As I briefly mentioned in my previous post, I recently flew to Chicago to attend an internal IBM Rational kick-off event. As a technical manager at IBM I lead the Software Group IT specialist team in Mexico, which includes engineers who belong to the Rational brand. Therefore I need to know in what direction the organization is moving.

As a long time software developer, Rational has always been intriguing to me. I have worked on many complex projects, sometimes alone (when that was still possible back in the 80s and early nineties) and more recently leading small teams. I started programming at age 14, and sold my first commercial application for the Apple II four years later. Being a good programmer did not help me with my first engagement as a consultant, though. Even thought I had already published three commercial applications in the U.S. at the time, that did not prepare me at all for the job. I can say with no hesitation that the project turned quickly into an absolute disaster (it was riddled with typical project management issues, which I was unable to anticipate). I learned a lot from the experience though, and have been able to avoid making the same mistakes ever since.

Rational has a great value proposition. It offers to train IT organizations in how to effectively implement a development process that should allow, in theory, to avoid most of the common pitfalls these organizations encounter daily. That process, RUP (Rational Unified Process), is the result of collecting the experience of thousands of teams who have worked on both successful and unsuccessful projects. Although, as many developers, I am personally allergic to any kind of process that stands between myself and my IDE, I have to admit that many of the failed projects that I have witnessed could have been executed successfully by implementing a decent process. I have found in particular that most programmers fail to properly garner requirements and effectively test their applications. Rational is specially strong in both disciplines and I like that.

So, if implementing a process is so beneficial why do few organizations actually do it? There are many explanations. Junior developers simply do not understand that they need to do it. Experienced developers are sometimes arrogant and think that they can live without it, not understanding that the code lives on when the application is finished and they move to other projects. Someone else will have to maintain the application and expand it. They will need proper documentation, test sets and tools to keep track of the changes. However, in my mind there is an additional reason. In many cases, those who sell methodologies too often have not written any line of actual code in years.

This is a problem as it creates a strong credibility issue. How can a Java programmer trust the recommendations of someone who does not even know the language and wrote his last COBOL application ten years ago? That happened to me when I went to my first Rational conference. I thought, well they may be right, but why should I trust them, after all they are no longer programmers. Today, I have realized that they do not have to be programmers. Their recommendations apply to any software development project, no matter what the language or the architecture is. However, I still feel that there is a strong technology gap between those who focus on methodologies and those who actually do the programming. That is why I am working on making sure that my Rational IT Specialists become fluent in Java and interact more with the WebSphere team. Credibility is key, no matter how good the service Rational sells.

As I am flying over the Atlantic, on my way to Spain for some well deserved family vacations, slightly bored by the in-flight movie, Miami Vice, I can’t avoid redirecting my thoughts to the future of the Internet.

The original idea behind the Internet was to build a tool that would help share knowledge by making it easy for scientists to publish information that would be easy to access and navigate. That original idea never really disappeared, but once large corporations entered the Internet and started the e-business era, that originally focus was largely lost.

Now, after Time named “Person of the year” You, we have officially entered a third era, the era of user generated content. This has a number of advantages as it makes sure that nobody can control the public opinion. However, there are also a lot of drawbacks, the main one being that all kind of questionable material is made available to people who are not prepared to separate truth from fiction.

I was recently listening to a podcast in which a member of a non-profit organization, devoted to make the Internet available to poor regions of Africa hailed some of the initial results that he had seen. He said that one community had started to create a site documenting traditional medicine that the population could use, which was important since this region was being devastated by the AIDS virus and that since anti-virals where extremely expensive, this could prove to be a good alternative.

That assertion got me thinking. How do we know that those traditional remedies are effective against AIDS? I have no problem helping poor people get cheap medicine, as long as it works. Otherwise this is just a total waste of time. The problem is, how do poor people with elementary education understand that this information has not been validated by the scientific community and that they may be wasting precious time using ineffective medicine?

This problem, of course, is not limited to Africa. Every day, students all around the world use the Internet in order to do their homework. Their process, Google, Cut and Paste, also known as plagiarism, is becoming the standard way to quickly produce reports and research documents. Most of the time, those who perform the searches go with the first result they obtain, without trying to analyze the quality of the data or the source of the information.

