IBM is offering online Jam software to other companies. This is one of the technologies in the Social Computing offering that was recently announced.

I was a facilitator and a content expert for the recent IBM Innovation Jam (ok, they overestimated my capabilities) so I got to see the process from an elevated perspective. The concept is to have your constituency put out ideas and let the masses refine them to something you can either consider or put into action. IBM had employees, family of employees and partners participate. Overall, it produced some very interesting ideas which are being acted upon. Hopefully, you’ll see them as products or services in the future.

The key to this being successful is getting the right people involved. This is an opportunity for creativity to come out from places that are usually stifled, or the overwhelmingness of work changes priorities. It also matters to focus the topic. For IBM it was about Innovation, and there were people that had innovative ideas.

Some say that laziness or necessity is the mother of invention. In our Jam, it was also inconvenience. One of the hottest topics was how to streamline the travel process with everything from larger seats to RFID tagging. You could hear peoples horror stories and pet peeves about travel emerge in the posts.

Other companies should pick up on this and give it a try. There is a vast amount of talent and ideas that don’t make it to the surface because they don’t have the conduit. This is just that vehicle.

One of the most famous pictures from WWII. We remember on this day.

Hat tip to BlackFive

Fourth quarter results are in and they are dismal at Salesforce.com. Breakeven profit at 0.00 per share plus revenue down expenses up 91%. Many companies have these times. I remember a time before Lou Gerstner that IBM reported a loss of 9 billion. The automakers are all drenched in red at the moment. Companies can recover from this.

I regularly speak to a variety of analysts on SaaS and most recognize that Salesforce is going to be hitting a technology roadblock and will have to make some tough decisions on the future. Again, something companies face and some overcome.  To do this, there will be a heavy investment to achieve this.  With expenses already almost to 100%, they have to look at the resources to accomplish this.  Further, how to migrate the customer base to the next level is a MAJOR issue.  This discussion is almost always a part of another discussion that speculates who will buy them. The usual suitors are IBM (yes an application), Oracle (to thwart SAP), SAP (to thwart Oracle), Microsoft and others.

I realize that this is trend talk and gossiping, but the trend for growth in the software industry is to buy marketshare, technology, customer base or all of the above. It is clear that SaaS is a technology that is widely accepted as where much of the software acquisition is going, and that it is disruptive to the packaged application model. I for one am not only pleased about this, having suffered through packaged apps since the dinosaur days of computing, but view it as necessary for the industry.

I will not be surprise to find they are snapped up in 2007, which is the timeframe I’ve heard from multiple analyst groups who speak to them regularly. Stay tuned, same bat time, same bat channel.

Update: My information as noted by the comments on revenue should be up 58%, and expenses up 91%. Thanks to the readers. I still think they are on the auction block.

A few weeks ago, I smashed my ring finger in the folding connector to my bush hog while I was detaching it from my tractor. It hurt so bad, I had to move it to see if it was broken. Needless to say, it was swollen and turned blue. My knuckle is still twice the size and I can’t get my wedding ring over it.

I’ve been waiting for the swelling to subside, which it hasn’t, so I resigned myself to the fact that the damage is done and my ring isn’t going there anymore. So, I put it on my right ring finger, and it fit fine. I’ll note that this is an acceptable solution ring wise as it is the custom for a Danish couple to put the ring on the right hand at the time of the wedding to siginify that they are married. My wife is Danish by birth (although she is now an American) and she is also fine with this solution.

Upon going to work (IBM, not yard work), I found that either the sight or feel of it on the other hand has messed up my typing. The feel of it on the other hand has got me typing the wrong keys and making mistakes I don’t usually make which is disturbing. I’m sure that I’ll eventually get used to it, but it’s rare that at my age, I am disoriented by anything. I am a good typist usually, and learned in a class in high school to type numbers and letters without looking.
I’ve purposely left any typo’s in this blog to represent the difficulty I’m having with this.

Note to my Karate readers, I am still able to fight just as well, regardless of the injury and will be sparring a student testing for 3rd degree black belt shortly. I’ve learned to play through the pain.

Once again, this is a developerWorks issue.

Today at 2:00 EST, Greg Kelleher will host a live linux chat. Here is the promo, and the Link to click into the chat.

Live from the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, Greg Kelleher, senior program manager for IBM’s Linux client strategy and market development, will be here to chat about what is happening with Linux on the desktop. In particular, recent advances in Gnome/KDE application interoperability through the Portland project, the activity behind the scenes by the technical leaders in the community, better desktop graphics via technologies such as Xgl and Compiz, and strong Linux support with products such as Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime are all coming together right now, so there’s no better time to consider making the move.

After reading the reviews by Paul Kedrosky of the Wall Street Journal and Stephen Manes of Forbes.com both described what the introduction (and reaction) of Vista was. Use your own words, and I’ll put up some of theirs in a minute, but the key to this is the door to packaged application is closing. Conversely, the door to Software as a Service is opening. Vista is but a nail in the packaged app delivery model, mostly because the shortcomings of Microsoft exposed this.

First, Kedrosky states:

Ever since releasing the first major upgrade to its popular Windows operating system in more than five years, Microsoft’s stock has been on a record tear — downward. One more down day and we would have been tied at nine for the longest tumble in the company’s 20-year trading history.
So, what gives? In short, investors are increasingly skittish about Microsoft’s Vista. Late, horsepower-hungry, missing some promised features and getting indifferent reviews, the product is nowhere near the buzzmaker of its predecessors, Windows 95 and Windows XP. Analysts and investors are worried that the product is too little and too late, so much so that Vista won’t fuel the usual earnings-goosing upgrade cycle that such releases have in the past.

