rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Monday, 17 June 2002

Strategy Letter V is another great piece from Joel. He really does a good job of mashing usually disparate concepts (here basic economics with recent technology news) to create intelligent end results, which often seem so simple you wonder why you didn't see it already. That's the power of good writing.   "Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun's two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you're going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley." 2:16:56 PM  comment []      How To Manage Companies in the New Economy 1:18:41 PM  comment []      Java Technology Community Search: "We call it Beta Search, you'll call it a Blessing." Sun partners with Google for the java.sun.com search. 1:10:48 PM  comment []      I think I just managed to subscribe to Cafe Au Lait and The ServerSide using the RadioDistiller. I'll watch my feeds for the next day or two and if they work I'll post them here. Very useful - I get all my news in the aggregator now! 1:05:57 PM  comment []      Rusty tried IDEA but didn't like the popups. Horses for courses, I love the way IDEA makes me a smarter coder, and much much faster to build stuff. IDE? What IDE?. E.R. Harold: The IDE is not smarter than I am. Hell, it isn't smarter than my cat Marjorie. It should not pretend that it is. [Be Blogging] 12:31:14 PM  comment []      Rhys Weatherly: The Two Doofuses (or Why Type Safety and the Garbage Collector Really Exist [via Peter Drayton] [via Sam Ruby] 12:25:00 PM  comment []      Which version of SOAP should you use[~]JAXM or JAX-RPC?: Excellent overview (from a Java perspective) of the various SOAP related activities. [Sam Ruby] 12:23:57 PM  comment []      Sun plays catch up with Web services. The company, sensing it has fallen behind rivals Microsoft and IBM in Web services leadership, is launching a renewed strategy in an attempt to play catch up. [CNET News.com] 12:20:13 PM  comment []      Writing press releases - as always Scott produces quality information, I'll be testing this piece for the JIRA 1.3 release. 12:17:44 PM  comment []      I can't say I agree more - if you're still using Windows a lot, find out why to Switch to OSX. 12:16:09 PM  comment []      Google using internal weblogs for new ideas. Fast Company: How Google Searches Itself. Mayer, an intense, fast-talking product manager, scribbles rapidly as the engineers race to explain and defend the new ideas that they've posted to an internal Web site. By the end of the hour-long meeting, six, seven, or sometimes even eight new ideas are fleshed out enough to take to the next level of development. [Tomalak's Realm] They may not call them weblogs, but that's what they are. People in google put up web pages with ideas, and others can comment on them. The managers job is to harvest good ideas. Very cool idea. [pberry: Radio Edition] 12:14:54 PM  comment []      Six arrested in SoCal golf course prostitution bust - amusing: Investigators observed sex acts between golfers and women, McConnell said. Elsewhere on the course golf was being played, Kennedy-Smith said. [via Adam Curry] 12:14:16 PM  comment []      Found a great new OSX weblog today - Mac OS X: The Search for OS Canaan - via evhead. It's well written by Damon Wright. He's one of the stars of the new OSX "Switch" commercials (see his commercial). He's posted a great piece about how the whole commercial thing came together, and has lots of good posts about OSX software. I'm a reader.     12:07:14 PM  comment []      From Blogging Roller: "Mike's right, it sounds like WebGain is just throwing Visual Cafe over the wall to the open source community. But, I don't see anything wrong with that. I'd rather see old software products released as open source than see them disappear into oblivion." I agree completely - noone anymore should cancel software products and throw away the code. They should just open source it and then move on IMHO. My point here was that I think it's unlikely Oracle will get much developer support given there are already a number of large Open Source IDE projects which are well staffed and much more mature. (Also note: Collab.net handles Oracle's Open Source projects, as well as the NetBeans site - one wonders if they are going to handle the Open Source Oracle IDE too - can you say conflict of interest? ) 11:59:25 AM  comment []      Fake light sabers making real cash - making more than $1 million selling light sabers? Sounds like fun to me. "Why do women like jewelry?" Parks asks. "The light saber reaches an emotional need to feel like a hero." 11:42:23 AM  comment []      Candy-coated eBay tale was too good to be true - "Yep. The story of eBay, the online auction house, and Pez, the novelty candy, is a fib. A fabrication. Another blast of Internet hype." 11:36:49 AM  comment []