The result is that urban legends, questionable information and plain damn lies are quickly spreading all over the Internet. There is a clear danger that in the future, there will be no more trusted sources of information. Today, most quality data is posted by those who have gone through a classical education. However, as younger generations who rely on the Internet in order to obtain their information grow older and traditional, respected information sources start disappearing because they can no longer compete against free content, we may see start to see a new phenomenon, more information than ever before, with a rapidly diminishing quality or accuracy.

Many may say that Wikipedia proves me wrong. On the contrary. What will happen when a popular belief becomes so strong that those who know the truth are on the minority. Sure, the article may be disputed, but who defines the truth? Truth is not obtained through a democratic process, it is the result of analysis, investigation and science. Today, the most prevalent opinion is likely to get ahead on Google’s result page. It could mean that in the future we may, as a society, believe in Creationism, the Earth being the center of the Universe or the Horoscope being able to predict our future. That is scary thought.

In the past, we lived in a world full of certitude. The truth was available from a limited number of trusted sources. That was dangerous. Today we are moving to a world where the truth (if it exists) can be challenged by anyone, even if that person is absolutely not qualified to make an informed judgement. That is even worse, specially if our kids are not properly trained to develop a critical thinking and the general quality of education continues degrading.

The new Internet is all about collaboration. Wikis, team rooms and other technologies look to foster team collaboration as an effective way to quickly reach better results. As community efforts like wikipedia yield amazing results, the private sector is looking into using similar tools in the enterprise to make significant productivity gains. The question of course is, does this model work within for profit organizations.

I do not believe that it is very controversial to say that in all teams there are high and low performers. In the past, this could easily be detected by the team leader. However, as we are moving to virtual (geographically dispersed) teams and virtual offices, understanding perfectly the level of contribution for each team member can be challenging, specially if the software used to publish and share those works does not include some kind of management system. It may seem silly but this is a real problem because while most employees are willing to share, they expect to be compensated or recognized for doing so, and I believe that this is a fair request. There have always been individuals taking credit for someone else’s work, and as technology evolves, this could become easier than ever. If we want to work effectively in this new world, we must make sure that everyone is fairly evaluated.

The problem therefore consists in accurately measuring individual contributions. This is not easy. How-much recognition do you get for a new presentation, compared to say modify or add a couple of slides to it? What is the value of a new reusable component? Those are obviously subjective values, but an automated system that tracks contributions can help.

If we think that web 2.0 is all about collaboration, we should use that fact in order to rank contributors. By allowing employees to rate documents or even specific versions of that document, we can see how a document has improved over time as a result of individual contributions. This information could allow us to quickly find out who the top contributors are and reward them accordingly. Today, most wiki tools lack those features which, from my point of view makes them unsuitable for the enterprise. There are fundamental differences in what motivates a person to work on an altruistic project such as wikipedia and what motivates a person to work for a company. This needs to be recognized by enterprise collaboration software vendors. It is nice that enterprise wikis offer features such as better security, spam prevention and change control. However, that is not enough. For collaboration to work, employees must be certain that they will benefit personally from sharing their work. Today, most systems I have used do not recognize that fact and therefore fail after a while, usually when the managers stop forcing employees to use it.

With the recent revelation that Apple will add support for ZFS it has become totally clear that Apple does not suffer from the “not invented here” syndrome that has affected many other hardware and software manufacturers. This is the second open-source project created by Sun that has been quickly adopted by Apple, the other one being DTrace which is at the core of Apple’s new XRay application that will help developers debug their applications more easily.

It is important to mention that while ZFS and DTrace are open-source, they are not licensed under the GPL. Instead, SUN decided to use it’s own CDDL which is not compatible with the GPL and therefore complicates efforts to add ZFS and DTrace to Linux. While some are willing to overlook the license issue and are trying to port these projects to Linux, it is unlikely that any of these project will make it into any standard Linux distribution, because Linus Torvalds and other important members of that community are not willing to add core kernel modules that are not GPLed. That means that Mac OS X will probably become the first OS after Solaris 10 to implement ZFS since there are no plans to add it to AIX, HP-UX or Windows.