Here is the SaaS nail in the coffin:

In truth, Vista problems are just symptoms of a deeper Microsoft malaise. Monolithic software — bits in a shrink-wrapped box — is a dying business. It is being slayed by software sold as a service, by open source, and by ad-centric online software (i.e., Google).

What I like best was the IBM comparison, and note the sarcasm:

Meanwhile, Microsoft is trapped between Vista and a Google-created hard place. It is much like what happened to IBM years ago when Microsoft laid it low, with the company looking slow and the industry no longer afraid. Competitors now see Windows as a heavy weight around Microsoft’s neck, one that keeps the company safely occupied on a treadmill far from their own businesses. That is why the best news for them in the last few days came when Microsoft began talking up a new version of Windows set for 2009. Yeah, go for it guys, knock yourselves out.

Next, Manes is far more terse (emphasis mine) (I like that he agrees with me on how Vista blatantly copies Apple):

Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code. The result? A vista slightly more inspiring than the one over the town dump. The new slogan is: “The ‘Wow’ Starts Now,” and Microsoft touts new features, many filched shamelessly from Apple’s Macintosh. But as with every previous version, there’s no wow here, not even in ironic quotes. Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody’s liver out. 

And this is hardly an endorsement (emphasis mine):

My recommendation: Don’t even consider updating an old machine to Vista, period. And unless you absolutely must, don’t buy a new one with Vista until the inevitable Service Pack 1 (a.k.a. Festival o’ Fixes) arrives to combat horrors as yet unknown.
I suggested to one Windows product manager that if the company were truly serious about security, Vista might offer a simple way to delete files securely and eliminate all traces of identity and passwords so you could safely pass the machine on or sell it years from now. His reply: “Does any other operating system do that?” That tells you all you need to know about Microsoft. The real slogan: “No innovation here.”

So it is not really about how bad Vista is, although it really seems to be, it is the obvious pointing to how late and burdensome the packaged app model is compared with the SaaS model of buying and installing software.  In my dealings with the SaaS executives, partners and other companies, the key to this is that it is a disruptive technology.  Hopefully, that will translate into benefits to the consumer and get us out of the anchor that packaged applications are to us.

I’ve often opined that Microsoft will face many turning points in their history similar to what IBM has faced.  Reinventing yourself in the face of a technology shift or disruption, such as SaaS, or whither, or fade from relevance.

Ultimately, this exposes that SaaS, or some variation of that model is taking over…

I had originally changed my theme to one with widgets, which was nice but too buggy. I learned this and that some folks still actually use IE still, which is where the problem was. Seems it works on every other browser but IE.

So I’m back to the basic format for now until I have the time to find a theme that is functional.

So, boring but it works.Another reason why I am trying to get Microsoft out of my life. This time, a buggy browser….

Update: A vista design/security flaw is discovered, I’m shocked

where:

• An is the number of servings of alcohol
• S is the smokiness of the area on a scale of 0 - 10
• L is the lighting level of the area, measured in candelas per square meter, in which 150 is normal room lightning
• Vo is Snellen visual acuity, in which 6/6 is normal and 6/12 is the lower limit at which someone is able to drive
• d is the distance between the observer and the observed, measured in meters

Nuff said.

I was reading the developerWorks blogs for both something interesting to blog about and to promote going to dW to see what’s going on.

I clicked on what was the popular links of the day, the first being Inside Lotus, but that didn’t hit me as much as #2…
Todd Watson writes a blog in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

It made me reminiscent for the good old days of DOS. His words quickly get to the point:

First, it’s a keystroke-driven word processor. No mouse required. (And I’m quickly finding that those now 17 year-old keystroke commands are coming back to me very, very quickly, which in and of its own right is kind of freaking me out.)

Second, it’s just faster. I use a bunch of different tools for blogging and writing, and WP 5.1 for DOS still takes the cake.

Third, I miss DOS. I was just commenting to a colleague of mine this morning that very thing: “I miss DOS.”

The more software we get, the heavier its footprint, the less work I get done.

I think that’s why I’ve been so interested in these Web-based applications that sit up in “the cloud.” They’re mostly fast and easy to use. They remind me of DOS.l

GUIs are way overrated. I deal in words…give me something that I can write in and doesn’t require my hard drive to spin so much. I’ve spent half my life waiting on a spinning hourglass.

I miss DOS too, for all the astute reasons Todd points out, but it was also the last stable OS that Microsoft put out. It worked, it was fast and it was lightweight compared to what we have to deal with today. Sure in my old age, it is harder to remember keystrokes than to click an icon, but with repetition comes familiarity. I still use ctrl-c and ctrl-v rather than edit/cut, edit/paste (and other shortcuts) because they are faster.

I’m not a control freak, but I do hate it when I’m help captive, like I feel using Windows. It’s like having a Formula 1 car with a 1950 circa engine that breaks down. Slow and unreliable in a powerful machine that mostly waits.

After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch.
–Lorenz’s Law of Mechanical Repair

Identical parts aren’t. –Beach’s Law

Any tool, when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner.
–Anthony’s Law of the Workshop

Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.
–Tussman’s Law

If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
–Lowery’s Law

The solution to a problem changes the problem.
–Peer’s Law

There is no mechanical problem so difficult that it cannot be solved by brute strength and ignorance.
–William’s Law

Handy Guide to Modern Science:
1. If it’s green or it wiggles, it’s Biology.
2. If it stinks, it’s Chemistry.
3. If it doesn’t work, it’s Physics.

Machines should work. People should think.
–IBM’s Pollyanna Principle:

The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage - management.
–The Dilbert Principle

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
–Ehrlich’s Law

It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize that you are in a hurry.
–Ralph’s Observation

If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.
–Cannon’s Comment