The new economy – part 1
Yesterday I read an article from Mark Mills on Forbes about the new Economy, and this morning another article on TechRepublic saying now it’s a great time to be a developer. I agree with both, and as usual, I want to put my own spin to it.
There are 2 key words appear in both articles: Cloud, and Mobile.
The cloud has, and will continue to, fundamentally change everything we do. The term Cloud is a catchy term. What it really means is the as-a-service (AAS) model. (Software-as-a-service, platform-as-a- service, infrastructure-as-a-service, etc.) When an industry moves into a AAS model, it signifies maturity, and the IT industry is finally maturing. Just in the last few months, I bumped into two separate companies who said, “For the last 10 years, we were actually an IT company also doing X.”, and X is their actual business. One of them is the world’s largest hotel chain, and the other is a local public school system. Both of them said they spend so much energy into IT that basically turned them into IT companies over time. Look at any big companies around you, do they have a big IT department? Their own data center? Are you part of that big IT department?
As the IT industry matures, we realize we are wasting resources by having duplicated IT departments in each company doing pretty much the same thing. When I was in Fannie Mae, I keep pushing to have Sun MicroSystems run our data center instead of running our own. My argument was, “Why do you think we, a financial company, will do a better job of running servers than those who’s lives are to run servers.” “Well, security, data behind fire walls, etc., etc.”, my manager said. As the cloud gets better, more companies are realizing giving IT to those who does IT well is a far better and cost effective solution. After all, you would not have a plumbing crew on staff just to have a water cooler in the office, right?
A wrote a blog 3 years ago predicting 80% of IT goes to the cloud. I think have a big chance of being right!
Now, think about what that means. There is currently probably billions worth of IT that sits in different companies in the world. What this trend will mean is that all of those will slowly move to the cloud. This is a fundamental change. When a change this big is happening, there will be lots and lots of opportunities.
I will write about Mobile in another post.
The Kindle Fire will help push the iPad into Enterprises
Just looking at the last 2 days you know the Kindle Fire is going to succeed. Now I’d like to throw in my 2 cents. I think the Kindle Fire will help push the iPad into Enterprises.
Why? Like a lot of analysts are saying, the Kindle is going to kill most Android tablets. New Android tablets will need to compete on Kindle’s terms. Cisco, RIM, and other enterprise hopefuls will now need to come up with something that is around $200.00 and still usable. Now I am not saying the Playbook will be gone, but it will not be widely adopted.
Also, while the Kindle Fire is going to be ultra successful, Amazon will probably be less Enterprise friendly than Apple. Amazon will focus on media consumption that it does well.
Now may be the Fire will be another iPod Touch (you know the military is using iPod Touches, right?) but it all depends how open Amazon will make their Android app store be. My guess is that they want their app store be as closed as Apple’s.
So all of these point to less Android competitors which leave the iPad free to continue it’s penatration into the Enterprises.
By mid-year 2012 we should know the full potential of the Kindle effect, and if Microsoft didn’t execute Windows 8 well, Apple may finally be able to get into the business market.
Everybody is getting sued, now what?
Tonight we have a great Meetup over at MoDevDC. The topic is about Patent Infringement lawsuits and how developers can deal with them. Here is an overview of the night’s presentation and discussion topics:
1) What is the overall situation?
We interviewed Florian Mueller, an Intellectual Property Law Expert and founder of the FossPatents Blog. He gave an overview of the current patent situation here in the US and how we can work with the current issues.
Here is Florian’s take on the overall situation.
2) I got sued. What do I do?
A developer’s view is also presented on what one may do upon receiving a letter.
3) Patent Infringement 101
Rick Toering from Womble Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice, LLC, gave a high-level description of the steps that are involved in a typical patent infringement defense case. He breaks down a case along with the typically cost of each step.
4) What can we do?
David DiGiammarino from Article One Partners talks about his firm’s work and how crowd sourcing prior art can help the overall situation. The take away point is that if a group of us pro-actively go after patents that are being issued and collect prior arts, we may have a better chance against potential lawsuit ligtigation.
5) Why are software patents such a mess?
Our other organizer, Yermo Lamers, talks about a recent article that he wrote on “Why you shouldn’t be allowed to patent a better virtual mouse trap.” The article talks about someone patenting a virtual mouse trap for a potential game. A patent aggregation company bought that patent and start suing all virus scanning software companies. You can find the original article here.
We then go into a Q&A session with the following panelists:
Rick Toering – Patent Attorney, Womble Carlyle, Sandridget & Rice, LLC
Frances Weber – EVP, Article One Partners
David DiGiammarino – Director of Sales Article One Partners
Jonathan Freeman – CEO, WidgetPress
Yermo Lamers – CEO, App Update
Todd Moore – CEO, TMSoft
With over 80 attendees, it was a lively discussion to say at least.
Some of the questions:
- Why don’t developers put more pressure on Apple and Google?
- Can we file a class suit against these entities?
- Can they sue me if I just offer my app for free?
- How do I know if I infringe their patent or not?