While many will think that this is great news for Mac users, who will get a greatly improved file system, the way I see it, this situation underscores some of the problems with the way some companies deal with open-source projects. While I do understand why companies want to keep some level of control over the projects they initiated, they must also be aware of some of the negative consequences that the use of restrictive licensing can have over the adoption of their technologies. Sun must have known that by not releasing these technologies under the GPL or LGPL licenses, only Apple was likely to consider its use in their OS (as neither HP or IBM are likely to endorse a technology from a direct rival). So, why do it? Is this just another marketing stunt to try to get some publicity and win over developers without risking to lose valuable intellectual property to competitors? I am inclined to think so.

Apple also started dealing with open-source in a similar short sighted way when they decided to publish the source code for Darwin, the heart of Mac OS X, under the Apple Public Source License which is very restrictive.

However, even though Apple has not changed the license for Darwin, they have used the much more liberal Apache 2.0 licence for their projects hosted on Mac OS forge. This is a big step forward, as most developers feel very comfortable with that license. On that site there are a lot of great projects initiated by Apple such as Bonjour, Launchd and Webkit, to name a few. Therefore, while I still believe that Apple is getting more from the community than what it is giving back, I feel confident that they have learned their lesson and are really playing fair now with the open-source community by sharing some valuable projects in a way that allows everyone to use them, without significant restrictions. On the other hand, it is clear that Sun still needs to walk the talk.

I started blogging relatively recently, which means that while my audience has been increasing steadily, it is still relatively small. That is why I was quite surprised to see the response I got to my most recent posts.

Two days ago, I wrote about a web-site called yourminis.com. It is a great site and I highly recommend it but, in my commentary I mentioned some small problems as well as some wishes for future releases. I was very surprised to see that I almost immediately got a post from one of the developers addressing the issues and telling me that indeed a future version of their site would include some of the features I wanted to see implemented. I was shocked. Sure, my site is listed on technorati, but even so, they must have been doing some serious blog monitoring to find my post that quickly.

Yesterday, I wrote about the motives that may have pushed Adobe to publish a beta version of Photoshop CS3. Sure enough, I almost immediately got a response from someone claiming to be an Adobe employee. In this case, finding the post may have been easier since my post was mentioned on digg. It is therefore possible, and even likely, that this particular Adobe employee just stumbled upon the article while looking for technology news. Even so, the fact is that he took time to write a post and tried to diffuse some of my speculations by stating Adobe’s position.

The point is that companies, large and small are listening to what is being said in the blogosphere. They know that if they want to be successful they have to both leverage the positive comments as well as address the issues before they grow out of proportions. Bad comments can have terrible consequences. Take for example the recent Forrester study that alleged a sharp drop in sales at the iTunes store. Even though Apple denied the story, it was too late. By that time, newspapers everywhere had published the story, which bloggers had made popular over the Internet, and Apple’s stock was down 3%. Even though this mishap was short lived, the stock returned quickly to its previous value, it is clear that bloggers are gaining a growing influence. This fact cannot be ignored by corporations and small companies alike and some are starting to act. Companies like relevant noise or cymphony are capitalizing on these new needs to grow a business. I can’t blame them, it is obviously a market that should experience explosive growth over the close future.

There has been much discussion on the Net over the fact that Google has an unfair advantage over any potential competitor because of their leadership in the Internet search market.

The truth is that even though Google has been building up an amazing arsenal of online services, either developed in-house (gmail, google calendar and google maps come immediately to mind) or through acquisitions (writely and youtube, being some of the most notable so far), most users have not felt yet Google’s dominance outside the search market.

From my point, this is due to the fact that they have done a lousy job integrating all these services into a single, practical portal. Sure, you can now customize Google by clicking on the “Personalized Home” link on their home page (by the way, this link is not available for Safari users in the U.S. but seems to work fine on their British site) but this is certainly not the kind of experience I was expecting from this company. Of course, I did not expect ground breaking graphic design, as Google is known for their spartan (bandwidth saving) looks, but this portal looks just plain ugly and doesn’t offer any compelling features that will make me oversee that problem.

I recently discovered a site that offers exactly what I expect from a portal that could become my home page. That site is yourminis.com and it is simply gorgeous. Adding or removing widgets, minis or portlets (whatever you choose to call them) is very simple and is clearly based on the way Apple manages its dashboard widgets, which makes it very intuitive to Mac users. Currently there are plenty of widgets that you can place anywhere on the page and resize as you wish. Besides the well known time and weather widgets there are many games and useful services to choose from. Even if you have no use for widgets inside your browser, it is still an amazing display of what can be accomplished with Flash (not that most users would know that that is the underlying technology used by this great site).

