Apple’s iPad Tue, 2010.02.09
Posted by tevirselrahc in apple, hardware.Tags: apple, ipad
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It’s been announced. The new revolutionary gizmo from Apple.
Yes, it looks good. Yes, Jobs did his usual spiel to present the new toy. And yes, when I saw the presentation I wanted one.
The good thing for me is that Apple is giving me some time to think. Had it been available at launch, it might have been a less rational, “want” reaction to buy. So I get to cool off a bit.
Now, my feeling is that it is trying to carve itself a niche market. Then again, Apple is typically good at carving niche and generating “want”. I am just not quite sure yet what that niche is… And I do not yet know whether I fit within that niche… There are certainly some very nice aspects to it: in-house portability (it may be easier to use on a couch to look up IMDB information about the movie I’m watching), functionality (all my iPhone apps and more), decorative (an expensive picture frame when not in use), readable (it’ll be easier to read my eBooks on this than on the iPhone), etc. But it will certainly not be a “real” computer replacement (I don’t see myself editing documents or pictures on it).
So does it fit my usage pattern? In some way, yes. But is it worth the price? That is still debatable. And Apple might lower the cost in the near future like it did for the iPhone. If I compare it to a dedicated eBook reader (e.g., Kindle), then this has much more capacity (and colour) for an incremental cost. One of the things I would have liked to see is some memory extensibility (e.g., an SDHC slot). Granted, Apple wants to seel the enhanced hardware, but even my MacBook Pro has an SDHC slot now – and this fits between the iPhone and the MacBook!
So will I buy it? If it were up to me, I would still think for a while. But SWMBO has already decided that this is the device for her, so we will be getting one when it becomes available…
Windows 7… Tue, 2010.02.09
Posted by tevirselrahc in apple, hardware, microsoft, software.add a comment
I had to install Windows 7 on one of the machines at home. Well, maybe I did not have to, but I still did. I guess I was hoping for something better than Vista. So I went ahead and got the upgrade and installed it.
After two weeks of running Windows 7, I got a black screen of death… Great start! Reboot, driver updates, restart – all seemed OK.
Last week, I finally got around to playing a bit more with it and looked that the performance index… I was a bit surprised to see go from 7.5 under Vista to 3.7 under Windows 7! And Windows 7 is supposed to have better performance than Visat?!? Not sure what happened, but I’m not overly happy. Now I’ll have to figure out why it now has such a bad rating with the same hardware.
Luckily, my main computer is a Mac…
The Battle for Blue Wed, 2009.12.09
Posted by tevirselrahc in flickr, image, organisation, trivia.Tags: colour, corporate
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I never really thought about why a company choses a colour over another one for their logo. However, this picture does seem to indicate that a lot of companies are thinking along the same lines.
Thanks to Phil Gyford for the image!
Everybody does support Tue, 2009.08.18
Posted by tevirselrahc in Uncategorized.2 comments
This is something that has been in my head since the Rational Software Conference in June…
With the advent of all the social networking opportunites out there, it has become evident to me that support for a company’s products is no longer just limited to the official support organisation. Granted, that organisation is still required as there is a need for customers to call in when they are faced with a problem – we can’t get away from that! However, we must also recognised that our customers are also part of one, and often, many, social networks.
In such a new world order, it belongs to us to become aware of what is being said about our company and our products and to take action when one feels it is required. That action can be to either speak out ourselves – if we have the knowledge – or use our companies networks to inform people who would need to know. And when problems are brought up and discussed in social network fora, we might want to get our support organisation involved!
Does that open the door in our organisation for “social networking monitors”? Perhaps that is not a bad thing!
MDA, MDD, MDE Mon, 2009.07.27
Posted by tevirselrahc in blog, dsl, software, software-development, tools.Tags: dsml, mbd, mda, mdd, mde, methods, process, software-development, sysml, tools, uml
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Jordi Cabot has an interesting Blog on Modeling Languages. In it (an on LinkedIn) there was a discussion recently on the difference or similitudes between MDA, MDD, and MDE. It’s interesting that Wikipedia treats the last two as the same thing – I like Jordi’s description better.
However, as I read Jordi’s blog posting, I found that his explanation certainly makes sense and is probably correct nowadays, in a more modern sense of the terms.
