moebius recursive

From Cnet:

In an effort to capitalize on the Java brand, server and software company Sun Microsystems will change its stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA next week.

Sun is making the shift because Java has far greater brand awareness than the company’s name, said CEO Jonathan Schwartz in his blog on Thursday. The current symbol, which stands for Stanford University Network Workstation, reflects the company’s origins but not its present, he said.

“The number of people who know Java swamps the number of people who know Sun,” Schwartz wrote. “JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the Internet, and a brand that’s inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability).”

Sun estimates that 1 billion consumers recognize the steaming coffee cup symbol of Java, it said in a press release.

Using similar logic, Microsoft will soon be changing it’s stock symbol to BSOD an ‘innovation’ for which it is well known and that people associate with the MS name.

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sun, java, bsod, microsoft, stock

Ok, maybe the title is a bit strong, but it is the one thing that struck with me when I was reading through a posting on ESB-Oriented Architecture at IBM DeveloperWorks. This is the part that struck me:

Rather than the IT field of dream’s slogan of “if you build it, they will come,” a more appropriate slogan comes from Extreme Programming (XP): “You aren’t gonna need it.” This slogan is shorthand for a very practical principle:

Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.

This principle—don’t build it until you need it—is the opposite of the IT field of dreams. Rather than building it because you hope that someone will want it, do not build it until you know someone wants it. Then you can make sure to build what they want, not what you think they might eventually want. And you will not incur the costs of building it until you are also ready to reap the benefits of having built it. This principle is just a good business philosophy, and it applies to the IT department as much as any other parts of the business.

This may have some applicability at a ‘micro’ level, say, when you are deciding whether or not to write a function or class — a task that may take minutes or hours. But, I think it absolutely misses the mark for larger scale efforts that might take months or years. I believe this posturing also reflects the disdain that the ‘agile‘ and XP herds have for sound architectural principles. Coding is not architecture. Nor is it proper documentation.

A successful enterprise architecture strategy should reflect a robust enough understanding of the business that it supports to be able to anticipate when changes are needed and build them before the business actually needs them. This is how architecture adds value to the enterprise, not just to a project. However, if you enter into a reactive process where you are trying to build out significant infrastructure at the same time that a project or projects is intending to consume it you will likely fail.

To put it in the terms of the posting: the business would have come (and gone) because you couldn’t build it fast enough to add value. And rare is the project that will just hang around for a year while you quickly try to deliver. Something.

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ibm, architecture, badideas, developerworks, esb

Both of the things that I am about to suggest have been around for a while, but I think the combination of them is very compelling. First off, if you haven’t already, read A Long Way Gone. Then watch the movie Blood Diamond (if you have already seen the movie, read the book).

While the story of the ‘boy soldier’ is just a subplot in the movie, the book does an incredible job of providing first hand insight into what it was like to exist in that mode. The movie really brings to life all of the things you read about in the book and provides more insight into that subplot in the movie.

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boysoldier, conflictdiamonds , book, dvd, history

This is a rather stunning/shocking video of a Chinese made car absolutely failing a crash test at around 42 MPH. The car basically crumples in half and the crash test dummy takes it pretty hard. It costs $9000USD and you definitely seem to get what you pay for — not much in the way of safety.

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cars, crash, madeinchina, buyerbeware

So what does 192 AA batteries get you? An 83.7 pound car with a top speed of 75.8 MPH and an average speed of 65.8 MPH.

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battery, car, electriccar, gadgets

This article sheds a bit of light on the true nature of Microsoft revisionist history innovation. The final bit sums it up nicely:

The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall’s Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI’s roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft’s Windows finally emerged as a standard.

But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man.

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history, microsoft, technology

If only one of my memory lapses proved to be so profitable…

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fun, humor

It struck me as uncomfortably timely and ultimately confirming that there was a Diane Rehm show (broadcast on 26 July 2007) discussing why the US needs to invest more in it’s infrastructure, rather than, say, giving tax breaks to the very wealthy. This discussion was unfortunately punctuated with the failure of a major bridge in Minneapolis just five days after the broadcast.

Give the discussion a listen.

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ideas, news