Nikoport

I am not quite an “early adapter”, according to the scheme of Seth Godin - i belong to the “early majority” (guys who get not state of the art technology, but when it is already being used by some innovators).

Looking at the first versions of anything i see so many troubles because software/product was not being properly tested and was rushed out in order to comply with the promised release dates/dead lines. My idea of any product is that 1.01 or 1.02 are the best place to start. I won’t install Vista SP1 until i see that it is really compatible with existing software/drivers and there are no more data losses, as well as only now i am considering upgrading to Leopard, after 2 patches have been released.

I think it was at User Friendly that i have seen quite funny cartoon some 5 years ago, about star trek ship not being able to shoot because of the beta software installed. Pity can’t find it in archives. =O(

Using the first release makes you a beta tester, and if i need something to work properly without troubles - i have no luxury of using a beta product. When i have time( time, what is it ?), i may take a look at a beta version (i check out new versions of GIMP and Inkscape on regular basis, because i can easily fall back to the final release/stable one). Being excited about a product that can easy your daily life can take you into beta testing (1.0 included).

p.s. take a look at one of Seth Godin books, for example Purple Cow to understand what i am talking about.

p.p.s. Joomla has recently launched Joomla 1.5, after many month of testing and developing, and a couple of days later appeared 1.5.1, the same situation happened with Drupal 6.0 (6.1 was in 2 weeks here) which once again prove, that first version is always a beta version.

Microsoft is offering this staggering money for buying out Yahoo - 44.6 billion dollars in money and share. They hope for a bigger share of advertising market, and i hope that this deal will fail, we need more enterprises in the internet area and not 1 or 2 which control the market completely. Right now, there are 3 major players out there in the internet: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - and i see absolutely no reason for .

Last year there were rumors, that Google were considering into buying Yahoo - that is not a good thing either. I would welcome any company into competition with those 3 but not one of them buying out another one.

I know, that Microsoft’s offer is also about 62% premium on share price, but i hope for reason and greed (this one should work better then the first one in the major corporations) to resist this offer. I feel that if Microsoft will get their hands on Yahoo there will be nothing good for all of us: besides less competition i believe that Yahoo and all what it stands for will disappear in a couple of years.

How do secure a market if you are a Microsoft, and your concurrence is starting to win the market ?

The answer is quite simple and trivial - release your project for free, to kill the concurrence. It was done in the 90s, when Microsoft started conquering the web, by releasing Internet Explorer free - and as a result Netscape was obliged to do the same. Besides the fact, that IE4 was better then NN4, the main reason the people made the switch was this one - it was FOR FREE. Now everybody sees Firefox conquering the market, gaining everywhere the percentages of the users, and as of now the most switchers are old Internet Explorer 6 users, who are ghm lets say have forgotten to pay for their Windows copy. They wish to gain access to the new functionalities - like tab browsing, RSS etc, but they are not prepared to pay the full price of a Windows to get it - so the only way is to get a Firefox, because a free upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 was closed by Microsoft.

Now Microsoft has realized once again - they cannot have the market without giving people something for free. In the ancient roman times the emperors were giving free entrances to the coliseum and free food in order to maintain people happy, now we have Microsoft giving its most important tool for free (few days ago the Windows validation check was required in order to download the IE7). No, i am not complaining because i have paid for Vista Business while some others are not - the reason the people pay for software is because they recognize the works of the others, and because they know how much it takes to create any small little insignificant piece of software, and what a monstrous effort it is to create something like an IE, even being crippled like it is.

Quite a smart move by Microsoft, which i welcome from the heart - we need to move on to the better quality browsers, IE6 have to die as soon as possible, and today in the morning my statistics for this site were telling me, that still 55% of the visitors are using it. All web developers will be jumping and throwing parties when IE7 will be the least available on the market - it is so far beyond the old crippled Internet Explorer 6.

