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While at RSC 2009 this year, I talk with IBM’s Grady Booch<\/a>, who you might recall from our discussion at RSDC 2009<\/a>.<\/p>\n We start out talking about the carpet design in the room, a sort of “early, gothic, bordello.” Next, we continue a conversation we’d been having before filming about, in Grady’s words, “the presence of software abundance in the face of economic scarcity,” which raises the question, as Grady puts it: “how does one attend to economic scarcity in the face of software abundance?” Put another way, software can be an easier to get resource than others in tough times to get an edge in business.<\/p>\n Launching off from this discussion, I wind my around asking Grady about the business\/IT alignment talk that I’ve been having with other IBMers at RSC 2009.<\/p>\n Next, having over-heard Grady talk with someone in the hallway about time management issues being a big deal for him now, I ask him for any coping tips he might have to share with other people who has these problems – like everyone in the modern work world. As part of managing his time better, Grady says he’s done around 50 presentations in SecondLife in the past year. Keying off this, I ask him to tell us what’s been going on in SecondLife in the past year or so.<\/p>\n Generalizing this a bit, I tell Grady that I’m usually a very plain text oriented guy so I often don’t “get” people’s desire to use visual communications like video. Nonetheless, I was interested to hear what he thinks things like SecondLife and video conferences add; his answers are pretty compelling.<\/p>\n