Google Takes on Microsoft Windows

http://bit.ly/VTbJ0

Who knows if Google can transform its strengths in handling megatraffic into the ability to develop a mega-OS?

Google today is primarily an IT company. Yes, it is quite annoying that this public company won't publicly discuss where it keeps its servers, let alone give a hint to the secret sauce that powers them.

The fact remains that the company has achieved astonishing technical competence in developing and managing a hive intelligence that will be the subject of historical analysis centuries from now.

The question is whether it can turn its expertise outward and deliver an application (eg, OS) strong enough to knock Redmond off of its perch.

Few tears will be shed (outside of Microsoft, that is) should this occur. Older-generation folks such as myself have simply spent too many years putting up with buggy versions of DOS, then Windows, then being subjected to the innumerable and large problems that the virus-magnet Internet Explorer has caused.

Microsoft has been almost willfully careless over the decades with its arrogantly casual treatment of the problems its OS and browser have caused, in my opinion.

Its strikingly hubristic, monopolistic practices were oh-so-close to being consigned to the dustbin of history, before judge Thomas Penfield Jackson indiscretely bragged about what a badass he was in adjudicating Microsoft, thereby calling into question his judgement and neutering his verdict.

Comparing Microsoft execs to "stubborn mules," Jackson demonstrated that even a very smart person can be a real dumbass.

A younger generation doesn't seem to have this emnity toward Redmond. With their first experience being a well-oiled Windows XP, and with many of them enamored by the XBox, the Vista fiasco seems to be the aberration rather than the norm to them.

Yes, they've encountered the XBox's red ring of death (the child of the blue screen of death), but simply trade their units in when this happens. Microsoft, to them, is a good consumer electronics company, and Bill Gates is just another old rich guy.

So, maybe any rant I have against Microsoft reveals a mentality that's been passed by, sort of like those old guys of my youth who used to piss and moan about FDR.

The historical record does reveal Roosevelt's arrogance--trying to pack the Supreme Court, running for endless terms as President, initiating an age of massive government intervention while overstating its results and taking too much credit himself, serving until he was so enfeebled that he did the world untold damage by his weak Yalta performance.

His still-new memorial in Washington DC betrays the grandiosity of the man, in stark contrast to the classic, powerful elegance of the other presidential memorials. Yet Roosevelt continues to be considered one of the country's great presidents, the guy on whose watch the government established a safety net for its citizens, The Great Depression ended, and World War II turned decisively into what would be total victory for the good guys.

The historical record is already treating Bill Gates et al in similar fashion. Bill is seen today as a great technological visionary, his company as the single most important in the history of computing, and his philanthropy as the modern-day equivalent to Andrew Carnegie.

Yet the company made its wealth in a fashion I consider to be nefarious. It had no concept of homegrown innovation or of treating its customers (whether vendors like Compaq and Dell or users like you and me) with any sort of consideration or respect.

So if a day of reckoning does come for Redmond, I would expect to see very little sentimentality over its fate. Reminds me of when airlines started to fail. After decades of providing uniformly hidebound, crappy service, no one cried when we lost such previous American icons as Eastern Airlines, PanAm, and TWA. No one would have cried if the same had happened to United.

General Motors is experiencing the same situation today. Had the company decided, let's say in the 1970s, to manufacture well-built cars and tried to address what has proven to be a chronic cycle of oil shocks, then maybe there would've been some customer loyalty that would've kept the company from its recent embarrassments and failure.

On a smaller scale, the Comdex trade show perished a few years ago, after many years of abusing its exhibitors and attendees. Many people mourned the passing of their annual November bacchanal in Las Vegas; no one mourned the passing of the Comdex brand itself.

As I said, there is an entire generation of people who do not share my views and history will continue to be kind to Microsoft, I think.

So I should rant no more. But deep down inside, I think it would be cool to see Google just kick Microsoft's butt right out to the curb.

NOW Magazine Wins Award

http://tinyurl.com/nz7uy7

Nice to see this recognition for a great collaborative effort among many of us at TIBCO.

As Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, I have appreciated the support and guidance of Ram Menon over the past few years, though, as we've produced the mag in several languages with several breakthrough articles and interviews.

And a quick tip of the hat to Scott Fingerhut, who adamantly resisted my efforts to name the magazine "Predictive Business," insisting on the much simpler, yet far more powerful, NOW.

Music and SOA: Theory and Practice

A good writer can make any subject tolerable, even interesting. I hope to write well enough here to make the subject of this post as interesting as possible.

