I am reading “The Business of Software” these days. What a delightful book to read about business of software as a product and services. After starting as a developer I have been in the services for the past few years. Michael Cusumano, the author distills the business of software in few succinct words

The Software services business … is about getting enough profitable accounts to keep your consultants and developers busy close to 100 percent of the time…..

It is usually important to mix senior people with junior to maximize profits for any given client project……

economies of scope are the holy grail….. they can come from structuring knowledge such as how to do requirements, manage projects, customize applications, conduct user acceptance testing, or reuse design frameworks and even pieces of code across different projects and customers.

Do read this book if you are starting a career in software in whatever side of the business - product or services.

• 0 Comments

In his 1995 speech “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” given at Harvard Law School, Charlie Munger said

“Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

Coming from Mr. Munger, incentives as the very first cause or bias in Human Misjudgment, learning about incentives is quite important. And now Tyler Cowen, an economist and author of very famous blog Marginal Revolution has written a complete book on incentives called “Discover your inner economist”

• 0 Comments

As speculated on Firefox wiki Safari, the web browser from Apple has been released for Windows. It is a very interesting development as this would take away some market share from IE and Firefox. It is also important for me as my work involves accessing enterprise apps using a browser. So far most of the time folks would access these apps using a browser that is IE or Firefox. But now that Apple has unleashed its Safari on windows users it would be interesting to see if how this pans out for us.

Anyway I was following WWDC07 over the internet and it was quite close to being there, here is screenshot of the Safari Announcement

Steve jobs is a master salesman. Few things to note from his keynote are how successfully he uses “the hook” technique for presenting ideas or telling a story. Just like films or serials/sitcoms have punch lines to pique the interest notice he has “One more thing…” in the above picture. Also to note is how the core ideas or takeaways from the keynote were reinforced at the end with the following - sweet, simple and easy to remember line

“So, we’ve seen this morning Leopard, Safari for Windows, and an awesome way to write apps for the iPhone.”

• 2 Comments

Finished another redesign of Beta Thoughts. It is hard to understand why I redesign. This redesign is probably the best I have seen on this semi-active blog. Here is how I did it

1. I have used the BloggingPro Widgets Ready theme from Blogging Pro.
2. Choice of colors comes from the latest book by Geoffery Moore - Dealing with Darwin. I am quite pleased with how it has turned up.
3. Beta Thoughts logo at the top is created by using the excellent font Delicious found here.
4. Changed the image on About page. Now it shows a photograph clicked while on our way back from Santa Barbara going towards Solvang.

• 0 Comments

• 0 Comments

What is the most widely used SOA enabled application? If you work with enterprise software, like I do, names of large German software vendor or the one here locally from Redwood City or up in the North of bay area may start popping in your head. But I would say think a little bit more. Consider this, the application being talked about is used by millions of users, across operating systems, hardware platforms with so much ease that even the metaphorical grandmas can use it. The application is blogging engines like Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger. All these engines have evolved in a service oriented framework without consciously keeping the SOA approach in mind. A typical engine offers the following services

• 0 Comments

But one of the ideas behind the 401(k) was, “you can do it!” You own it; you run it. And you’ve got millions of people out there saying, “I can beat the averages.” What do you say to that?

I say, don’t kid yourself, pal. Look, it’s so simple. We’re not like the kids out in Lake Wobegon. As investors, we are all average, and as investors, we all share the stock market’s return. It’s going to turn out to be 8 percent return, we’re all going to share 8 percent return, but only before costs are deducted. We all share the market’s return less the cost of the financial system. All those management fees and brokerage commissions and sales loads and God knows what else is thrown in there — the advertising that you see.

• 0 Comments