However, “MDD” has been used for quite a long time to describe model-based (as opposed to model-driven) development. That use of the term would not fit within the definitions presented by OMG as part of MDA (e.g., the CIM/PIM/PSM levels of abstractions and transformations). I suspect that this approach may also still be in use today – although probably not the best way of working with models. This may especially be true of some of the model uses seen in “agile” approaches.
So perhaps there is a need, in the diagram shown on that blog, to also have a model-based development (MBD?) circle that would intersect with MDD, but not the others?
All this also can not be discussed without mentioning the standards, processes, and methods (and the effect of tools on these) surrounding these approaches. Models need to have a standard representation to be useful – and the UML (and SysML) is certainly one that is common these days. However, other notations such as BPMN, ERD, etc., should not be discounted as they represent interesting domain specific modeling languages – and not all can be easily expressed using UML . Tools are too often viewed as a panacea to what ails software development – when they can be a hindrance when one does not understand the standards, processes, and methods they support.
IBM’s accomplishments… Thu, 2009.07.16
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm.Tags: history, ibm
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This list is both a bit scary and something of which to be proud…
What to do with “legacy” products? Wed, 2009.07.15
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, product-management.Tags: legacy, product-management, products
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I am now in charge of the product management for a bunch of “legacy” products. You know, those products that are old and, some cases, decrepit, but that our customers just love to keep around. They are comfortable like a well-work pair of jeans or broken-in shoes. But these products are based on old technology and we now have new platforms, enhanced capabilities, new UIs, etc. that should entice our clients to move…but some of them are stubborn.
So what do we do with these products that still bring in revenue (mostly maintenance, but some transactional)? They bring too much revenue for us to simply decide to throw that away (especially in this time of economic upheaval) as we fear those stalwart clients will move to the competition. And our new offerings, although more powerful, are scary in just those additional capabilities!
There are a few things that we have to look at for those products.
- First, to borrow from the medical profession, do no harm. This means that our current clients must feel they are not in a dead end – even though the product itself will not be updated. These users like the product as it is, so we need to work with them to determine why it is still the best tool for them. We need to see if this is a niche that we need (want) to address with an offering, perhaps a modified version of an existing, high capability offering.
- Second, we need to get these clients to move to something that we will want to support and augment in the future. We need to make this transition as painless as possible both from tool migration and from usage perspectives. Note that I states “as painless as possible” as it is often difficult to make this painless. Sometimes the artifacts do not migrate properly between the tools and require manual changes, sometimes the user experience is different. In either case, there will be some pain. From a tool perspective, the goal is to make sure that not information/data is lost in migrating the artifacts and to document the migration caveats. From a usage perspective, we need to document the changes in the way the tools look and in the way standard or common tasks are accomplished. This is where the user-centric design teams are very important. In all cases, we would want to consider services to help these clients including consulting, training, and pre/post-sales support.
- Third, we need to arrange the two previous points so that our development, maintenance, and support costs are minimised. These are legacy products and are typically not expected to be a drain on resources. We also want to be able to move the resources from these products to our strategic offerings (which should be the migration targets!). Although this is not directly related to our clients, we can’t expect them to stay on the old, comfortable applications forever and, at some point, all these resources will have to move.
So how does this translate into actual plans and activities? This is where knowledge of your products and clients comes into play – and this is what I have to figure out for my products! I don’t yet have an answer, especially not a generic one. But I may just come back to this blog to let everyone know…
Yes…I’m Tweeting… Tue, 2009.05.12
Posted by tevirselrahc in Twitter, conference, ibm, iphone, rational, rsdc.Tags: conference, ibm, iphone, mac, rsc2009, Twitter
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As part of RSC2009, we have been encouraged to use Twitter to promote the conference, as well as to report what is happening… So I broke down and got a Twitter account.
You can see the result of my efforts in the new tool I have added in the right column in this blog.
My tweeting tool of choice, at this point, is Tweetie, both on the Mac and on the iPhone.
Hopefully, network connectivity at the conference will be good (i.e., better than last year) so I can do live tweeting!
Rational Software Conference 2009 Tue, 2009.05.12
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, rational, rsdc.Tags: conference
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Once again, the Rational Software Conference is being held at DisneyWorld in Orlando. Except that this year, we have lost the “Developers” (or was it “Development”?)! No matter, same location, new content – and even more content this year with all the Telelogic stuff from their Innovation 2009 conference! Two conferences for the price of one. In case you are wondering, here is the agenda as a Wordle graph (Thanks to the incomparable KellyPuff in her professional personna for this!):
More information on the conference site!
If you go, look me up!