It's often remarked that music and mathematics seem to fit well in certain people's brains. The great Doug Hofstatdler's Goedel, Escher, and Bach took this and related insights to a sublime height.

As a music and math person, I've never seen or felt the connection. Yes, both use abstract, universal symbols. Both require superific concentration. Both are easy to appreciate and impossible to master.

Yet I think the music-math brain is a statistical coincidence. I've known a lot of great pianists who can barely add and a few mathletes who couldn't carry a tune with a forklift.

I do, however, see an important intellectual connection between a certain type of music and a certain type of enterprise IT. The music is that of Anton Webern, an early 20th century composer. The enterprise IT construct is today's SOA.

My friends and I were invariably able to clear the dorm room in college when we put on the Mahler around midnight. Most people just couldn't hang, had no willingness to watch us music geeks revel in the subtleties and bombast of the magnificent Gustav. So I know I better keep things moving here as I approach the even more difficult Anton Webern.

So let's leap forward first to the SOA part of the discussion. The keys to building a SOA, as we know, are identifying and liberating/decoupling services from within applications, loosely coupling (and later, perhaps composing) them into desired functionality, orchestrating them, then governing them so they do what you want them to do.

This approach is remarkably similar to the one Webern took with his compositions around 100 years ago.

The early 20th century was a revolutionary time in the worlds of art, music, and literature. The 19th century's beautiful scenes of people and places became abstract representations of inner psyche. The weighty lyricism of Yeats turned into the despairing way the world will end with TS Eliot.

And in music, a centuries-long melodic tradition turned into the deconstructed, compressed forms of what were known as the Second Viennese School composers.

If you don't know Webern, just go to wikipedia, you'll find a few seconds of sound there. If you want more, fear not, his typical pieces run six to nine minutes, a fraction of Mahler's 90-minute Mahler symphonies or Wagner's hours-long operas.

Yet Webern compressed a world--and worldview--of music into those precious few minutes. The music has its own spare beauty, to be sure, but is not something that anyone could bear on a large scale. It is, to think in modern business terms, efficient.

The theory behind Webern's music is fascinating to those who like this sort of thing, but the theory is useless if the guy couldn't write good music. Webern could.

The key thing to remember is that Webern took traditional elements--melody, harmony, meter, and texture--tore them apart (liberated/decoupled them), then put them back together in a spare format that appears almost random (or maybe loosely coupled) on paper but is actually composed with great structural unity and flow.

The governance in this case, is of course, the conductor, without whom the piece would quickly dissolve into a fibrillating heap when performed.

The end result is music that still sounds "weird" to most ears even today, yet grows on one more and more. Yet I annoint Anton Webern the intellectual Father of SOA. His principles are being practiced, knowingly or not, by SOA practitioners worldwide today.

As with Webern, the SOA gang's work can be difficult to explain in theory and effectiveness, difficult to master, and represents an enormous threat to the old ways of seeing and doing things.

I'll stop the analysis right there. The slippery slope of comparing Webern with music created 50 years on either side of him looms before me, as does the chasm of convincing anyone but the earliest adapters that I'm making sense here.

The analogy cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon my blogpost.

My Heart's Not Into SOA Marketing

I've been debating this post with myself for a long time. All the voices in my head have contributed to the dialog. It has to do with my health, with my future, and with my relevance.

I'm not famous enough, even to my friends, to think I'm making a public statement here. But I plow on with it.

I wrote the headline for this post with google in mind. Gotta get "SOA" in there for it to be picked up. The head is also a pun, as it relates to my health, which is the real topic of this post.

I've been fighting with this asinine coronary artery disease, or CAD, for about 15 years now. The semi-crippling chest pains first hit when I was mowing the lawn during the years we spent in Wisconsin, when I 38 years old.

For some reason, the disease was never diagnosed there, in the buckle of the Heart Bypass Belt of this country. But upon my return to Silicon Valley in the late 90s, the pains grew increasingly worse and frequent, and in 2000 I had a complex triple bypass that revealed what was termed "severe" and "extensive" disease.

Two more relatively minor angioplasty procedures and several scares later, I have a 1-in-3 chance of making it another nine years; after that, the prognosis gets grim.

This is not exactly the sort of bad news about, say, newly diagnosed cancer that a few thousand people in the US get every day, let alone the tragic news that comes to too many about dread disease or accidents taking another life before its time.

But it has focused my mind wonderfully, in the words of the good Dr. Johnson.

As we say, we can get hit by a bus at any time, an expression that resonates profoundly if you spend any time in San Francisco and its infamous Muni buses.

