Comments on: Myspace, Agile, and Murdoch's Internet

By: Rod Street

Rod Street — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 02:49:34 +0000

We've basically got a net inside a net. The diehard techies have our internet where we slave away providing the foundation. Myspace makes it easy for the average person to get in touch with all the tools. Now if there were just a version for the older crowd.

By: jm

jm — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:43:13 +0000

MySpace: AOL 2.0

By: Cote'

Cote' — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:25:31 +0000

Roger, Ric, and Jonno: you’re right that the technological space for doing frequent releases is up for grabs. The current way we deploy/install/upgrade software drives the fear of frequent releases. On the other hand, there is a pessimistic thought in my head that goes “if we haven’t solved it yet, will we ever?”

Kevin: that’s a great cultural point. I’m excited to see how the next generation(s) of workers either change or don’t change what you’re talking about. The current crop of info-workers (myself included) had computers since birth, and that will surely accelerate over the next 10-15 years. I wonder if phones, cars, air-travel, and electricity are a good analog for that trend?

By: Jonno Downes

Jonno Downes — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 01:15:09 +0000

Ric,

I think you can turn that around, and say one of the reasons that enterprise software is monolithic and tightly coupled is that upgrades are so unpleasant.

Having a single platform lets you test, deploy, and bed down that system down once every few years, instead of managing continual integration of independantly evolving services.

By: Kevin Brennan

Kevin Brennan — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:09:56 +0000

Another quote from a MySpace article:

Skyler said she’s seen things break on myspace, but nobody seems to care much since they know it’ll probably be fixed tomorrow.

I can guarantee you that will not be true in an enterprise application.

Another thing to keep in mind; many users of enterprise apps are NOT computer literate. We're talking people who've done the same job for 20 years. Change is scary to them. Many of them only know how the application works by rote; they have no real intuitive idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

We're talking about people who need and want training to move from, say, Office XP to 2003. I won't say they can't possibly adapt to this kind of environment, but I don't think it's safe to assume that they will.

By: Ric

Ric — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 03:09:36 +0000

I was going to make a similar point, Roger – that one of the reasons enterprise software upgrades are so unpleasant is that they are monolithic and tightly-coupled. With a service-based system that is modular and loosely-coupled, you don’t have the same problems

By: Roger L. Cauvin

Roger L. Cauvin — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:39:51 +0000

“One of the concerns in Enterprise Agile is that customer’s don’t want lots of releases.”

Yes, but as you touch on later, that’s not the root of their issue. Why don’t they want lots of releases? They don’t want all of the issues associated with deploying them. Instead of worrying about frequent releases, figure out how to make enterprise releases painless. Offsite hosting is but one possible solution.