How Many Software Companies Monitor Their Software as Well as Tesla Monitors its Cars?
The unfolding story of how the New York Times’ negative review of the Tesla Model S may have actually been faked is a cautionary tale for software vendors. Basically, there is enough instrumentation and feedback built into the Tesla S that Elon Musk was able to “shred” the review, as Dan Frommer writes. The graphical [...]
Gaining the Wisdom of Crowds in a Bootstrapped SaaS Company
When you’re bootstrapping a small company, sometimes it’s hard to do the things larger organizations take for granted, like making sure you’re listening well enough to your customers. On the other hand, you can take advantage of your nimble nature and the availability of some great technology to do some things that even a lot [...]
Building Apps is Wrong!
Software developers, too many of them in fact, are still building apps. That could be a mistake. For decades, software developers have identified business functions and transactions that they could create applications around. The job of an application usually was to permit the recording of a business or accounting event, perform some computational magic upon [...]
The 7 Kinds of Software Developer Wushu
James Governor got me thinking along these lines by asking how to segment developers. He asked whether the web “killed” the professional developer, or at the very least radically reshaped the segments. I don’t know about all that, in fact I’m pretty skeptical. But what I do know is that the way James talked about developers [...]
Those Special Customers Developers Love (Well They Should Love Them!)
Do you have any special customers that your developers hate? These are the customers that can mysteriously break your products over and over again, even though perhaps thousands of others report no problems. How does this work? First, understand the psychology of bugs. Developers don’t consciously create bugs, they come about as errors of omission, [...]
Scoble Discovers Developers are Schizo About New Platforms
I just listened to Scoble’s bar interview of @longview (Nick Long) and @renatto (Paul Robinett), two Dreamworks developers who are building a mobile app of their own. They’re talking about the Mobile World, and there are some great sound bites coming from the interview. BTW, the Cinchcast tool he used to do the interview was pretty [...]
What Will GPU-On-The-CPU Mean for Analytics?
This week’s InfoBoom-sponsored post is all about Intel’s announcement that it would be shipping chips that include an integrated graphics processor (GPU) on the same chip as the CPU under their so-called Sandybridge architecture. A lot of folks probably ignored the announcement thinking it meant better video games for their kids and perhaps their laptops, but [...]
Database.com, nice name, shame about the platform (Huh?)
Matt McAdams writes an interesting guest post for Phil Wainewright’s ZDNet blog, Software as Services. I knew when I read the snarky title, “Database.com, nice name, shame about the platform,” I had to check it out. The key issue McAdams seems to have with Database.com (aside from the fact his own company’s vision of PaaS is [...]
Forget SaaS vs On-Prem, Here are 8 Application Styles to Consider
The EI discussion about Microsoft’s poor handling of Silverlight brought out the different viewpoints swinging. The “RIA was never a good idea” camp was in full force as was the “this confirms everything about HTML5″ and the “Flash is on the same train as Silverlight” camps. I don’t see these developments nor the evolution of [...]
Roadmaps… How Much is Too Much?
One of my favorite services, Feedly, published on their blog the roadmap for their next major release. Obviously this is not a new practice and through various mechanism companies make available for comment their product development process. In recent years the evolution of “ideation” applications has provided companies of all types a powerful capability for [...]
