Missing the Inflection Point

A point worth pondering...

"Avalon is to Microsoft as microchannel was to IBM."

Time will only tell. I think there are significant problems with nearly every aspect of Longhorn. But that's from a technical perspective. The continuing flury caused by Joel Spolsky's insightful analysis of factions inside Microsoft originated and is supposed to be about the customer and about business.

Microsoft has been better about business than anyone else in the software industry. I have no qualifications to argue with that.

I can't help observing however that the responses from the MSDN camp I've read almost completely miss Spolsky's argument. (McLaws, Box, Wes)

Excercise for the reader: determine which camp *you* belong to. Can you overcome cognitive dissonance and identify three of Joel's significant points that are being missed in the three responses linked above?

Shell tries to come clean

Let's see where this goes...

The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".

In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says... "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."...

His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.

"You can't slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.

Misinterpreting the CMM

Andy Hunt misinterprets the intent of CMM. (But then most of us do.)

The CMM, and even better the CMMI Continuous Representation, is an approach toward incremental process improvement and measuring their progress. Most organizations would not benefit from considering more than a level 3 assessment, and even then only in specific process areas.

This approach to process improvement is incremental. The XP/agile approach is radical. They are neither one ideal, and in fact more complementary than proponents of either tend to realize.

I'd recommend "Making Process Improvement Work" by Potter and Sakry to anyone who wants to understand how to use CMMI, or process improvement generally, effectively.

Reinterpreting Databases

Charles Miller explains why we need better interpretations of the concept of "database".

First International REA Technology Workshop

REA (Resources-Events-Agents) originated as an accounting model. Early on it's application has been with computing. Significant applications of REA have been extended out to inter-enterprise supply chains.

And now there are some interesting results from the First International REA Technology Workshop.

Several participants from Microsoft Business Solutions.