- If I am launching a new product, how do I make sure I don’t infringe in other people’s patent?
- Is setting a LLC good enough?
- Are LLCs in one state better than another?
The meeting went very well and it pave the way for more meetups like this, where we will explore real solutions.
One point that most attendees agree is that the current situation is very dangerous. If we don’t find a solution quick, mobile development community as we know it may well cease to exist. The great innovation that has happened in the last 2 years will stop. We won’t have an app for everything, and we will go back to only big software companies creating products. That would be sad, indeed.
As I see it, we need new ways to defend these cases. The traditional defense cost 2+ million dollars and that is just way over budget for most mobile developers. Just like we productize software products, we need to “productize” the defense. We need to productize prior art search, productize patent search, productize patent litigation and productize settlement negotiation.
I hope this meeting starts a new round of conversation about finding real solutions to this problem.
The world with tablets
I was having lunch with a friend and we chat about the future where most people will use the tablet more than a PC. ( I know, that’s Steve Jobs’ vision, but it’s also Bill Gates’ and also mine. 
) Anyway, he start asking questions like, “but is the tablet powerful enough to handle everything”.
This reminds me of the early day of digital photography when people asked, “wow, if we are taking hundreds of pictures, wouldn’t it cost a lot to have them developed?” “how do I put them in albums?” “what do I do with my baby book if I don’t print all the pictures out?” “So I won’t be able to flip through the pictures?”
With new technology, your behavior will change. There will be give and take but to the better for the most part. I think it will be the same in the tablet world. A world where most ‘computing’ is done from a tablet like device rather than a PC. Some people will love it, some will hate it, most will adjust to it. That’s progress and I like it.
Top 3 Needs
Recently a friend of mine asked “what’s your top 3 needs right now”. Here is my respond,
Top three things? These 3 things are always true, but as we get into a different stage, they take on a different meaning.
1. Focus. Focus is no longer, heads down and get the release out. Focus now means don’t get side-tracked with the day-to-day but make sure we are marching toward the right goal 6-10 months from now.
2. Cash flow. It’s rather easy to make financial decision when you have absolutely no money. When we are getting money in and need to spend some money, any small financial decision is critical. It’s far easier to spend money than to make them.
3. Growth/Scalability. As we grow, we start taken on different jobs. Starting to be managers rather than workers. Starting to put in process rather than just getting it done.
OK.OK. More concert needs:
1. Legal support. I am going to engage the lawyer soon.
2. Resources. We have been hiring and will continue to do so. Key is the get affordable and effective resources.
3. Slow down. As we gets traction, it’s very easy to think that we are invincible and thus go too fast.
Sze
iPhoneDevCamp DC Demo
For those of you who will attend my presentation in the iPhoneDevCamp tomorrow, please do the following in advance to follow along in the demo:
1. Download exZact Lite from the App Store.
2. Goto the Setting screen, key in the following:
Email Address: ipdcdc (Yes, it’s not really an email address, it will work, trust me.)
Server: zerioninc.com
3. Hit Sync Data With Server
See you all tomorrow.
Vote Report Wins the Golden Dot Award
Yesterday I went to the Politics Online Conference in Washington D.C. for the Golen Dot Award. Since so many of my friends ask “What is that?”, I’m going to talk a bit about the project and the award itself. I will then post a follow-up blog on my experience yesterday in more detail.
The award is the Golden Dot Award from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet at George Washington University. Every year, they organize the PoliticsOnline Conference in Washinton D.C. and announce the best internet projects related to politics. This year, our project, the TweeterVoteReport and Inauguration Report, won the Best Mashup category.
The projects, VoteReport and InaugurationReport, are Crowdsourcing Political Journalism projects. In plain English, it’s using social network technology and allows the public to document political events. During last year’s election and the inauguration in Jan, we use the same technology and allow people to share their experience. The result is huge amount of data (text report, photo, audio, video) with geo location information. We collect data through Twitter, SMS, Filckr, Youtube, iPhone and Android. We then open up this stream of data and allow any media outlet to mashup in anyway they want. The project is completly open-source. The project was organized by NPR, Tech President, American Univeristy and CBS News. There are over 20 developers participated in these projects, including Sanford Dickert from Contagious Conversations, Dave Troy from TwitterVision, Andrew Turner from GeoCommons, Sze Wong from Zerion Software, and Nathan Freitas. Full contributor list of the vote report project can be found here.
You can read more about the projects in my pervious blogs or the following links:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/vote-report-wins-golden-dot
http://afine2.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/twitter-vote-report-goes-to-india/
http://blog.twittervotereport.com/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2009/01/inauguration_report_is_live.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99395388
http://www.inaugurationreport.com/
Like I said on the Panel yesterday, it’s been a great honor working on this project. From both the social data collection and development collaboration perspectives, this project was a great success.
Sze Wong holding the Golen Dot Award
Developers Hate J-RAT
One of my team member told me that she saw another team using our J-RAT method. I said “Great! How they like it.” “All developers hated it,” she said. “They didn’t like being watched and couldn’t actually code when sitting with everybody.” Well, that is a classic misuse of J-RAT. Every J-RAT sessions that I moderate have been loved by developers, testers and users a-like.
