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January 05, 2008 | Greg Ness: New Google Presentations Feature

More information here.

January 02, 2008 | Greg Ness: 2008 A Breakout Year For SaaS

No matter whose IT predictions you look at for 2008, software as a service (SaaS) looms big. For those not familiar with this term, SaaS is software that customers do not pay to own. Rather, it is an on-demand system usually hosted through a third party and customers access the software’s applications via the Internet.

The SaaS model has seen tremendous growth in the last few years primarily because it is easier and costs less to implement than large enterprise systems that reside on a company’s own servers. Some fast-growing SaaS vendors include companies such as Salesforce.com, RightNow, and NetSuite, but there are many companies charging hard to catch-up in this sector including software giants Microsoft and Oracle.

There are a number of stories that have surfaced in the last few months indicating SaaS has reached a crucial tipping point, and 2008 may be the year that it begins its breakout to become the norm for most companies:

November 15, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: The Immeasurable ROI of Unit Tests

One of the biggest problems with advocating Unit Tests is the fact that the return on investment is transparent and immeasurable.  In his blog {codesqueeze}, Max Pool offers a simple but elegant way to increase awareness of how much time is wasted when you don’t Unit Test.

October 26, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: Poor Design Can Make Good Software Bad

The worst kind of bug is one that was developed into a software application by design.  To better illustrate what I am talking about, take this example from worsethanfailure.com:

As the recent father of twin babies, Philip B. was relieved to learn that his employer’s benefit provider, Sun Life Canada, made the insurance process really simple. Adding the little ones on the plan required no more than a phone call to provide birth dates, names, and that sort of thing. All seemed so easy, until the customer service rep realized what Philip was trying to do: “I’m sorry sir, but we need a different birth date for each of your kids.”

“Uhh, er,” Philip stuttered, rather puzzled, “they’re twins? They were both born on the seventh of May, so they actually do have the same birth date.”

“Oh yes, I understand,” she said, “but our system cannot handle two people with the same last name born in the same month of the same year on the same plan.”

August 22, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: Developmental Integrity

It is not often you have the chance to coin a phrase, especially by accident.  Yet occasionally a person is faced with a situation in which they are talking about an event or relationship that has no good descriptive name, and are forced to make up their own.  This was the case when I was trying to explain to my peers the relationship that existed between Software Reliability and Software Maintainability.  And thus Developmental Integrity was born…

July 25, 2007 | Paul Bourdeaux: Writing Maintainable Code

Lately, there has been some heated discussion in the software engineering community about what it means to write maintainable code.  The concept of architecting and designing software so that it is more easily maintained is rooted in the desire to keep support costs down for the customer.

Much of the recent discussion was spurred by a jdn blog about developing a software application that will be maintained by developers who are unfamiliar with current practices.

April 19, 2007 | Dean Froslie: IT Departments Wary of Web 2.0

For many organizations, the growing Web 2.0 movement sets up an inevitable showdown with the IT department. The biggest benefits of Web 2.0 – employee collaboration, audience participation and management transparency, to name a few – directly conflict with the highly-structured, control-driven IT world. This point was further illustrated in a recent McKinsey Global survey of executives (reported by Business Week).

April 14, 2007 | Greg Ness: Salesforce.com Moving Aggressively Into A Broader Marketing Platform

Salesforce.com, a fast-growing on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) company, is rapidly broadening its scope to become more of a complete sales, marketing and customer service system provider. In doing so, it is likely to attract increased competition from some bigger rivals. According to this Business Week article, Salesforce.com grew 76% in 2005, 60% in 2006, and is expected to see 45% growth this year. That means quadrupling in size in three years! And talk about guerrilla marketing: their stock symbol on the NYSE is CRM.

April 02, 2007 | Greg Ness: The New Golden Age of TV

Stories abound reporting the decline of traditional television, but if Steve Rubel is correct, TV might be entering a new golden age. Rubel claims there have been two great software development platforms:

1) The personal computer
2) The programmable web

Rubel predicts the next big development platform will be television, and he makes a good point. Until now, the broadcast networks, cable companies and satellite programming have provided almost all the scheduled content options on television. But with the advent of Apple TV and other new options, consumers may soon have an almost limitless range of options from which to choose, and software is the key to making that happen (see 57,000 Channels and Nothing On).

December 08, 2006 | Dean Froslie: Spammers Evolve – and Succeed

Bill Gates is often needled for his infamous “640K ought to be enough for anybody” quote in the early 1980s (which, incidentally, he later denied saying). Another Gates prediction from three years ago – that the spam problem will be solved by 2006 – seems similarly short-sighted.

October 10, 2006 | Phil Leitch: What Google Did On Their Own Dime

As Greg mentioned in his post today, the internet is buzzing with thoughts on GoogTube and what it means. What struck me as amazing is that by spending a billion and a half dollars, the stock rose four billion dollars. Heck, go buy some more risky and expensive stuff it seems to be working for the shareholders.

Along with spending a lot of money, Google has again been pretty active in the past week but most of it was overshadowed by the rumors of the impending purchase of YouTube. So in as few words as possible, I present “What Google Did On Their Own Dime”...