...and surprisingly it's not a service owned by Microsoft. Last Friday Napster-to -go went live offering what is potentially the biggest threat so far to Apple's dominance of the online legal downloads market.

For just $15 a month subscribers got to download an unlimited amount of music, the catch being that as soon as you stop subscribing, the music stops too. This particular trick comes courtesy of Microsoft's Janus digital rights management system which periodically connects to an assets license provider to confirm whether or not the license is still valid.

Portable music devices are supported by the new service, unless of course you own an ipod. Napster are also being a little quiet at the moment with respect to which music labels they have signed into. the service, and how those labels get paid (Apple have a vast collection of labels and payment happens pretty much the same way it does in the high street.

Napsters service does look compelling though -definitely one to watch.

7:52:28 PM    

Loren Heiny (Tablet MVP and sibling to Lora Heiny, also a tablet MVP - I'm told by Lora that her parents have a warped sense of humour and named all their kids with very similar names) has put up a page on his blog with links to all the media and blog reaction to HP's new TC4200 Tablet PC. What a thoroughly nice thing to do.

The big deal with this new Tablet, for those that haven't heard, is that it's the first notebook, with tablet features. It's not designed from the ground up to be an ultra portable Tablet PC. It's designed as a low cost, entry level notebook that just happens to also be a Tablet. Ultimately this is the way the Tablet PC domain is sure to go, with a handful of dedicated, highly mobile tablet devices, but with the industry as a whole providing tablet functionality in most of the mainstream notebooks.

First impressions of the machine, from the links I've read at Loren's blog, are that HP have done a good job of keeping the price point low, but that does mean compromises that many people just won't stomach. A slow Celeron based processor for example, and a somewhat limiting 1024x768 integrated screen resolution, for example. Still, it is priced well, it does compete with Averatec (the other "cheap" tablet maker), and it is sure to attract a lot of interest from new notebook buyers who hadn't before considered Tablet PC as a platform.

 

8:37:38 AM    

Well quite a lot actually. My customer is a strong advocate of Extreme Programming. They have programming pairs, they write user stories, undertake the planning game, enforce test driven development and basically follows all the rules laid out in Kent Beck's "eXtreme Programming Explained", seen by many as the bible of XP. In a conversation with another developer there yesterday, a question came up. "Do you think more companies will take up Extreme Programming once they see successes like ours?". My answer was immediate. "No!".

XP already has big and public success stories to add to it's marketing toolbox. Take the Chrysler project for example where many of the tenets of eXtreme Programming were finally firmed up, and subsequently documented. Sure, certain practices have fractured out of the XP only fold (refactoring, test driven development, continuous integration) and are now doing very well on their own in the big wide world, but XP the process still has a slow uptake.

The reason I think is the name. It's got to be. XP delivers quality code faster, with more customer involvement, less upset and dissapointed users and happier developers. XP is perhaps the one method out there that actually gives the customer control over what gets delivered, and when. More "traditional" methods on the other hand tend to favour the "trust us, we know what we're doing and you'll just have to be patient" approach to delivery and expectation management. So with all that in mind I think the only reason eXtreme Programming has not been adopted as widely as it could is the name.

Extreme. Conjures up images of snowboarders hurling themselves off uncharted mountains doesn't it. Mention the word "Extreme" somewhere and people instantly think blood, fear, and death. More to the point, they think risk, and lots of it.

Done right, and done to the letter XP delivers incredible benefits to business and developers alike and is perhaps the least risky of all the development methods. It's certainly less risky than "guessing" at a solution through a 50 page document before pouring millions into a team in the hope that what's documented is actually possible. All that we need to do then to get this point across is rename eXtreme Programming.

So let's rebrand it. How about Zero Defect Design and Zero Defect Development (ZDD). Ah - that's better. Now, if I can just get Kent Beck and Addison Wesley to rebrand everything they've ever published I just know we'll take over the world at last.

8:37:35 AM    

Slashdot has a thought provoking discussion under way at the moment about blog ownership. To quote the headline post...

Recently, some companies have come out with formal weblog policies and others have fired employees for inappropriate blogging. With an increase in official company blogs, and some large companies like Microsoft and Google offering popular blogging services, the issues become even more clouded. Some bloggers are beginning to speak out about corporate and government control, others would probably prefer to not risk their jobs.

The issue here though is not really "owning" in a copyright sense. It's more "owning" in a censor and gagging sense.  There seems to be a whole graduated scale of views out there about just how an Employee can go. At one end of the scale there's Microsoft, and the physical embodiement of it's blogging policy, Robert Scoble. Microsoft actively encourages bloggers, and as Scoble demonstrates in his blog manages to survive quite nicely whether the comments are gushing or critical. In fact, Microsoft's attitude to blogging in recent years has perhaps been one of the clearest indications of a company striving to be more open, more in touch with customers. Robert often criticises the company, the company's management and products, but it's viewed in the correct light. By having criticism aired, and by showing that Microsoft employees are not mindless automatons, the company's image has improved immeasurably. Some would say it's products have too.

Further down the scale the same can be seen at ThoughtWorks through Martin Fowler's bliki (a cross between a creative blog and an informational wiki). Martin doesn't post too many critical comments about Thoughtworks, it's people, or processes, but he does give a candid and often quite surprising view into the inner workings of one of the most valuable consulting brands in the world. Today for example he explained how Thoughtworks likes to rotate people around the world, strongly encouraging staff to spend a large chunk of time living in a foreign country. As one who's done that for work, the thought of a company "encouraging" that appalled me, but Martin's blog is open enough to explain just why they do it, and how it benefits everyone. Another example then of blogging as a means of providing transparency into a company.

At the opposite extreme though are the cases too numerous to list completely, but all of which ultimately revolve around company's taking a "do it or else" attitude towards blogs and their creators. There's the case of the airline stewardess who got fired because her anonymous blog carried pictures of her posing seductively inside an aircraft cabin. Why that's a sackable offence, and how employing beautiful staff damages the reputation of an airline and justifies dismissal I'll never know. There's the case of the Electronic Arts programmer's wife who, so scared of the backlash EA would unleash, posted her fears of how the company treats it's staff anonymously on someone elses site. EA's response has been "understanding" in a teeth grinding, "we'd have got away with it too if it weren't for those pesky kids" kinda way, that just seethes "we'll fire whoever is responsible when we find them". Why though? All the person did was express concern over how the company manages it's staff. For someone to do that means there has to be a bit of a problem? Surely it would be better for EA to change their working practices and address the problem, instead of doing a Whitehouse style PR two-step.

I've come across it as well. When I made a quip in a post at Edenbrook that I had a big workload and didn't think they appreciated it, I got a seething email from a director asking me to remove it since it might give someone the wrong impression of the company. How would that give someone the wrong impression of a company? I had a big workload, I wasn't coping, and had even been made seriously ill by it  - again, wouldn't it have been better for the company to do something about it?

At the end of the day this is the root of all the blogging problems. Blogs provide a way for people to share information. That information could be technical, personal, career or social. The point is, it's a sharing mechanism. Company's though see a buck. If we have 50% of our employees blogging then that's a good thing because it raises the profile of our company globally, just so long as they say the right things.

I'm sure the lawyers could argue that blogging on company time, or about company issues while employed, really does mean that blog content is subject to whatever restrictions and controls employers want to place on it. It will be a sad day though when someone does set a legal precedent like that and the millions of pages of candid open blog content out there become just more mindless advertising drivel for company XYZ.

 

8:37:30 AM