July 2003 Blog Posts
"One in ten jobs in US tech vendors and IT service providers will move offshore by the end of 2004." In a few years, I'll probably have to join a union in order to get a job.
If you're serious about tracking Microsoft, I'd recommend downloading the presentations from the financial analyst meeting. It provides a great run down of what the company thinks is important and how it's positioning itself. The analyst community is a very important audience. You also pick up lots of little tidbits such as they've spent 23 billion dollars buying back stock over the last four years. They still have over 5 billion in equities of which half is in cable and satellite companies. Next year, they want to get to an installed base of 16 million Xboxes with 1 million on Xbox Live....
Picked up a copy of Rise Of Nations and installed it. Plays well. Some parts of the UI don't seem that well polished but all that matters really is the game play. Only played two games so far. Haven't worked out the strategy but it's very close to the Ages series of games. Will try a couple of more games and then go head to head on the Internet. That's when you really learn how a strategy game is played. Tell me if you want a game!
Not mixed really. It's been another solid year for Microsoft. Interesting to read the end of the Fourth Quarter Earnings statement that breaks out revenue by product area. Nothing to get overly excited about. Server growth is going well and that's absolutely key at this point to continue embedding the Microsoft platform in the Enterprise. Nothing there though to light a fire under the stock price. There wasn't any annoucement about a dividend but that's not a great surprise. It doesn't mean it won't happen; just means they're not ready to annouce anything. More likely they would do that at the...
Ah! The social implications of phones equiped with cameras. Skirt shots, Toilet shots, digital shop lifting and more. Gee, who could have predicted that? <sarcasm>
Some interesting stats in this article. Sales increased by 37% with 90% of the market dominated by Wipro, HCL and Zenith. Sounds like there's a lot of growth left.
There are new free ebooks from Microsoft. I'm impressed. Got Bill Brysons "Short History of Everything" and this "Open Innovation" book looks interesting. Meanwhile, Jenny is downloading "The Joy Luck Club" which is a favourite book of hers. Looking forward to what the other freebies will be.
About time. Google is probably the most valuable cyberproperty out there. The most critical web portal there is. Competing with it should be a lynchpin of a Microsoft strategy. Typically, Microsoft will compete by building an easy-to-use rich client interface that uses it's own service but it's a simple truth that Google does a great job compared other search engines. Microsoft needs a better search engine.
Another code generation product - looks like mostly data access but it's a start.
Interesting list. I'm going to start running Lavasoft Ad-aware - reviews seem good and it's free.
Found my computer was infected with spyware. Had to nuke something called Internet Optimizer following these instructions. Looks like I'm going to need to find some good spyware detection software and run it occasionally. Let me know if you know a good one.
Very interesting animated presentation by Lawrence Lessig (Professor of Law at Stanford Law School) that builds on this refrain:
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting the past
Ours is less and less a free society
Unfortunately the audio stopped on me half-way but still worth it. Lots of historical examples. It's aimed at supporting Open Source and certainly provides food for thought.
It's an end of an era. It's also a clever move. Options aren't much of a benifit if the stock isn't growing and won't keep current employees or attract new employees. A stock award means a more predictable payout but still keeps interests aligned with corporate success. It will help with hiring. It also means better accounting and transparency of the financial statements which will please the bean counters given all the pressure to expense stock options. Less stock dilution is also good news. Unfortunately, this will also reduce the income numbers going forward and it will probably be a bit of...
Oh yes please! It's about time Microsoft started paying out a decent regular dividend. It doesn't need that much cash ($46 billion) and it's no longer a growth company.
Download Bullfighter for free - a text analysis program from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu that tells you how "readable" a document is. Essentially a bull sh*t detector.
Nice little offer. Check out the Microsoft reader website for more details. There's a Bill Bryson book up there that looks good.
Since this article has all of a sudden got some attention, I'd just like to invite anyone who reads it to send me comments, criticisms or flames (ianwij at brainnoodles.com). I still think it's a good approach for a great many applications. I've been slowly researching and thinking how I would really try it in practice but I'm not doing any programming at the moment - doing too many other things. I'm very interested in hearing about extensible code generators or formal methods that would provide a theoretical basis for them. And if you're a VC, get in touch!
I'm quite happy to report that my readership hasn't died off yet. Thanks everyone! I was expecting to end June with about 200 unique visitors for the month compared to 168 last month but then Andres Aguiar posted a small link to my Writing Code Is Stupid article and I hit 215 uniques visitors in just the last day! So I've had 409 unique visitors in June visiting 1948 times. Cool. Nice to know you're out there!
The trend of outsourcing the software industry to India continues. It's a topic I like to track quite close as I think it's a trend that will have a major impact on all software professionals in the West. I would go so far as to predict than in a decade, there will be few computer jobs here or at least the mix of skills will change significantly. The interesting question is how to develop one's own skills and make money out of this trend? I have a hunch that this trend will go even further to fueling Open Source software.