosophy is to give users as much as possible, and to make it free whenever possible. That is, of course, a somewhat disingenous statement, at least at the corporate level, since that’s not Google’s raison d’etre at all. Google exists to create opportunities to show advertising, and simply happens to do it by creating valuable information utilities. It is not a charity, however heavily subsidized by the public markets. But I digress.

Tech or Transcendence?

Nicholas Carr has begun to make a nice career for himself callings spades spades and asking good questions about whether accepted orthodoxy in business and technology should be accepted quite so readily. He made a splash with a Harvard Business Review article a few years ago arguing that information technology doesn’t matter–isn’t a competitive advantage–for modern corporations since they all have access to the same resources. Lots of knee-jerk reaction to that. I don’t happen to agree with him, but mostly because I don’t think strategic thinking has evolved to the point where we can treat IT strategy the same way we think about, say, pricing strategy.

But I digress. His recent blog post,
The amorality of Web 2.0, takes a look at the filters through which we see the web., and asks why so many of people in the technology world don’t talk about the Internet in terms of an information utility, but in terms of spiritual self discovery. On a more earthly level, he also draws some attention to the fact that the “cult of the amateur” represented by WikiPedia, the Blogosphere, and carped on by various commentators might not be such a great thing after all.

Worth the read.

Sun, Google Redux

Forbes summarizes it: not much going on.

Sun, Google Deal Much Ado About Nothing

Sun and Google

A quick comment on Sun and Google’s announcement that they’ll be cooperating to distribute OpenOffice, Java and Google Toolbar:

I don’t entirely get it. But not because it’s a small thing compared to what various folks were hoping for (although it is), but because it’s so unbalanced. Sun seems to get a lot more out of this than Google does. Bundling Google Toolbar with the Java runtime environment seems almost silly, and a little anti-consumer. After all, one reason I don’t have QuickTime on this computer is that I don’t like Apple’s insistence that I install iTunes at the same time. Still, a “Get Java” link on the Google home page would be a big deal for Sun.

The bottom line: I don’t think there’s actually very much going on here. Google, certainly, doesn’t seem to have gotten anything they didn’t have before.

Massachusetts requires open formats

John Patrick comments on a new Massachusetts requirement for open document formats.

The document formats for Microsoft Office have always been trouble. Not only are they poorly documented themselves, they’re the product of a long and not particularly well coordinated development process. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to write software that works with them, and that’s certainly set the world back. Other than the relative difficulty of dealing with Office files, there’s no reason why the information management tools, like Google Desktop, that are coming on the market now couldn’t have been available years ago.

Patrick has some other points, including a discussion of why Microsoft’s choice to not support the Open Document format is an anti-consumer decision. Microsoft will have their own XML based document format, which will probably be better suited to the needs of Microsoft Office, but it will be subject to legal restrictions that will hamper its integration into innovate new software offerings.

Hopefully the Massachusetts decision, which was made for sound technical and economic reasons, will get other states, along with the private sector, thinking about this issue. Discussion of open source in desktop applications has traditionally focused on the use of OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. The file format issue is different: an open format gives you flexibility before and after individual users start to work.

BBS: The Documentary

It’s hard to believe that Internet only took off ten years ago. Before 1995, if you wanted access to the Internet and weren’t affiliated with a major university you were more or less out of luck. Which was fine, because there wasn’t much to do on the main network anway.

I got my first Internet access in 1993, but I grew up with computer Bulletin Board Systems instead. Run by hobbyists and generally only allowing a single user at a time, they gave a whole generation its first exposure to online community. BBSes gave me my first opportunity to write, and gave me a reason to learn to program, and introduced me to many people who are still friends.

So I had a great time watching BBS: The Documentary, a four year labor of love from Jason Scott, who is also the proprietor of Textfiles.com, an archive of, well, BBS-era text files. You can find the documentary itself on BitTorrent, thanks to a Creative Commons license, or you can order the three-DVD set.

Google’s IM Strategy

I’d better get my two cents in on Google’s entry into the Instant Messaging market before it’s old news, so here goes:

As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last week has noticed, Google has launched an Instant Messaging network. Google has generally been good at producing very simple, clean user interfaces, and the Talk client is good example, without the bells and whistles (and incessant advertising) of the default Yahoo and AOL software. And that’s about it, really. I haven’t tried the voice functions yet, since I don’t have a microphone on my testing PC, but the various reviews say it works fine.

The problem is that that there are already too many instant messaging networks. With Talk, I now have accounts on three of them. But I generally don’t think about the network at all – I use Trillian on the PC, which combines my AIM and MSN (and now Google Talk) contacts into a single client. A surprising number of instant messaging users still don’t know about software like Trillian, but more learn every day, and eventually I fully expect to see instant messaging networks treated like long distance networks: it doesn’t matter if I have MCI or Sprint. The only difference is that the translation will take place on the client PC, via software that can access multiple networks, rather than at the local carrier level.