So living life to its fullest, seizing the day, addressing challenges head-on every day, and all that should already be part of living one's life the right way. Doesn't always happen.

I've spent so many years covering the wondrous machines (and software) that are almost routinely cranked out of Silicon Valley and from like-minded people throughout the world.

We in Northern California like to think we live in the world's most splendiforous region with the most innovative technological culture by far.

This may be true, because all great technology companies did and do come from here--with the minor exceptions of IBM, Microsoft, Novell, DEC, Compaq, Dell, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, and Nintendo. Oh, and the creators of most programming and scripting languages, Linux, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the browser, and the Blackberry.

The weather is great here, though. There have been a few breakthroughs and insanely great companies here as well. So I've enjoyed my time, writing, editing, launching magazines and events, meeting many great and eccentric people, and feeling lucky on a daily basis that a failed piano player and erstwhile sportswriter could hack out a living in this hypercompetitive industry.

But now it is time to get serious.

So many of the 10 million or so words I've written over the decades have been workmanlike, as just another writer/editor guy bangs out another feature on local-area networking or asynchronous data flows, or touches up a press release about the next great thing, or asks another executive not to bullshit too much when he or she is telling me how excited he or she is about his or her job and his or her company's new strategy.

I was amused from the time of my first writing job out of college how so many writers wanted to be the next Hemingway and just hated the idea of "selling out" by making money for craftwork, whether journalistic, propagandistic, or somewhere in between. Maybe because my limitations were so apparent to me, I never felt this urge to write The Great American Novel or any anger because I couldn't.

Besides, the short forms served me better. Less work, you know. The onset of Twitter is a godsend to me.

Back to the thought of getting serious, maybe there is some sort of great writing inside of me, waiting patiently all these years to get out, corrupt people's minds, and bring down society in general and Western Civilization in particular as we know it.

So that's what I'll pursue. Oh, but first, I have unfinished business with SOA marketing. What first lured me to this industry and has kept me here unapologetically all these years is the notion that information technology is the most important business in the world, that it will continue to bring enormous change to the world, lift people out of starvation, remove the scales from their eyes, and lead to a better world. I really believe this.

So before I finish that novel, I'm going to refocus on SOA, which I believe to be the profound computing breakthrough of my lifetime. I love this business. I love almost all of the people I've met in it. And I love the precious time I have left to write about it, live in it, and enjoy it.

Thanks for reading.

--roger

Job Losses in India "Trickle Down" from US

I've been in touch recently with Sharon Colaco, a well-known IT business writer from Pune, India.

Working with Sharon over the years, I've found that she takes a detached view of the IT business in India, ie, she's neither a cheerleader nor someone who is overly critical, in a country where emotions can run very hot whether one is defending the country's reputation or picking it apart.

I asked her about how much job loss has there been in India in the wake of the global financial crisis, and how much of it has been directly related to the US and Europe. Now seemed like a good time to elicit this opinion, as we're several months out from the initial economic shock and have had enough time to see how all this is playing out.

This was her response in a recent email to me:

This is a worldwide downturn, and Indian firms realize that the first three quarters of 2009 need to be tided over before things will even start to look up.

The industries that faced the highest job cuts were Textiles, BPO, Automotive, Steel Production, (local) IT, Jewellery, Construction, and Mining.

Most of the the BPO and IT losses are directly related to the loss of business from US or European clients, but there is also a homegrown recession within India. Even though housing loans are cheaper, and homes have become cheaper, the construction industry is going through a very tough phase in India currently. Not enough people are buying homes, fearing layoffs and salary cuts.

Yet companies are resorting to job cuts as only the last measure. Most companies are tightening their purse strings – recruiting few or no new employees, cutting salaries, perks and incentives, telling employees pitch in by putting in longer hours – the emphasis is to carry on with the same team sizes, but cut costs on the teams drastically.

Employees too prefer these measures to actual job cuts. This is the “salary correction” that you and I discussed last year, Roger.

With no or very few new recruitments, the country’s fresh graduates are facing a very tough time. B-schools have seen a decrease in their campus placements this year. Companies who do come to hire, offer much lower pay packages than the previous year.

Despite all this, India is not facing a “full-blown” recession. Spends on infrastructure have not reduced. Indian manufacturing, banking and government sectors are doing quite well. This is a key indicator that the country is doing well, but is spending cautiously.

To conclude, the impact from the US is only a trickle down effect, and most of India thinks that things will look up after the next quarter.

In the meantime there is a lot of internal retrospection, improving of services, tightening of spends. When I look at this situation objectively, I would say this is a very important phase for India. I am glad its happening because companies are looking at themselves objectively, making themselves lean and mean, and when the recession is over, you are sure to see a new India emerge – stronger and all set to take on the world’s business once again!

