I was promoted a couple of weeks ago. This was something totally unexpected but it turns out that I am now just a step away from becoming a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, which just a month ago seemed like an impossible goal to achieve. It won’t be easy but I will certainly do my best to try to reach that position.

The best part of the promotion is that I got a larger, closed office. When you spend as many hours as I do at work, you want to feel at home at work. I therefore decided to decorate the walls by hanging pictures of all the tech luminaries that have left their mark on the computer industry as well as the products they brought to market. In a way,this is my personal Computer Hall of Fame.

Well, it turns out that this is much easier said than done. If you look on the web you will not easily find many pictures or stories from our recent past. Try for example looking for images of Sir Clive Sinclair (the man who brought us the ZX 81 and the ZX Spectrum computers) and you will be disappointed by the results. Same story for Sir Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad, who brought us the CPC 464 back in the eighties. You may think that this only happens to brit aristocrats, but you would be wrong. I tried to find a picture of former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner and could only find a small picture on IBM’s corporate site. Even worse, I could only find two poor quality pictures of Adam Osborne, the man who brought us the first commercially available portable computer, and passed away just five years ago. There isn’t much information about him in Wikipedia either.

In general, most companies will carry current pictures of their top executives but except for a small number of honorable exceptions (IBM and H-P mainly) they don’t seem to care much about preserving their history. The situation is obviously much worse for dead companies like Netscape, Amstrad or Atari which do not have curators interested in preserving their legacy.

With the Internet focusing mainly on recent events, if we are not careful, in a couple of years we will have lost a large part of our recent history. There are a couple of nice sites that deserve praise, for example folklore.org which extensively documents the history of how the original Macintosh was built, but that is obviously not enough. It would be nice if there was a place for all of us to collaborate on preserving the exciting stories of the computing revolution. On wikia there are 28,586 Star Trek articles, but there is nothing comparable for the computer history. That is really sad.

Several argentinean newspapers (link in Spanish) have reported on a MacBook Air gifted by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner. This is apparently creating a large controversy as the product is perceived as a luxury item. As a result, the presidency will create a public official gift registry to avoid any suspicions of corruption. This is certainly a good initiative implemented in many countries rocked by similar scandals in the past. However, in general the controversy was created over much pricier gifts like the diamonds that African dictator Bokassa gave to French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing back in the 70’s.

What really surprises me is to see how Apple products have become a symbol of luxury recently. I am sure that everyone remembers for example the gold plated iPod that David Beckham received from his team mates. I have seen many CEOs of large enterprises be the single Mac users of their company. For example, I know that Ricardo Salinas Pliego, CEO of Grupo Salinas and one of the wealthiest men in Mexico uses a Mac. At Banorte, one of the large Mexican banks, and probably the fastest growing one, there are only two Mac users. However, those users have a lot of weight as they are the CEO and the Director of Marketing.

What does that mean for the future of the Mac in large companies? Well, it means that the IT staff has no option but to learn how to use those computers and support them. That opens a new market for Apple. It also means that it is becoming harder for IT departments to adopt solutions that exclude the Mac. This is not good news for Microsoft and it could help companies like IBM or Oracle that have developed collaboration solutions that are truly platform independent. Many open-source advocates have long criticized Apple for their proprietary approach to computing. It is time for them to recognize that Apple is helping their cause very strongly by forcing the adoption of open standards.

Yesterday evening I was invited to have dinner at a chinese restaurant, Wing Lei,located inside the Wynn Hotel and Casino. It was a great occasion to spend some time with our customers and talk about all things unrelated to business. I must say however that I was highly disappointed by the restaurant. While I do not have any complaints about the service, I must say that I expected more from a restaurant that was awarded a star by the Guide Michelin. We paid around US$200 per guest and left disappointed and hungry.

Since the Wynn is located in front of the Fashion Show Mall, I spent some time shopping there before dinner. I went into the Apple Store to buy new earbuds for my iPhone because the plastic had started to wear off near the jack connector due to intense use. I was surprised to see that they sent me immediately to the Genius Bar and that they gave me new earbuds without asking questions despite the fact that it was clear that my phone was jailbroken and unlocked. Great customer service! That is why Apple is winning the hearts of even the most diehard Windows users.

