I feel like number 2 today (babies do #1 and #2), but I already work at home so I can’t call in sick, I’m already here.

Remember when (for those “old” enough) when you stayed at home so you didn’t get the others sick and work got done even though you weren’t there? Now in the days of everywhere connections and telecommuniting (pause to sneeze twice there), I’m still at home, sick and still at work. I’m blogging from the bed instead of the office.

No more sick days, just a different way to work. Like we are that important that the doors to the company might close if we aren’t there.

As i wrote earlier, I am back doing analyst relations at developerWorks. So i went to the blog site to see what is going on. While I read various author’s blogs, I get them through an RSS feed, so I haven’t had the “site experience” for a while.

I was quite impressed at how it has developed from the beginnings we had a few years back. Let me reflect a bit. My first tour of duty was before their was a blog site. While many get credit for bringing it up, the main goal at the time was to reach new developers. We reached IBM developers well, but outside of that we weren’t as well known. It should be noted that developerWorks has consistently put out work of high quality, but making it known was a challenge. There is always the latest buzz in the industry, and just competing for airtime inside of IBM is a task that many times can be bigger than against our competitors. So we decided to put up the blog, without asking for permission, or letting anyone know. It is a shame as developerWorks is one of the software windows to IBM Research, one of my favorite IBM groups.

Many recall the “official blogging policy” introduction at IBM, but few know that this was after the developerWorks blog had been sailing along for sometime. It came up as it turns out, under the radar and for a while was the defacto IBM blog site. There was a period when bringing up new blog sites at IBM was halted (to get the official policy in place as it should have been), so the only public way to get promoted at IBM was to get on the dW blog site. This lead to a mishmash of contributors at times, and while it can be argued that the original goal of raising the awareness of non IBM developers to dW had to compete with getting on the blogsite, the site did achieve status and popularity. In the rush to be an IBM blogger, the only place to be one was at developerWorks.
My explorations took me back today as I reflected on the quality of the bloggers and their messages.

Buell Duncan, to whom developerWorks has reported to for 4 years speaks the most in the least words of many blogs I read.

The resident superstars, Grady Booch, Ed Brill and Bob Sutor have been anchors from the beginning.

There are noticeable IBMr’s who either have been on other blog sites, or deserve their own site, but are featured on dW like Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Sandy Carter on SOA. Irving will be missed, especially for his astute commentary on issues like immigration, his recent entry which reminds me of something my mother told me once about why we are here. Humans need challenges to overcome, mountains to climb and hurdles to jump, mere existence is not enough. We get our greatest satisfaction from the conquest of the biggest challenge, then we stretch our limitatons past what we thought we could accomplish. We then look back and see that what was once thought impossible, and realize it was easy compared to our next problem to solve.

Back to the point, the quality of blogs/authors, subjects and span of coverage is impressive. I will be blogging more about it now as one of my topics of interest. *Spoiler* - upcoming topics include Bright Eyes, QED WIKI and Code Exchange if you’ve lasted this long in my ramblings.

It will develop further and is a great resource for developers getting 3 million unique hits a month for many topics of interest and is growing daily. Subjects like Social Computing are fertile grounds. Fortunately, there are some analysts that challenge us to do better, this is our next mountain.

And it’s not like Windoze 95 in terms of general acceptance, that’s for sure. Not a yawner, but also not the Grateful Dead cultish acceptance.

I was talking with my daughter (disclaimer - I have 2 relatives that work at Lenovo) who has taken the Vista training courses. My first comment to her was when I retire (or before if at all possible) was I’m getting rid of Windows as soon as I can. My first choice would be Linux, but I’m not sure that the desktop is fully ready for prime time. I mean idiot proof by that statement. My second and if it had to be today would be a Macbook because of the audio/multimedia capability.

