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June 20, 2005

Lowest Common Denominator

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogs (I really dislike blogosphere) that “small is the new big”. 37signals loves it, of course. Scoble talks about it in Microsoft land.

Brought it up with my CIO this morning, and he even brought up the “old” concept of Extreme Programming. However, we came to a very quick agreement on why - if they’re so great - you don’t see these models implemented more: the prerequisite.

You have to start with a group of functional, motivated, communicating people who have very little ego in regards to a shared project. This includes the management, and the money - not just the core project team. The moment you throw in someone who is entrenched in his work flow, who is dogmatic about a given implementation or technology, who is in “coasting” mode, or who clams up every time something might possibly be construed as criticism (even constructive), then these hi-efficiency models grind themselves to pieces.

It’s like a hi-performance engine. To get those levels of performance, everything has to be tuned just so.

If you don’t meet those prerequisites, then it’s back to the more structured models - because the structure can help route around the damage of the low-performance parts.

Either that, or you swap out parts. But that’s another issue entirely.

Posted by jim at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Get out of my way

Several years ago, I came across an open-response question:

“If you could have only one superpower, what would it be?”

A lot of respondents wanted to fly, or be immortal, or see the future - but one person came up with a superpower that I keep going back to time and time again:

The power to make people get out of my way.

Line at the grocery? On hold? Crowded room? Traffic? Obstructionist bureaucrat? Get out of my way. The joy in the idea only underlined how much time we all spend with someone in our way - often for no good reason. Jenni and I still turn to each on regular occasion and chant, “I want the power to make people get out of my way.”

During a content-poor seminar this morning, I was pruning and cleaning the documents on my Windows laptop. And was marvelling at all the little ways that Windows kept getting in my way. Mix of mouse and keyboard to do simple tasks. Lack of visual cues. Terribly inconsistent interface. Obscured menu language. It got even worse when I decided to take some time to explore OneNote - which is supposed to be Microsoft’s let-you-do-things-quick freeform note-taking app.

The damn thing kept getting in my way until I shut it up and went back to my good old text editor. Maybe OneNote does neat stuff - but I couldn’t get the damn thing out of my way long enough to find out.

And I realized that I wanted my old favorite superpower, but applied to technology. That all the technologies and solutions and applications that I enjoyed using were the ones that - as much as possible - either stayed out of your way or got other things out of your way.

I’ve spent a lot of my career in technology saying that what I enjoy doing is providing cool solutions and elegant tools. But what is a “cool” solution or an “elegant” tool? I couldn’t find a succinct way of saying it. I have that now.

Tools that get out of your way.

Posted by jim at 01:10 PM

June 06, 2005

Weighing in NOW

I want to say these things now, so I'm on the record before the pundits weigh in.

I think Leander over at Cult of Mac nailed it: one of the big reasons Apple (Steve) is switching to Intel is to get hardware that will let him do the next ITMS - iTunes Movie Store.

I think Leander was also correct in saying that Transitive's binary translation technology is one of the huge roadblock removers for this to happen.

But what about the Osborne Effect? Who is going to want to buy a Mac G4/G5 now knowing that the entire platform will shift starting in 2006 and ending in 2007? More importantly, what about Apple's profits during that time?

Everyone will point to Apple's well-known 4 billion in reserves. But there's one other item that I want to mention: iPod.

The iPod division accounts for over 1/3 of Apple's profits right now. Right now - while iPod is still generating that kind of cash, is the best time for Apple to take it on the chin in their Macintosh division. iPod cash flow will help carry Apple during the coming lean times of Macintosh hardware sales.

So, why is Apple doing this?

What are the roadblock removers?

Posted by jim at 11:10 AM

June 04, 2005

See Change?

The Mac community is abuzz. The rumor of Apple switching to Intel processors has been around for years. It was an issue back in the mid-90s, when Apple tried licensing their ROMs and allowing other manufacturers to release systems that ran MacOS. It became a huge issue in 2001 when it become apparent that Motorola was unable to advance the speed of the G4 processors. It’s arisen again, with rumors that Apple has been talking to Intel due to problems that IBM has had advancing the G5 processors (while at 2.7GHz now, they were supposed to be at 3Ghz a year ago).

C|net just threw a lit match on the tinderpile, with an article claiming that, at next week’s WWDC, Apple will announce a phased migration to Intel starting in 2006.

I still think it more likely that Apple is talking about using Intel chipsets (not processors) for coming hardware, and C|net has been known to have their head up their arse regarding Apple in the past. We’ll see next week…

Posted by jim at 08:46 AM