Posted on Fri, Apr 05, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, comScore Shocker: Android loses market share in latest report, please check it out. You might expect the same-old, same old from comScore's latest mobile market share figures, but you would be mistaken. There were several surprises.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
Mobile-Device Management: 10 Best Practices for Creating a BYOD Policy | eWeek
Bring your own device is spreading across organizations, and it's causing some confusion among IT pros on how to manage a hodge podge of devices. This article offers some practical advice for creating sensible BYOD policy in your organization.
Why What You’re Reading About Blink Is Probably Wrong | Infrequently Noted
When Google announced its new browser rendering engine Blink this week, it certainly generated a lot of strong opinions. This article maintains that most of those are wrong. Do you agree?
What is Open Source Cloud? | Linux.com
This post gives you a cloud computing primer, then explains the importance of cloud computing in the context of open source and that having an open cloud is essential to keep the work of the open source movement moving forward.
Your Code May Work, But It Still Might Suck | Smartbear
There is value in dedication to your programming craft and that means creating elegant code in every step of the process, even ones that might not seem to matter. Just because it works doesn't mean it's art and that's what you should be striving to produce.. See the next post.
The Artful Organization | Agile Zone
When I saw Seth Godin speak a couple of weeks ago, he spoke of the importance creating something unique and how creative organizations will win --and this post extends that notion on the importance of being an organization that creates something unique and beautiful and offers some resources to help get you there.
Photo by Ron Miller. Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Fri, Mar 08, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, Suddenly Everybody Wants to Follow Apple's Integrated Hardware-Software Model, please check it out. What do Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Amazon all have in common? They are trying to emulate Apple's successful software-hardware integration strategy -- but do these competitors have the chops to pull it off?
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
Cloud haters: You too will be assimilated | ZDNet
In this amusing post, you'll learn no matter how much you hate the cloud and all it stands for, resistance if futile and you will be assimilated.
Apps Reorder the Job Landscape | WSJ.com
Companies are finding an interesting outcome from building apps. Sure, it costs money to hire developers to design and maintain them, but in some instances, it's giving users power to do things themselves that used to require the help of employees -- and that means fewer customer service jobs.
The Missing Docs: For When You're Not There | Mendix Blog
It's bound to happen. You're going to get called away for a family emergency or you're going to finally take that long-planned vacation and you need to document how to keep the department going while you're gone. This piece offers some sound advice on how to create a document for your staff to keep things going in your absence.
This is Not Your Father’s Software Industry | blog.payne.org
The software industry is in the midst of a radical shift and companies like Uber and Airbnb are leading the way. This author believes we will begin to see more apps that resemble these companies and less that resemble traditional enterprise software over the next decade.
Five reasons why Windows 8 has failed | ZDNet
Windows 8 desktop sales are dismal so far and there are many reasons including developers don't like it and neither do end users. That's a pretty deadly combination right there and there are three other reasons too.
Photo by Tomma Henckel Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, Feb 07, 2013
by Ron Miller
Ness Blogger
Back in the 80s when I was working for a small management consulting firm in Boston, the operations manager went shopping for these new-fangled devices called PCs. She ended up buying IBM-brand PCs and I remember her saying, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Many people in IT today probably feel the same way about Microsoft, but is it still true or is Microsoft on a slippery slope toward irrelevancy caught in the middle of a changing computing landscape?
There are two key trends squeezing Microsoft as it gets attacked relentlessly on two fronts. The first is the iPad and the second is the Chromebook -- and by extension the broader trends of mobile and cloud computing.
Microsoft is not stupid. It has recognized these assailants and they have taken action to fend them off. On the user level, they developed a broad cloud computing plan that includes Office 365 and Sky Drive. On the enterprise side, they are making a push to the cloud with hosted versions of SharePoint and Exchange, and the Azure development platform among other steps.
Windows 8 is an attempt to capture a single screen view of the world with Windows 8 on the desktop, Windows 8 Phone and Windows RT and Windows 8 on tablets. They have developed their own tablets and made investments in Nokia and Dell to keep the PC and phone ecosystem oriented toward their products.
