Links for January 4th through January 5th

A little something extra…

In one of the pieces below, Tim Bray does a nice write-up of the ongoing (pun!) question for the past few years: what’s up with enterprise software (seeming) to suck so much? Consumer technology has taken a strong lead over business software, in general, and it’s been perplexing to see how long business has taken to catch up.

Clearly, businesses need to start doing things different if this motherhood and apple-pie line is more than a straw-man. The obvious question is: how?

The more useful question is: what are examples where this much transformation has actually worked, and how can we start applying them? Even better, what are examples where it’s failed?

As an example, if I recall the US retail numbers from this past Black Friday, Wal-mart, Target, and all manner of “old school” companies were in the top 20, with only Amazon and two other “pure web” retailer in the top 20 for online retail traffic (though, begging the question for actual sales figures?). How’d that happen?

Along these lines, Israel Gat over at The Agile Executive has dragged the Agile chair into the conversation a few times of late as well: on ERP and Agile and then a follow-up.

The Links

• IBM and Lombardi revisited, now the dust is settling
  More, in-depth thinking on IBM buying Lombardi.
• A Few Thoughts on the Nexus One
  "Overall, the phone is good enough that it's conceivable in a way that it wasn't a few months ago that we'll see a replay of Apple's experience in the PC market twenty-five years ago, in which Apple's fit and finish was unquestionably superior, but a commodity platform that was "good enough" and available to the entire industry ended up taking the lead."
• Gartner acquires Burton Group, bolsters presence
  Robert Westervelt
• Systemantics
• ongoing · Doing It Wrong
  "What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups."
• 2010 Tech and IT Influencers: Trend Predictions in 140 Characters (3rd Report by TrendsSpotting) | Trendsspotting
  Nice round-up of all sorts of predictions, including from RedMonk.
• The 2009 Cloudies Awards
• Contact (Robert Brook)
  Dude I hate it when people do this: "Here’s what I really don’t like: a message saying 'please call me back.' If it’s important, tell me what you want to say. if it’s not important, why are you expecting me to contact you back? Just tell me. Tell me what you want! It’s not difficult!"
• The Rumors Are True: We Spend More And More Time Online
• Mint’s Aaron Patzer: Quicken’s future is online
• Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas, 50% Growth from November to December
• Seeking Profit in Open-Source Search Software
• Genuitec looks to battle IBM Jazz with ALM product rollout
• Eclipse Pulsar seeks mobile app dev unity
• Jive refines corporate social networking tools
• Redefining Software Platforms – How PaaS changes the game for ISVs
  PDF report on the PaaS lay of the land from Phil Wainewright.
• JsMag – the magazine for JavaScript developers
  Check out Charles' article on command line JavaScript with Rhino!
• Software Development in the 21st Century – Jan 21st, Austin
  "Martin [Fowler] will call upon his more than 20 years of software industry experience to talk about how the history of the software also serves as a roadmap for what to expect in the future."
• IBM software sticks to the plan for 2010
• Microsoft tests support forum where experts bid to help n00bs
  A marketplace for support questions.
• Podcast: Would You Bing For Free News? – Planet Money Blog : NPR
  I find this whole thing fascinating and thrilling because it's a straight-forward experiment about .com meets brick-n-morter business models. I so want them to do it to see if it actually "works." In this case, there are two "works": Bing gets more page views and revenue, News Corp. gets more revenue.
• Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE
  Bruce Sterling does a gothic high-tech piece.
• The Personal Enterprise
  "The Personal Enterprise (or the Facebookisation of it) is not about picking and choosing which services get opened up and which have controlled delivery, instead it is about opening up as much data as possible and creating an ecosystem that allows personalization to be developed." Also, love the part about simple being seen as bad: The Fear of the Simple.
• Corporate social products | Networking tools and services | Socialware
  "The Socialware products and platform were built specifically for the needs of enterprise users. Our goal was to take everything that is valuable about open social networks and layer in the capabilities required for safe, controlled and compliant enterprise adoption. When it is all said and done, we help enterprises unleash the power of the social networks on their terms."
• Lehrer's Rules

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.