The only problem, from my point of view, is that in order to succeed, your minis.com needs to offer a few additional minis and rethink some of their existing components. For example, the .mac mail mini shows the first twenty emails in your inbox. That is correct, the oldest twenty messages, not the most recent ones, which would have made much more sense. It would probably be even more exciting if developers could create and offer their own minis.

Until now, the web has seen a lot of competition because there simply isn’t a single site that offers almost everything to everyone. Google has been very successful developing strategic web services that are appealing to most of us. Still, today most internet users only use a couple of those services, mainly because of their poor level of integration. However, that could change quickly if Google learns from companies such as yourminis.com or even Yahoo (which despite its current woes offers a much better portal). Then, and only then, will most people realize the amazing influence that Google has over the Internet and the negative effect this can have over competition in the virtual world.

Although I am not a heavy blogger, I post entries to my blog three or four times a week, I have found it easy to keep it updated. After all, every day I get exposed to situations or news I would like to react to. That is the way most blogs work, we receive information and we like to be able to tell others what we think about it. That is easy, and that is why there are also daily radio and tv talk shows where people express their opinions on what happened a day before. These shows do not require a lot of preparation, participants just listen to or read the facts a couple of minutes in advance and then start talking about the subject. Of course, there are differences, some people know more about a particular subject than others and therefore are able to say more interesting things than others. Like many, I spend some time reading those blogs and sometimes watching TV programs like Crossfire on CNN.

As many of you know, I also publish a podcast, IT Insight. Maintaining that podcast has proved to be much harder. Why? Well, each podcast material is original. I have to select a subject, prepare a presentation and check my facts. That takes time. I have found that I am not able to produce more that one episode a month.

What does that mean for the future of blogs, newspapers and talk shows? There certainly is a market for content that is published in reaction to what other people say or do. However, that market is going to be over crowded since this is something really easy to do. Differentiation will be hard to achieve, but is possible based on subject knowledge and personality which will however inevitably lead to market fragmentation. On the other hand, news consolidation, which is what most newspapers and TV news shows offer today, is less and less valuable as all RSS users know. Finally, news gathering is still crucial as is original content production.

Today, most newspapers survive mainly because of the trust relationship they have established with their readership. However, since most have given up on generating original content, relying instead on syndication to become more profitable, they are finding themselves in the same uncomfortable situation as TV broadcasters who have no control over their content and are finding out that their customers do no longer need them to access it. If newspapers (both physical and online) want to survive they need to get back to the basics, gathering information from the source and producing original content, even if it is expensive. Otherwise, their feature looks bleak.

Software vendors like to talk about innovation. They usually mention their R&D budget as a proof of their commitment to creating new exciting technologies. However, the truth is that most large companies are turning to A&D (Acquisition and Development) strategies to quickly incorporate new ideas into their products. Buying startups that have developed new ideas and proved their value at a small scale in the market seems to be cheaper than maintaining large labs which produce inconsistent results.

However, even with shrinking research funds, large companies have been able to set the pace of technological innovation. In the enterprise for example, it is hard to believe that the Web Services revolution could have occurred without the large investments made by companies like IBM and Microsoft. The same goes for BPM (Business Process Management). Something similar happens on the desktop, where most innovations seem to come from Apple and to a lesser degree Adobe and other smaller companies.

So, where is the innovation within the open-source movement? The truth is that I do not really see it. The engineers that work on open-source projects seem to focus on doing things faster, better and cheaper (with mixed results). That is great but I would like to see more innovation. Take for example the just released Firefox 2. Take a look at the new features offered in this release. You will find new exciting features such as Inline spell checking, RSS support and much more. Not excited? You are not alone. Most of these features are already available elsewhere. If you want real innovation in browser technologies you better look at companies such as Flock, OmniGroup or Opera.

Do not get me wrong. I love open-source software. I am an avid Firefox user as well as an Apache Foundation fan when it comes to looking for solid Java or C APIs for my applications. However, I really believe that if the open-source movement really wants to take over commercial software companies it needs an improved value proposition. Faster, better and cheaper is good, but it is innovation that get people excited.

When you write a blog you quickly learn that on the Internet not everyone is nice. There are simply tons of rude people out there that will not hesitate to insult you just for expressing opinions that do not closely match theirs. They usually hide themselves behind the anonymity that the web provides.