Google and Microsoft together have joined the OpenAjax alliance, which is quite a funny fact, because Google actually is one of the co-finders of this alliance. It is a kind of weird when a co-founder delays its decision about joining a project that he created. This fact is a very important issue for the future of the Ajax, as having so many enterprises on board, who influences a lot the development of the hottest net application strategy of the last years will hopefully help them to develop a new strategy for Ajax development. A very important fact, which is quite forgotten by a lot of people, is that at the same time W3C is developing a new standard for Ajax, and this whole thing may turn OpenAjax vs W3C, and since i believe that W3C do not have a lot of credit lately, they better join forces with OpenAjax or they risk end their standard development which will be ignored by the vast majority of the browser developers. Important notice is that between those who participate in OpenAjax alliance there is a big important name missing - Apple Inc, i guess they are going to join at some point, cause all other major browser developers including Opera are there. Important to notice, that besides browser developers some big names for the server side applications and servers are there, such as BEA, Oracle, Sun and Sofware AG. The big question is who’s going to be the first to publish the specification, and who’s specification is going to be really adopted by the vendors.

Microsoft has announced, that it will open the source code of the FoxPro core modules to their CodePlex community development site. This announcement comes just a couple of days after telling the world, that the last FoxPro version, will be really the last FoxPro. FoxPro times have passed and a lot of products, even Microsoft itself with Access and SQL Server defines the borders and frontiers, where are not much space left for FoxPro, though for some of the cases FoxPro still may be one of the best choices available.

It seems, that the big corporation decide to make a commercial product into an “open source”, only in the case when this commercial product do not have a future anymore. A good example to compare would be Borland with its Interbase database (from closed to open source and back), and Sun with Star Office (closed->open source->both ways). It seems to be a pretty common practice, for a product survival, since Netscape has turned its dying Navigator into flourishing and powerful Firefox. I believe, that the decision of turning FoxPro open source is something, that should have appeared already some time ago, this way a lot of work and forces would be saved from disappearing.

CeBIT is still the greatest computer trade show in the world. I have been there for a couple of years, and i loved each and every minute of it, with a lot of people everywhere, a lot of confusion, but at the same time - a spirit of sharing the technological achievements and sharing the experience. It is a place, where you can learn the people from the informatics industry from all around the world, where you can see whats new in the world of technology will be available on the market tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

A lot of things were written about the future of the CeBIT, since in the past couple of years the number of the publishers and visitors has been decreased significantly. CeBIT has faced exactly the same problem as a lot of computer shows have faced in the past years - growing cost of the representation for the firms trying to appear there, and a growing price of the tickets, which makes quite expensive - and hence impossible for a lot of companies to send their teams to the show. One very big trade show which has faced exactly the same problem is E3 game show, a lot of big companies have announced last year, that this year they are going to ignore or make a very small presence at the E3 trade show, in favor of publishing their press releases on the net. After that announcements, the organization has decided of changing the format of the show from “open for everyone” to “invitation-only”. They are just optimizing the costs, for concentrating on the essential - the media, who will be invited for publishing the information for the rest of us, grunts. =)

I think that in the next couple of years, the CeBIT will face the same problem and will change their format, concentrating more on the specialists and not on everyone. The words like “Members of the media, retail, development and financial communities” will become the key for describing the attendees.

I believe that in the era of internet and computer technologies all of these shows have their fate decided; but i guess, i am going to miss the spirit of 90s and 200x’s at the CeBIT, which was a quite a fantastic feeling, of being able to talk directly to a lot of firms presenting their products and developers, who knew exactly what software was supposed to do, even if in a lot of cases some firms where sending just marketing personal.

update on 20th of march 2007:
In this PC World article, it was written, that CeBIT 2007 in the first 3 days has got more visitors then at the 2006 edition, but still i attribute this rise to the fact that a lot of stuff was written about CeBIT, and that even a negative marketing still can bring the positive results. Having above 200.000 visitors may be a result for short period of time, cause as long as firms like Apple do not plan to announce products, like iPhone, at CeBIT - there is not much space for growing. Not many firms would wait until CeBIT or any other trade show to present a new product, since the concurrence is always pushing to advance, it is a good option though to play with a technology that was announced before, like if Apple Inc would participate at CeBIT, a lot of people would be more then excited to take a look at the iPhone or a new iPod.
The words, that CeBIT is going to grow are spoken at the same time when it was announced that CeBIT 2008 will run only for seven days (instead of usual 8), and that it is just one of the step of the CeBIT reorganization. For me, it is clear signal, that CeBIT is not having a lot of successes, and that in the next couple of years they need to review the trade show format in order to survive the technological progress.

