Tuesday, April 02, 2002

Some observations from Louis Gerstner in his final letter to shareholders as Chairman of IBM. His comments are interesting considering that the shift in the I/T industry that he refers to coincides with the evolution of XP and other agile methodologies. "A massive shift is underway in our industry...customers are finally driving the direction of the information technology industry. The first 30 years of this industry's history consisted of the technology inventors inside I/T companies talking to the technology implementers inside businesses and institutions. For most of that era, the applications of the technology were fairly limited-focused on the automation of back-office processes like accounting and payroll, or desktop applications such as word processing and e-mail. Then, starting in the early 1990s, businesspeople began to understand the importance of information technology to everything they wanted to do." "Customers...have made it emphatically clear to this industry that they will no longer cede control to the makers of the technology. That means that customers are demanding integration, and refusing to accept piece parts that aren't designed and delivered to work together." [ll] 11:02:08 AM

Intranets are a mess: "People weren't using it because information wasn't being updated".  I think the lesson here is pretty simple.  You cannot centrally control or author information in one place or it will become stale very fast.  Everyone has to be able to post information useful to them and their colleagues.  And, most important, it has to be dead simple to use -- browser based and fast. [gtb] 9:38:24 AM

Quicken uses strong arm tactics to force users to upgrade. "Older versions of the program — Quicken 98 and 99 — will cease to download banking statements after April 30" [gtb] 9:33:08 AM

An Economist article on a specific instance of the evolving checks and balances in the on-line world: "One market opportunity, however, frequently creates another. The past few months have seen a rapid rise in interest in software designed to catch the cheats." [gtb] 9:26:20 AM

An outstanding article on sorting out the web services alphabet soup for developers by Jon Udell.  He argues articulately against using RPC as the protocol of choice to support them: "RPC technology may or may not prove sufficiently robust at Internet scale, but the Web is proof that pure document exchange will. In a world of rapidly changing business alliances and technical infrastructures, large-scale distributed applications cannot depend on brittle RPC-style APIs that require all endpoints to evolve in lockstep. The more XML messages say about themselves, the less their senders and receivers need to know about one another's infrastructures." No question, loosely coupled is better than tightly coupled.  However, simple is better than complex -- XML-RPC is much easier to implement and maintain than SOAP.  Also, you can design the XML-RPC calls to be loosely coupled so they don't have to evolve in strict lockstep.  In general though, Jon is bang on in his comments -- the decision on what to rely on is a tough one. [gtb] 9:09:24 AM

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