Make no mistake, Microsoft remains a formidable company with deep pockets and lots of smart people. It still maintains a powerful presence in the enterprise, but if you look at any company starting out today, how many are going to go with the Windows/Office model which has been the revenue bedrock of the company for so long? Not very many. That means as these newer businesses grow and develop, they are not going to be Microsoft shops as in the past.
It's like a company with an old demographic. The market is still strong, but the youngsters aren't buying into the vision.
And of course we have begun to witness the shift away from PCs. So far, the numbers have not been very kind to Windows 8 on the desktop or any device for that matter. comScore announced its latest figures and Microsoft phones are still langusihing at a dismal 2.9 percent of US market share, continuing a downward trend. Meanwhile, although Microsoft has not announced Surface RT sales, reports have them sitting at around the same 3 percent. The Surface Pro came out this week to mixed reviews. By contrast, Apple announced it sold 22.9 million iPads and 47 million iPhones last quarter.
Then there is the Chromebook, the cheap cloud-based notebooks running Google's Chrome OS. As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote on ZDNet, Chromebook is coming on much stronger and much more quickly than expected. As he reported, Acer, which just started manufacturing Chromebooks at the end of last year, now reports that these machines will account for between 5 and 10 percent of its US shipments this year.
Other PC manufacturers are noticing too. Recently Lenovo announced a new Chromebook offering and just this week HP jumped on board, albeit with what sounds like a very poor implementation. The key here though is that these traditional PC/Windows manufacturing companies are looking elsewhere and selling alternatives and that has to be cutting further into the Windows market.
I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Microsoft is going anywhere any time soon. I expect it will be around for years to come, but it is clear that Microsoft's key markets are being squeezed by devices that aren't running Windows -- and if you're placing your bets on Microsoft, you might want to at least think about that choice moving forward, and recognize that there are alternatives now.
Photo Credit I'm a PC: bytesrc on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons SA license.
Photo Credit iPad: Sean MacEntee on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons SA license.
Photo Credit Chromebook: Google
Posted on Thu, Nov 29, 2012
There is a common misconception among IT pros, especially the ones who cut their teeth in a time before the cloud, that at worst it's a vast conspiracy to take away their jobs, and at best it's giving all your valuable data and content to a third party vendor who doesn't care about you.
In reality, as I've talked to IT Pros over the last several years, they lie upon a spectrum. There are those who are virulently anti-cloud and there are the the true believers who are all in on the cloud and see all the benefits it provides; how it frees the business from running data centers and lets them concentrate on their core competencies, that it's elastic and can grow or shrink as needed; that you only pay for what you use.
But many others lie somewhere in the middle, ready to listen, but taking a more cautious approach. One IT executive I spoke to recently suggested he wasn't averse to new ways of operating. In fact, his company had embraced Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and he wasn't anti-cloud, but he worried if took his company to the cloud, then changed his mind, what would happen then? Once his data center was closed and he had committed to the cloud, he couldn't afford to build out the data center again.
The fact is, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach, but more importantly, no matter what degree you embrace the cloud, it doesn't represent the end of IT. Tony Byrne, who is president at Real Story Group says what it does require is a new way of doing your job.
Speaking this week at the Gilbane Conference in Boston, Byrne pointed out that part of the problem is how cloud computing is being marketed and sold. "One of the themes that links cloud and mobile," Byrne says, "is the idea of freedom and liberation." He says this is on two levels: the freedom to communicate and work and anywhere and freedom from IT and network and servers (and by extension complex and often obtuse enterprise software).
But Byrne, who personally believes most companies will settle on hybrid approach with some services in the cloud and others in the company data center, says it doesn't mean the end of IT in spite of this freedom argument.
He says that IT still has a role to play and if the vendors don't respect that, IT pros must push back. "You still need systems and networks people and certainly developers in the new world of the cloud," he explained. But what you can't do is simply abdicate responsibility because you are so frustrated with this changing environment. Byrne says instead, you have to push back against vendors who are suggesting you don't have a role to play.
But he says, IT also needs to make some adjustments about it works in order to align with the changes going on in IT today. That means IT needs to focus on a new set of skills which align business and IT in a much more concrete way than in the past. The Cloud isn't an escape route. It's new path to getting work done, and IT pros must adjust to this or risk their worst nightmare scenarios of obsolescence.
