Tuesday, July 3, 2007

The right understanding at the wrong streetcorner...

Our guy here does know what Microsoft's big mistake was back in the day that allowed Linux to rise so quickly and so decidedly.

"Microsoft's brass blew an important test when it failed to get XP's replacement ready for the market. While XP ranks as a stable product, it took too long to carry the Longhorn project over the goal line."

But...

What this guy (and most of the industrial world) doesn't know is Microsoft's salvation.

VCSY technology can turn all of this to Microsoft's favor leaving the 10% that have already left to be the attrition MSFT would have faced with going toward a component/web-application developer approach.

The remainder will be retrained to facilitate systems similar to Project Zero... componentized application building. The Current paradigm is still tilted more heavily toward developers than Anny Mae Admin. they have to have somewhere for all these current paradigm developers to go.

This is a sea change and if you know the concept of those words as Shakespeare intended them you know the 'developer' community will be unrecognizable over time. They will cease to be what everyone considered them to be and place them closer to information admins than code wizards. The wizardry will be in the arbitrated ecology.

Now they can take the next couple years to educate those who are loyal and capable to build larger abstractions toward general purpose use and use the technology license (excluding Linux users not aligned with Novell) as a strangle-hold to starve off the 10% who fled (those are going to be the most business savvy developers lost as they were able to read the movement at the time but did not know the desktop v web information theory realm as well as they might.) for not sticking with MSFT until this next generation technology they've been working on since 2001 became mature and ready to produce.

All this is going to take some time, but, I believe the results will be seen surprisingly fast, further dissolving the traditional developer base down to specialists and hobbyists. Yes, I mean the demise of programmers as a large culture. They see a new pasture working on Linux desktops, but they will soon realize they've been closed off from behind like a heard of buffalo that have crossed a dry lakebed only to have the lake waters return and stranding them on their green island.

The excitement will be on the web and they will have to toe the IBM community line or they won't be 'developers'. They will be coders... and THAT will become about the worst thing you could be called in future world.

How much time? Perhaps improvements on the order of ten times the amount of time needed to do traditional product development and deployment. The main bottlenecks in software development have to do with determining the user requirements (interviewing the users, mocking up their requirements, evaluating feedback, redesign and loop until users are happy - interrupt: users are never happy begin at do) and testing. The toy-like method IBM is putting out is an expression of abstracted complexity being reduced into few steps with less 'data matter'. As innovation extends the offerings will become more and more useful and robust as the re-use ethic and an ecology to achieve re-use is central to the SiteFlash concepts.


Innovation takes time is right - invention takes an instant followed by a mountain of real work. Innovation requires mountains of invention in bits of work accumulated.

What's nice about SiteFlash is the ability to maintain all the knowledge in cultures and communities and repurpose it elsewhere.


Innovation begins on this and other like platforms in small steps. If they are successful, they will accumulate and proliferate and be repurposed into cultures in verticals rather than 'consumer bases'.

Hopefully soon we will see what Scorpio and Flex will come up with for the Adobe community.

If Google ever joins the advance, Gears can be installed on any platform to tie Google's search, advertising and community capabilities into any application.

See where the power goes? This is why it's so odd none of the big guys have the upper hand except IBM and it's acting like a shepherd rather than a cattle roper.

I gotta say, if Ballmer is smart, he'll take that approach. I don't know how smart Ballmer is so anything is possible.


http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9739643-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=NewsBlog
If you're Steve Ballmer, don't read this
July 3, 2007 4:42 PM PDT
Posted by Charles Cooper

Instead of kicking back for the July 4th holiday, Steve Ballmer should be going batshit crazy right now.

If you're Microsoft's CEO, the finding by Evans Data of a falloff in the number of developers writing apps for Windows desktop computers makes for grim reading.

The study, which reports a 10 percent drop in the number of developers writing software applications for Windows, also forecasts another 2 percent decline this year. The big winner--this hardly comes as a surprise--is Linux. Evans Data says the percentage of developers writing Linux applications is up 34 percent from last year.

I suppose Microsoft can satisfy itself with the "to be sure" clause that about 65 percent of developers still write for the Windows desktop. True as far as that goes. I don't know anybody of right mind willing to suggest Microsoft is headed for bankruptcy court. But Ballmer can connect the dots as well as anyone, and he understands that the trend points in the wrong direction.

Ballmer: Happy July 4th
I remember how a (now former) Microsoft exec tried his best making side-by-side comparisons between the Windows OS stack and Linux, hoping to convince me of Microsoft's inherent advantage. Why didn't I just see? Sort of reminded me of the warden in the movie Cool Hand Luke telling Paul Newman that he needed to get his mind right. Happily, Microsoft's minions aren't running that jive anymore--or at least not with a straight face.

Operating system development obviously is a fraught process, but Microsoft's brass blew an important test when it failed to get XP's replacement ready for the market. While XP ranks as a stable product, it took too long to carry the Longhorn project over the goal line.

Microsoft is rightfully proud of the Vista operating system, but it came at a cost. During the interminable runup to Vista, Apple one-upped Microsoft by getting out more timely updates to market while Linux successfully rooted itself within the corporate enterprise community.

Microsoft's hopes now rest with Ray Ozzie, the company's chief software architect. But not even the Great White Wizard can turn back the clock.

Uhhh... No but the clock can be payed for the time.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

good morning port,
just wanted to introduce myself; rb member captain_feedback (lurking for now) and could not find a better way to contact you directly.i've become a huge fan in the last couple of weeks, and as a recent newcomer to the vcsy LONG community, have realized that i'm blessed to jump on the coat-tails of some very patient, nay long-suffering giants.
just read a couple of posts that implied you are here in CA, me also... on the central coast. look forward to meeting someday.
voluntary disclosure - long
st - buy lots & lots
lt - sell enough to pay off everything and buy a new house