I’ve been an OS fan since DOS 1.0. I’ve messed around with CP/M, coded in JCL, OCL, DFU, RPG II, Cobol, basic and any number of other OS programming languages. I’ve finally decided that with my real job, I don’t have time to debug, screw around with or other to get a system to work. I want it to boot and go. As I’ve been around since before the IBM-PC was announced, I’m up there with the best in terms of numbers of Ctrl-Alt-Del’s to re-boot and in number of blue screen’s of death. ENUFF!!! Sure, I’ve had fun trying to get things to work and get satisfaction from figuring things out, but at some point it should just work.

Back to my daughter, she did report that the Vista interface looked like the Mac OS, so that is encouraging, except I’m willing to bet the Mac OS is more secure and less buggy.

ZDNet has already issued the Vista gotcha report and that is from experienced users. Imagine the regular user out there who isn’t this sophisticated.

I say go Linux distributors, Mac Book, Open Source, anything else out there that will work so I’m released from the Windows OS handcuffs.

I’m making some blogroll updates including a new blog from Judith Hurwitz, one of the authors of SOA for Dummies…

One of the complaints I had with my last template was the inability to sort the blogroll alphabetically, now also fixed with the latest update.

“I’m going fishing.”
Really means: “I’m going to stand by a stream with a stick in my hand all day, while the fish swim by in complete safety.”

“It’s a guy thing.”
Really means: “There is no rational thought pattern connected with it, and you have no chance at all of making it logical.”

“Can I help with dinner?”
Really means: “Why isn’t it already on the table?”

“Uh-huh.” “Sure, honey.” “Yes, dear.”
Really means: Absolutely nothing. It’s a conditioned response.

“It would take too long to explain.”
Really means: “I have no idea how it works.”

“We’re going to be late.”
Really means: “Now I have a legitimate excuse to drive like a maniac.”

“Take a break, honey, you’re working too hard.”
Really means: “I can’t hear the game over the vacuum cleaner.”

“That’s interesting, dear.”
Really means: “Are you still talking?”

“Hey, I’ve got my reasons for what I’m doing.”
Really means: “And I sure hope I think of some pretty soon.”

“I can’t find it.”
Really means: “It didn’t fall into my outstretched hands, so I’m completely clueless.”

“You know I could never love anyone else.”
Really means: “I am used to the way you yell at me and realize it could be worse.”

“You look terrific.”
Really means: “Please don’t try on one more outfit. I’m starving.”

“I’m not lost. I know exactly where we are.”

Really means: “No one will ever see us alive again.”

Today HP is charged with spying on Dell regarding their printer business.  A few months back, they had board problems and spying on telephone records.  Both cases involved pretexting to obtain records.  Whether they did or whether they didn’t will be decided in court no doubt.

HP would like to be known for it’s footprint in printing, PC’s and Servers, but it is getting more ink about it’s dishonorable tactics both internally and externally.  This is after a period of time that there was a flawed leader who didn’t focus on operations and was ousted, more PR problems and corporate image issues.

In the early 70’s, Richard Nixon got ousted because of his dishonest tactics of spying on the competition, this was when he trounced his opponent in an election, and didn’t really need to do the spying.  I argue that HP has good enough products that they really don’t need to be doing this.  They even had better sales than any other IT company including IBM for 2006.

Will they be ousted like Nixon, I doubt it, but their credibility and trust as a company is on the line.  One of the better writers that I’ve been associated with told me a good comparison for trust, “Trust is like virginity, you can only lose it once”.  HP now runs the risk of losing the trust of the industry and customers.  For sure there is tarnish to it.

It says in the Bible, you can tell a tree by it’s fruit.  HP’s management is not showing fresh fruit right now, rather some that is rotting on the trees.  I like HP and think their offering have been good through the years, but there is no need for these Nixonian tactics.

When you are recognized by one name like some celebrities, it is a mark of your reach. Such has been the case of Irving Wladawsky-Berger. All you have to say is Irving, or IWB and (at least in our industry) you know who we are referring to.

