Nov 29 2010

Random Thoughts November 2010

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas are usually to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to merit their own post.

There are a slew of collaborative and social tools that still compete with email. A bunch of web 2.0 document management applications that still compete with the shared network drive. A lot of financial software biggest competitor is excel spreadsheets. And not to mention the Customer Relationship Systems that compete with phone numbers in scraps of paper and a pile of business cards. Think of an industry, and your biggest technology competitor most often the dead tree technology like paper, and filing cabinets, and entry level end products.

Programming languages don’t die with a marketing bang, but fade away with the whimpers of programmers that have to maintain applications written in them.

Shared network folder must die.  Hard an slow to search or specific document, people are always restructuring the folders and moving the files, there are always duplicate files, common for people to forget to track their changes, track changes in word is horrible when the file changes a lot and often.

In a world with smart phones and 3G data plans, why do people still use cell phone text messaging?  People have done the math and proven that one megabyte of text can cost over $1000 dollars in phone charges but only cost the phone carriers pennies to provide.  There needs to be a simple service that does group text messaging that doesn’t rely on a single protocol, such as SMS. Just how Apple’s FaceTime works on Wi-Fi and does not depend on the phone carriers, someone should develop a text messaging platform that can work without a texting plan. An ideal text messaging platform would need to work with a other protocols, such as email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, and SMS.

Microsoft should do anything possible to get mobile developers to start developing for the Windows Mobile 7 platform.  Microsoft should give out Visual Studio IDEs, books, free cloud hosting, and do a 1-day training tour to promote to mobile developers. But most importantly, Microsoft has to demonstrate how their platform can be monetized by independent developers.

The idea of a star performer is unfortunately often modeled after celebrity performers where a team is there to make the star shine brighter. In a development team a star performer makes the team better.

If Hollywood set out to design a better mouse trap they would rent you the mouse trap, charge for each mouse caught with it, and they own all rights to the mouse.

From time to time a semi truck or two carrying a shipping container full of Apple goods is delivered to a Apple distribution facility. Each shipping container is followed by a rent a cop security vehicle. Each shipping container holds anywhere from $1-3 million dollars worth of Apple products just off the assembly line in China. All of a sudden I feel like going on a mission.

It’s widely known that Michael Jackson purchase the rights to The Beatles music catalog. It’s also well known that Steve Jobs had for over ten years tried to get music of The Beatles into the iTunes music store. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s of very little surprise that a year after Micheal’s death Steve Jobs was finally able to buy the rights to carry the whole music catalog of The Beatles.

The Beatles on iTunes

The Beatles on iTunes