Business Logic Reuse - What Color is Your Box?
I enjoyed Harry Piereson’s well thought-out response to David Chappel’s entry on SOA and the Reality of Reuse. I couldn’t have said it better myself, though that won’t stop me from trying. The way I see it, David brings to light the fact that the emperor has no clothes and then Harry tells you why the emperor is naked. The focus on business context in Harry’s entry really caused me to think about why business logic reuse fails.
Microsoft Versus Open Source - Does Anybody Really Care About This?
The article summary “Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win?” from the Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge magazine bubbled up on the del.icio.us most popular list this morning. Being that this is one of the “classic debates”, I felt compelled to give it a read. As one might expect of an economic publication from HBS, the material is relatively academic in nature. Some of the suggestions for folks in Redmond to remain competitive with the open source community sound great in theory but are unlikely to ever cut it outside the ivory towers. Price discrimination on Windows software is one repeated suggestion. At first glance, this appears very logical, since the marginal costs of distributing additional copies of Windows are near nil. However, this would lead to a very rapid deterioration in pricing structure leaving little or no pricing transparency. People are agreeable with paying $300 for an iPod because they know that everyone else is in the same boat. People hate contracting for packaged software and buying cars because they always feel like they are getting screwed by the salesman who uses some secret formula to determine the price of the goods. Is this a perception that would increase Microsoft’s ability to remain competitive? I highly doubt it.
Next Generation Coordination Mechnanisms - Harnessing the Power of Many
Just as I was doing a bit of mindmapping of ideas around Internet and societal convergence, my RSS reader buzzed with a new post from Dion Hinchcliffe on Social Computing and Internet Singularity. Dion didn’t go into great details; referring instead to ideas he had articulated in earlier posts. His posting was, however, enough to prompt me to pull together my thoughts, give them a bit more structure and then send them into the great wide world to begin a life of their own.
Agile Methods and Special Operations Units
I tried answering Tad Anderson’s comment within the bounds of my August 8th posting but eventually decided that this topic really warranted a posting of its own. My thoughts around using Extreme Programming and other Agile approaches to software development are pretty well formed. As an ex-soldier, military analogies seem to work particularly well for me:
User-Generated Content
For some time I’ve been giving thought to user-generated content on the Internet. In particular, I’ve been interested in audio and video content. A recent post by Dion Hinchcliffe drove me to put a bit more structure around my ideas and put pen to paper, figuratively speaking.
Open Source Enterprise Applications - Lacking the Critical Mass
I was revisiting an article I penned very optimistically several years ago about open source software collaboratives. Most notably, I mentioned the Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative and the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC). These were (I stress the “were”) seemingly ill-fated initiatives to share the source code to business applications in the commercial and public sectors, respectively.