In fact, since Google Talk uses Jabber, a standard protocol, it’s already supported by clients like Trillian Pro and the latest versions of Apple’s iChat. That means that Google’s Talk client is unlikely to achieve much market share in the end, however clean it is, because there are so many other options and nobody is going to abandon their other networks just for Google’s client. It doesn’t add much residual value except the voice functions, and Trillian and iChat already support that over AOL’s network (and it works fine). Since it’s so easy to be on multiple networks, the advantage of being on a single large network is minimal. This may make it easier for “upstarts” like Google to get into the space, but at the same time it’s unlikely that the introduction of Google Talk is going to bring large numbers of people into instant messaging who weren’t already using it. And voice-over-IM has been around for years, and I haven’t really seen it take off. It’s not going to be the differentiating feature. So why bother?

I think there’s a good reason. Even if you don’t use Google’s Talk client, you’re still using Google’s servers, and that gives Google the opportunity to index your conversations. As of today, the Google Talk privacy policy states that they will not do this – text and voice conversations are not held in the server logs. But the privacy policy can be changed, and doing so gives Google the opportunity to create a valuable service: online, web searchable records of all your IM conversations. I would actually like to have this available to me. That’s the real appeal of webmail, and GMail in particular: I can access my extensive email archive, which is full of addresses, phone numbers, and old conversations, from rural Cambodia.

Google’s strategy doesn’t require server based indexing, though. After installing Google Talk I installed the new version of the Google Desktop software. They’re already integrated–the Talk client becomes a plugin to the new Google Sidebar. As far as I can tell, Talk conversations aren’t being indexed, at least not in real-time. But they will be. And this will be useful. Instant messaging isn’t just for teenagers – it’s a valuable business tool. About five years ago I spoke with IBM’s John Patrick about instant messaging use, and was told that somewhere around a quarter million messages were exchanged within the corporation every day. This was five years ago. More recently, I’ve seen major software specification work go on via instant messaging, and my last company relied heavily on IM technologies for interoffice collaboration.

Since Google’s strategy is clearly to own, if not the desktop itself, the information retrieval aspects of the desktop. There are really only two ways people communicate personal or business information online: email and instant messaging. Google Desktop already indexes GMail and can also index email from other email clients (I had it index my Thunderbird email). It even indexes stored conversations from the AOL and MSN IM clients. Since the Talk interface is built in, it’s inevitable that Talk conversations will be indexed as well. It has to be – otherwise the product is a point solution that won’t even drive any advertising revenue.

All of which wraps back around to the question of why they started their own network in the first place, rather than just building the indexing support into Google Desktop, and possibly launching their own Trillian-like multi-protocol client to embed within the Desktop sidebar. As discussed above, I the only answer I can come up with is that there will be a server-based indexing offering in the future.

Microsoft, incidentally, really missed the boat on this one. Outlook’s index functions have been so bad in the past that I haven’t even tried using the last few releases for email. Microsoft has had years to integrate Outlook with MSN Messenger, and they haven’t.

Deciphering Pivot Tables

I’ve spent my share of time in Excel over the years, but up until now haven’t used it for any really complex data analysis. Since this may change over the three years of my MBA, I thought it made sense to learn a little more, and happily just came across the following article on the O’Reilly DevCenter:

WindowsDevCenter.com: What Is a Pivot Table

Java Enterprise 3rd Edition Cover

I’m not entirely done with tech yet; here’s a sneak preview of the cover for the 3rd edition of Java Enterprise in a Nutshell:

IDEA 5

I had a few residual Java things to finish up before turning into a full-time MBA seeker, so I just tried out IDEA 5.0 from Prague-based JetBrains. Earlier versions of IDEA were the best development environments available at the time. The software had (and has) quite a developer cult, too: when I fired it up on stage at a conference last year the software got applause (people seemed to like my talk, too).

They might have been a little ahead of themselves on this release, though. Since integration with Subversion (my version control system of choice for both software and personal documents) was new in this release, the first thing I did was start the new repository browser and point it to my home svn server. Somewhat to my surprise I was met by the blue screen of death. I’ll try it later on another PC.

The moral of the story is that copious pre-release testing is always indicated. JetBrains had this problem with version 4.0, too, although things got better with 4.5 (I never used version 4 in production, sticking instead with the “classic” version 3).

Agile Software vs. Big Design

Joel Spolsky takes a clear stance against “eXtreme Programming.”

Software development methodology is hard. I’m not particularly advocate of either main approach – not “Big Design Up Front” or “Agile” (which, for those not familiar, can be summed up as rapid iterations based on evolving requirements, although purists will tell you there’s a lot more to it than that). I’ve used both, and when I managed software development teams the process we used was generally a hybrid. I don’t think Spolsky’s anti-XP example holds as argument, since it’s entirely possible that the change he’s discussing would have become evident much earlier if the team had been using an Agile process. Or, possibly not.

Like most technology debates, this one isn’t going to end, partially because there’s no way to get reasonable comparative data, other than by designing some very, very expensive simulations, developing a range of products at least twice.

More on software management as this blog continues.