I met Jens Alfke during the 2006 WWDC. Apple had organized a party on their campus and during the event attendants had the opportunity to talk to Apple engineers. I had heard about the Pub-Sub API and wanted to learn more. The API allows developers to easily add RSS support to any application. RSS is used today to push web content and podcasts to users but it can be used to publish any kind of content. For example, an RSS feed could contain crosswords or sudokus. This would allow end-users to get a new set of games delivered every day automatically to their computer or mobile device, provided that their RSS reader understands the format these puzzles are distributed in. The Pub-Sub API makes developing such applications much easier as it allows programmers to avoid all the problems related to parsing RSS feeds.

I looked for the Cocoa team and asked one of the Apple engineers about Pub-Sub. It turned out that he had written the API. Jens was very enthusiastic about it and eager to share his knowledge, it was obvious that he was proud about the job he had done. I discussed with him a couple of ideas on how to use his API. I thought that it would be nice to expand the Address Book to support RSS feeds. After all, many of us have now friends who own web sites and keeping in touch with them through the Address Book makes more sense to me than doing it through Mail App. We had a nice conversation and I moved on.

I recently remembered this encounter because of a post that Jens published on his blog. In it Jens announced that he had decided to leave Apple and explained his reasons. I will not judge his reasons, but as a tech manager, what I see is a recognition problem, which is very common in the technical community. Engineers love to solve problems, but after they do, they usually want to be recognized. The problem is that others usually do not care. When I say others, I mean all those who do not realize the complexity of the work that has been done. This applies obviously to salespersons and managers but sadly also to family. I learned that very young, my parents did not understand the complexity behind writing 3D games in assembly language, they thought I was wasting my time. Today nothing much has changed, my wife and daughters don’t get it either, but that is ok. Do you imagine a world in which family love would be measured by the complexity of our work? I don’t think so. Recognition is something that you have to get from your peers in order to be really valuable. I imagine that the idea of being popular among a larger public can seem attractive but developers are not rock stars and never will because in order to be successful we much spend our time out of the public light.

Is it possible to get better recognition as an indie developer? I guess so. Wil Shipley is the closest thing to a rock-star among Mac developers. His multiple successes (first at Omigroup and now at Delicious Monster) are well documented, but this comes at a price, there is only so much you can do nowadays alone or with a very small team. And then, there is only one Wil.

In large companies like IBM, recognition usually comes in the form of an award and sometimes with cash. The technical community accepts the cash but they usually long for something else. At a recent meeting where we discussed the issue, some technical specialists suggested giving interviews as a reward. Others wanted to have their certification credentials printed on their business cards. It is obvious that we face the same problem, proper employee recognition. Some companies like Google allow their employees to spend up to 20% of their time to work on personal projects. This could be a way to allow them to get the recognition they are looking for, outside of the company (and help them understand how hard that actually is), but it is a very expensive proposition that most high-tech company shareholders are not likely to approve.

The truth is that we developers must learn to take pride in our work and live with the recognition of a group of persons we respect. That is the way it works in most professions anyways. I have no idea if there is such thing as an Accountant of the year, but even if there was I couldn’t care less, much in the same way accountants do not care about programmers. Should the picture of chemists be on soap boxes? I don’t think so. Engineers think they deserve recognition because they solve complex problems and have lots of ideas. It may be true, but if others do not see the value of our work we must learn to accept it. We should be grateful to have an interesting job we enjoy. That obviously doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t switch jobs when we no longer have fun, on the contrary, it just means that we shouldn’t do it in search of glory, because we will not find it. Music appeals to everyone, that is why there are rock-stars. Software development only appeals to a few.

As for Jens, I wish him the best in his new endeavor. I am looking forward to try the new applications he his working on, I am sure they will be terrific. I already know he is a great developer, he won that recognition two years ago at WWDC.