It's worth noting that sometimes companies need help through major transitions like the ones rocking IT today and finding consultants who are well versed in this type of organizational change can help your company make these types of transformations more smoothly.
Posted on Fri, Oct 26, 2012
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our most recent post, The Disappearing Cloud, please check it out now. A recent survey found that while most people don't understand the term "cloud computing," they use cloud services -- and that's fine, they don't need ot understand industry buzz words.
Please consider subscribing if you like what you see here, and if you have something to say, please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
IT budgets up, but salary cuts still a concern: study | Network World
The good news is that a study by Society for Information Management finds that average IT budgets increased this year, and salaries increased for 60 percent of IT according to the study, but 16 percent of IT pros had to endure salary cuts so it's not all sunshine and light.
A Progress Report on HTML5 Apps Platforms | Dr. Dobbs
The enthusiasm for an HTML5 app store was strong last year, but this year it seems to have waned as developers started working in earnest with the platform. It doesn't mean it's not going to happen, but the pace has slowed and may actually move away from the storefront idea back to the browser. (Not sure why you can't have both as with the Chrome app store.)
Google Compute Engine Is Gonna Change The Public Cloud Game | Cloudave
Could the Google Cloud platform challenge the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This writer thinks it's possible. He tested the platform and found that he could set up instances almost instantly and he believes this along with a simple administrative interface could be attractive to IT pros, which could draw business from AWS. We shall see.
Hackers, Security Pros Talk Penetration Testing, Social Engineering | CIO.com
Going to a security conference is bound to make you paranoid and CIO says they sent reporter to the GrrCon to get the low down. Read this post to find out what he learned about protecting your system from hackers.
Java still has a crucial role to play—despite security risks | Ars Technica
While many worry about security vulnerabilities in Java, it's so widely used by so many useful web services, it's difficult for users to shut down the Java Runtime Environment in spite of the risks.
Photo by Tomma Henckel. Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, Oct 25, 2012
A survey conducted by Citrix back in August found that a lot of people don't have a clue what the cloud is.
A few years ago, I remember reading about a survey which asked if people used RSS. Most people answered No because they didn't know what it was, but the fact was they were using services that took advantage of RSS and just didn't know it. The same appears to be true for the cloud, which is growing increasingly invisible to users -- and that's fine.
I love telling the story of my Dad's elderly neighbor who upon hearing that I was a technology journalist pulled me aside and asked, "Just what the heck is cloud computing anyway?" Apparently, you don't have to be an octogenarian to wonder this. The Citrix survey, which involved 1000 Americans, found just 16 percent could define cloud computing "as a computer network to store, access and share data from Internet-connected devices." Some people believed it to be toilet paper, while most believed it to be an actual cloud in the sky as in the fluffy white things.
Yet for their utter lack of understanding of the term and how to define it, the survey found that most people are using the cloud, whether they know it or not (much like those folks in the RSS survey). More than half claimed to have never used the cloud, yet when asked about specific services, it turned out 95 percent actually did use the cloud for such services as online banking, photo sharing, file storage and so forth. They just didn't know it was the cloud.
According to a recent All Things Digital Article aptly titled Nobody Goes Online Anymore, a Forrester report found that when asked about Internet use many people answered they were using the Internet less than in the past, but survey designers at Forrester speculate that this was because people using always-connected devices like smartphones didn't have to explicitly "go online" because the services were always on.
A few weeks ago, Brian Katz wrote a post called Disappearing Apps. His point was that you need to develop apps that are so well designed, the user forgets about the app because they are so caught up in it.
And if the cloud and the Internet, and perhaps the best designed apps are becoming so ubiquitous that people don't realize what they are using them, so much the better. The goal shouldn't be to get a majority of people to understand the industry buzz words, it should be to create applications and services that are so good, it doesn't matter what we call them. They just work and it's great.
Photo by kei51 on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
Posted on Thu, Aug 16, 2012
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our other post this week,
Survey Finds IT Confident it Recover from Cloud Data Loss, have a look. While most surveys and my own observations have found that IT pros remain wary of the cloud and the ability to recover from a cloud data loss, a new survey suggests attitudes could be changing. Is this a trend or an aberration?