Today i have had a nice meeting with the people from eChiron, a portuguese software firm where i have worked before. It was just an hour of meeting and talking to old eChirons, as we were called by the direction of the firm, and i guess i have missed them a lot in the passed months, since leaving the eChiron. I guess that i am not the only one, with my experience there, who even after leaving the firm feels some kind of a connection to it. In a contrary to the many other software firms, being at eChiron feels like being in a private firm where people know and talk to each other, which is a good and important feeling for me. Of course i have left eChiron, not because i was not satisfied with them, but because i felt, that professionally i needed to switch the firm in order to achieve better results.

eChiron is a small private portuguese software and managed services firm, which derives itself from the university study group. The eChiron has enjoyed a lot of success since its creation and now it is one of the top 100 portuguese software and managed services firms. I was privileged to work at eChiron for 1.5 years, during which i have learned a lot of great people, and a lot of the have become my good friends, and i maintain the connection with a lot them even after exiting eChiron. I think one of the best things about eChiron, is the environment and the relations between between the co-workers, even if in the past couple of years there have been a lot of critic of eChiron’s relations.

I have worked for 1.5 years for eChiron during which i was responsible for creating and maintaining websites like BMW, IPPAR, CM-Seixal between others. I have also had a very good experience and learned a lot of Oracle database at eChiron, developing a lot of applications in Oracles PL-SQL language and some in Microsoft SQL Server. One of the things that eChiron has started to change in the past months was .NET implementations, which were not too much at the time when i was working there.

The things that i think that eChiron is missing are good web marketing (they had a good professional once, but then fired her stupidly), good designer (same situation, had one very good, but not extended her contract as a cost optimization scheme) and a professional web design.

As it was written by Derek, Molly, WebStandards.org and a lot of others - there is a new law suit, by U.S. National Federation of the Blind (NFB) against a major american company - The target. As always, the opinions over the web are very divided, but as for me, i am sticking to those, who believe, that it is a good thing. It’s time for those, who ignore the standards, to start learning them, even if it means by this way.

Having some friends with disabilities, i know what it takes for them, to have a normal access to those things, which the most of us, using without thinking if its a gift or not. Once, i have even dedicated myself to some kind of the research, connected with the disabilities - i have seen a lot of not working elevators on the train platforms with a lot of stairs, ramps with such degrees, that i had fallen from the willchair while trying to convince 2 friends, that those ramps are ok, “accessable” buses with no adaptable entrances, and a lot of stupid people around, ignoring the basic needs of those, whom they might become, if they would have just less luck.

So if the big enterprises are ignorant, i see no problem of the people with the special needs, taking advantage of them. Really, dont get me wrong, i find such law suits as a “McDonald Hot Coffee”, as completely ridiculous, but when it is about the basic rights of those, who close to us - i dont feel a lot of pitty. Especially, when somebody was warned and asked for whole 9 month. No i am not talking about a poor little store, but about the company, whos name is a reference and who’s earning should have easily allowed them using the accessability standards.

Counting, that the Amazon.com is “powering” the Target’s site, i have to say, i would love to see both of them recognized as the responsibles, because for me - they are. I hope to see this thing spreading a little bit across the web, to see the people demanding a better sites and in the end effect seeing more quality work over the net.

p.s. and as it seems, that they have fixed some things over the night, it is allready producing a good effect and prooving, that they are capable of doing a good job, so i hope this law suit will help them to finish the job fast … as fast as it possible =O)