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I am currently in Dallas, attending a Rational Manager meeting. It is amazing to see how this brand has changed in just a couple of years. Recent acquisitions like Watchfire, Buildforge and Telelogic are quickly expanding the reach of Rational well beyond traditional corporate developers. That means that the organization needs to change in order to understand these new markets and customers. Believe me that IBM is making us work very hard to make sure that this accelerated growth is properly managed. Yesterday our planning session concluded after 10PM and today we worked non-stop from 8AM to 5PM. That is probably why the Rational Upper Management decided that we needed some fun to relax.

Introducing Whirlyball, a game so weird, it could only have been invented in the U.S. If you thought that playing polo on a Segway was strange, you must play this game that is pure extravaganza, combining lacrosse, hockey and basketball with bumper cars.

Surprisingly, we actually had some fun, despite losing all our games except for the final one, thanks to an extraordinary goal during extra-time by MVP player myself. I understand that I may be missing an incredible opportunity to become a pro whirlyball player, but there is simply no way I will play this silly game again.

Six years ago, Informix Software was acquired by IBM. I remember this perfectly because at the time I was an Informix employee and, unlike many of my colleagues, I was quite excited by the news. The truth is that I wanted to join a larger company that would allow me to learn new technologies besides relational databases. That is why, after the acquisition, I spent most of my time working on WebSphere software, but I never forgot my passion for the Informix database engine.

This may seem strange to many as there are many RDBMS out there that are more popular than IDS but I have my reasons. You see, other database engines like DB2 or Oracle might be faster when tuned by experts but Informix achieves excellent performance by just tweaking a couple of parameters. In my experience, an average DBA can get much better results from Informix than from competing products. Since exceptional DBAs are scarce, I feel that IDS is a great choice for most companies unless they need the advanced XML processing capabilities provided by DB2.

Until now IDS was available for most UNIX variants as well as Windows. A Mac OS 9 client SDK was available many years ago but was discontinued when Apple moved to OS X. That is why I was so excited to learn that IBM had ported Informix Dynamic Server to Mac OS X.

However, the exciting news for Macintosh enthusiasts is that this announcement is not just an anomaly. There have been rumblings that at this week’s Lotusphere event in Orlando, IBM was poised to announce several new products for the Mac, including the Lotus Notes 8 client, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime. This was made possible thanks to the efforts put by many IBMers to ensure that Eclipse runs smoothly on OS X.

Besides porting current IBM software to the Mac, IBM has also acquired some Macintosh software through acquisitions. For example, IBM recently acquired Solid, an in-memory database, that has offered for years a Mac OS X version of their flagship product.

While the Mac seems to have so far attracted the attention of the Lotus and DB2 brands within IBM Software Group, what about the remaining brands? Many software developers have long migrated to the Mac platform. It seems only logical that Rational should be interested in that audience. Since many Rational products are built on Eclipse, porting them to the Mac shouldn’t be that difficult. In fact, there already is a Mac version of Rational Application Developer. The problem is that it is for internal use only because it lacks the embedded WebSphere Application Software. This is a major issue. Despite being divided in five brands, IBM SWG products are very much integrated. Porting a single product is moot unless there is a clear strategy to port the whole portfolio.

A decade ago, IBM made a clear commitment to Linux and as a result made all SWG products available on that platform. That corporate commitment is still missing for Mac OS X, but the walls are crumbling, one at a time. For Lotus to make gains against Microsoft, IBM needs to support the Mac (and Linux) in a big way. Many Lotus products are built on WebSphere software and require Rational development tools to be customized. Convincing the WebSphere management team that they need to port some of their products to the Mac won’t be easy. After all, how many servers does Apple sell each quarter? Not enough to support a serious business case.

I do believe though, and this is pure speculation on my part, that it is just a matter of time before other critical IBM products such as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer get ported to Mac OS X. It is amazing to see how the success of the Mac on the client side is getting a middleware company such as IBM to progressively port its server software. In the case of Linux it was a well thought strategy to create some competition for Windows. It all made sense as Linux was (and still is) a strong contender on the server side. In the case of Mac OS X, it is an unorganized move, fueled by a single brand and the passion of many IBMers, including myself, who have adopted the Mac as their platform of choice.