Please consider subscribing if you like what you see here, and if you have something to say, please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
How Feline Behavior Mirrors Code Review Best Practices | Smartbear
Any time you can tie cats to anything on the Internet, you probably have a winner, and when you tie to them something as esoteric as code review, well how could I not include it in this week's round-up?
Ten Things I Hate About Working at Facebook | The World As Best As I Remember It
When you first read the list, you might be thinking, this one doesn't sound bad. Neither does this one. Then you realize the writer is writing with tongue embedded firmly in his cheek. It took me awhile to get it, I have to admit, but the author had me at the title.
Why IT Is in Danger, and Why Companies Should Care | Input Output
IT isn't in danger per se, but IT that attempts to maintain command and control probably is. This article looks at the changing face of IT with some nostaligia for the good old days when IT told everyone what to do and they did it but also with a clear-headed view that IT still has an important role to play, even as power shifts to the business units.
What Can IT Reasonably Expect in Cloud Reliability? | Tom's IT Pro
One thing is clear, you cannot expect that your cloud service will never go down. Unless you can guarantee your own data center will never go down, and I don't know anyone who can, then it's an unreasonable expectation. This article is good starting point for a discussion on what you can reasonably expect from a cloud service in terms of reliablity.
NASA upgrades Mars Curiosity software ... from 350M miles away | Computerworld
You might have had to conduct a remote software upgrade before, but you've probably never faced the same challenges that NASA faces when upgrading Curiosity sitting on the surface of Mars some 350 million miles away. That's seriously remote. Needless to say they are testing twice and upgrading once (so to speak). As the article points out, this is really not something you want to get wrong.
Bonus Link:
Judge Koh asks Apple's attorneys if they're 'smoking crack' | The Verge
The Apple-Samsung patent trial took a comic turn this week, when Judge Lucy Koh reportedly told Apple attorneys that they must be smoking crack if they think they are going to call 22 rebuttal witnesses. To which Apple attorney, William Lee responded, ""First, your honor, I'm not smoking crack. I can promise you that."
Photo by Tomma Henckel. Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Fri, Aug 10, 2012
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our other posts this week,
Mobile Growth Explosion Expected to Continue (infographic) and
When Platforms Compete, Developers Win, have a look. The former illustrates the explosive growth of the mobile market. The latter explores how when Facebook released a subscription service this week, it helped prove platforms are trying to attract developer mindshare.
Please consider subscribing if you like what you see here, and if you have something to say, please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
Why Bad Programmers Still Get Hired | Javalobby
We've all seen it haven't we? A company hires a programming hack (not a hacker) and you're wondering why. Perhaps because if a company has a good front end marketing team and technical competence, the quality of the underlying code won't matter for a time, and by the time it's exposed, it's much too late.
Designers and Developers: Why Can’t We Get Along? | Smartbear
Designers and programmers have traditionally butted heads inside organizations not unlike marketing and sales. This article offers practical advice on how to get the two groups to get along by providing insight into what each one does.
When software kills | TNL.net
When Wall Street instituted a new trading system without enough stress testing, something went terribly wrong when it went live. How wrong? It was so bad it ended up killing an established Wall Street frm. See, software can actually kill.
For your eyes only: New twist on Digital ID could keep you from getting hacked | ZDNet
After this week's hacking hysteria, there were a flurry of tech stories on how to protect yourself and your employees. This one looks at a new form of authentication where the user identifies pictures he likes or doesn't like using things that are easy for an individual to remember, but hard for a hacker to guess. It's an interesting idea.
How a Cloud Company Helped NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Mission in a Big Way | Input Output
NASA knew that when Curiosity landed on Mars, the video feed could attract as many as 100 million users worldwide. In order to keep their site from being overrun, it hired a cloud-based web-performance monitoring company to help it ensure it could handle the audience onslaught. The scalability of the cloud enabled the small testing company to deal with the scope of the project, which would have been out of its reach otherwise.
Photo by Ron Miller Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.
Posted on Thu, Jun 07, 2012
It wasn't that long ago that IT looked at cloud computing with more than a bit of mistrust, but that's been changing recently, and one of the reasons is cost. Cloud computing tends to be more cost-effective, and here's the thing. It just keeps getting cheaper.