J-RAT stands for Joint Rapid Application Testing. It is meant to replace either functional testing or user acceptance testing. The goal of J-RAT is to change the testing culture from bug centric to product centric, and remove the wall between the test team and the development team. The idea is to set aside a period of time for testing a particular module(s) and all related parties (developer, testers, business analysts, end-users) in the project should all sit in the same room and focus on testing. One moderator will be assigned to the room (usually the test manager) who’s job is to control the pace of the test and how many concurrent threads are running within the room. The room should have at least 2 white boards and ideally 2 projectors. The development team should control one projector and the test team should control the other projector. The moderator will control one white board where test cases are written on the board and everybody in the room should know which case(s) are currently running. The other whiteboard is for discussion.
For a successful J-RAT, the moderator must be trained to run J-RAT and must be respected by the team. Since the moderator is pretty much the boss during J-RAT and if people don’t listen, the process will breakdown.
J-RAT also calls for no senior management in the room, preferably not even the project manager (except when it is for user acceptancce test, then the PM must be there), as the goal is for the team to freely express their concerns and thoughts to get the product out the door without worrying about ‘politics’.
J-RAT done right will result in dramatic reduced in testing duration (usually 1/5), higher overall quality and much high team spirit.
The team that my team member told me about probably saw us running a successful J-RAT session and want to replicate that. However, without proper training, all they have copied is ‘putting everybody in the same room’. The result is a crowded room with a senior manager in it; everybody is nervous, and not much got done.
Sze Wong
Zerion Consulting
Ownership
My story on Verizon (see below) is actually a story about ownership. I am going to use this in my staff training going forward. This is a classic story about lack of ownership. Throughout the story, nobody from Verizon did anything wrong (some were nicer than others but they all follow the book) but somehow when combined, it makes a miserable experience for the customer.
That is the same thing when development and testing just ‘do their part’ and don’t take ownership of the whole thing. I told developers “Your bug is not fixed until confirmed by tester and it is your job to ensure that they can verify your fix.” I also told testers “Your testing report is not done until the developer truely understand what you meant and know where to start.”
Most project puts the ownership on the project manager, while this works, it’s not scalable. In my Verizon story, had there be a project manager, a point-of-contact, everything will be much better. However, I think a better solution is for a company to have a culture of ownership throughout the organization. Everybody is expected to take the job beyond their boxes. I usually explain this by telling people to tag on 20% of work on either end of the box. They are expected to do 140%. That is why people love to work with us and why we win. This is ownership.
80% of IT Infrastructure in the cloud by 2015?
Lately I’ve been in the cloud a lot. From Google’s app engine, sales-force.com, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (E2C), to Microsoft’s Live Mesh, we hear about the cloud a lot. More and more people are signing up for on-demand applications (We, as a small business, also use on-demand applications) and almost every other IT start-up that I talked to is a Saas of this or that. So the trend is clear, the question is are you ready?
What does IT Consulting looks like in the year 2015?
At the app layer, it will be like the VB world at a massive and enterprise level. VB was very successful as a component based development platform were almost everything you need, you can buy a component and plug into your program. With simple code, you can link these components together and make your own application. What VB fails on is what we IT guys like to say, lack of scalability, security, and portability. Well, by year 2015, you are going to have a world where basic business building blocks are available online on a subscription basis. You pay $5000 a month (inflation, everybody) to use the Bloomberg stock component and $20K a month for the Google editor component, you then put them all together and create the killer stock prediction engine and sell for $60K a month.
Problems to be solved between now and then? A universal, cross-vendor, open security and data-portability model. So unless you are working in a company creating components, we general IT consultants will essentially become business consultants. Instead of solving technical problems, business consultants are there to help companies solve their business problems. Help them put these business components together in ways that they want.
Now at the hardware layer, by the year 2015, computers will likely become cheap commodities like a phone and your DVD player. In fact, every appliance will be a computer and in each house there are multiple terminals to connect to them and get to the web. Other than a simple OS, everything runs on the web. If you need a new application, you either buy it online or call your phone company, it will then show up on your screen and you can start using it. Things that are different than now: you don’t upgrade your machine (get a new one), you don’t install new software (they are all online), you don’t install new OS (new OS’s are push to you automatically) and you buy a new machine every 2-3 years.
Problem to be solved between now and then: make the OS lighter (opposite to Microsoft’s direction), have high-speed connection everywhere (we are almost there), have sub-hundred dollar computers (almost there if windows is light).
Now how about general IT support, like help-desk, networking, installation, setup, etc. Support will always exist, but at a different level. By then no one will call you to setup a network in their office or setup/maintain their email server. No one will call you to backup their data either. Essentially IT support as we know it will not exist anymore. They are all controlled by infrastructure providers like phone companies and giants like Oracle, Google, etc. Businesses will no-longer have their own IT department.
Did I just say IT is dead? No. Just like every evolution step, there are things that are eliminated but more things are created, along with more opportunities and challenges.