The problem is so widespread that I have to eliminate almost half of the messages posted on my blog (that is after deleting all the spam that I get almost daily). I used to work at HSBC back in the web early days, creating their banking portal, and I recall that most of the customer feedback sent to the bank through the Internet could mostly be described as a collection of insults. It was clear that they did not expect that someone would actually read their e-mails not to mention receiving a call from a senior manager. It was only then that they realized what they had done and apologized for the tone of their complaints.

These examples clearly show that most people behave differently online than in the real world. Why is that? How is it possible that polite persons suddenly behave like children? Well, it may be that some of those actually are children, but more seriously, the answer is obviously anonymity. We bloggers tend to behave better online simply because we know that anything we write will never be forgotten by search engines such as Google and that some of our posts may come back to byte us sometime in the future. On the other hand, anonymous users are not compelled to behave correctly.

So, how do we reign in these barbarians? As in real life, the best way to control bad behavior is social disapproval. I sincerely believe that kicking someone out of a mailing list for not following netiquette rules has positive effects, even if that person can easily rejoin the group under a new fake identity. Other options are reputation systems like the one used by eBay but based on the quality of the posts written by each member instead of their trustworthiness.

However, despite its flaws, the Internet is currently the only medium that allows for true discussion of all major themes without censorship, taboos or the interference of political correctness. This is something invaluable that we cannot afford to lose by implementing secure identity validation systems. If the price to pay for true liberty is having to live with rude people I am more than happy to pay it. I still hope though that sometime in the future we will all learn to live in virtual worlds behaving with respect for others so that no one can ever be tempted to curtail our liberties on this wonderful media.

Leo Laporte has been pushing lately for renaming podcasts as netcasts. He argues that non technical people believe that they need an iPod to listen to podcasts and that this limits the potential audience of podcasts. I am not convinced. By looking at my logs, I know that I have IT Insight listeners who download the show using Juice as well as other alternatives to iTunes. Of course, most of my listeners use iTunes, but this only reflects the size of the market share that the iPod has captured.

However, this is not the whole story. Leo Laporte also argues that the dominance of iTunes is bad for podcasters. He seems to believe that a more fragmented market is better for podcasters. He goes as far as asking help from Microsoft to fight Apple dominance. This is ridiculous, it is like asking a wolf for help to keep the sheep under control.

As a podcaster who gets most of my traffic through iTunes, I understand why he may want to depend less on Apple. If your podcast is not featured regularly on the iTunes store or your podcast does not appear in the Top 100 list, you are out of luck and it is hard to get people to listen to your shows. However, Leo can hardly complain from lack of cooperation from Apple as they regularly feature TWiT and MacBreak among their top picks.

So, the question is, what does he expect from a fragmented market? Probably more power for podcasters. It is well known that he is currently in the process of building a network of podcasts and he probably would like people to go to his network page to select their content from a limited number of channels instead of a large directory containing thousands of podcasts where his products can easily get lost.

Will it help if Microsoft gets into the game? Most likely not. Instead of a de facto monopoly we will get either a duopoly or a fragmented market. The difference is that instead of the benevolent dictatorship we have today, we will get a known monopolist who will fight for its own financial benefit, competing not only for hardware supremacy but also for revenue from its own content (think MSN, MSNBC, etc). The same applies to companies such as Time-Warner.

From my point of view, I largely prefer a neutral directory that dominates the market where it is difficult to compete, but everyone faces the same difficulties, over a myriad of services where only professional podcasters, with a enough resources to publicize their shows on all existing directories, can reach all the potential listeners. I also sincerely believe that this scenario is also worse for consumers, at least for now, since the technology is still in its infancy.

I do not think that asking Microsoft for help is particularly wise. They are not known for defending the community interests. Besides, they also have enough interests in the content market for us to expect them to be impartial. Yes, I know, so does Steve Jobs, but since Apple and Disney are separate companies, any coordinated move is likely to go through high scrutiny by investors.

Leo Laporte claims to defend the interests of the podcaster community. He certainly does not represent me. I feel that he has already lost a lot of credibility by endorsing Dell computers on his TWiT show, when everyone knows that he is a Mac user. This is even worse. I feel that he is pursuing his own interests by trying to gain independence from Apple. I do not criticize him for that. I simply believe he should be more open about his true motives.