Gladwell, Basketball, and Music

I was discussing the recent Malcom Gladwell basketball piece with a friend of mine. In this recent piece, published in the New Yorker, the writer and a guy he interviewed draw a parallel between basketball strategy and the biblical tale of David and Goliath.

My friend told me that he's developed a similar insight, one with a parallel between music and the biblical story of Moses receiving The Ten Commandments.

My friend grew up in a place not familiar with Western musical tradition or with the Bible, so naturally views his complete lack of knowledge as an opportunity to bring fresh insight to these topics.

His insight came to him while he was watching me play a moderately difficult piano composition, the Chopin Ballade #3 in A-flat major. He had several thought-provoking questions.

Why are you using the black keys disproportionately here?, he asked. There are about 20% more white keys, yet you seem to be favoring the black keys, particularly on the left side of the piano. It seems the piece would be more effective if it had a better balance.

Well, I told him that not all pieces did this. This particular piece did probably favor the black keys a bit, since it was written in a key (A-flat major) that uses black keys as its "tonic," "dominant," and "sub-dominant" harmonic foundation.

Hmm, he said, so there are other pieces that favor the white keys?

Well sure, I said. If I played Chopin's A-major polonaise for you, you might notice a slight favoring toward the white keys. Certainly if I played his Etude in C major, I told him, you would see me hitting white keys almost exclusively.

Well, let's revisit that later, he said. I'm also troubled by the way you said the second most important notes are the "dominant" ones. Why aren't they the most important? After all, you said they're dominant. And what is "sub-dominant" supposed to mean? Less optimally dominant? I mean, your whole idea of music theory is screwed up here, he said.

Also, he told me it seems "mindless" to him how the left hand just sits there sometimes while the right hand is doing all this work. To quote: "Why don't composers put all the fingers to work more consistently? You could fit a lot more music into the same space this way. I mean, people love to listen to music, why not give them more of it in the same amount of time?"

Well, I said, it's really a little more complex than that. It's not as well-known keyboard composers--you know, guys like Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann--and Chopin--hadn't thought very, very seriously about music and how to combine theoretical knowledge with creative inspiration.

Centuries of musical theory, evolving from single-line monody through elaborate Medieval constructs, a few hundred years of Baroque contrapuntal innovation, through the dawn of Classical forms and their extensions in the Romantic Period, are reflected in the work of the supreme artist Chopin, I told him. There's also another 150 years of keyboard innovation after him, too, I noted.

Of course, I added, there are many passages in music--in fact, many entire pieces--that are just crammed full of as many notes as humanly possible to play. But to take this approach all the time in every piece of music is not an idea that any serious music person would take seriously. It would decrease one's enjoyment of music, not increase it, I said.

I hated to tell my friend this, but I think that Chopin would be badly offended by his uninformed, obtuse analysis. Certainly I was.

Well, my friend said, realizing I was getting agitated, it's too late for me to learn how to play the piano well.

Yet he remains inquisitive, and he says there is no reason why a Ten Commandments cannot be established for music in general.

He'd like to conduct an orchestra. He notes that all you have to do is wave a stick around, without having to spend years and years learning how to play an instrument. He also wonders why so many of the players--the trumpets and trombones, for example--just sit there for long periods of time.

Wouldn't it be more effective if you just had everybody play at once? That should be the First Commandment, in his view. Again, more music in less time.

My friend also doesn't understand why music people always talk about natural harmonies as "just" intonation--why do they take it for granted, he wonders? Wouldn't it be better if everyone took staying in tune seriously? He said if he was conducting the orchestra, he would insist that the players play in tune. That would be the Second Commandment.

He also noted that The Ten Commandments was originally part of Jewish history, which explains why so many Jewish people are good at music. But he thinks he could build a successful orchestra that is equal to all those groups with "born-with-a-violin" musicians.

He also told me of a writer friend of his who claims that similar lessons can be learned from comparisons that to the untrained eye appear ludicrous. I couldn't really follow the parallels he made with warfare, simulated gaming, and the history of hot dogs.

But I trusted him because his writer friend is said to be a genius by many. My friend has been able to construct the other eight commandments just from talking to him, he says.

I don't know. I really like my friend, and he's financially successful, but I don't agree with him. I think he needs to study music and learn a lot more about it before offering his silly opinions about it.

But I kind of like it when he gets biblical. I wonder if he's familiar with the stories of Jesus humbling himself?