From the announcement:

During his 37 year career at IBM, Dr. Wladawsky-Berger was instrumental in transforming IBM’s large systems to parallel architectures and in re-establishing IBM in the high-performance computing business with the POWER Parallel supercomputing system. He went on to lead a series of initiatives, helping IBM exploit emerging technologies as general manager of the Internet Division, and in spearheading IBM’s e-business, Linux, Grid computing, and On Demand business initiatives.

“As Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT; a member of the Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago; former board member of the Argonne National Laboratory and FermiLab, and co-chair of President Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, Irving’s influence has extended far beyond IBM,” said John E. Kelly III, senior vice president, T&IP. “We are fortunate that he will maintain a continuing relationship with IBM in a number of capacities. On behalf of IBM, I wish him all the best in this new phase of his life.”

What a legacy. I was fortunate to interact with him on several occasions. He was excellent to work with and dealt with each problem with ease. While he likely doesn’t know me from the thousands of others that have worked with him only on occasion, he was very courteous and treated me with more respect than many who couldn’t carry his shoes.

My favorite story comes from the PR team who called him a walking sound byte. He could focus and raise the attention level of any subject he was a part of or leading.

It kills me when anything is close to my home. Although I moved recently from Apex,North Carolina I lived there for 10 years and know it well.

There have been recent events that put Apex on the map like the explosion, and now it’s the blogger meetup that Nathan Gilliat has called. I have followed Social Computing closely and have even blogged about corporate issues like blogger relations and was connected to Nathan via James Governer. So that’s going from Apex to London, back to Apex to connect with someone in the business.

From Nathan’s blog:
When: Thursday, January 25, 6:30 pm
Bring your ideas, your stories, your favorite sources—oh, and your money. Ideas are free, but the restaurant prefers that we pay for the food.Topics? Social media use in Triangle companies, Social Media Club (yes, we’re on the map), anything you want. Meet like-minded people—you need more?

Dare I mention that XIOΣ has Wi-Fi? No, forget I mentioned that.

We’re near Research Triangle park so it makes sense that we should have those that care about Social Media, but like Nathan, I’m so used to dealing with people in other states or countries, that I forget there are many like us right here.

We get judged by any number of standards, from technical platform to earnings per share. Yesterday IBM released it’s earnings for Q4 and full year 2006. A number of other companies who we are compared to also released earnings this week. Here are some clips, you make the comparison.

• The News: IBM’s fourth-quarter net income rose 11% as revenue climbed 7.5%, reflecting a rebound in Big Blue’s services business and continued strength in software.

• The software business was IBM’s strongest performer with revenue growing 14.4% to $5.6 billion. That was up 11% after adjustment for currency. The software group contributed 42% of pretax profits from operations of the business segments. One reason for software growth was IBM’s aggressive acquisition of independent software companies. Mr. Loughridge declined to say how much of the sales growth was organic. IBM spent $4.8 billion on 14 acquisitions last year, 11 of which were software companies.

SAP and Oracle, both partners and competitors announced also.

• Late Thursday, Germany-based SAP (SAP) said in a preliminary review of its quarterly results that software-license sales, a key indicator of future growth, rose 7% to 1.26 billion euros ($1.6 billion), missing consensus expectations by about 100 million euros.
• The slowdown was particularly marked in the U.S., where sales rose just 4% compared to 15% in the year-earlier period. Including the effect of currency fluctuations, sales in the Americas as a whole didn’t rise at all, missing the 20% growth that analysts had been looking for.

• SAP has now revised expectations for software-revenue growth for 2006 to around 11% from an earlier forecast of 15% to 17%. It also said it now expects annual operating margin to increase by 0.6% to 0.7%, compared to previous guidance of a 0.5% to 1% rise for the year.

• The company warned in October that revenue would come in at the low end of forecasts.
  “This was clearly another disappointment from SAP,” Merrill Lynch analysts told clients.
• Oracle Corp. (ORCL) last month that also missed analysts’ expectations. The U.S. firm saw new license sales rise 14% in the second quarter, less than the 15% to 20% range the company had forecast.