The whole cost-benefit thing is still being worked out on the fly, as is typical in our quickly changing technology landscape, these days, but one thing is clear. As Charles Babcock pointed out
in a recent Information Week story, last March within days of one another, Microsoft and Amazon announced steep price cuts to their cloud services and cloud costs continue to go down.
As a CIO or IT manager, cheaper overall costs have to have you wringing your hands with glee. Your budgets under control and everyone is happy, right? It also reduces your overall infrastructure costs and if you're using cloud services, it reduces overall complexity and eliminates the need for you to upgrade individual users. Everything is done on the cloud service provider end.
And over time, clouds services are commoditizing, which means as more competition enters the space, the overall cost of doing business is plunging. Everyone loves the idea of simplifying your operations of course (although there are still plenty of IT pros who see cloud computing as a conspiracy to reduce head count), but the people who control the purse strings have to like the trend from a cost perspective.
My feeling is that there is still plenty for IT to be doing, even while moving some functionality to the cloud. Companies still need guidance in their technology purchases, whether they are in the cloud or internal. You still need customization and you still have plenty of legacy systems to maintain, that for better or worse aren't going anywhere.
I'm betting you have a fair number of devices you need to support and those PCs that we are supposed to not need anymore, you probably still have thousands you're responsible for maintaining. Your team is not going to be bored just because some of your services get shuffled off to the cloud. They may actually have some more time to do everything that needs to be done in a large IT organization and gets neglected because resources are directed elsewhere.
If the price is getting cheaper to buy those services, all the better. Perhaps it means, you can free up some budget for some special projects you have been putting off for way too long.
So as the price of cloud services goes down, it can only have a positive impact on IT overall -- and for those IT pros who are feeling threatened by this shift? I wouldn't worry. You're probably more valuable than ever.
Posted on Thu, May 24, 2012
It's Friday and that means it's time for our weekly feature where we search the Web looking for 5 interesting, funny and poignant links for developers and IT Pros.
If you missed our other post this week,
Taking Control of BYOD Devices Without Destroying Personal Content, please check it out. The problem with bringing your own device to work is when you lose it and IT decides to remotely wipe your phone -- including your personal content. This week, I learned about two ways IT could control enterprise content while leaving your personal contact untouched.
Please consider subscribing if you like what you see here, and if you have something to say, please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
And without further delay, here we go with this week's links:
HTML5 Security Isn’t | Input Output
This is a deep dive into what you need to think about from a security perspective when you are creating HTML 5 applications. Don't assume you're secure. Get some knowledge and be sure.
Don't Store All Your Eggs in One Basket: An Idiom for the Cloud | Cloud Zone
Remember the old chestnut about never putting all your eggs in one basket? The implication of course being if you drop that one basket, you've lost all your eggs. This author argues, that even though Amazon is really cheap, and easy to provision, you would be wise to have redundant storage on other sites in case something goes wrong. It's always been sound advice and it remains so.
Build your own open-source cloud with ownCloud 4 | ZDNet
The head is a bit deceiving in that you can't apparently build just any cloud app. This open source approach though is worth exploring if you want to host your own file syncing and storage service. Just this week, EMC bought such a service called Syncplicity, but if you are concerned about security, regardless of the vendor, roll your own sync and share service and run it on your own servers. That way, you have nobody to blame but yourself if something goes wrong.
Fashionistas (and bureaucrats and journalists): Please learn to code | Dan Nguyen's blog
Last week, we linked to a story suggesting that the everyone-should-learn-to-code movement isn't such a good idea. This writer thinks that was a wrong-headed column and his answer, is that of course everyone should learn to code -- the more, the merrier.
Surveys Show Enterprises Both Embrace and Fear BYOD | Cloud Commons
Apparently when it comes to BYOD, IT pros love it and hate it -- at the same time. On one hand, if employees are bringing their own devices, that's one less thing for IT to worry about, yet they are still responsible for security and governance (oh and linking it to back-end systems), so there's a control problem here. Lot to like. Lot to worry about. Could be a wash.
Photo by Tomma Henckel Used under Creative Commons Share Alike/Attribution License.