Innovation in Software

Busy, busy week this last week. Insanely busy, especially as my company’s year end is coming up December 31st, and I want to close my 2006 books and file my accounts very early in 2007.

Thankfully, things are on track for me to be able to pretty much shut down from the 17th December through to the 15th January, during which time I won’t be dealing with client work but will instead be retiring to my laboratory and tinkering on the mad, wonderful new inventions I have planned for release in 2007. If I get my planning right, by the end of 2007 I should be able to drop my client work entirely and move over to supporting my own products, which is where I wanted to be this time last year.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy client work, it’s just not what the company is about – I have absolutely no desire to work as a freelancer for the next 40 years, and I enjoy owning my own projects to take where I want. Client work doesn’t give me the freedom, challenge or the level of profitability that my own projects hopefully will.

Anyway, until I have some products to talk about here, it’s business as usual. Here’s some Sunday afternoon/Monday morning links:

I’ll find the time to post a full review next week, but I got an early copy of Designing the Obvious a few weeks back, and am very impressed with it. For somebody like me who needs to work at understanding design from a usability perspective it was a welcome dose, just in time for some major projects in the New Year. Like I say, next week there will be a full review with a run-down of what it covers but in essence, it’s all about making sure that we remember the humans who will be using the applications we make, and building interfaces around them.

For those of you unlucky enough to be working with Windows machines, you may want to know that Vista won’t be too bad once you get rid of all the cruft Microsoft was too busy ignoring to remove for you.

Whilst they only seem to be shipping the Nokia N73 right now, Three have announced x-series pricing which is very, very reasonable. I shall be grabbing one of these before Christmas, just as soon as a Sony Ericsson phone becomes available on those tarrifs. The only downside is that although they describe it as ‘unlimited internet usage’ what they mean by that is 1Gb/month data transfer, 10,000 MSN messages a month, 80 hours/month of Slingbox/Orb and 5,000 Skype minutes/month. Even so, that’s still a lot better than existing tariffs and when O2 and Vodafone step in with better offers, the deals will get better.

I owe Andy at Liquid Bronze a thank you for the heads up on this, but it would seem that if you know where to look and you’re in the market for an Apple this Christmas but want to spread the payments out, you can get 0% APR over 6-months on Apple hardware between £500 and £10,000. Unfortunately it’s individual customers only, and I need to splurge my money through the business so I’ll be taking a hit in January on my new hardware, but I noticed that their refurb products list has some pretty good deals going – slightly out-of-date Macbook Pros at 40% off, for starters.

When I get a few spare hours of free time in the coming weeks, I intend to spend a lot more time playing online chess. For those new, the comments section to this post on Feld Thoughts offers some good options. Feld himself settled on a site called Red Hot Pawn the name of which indicates just how young and cheeky the chess crowd is getting these days.

More ‘normal’ articles due up next week, until then comrades…

Here we go again. A round-up of links for a Sunday spent in front of the PC, or if you’re a corporate slave, a way to pass Monday morning bunking off doing real work.

What is the Secret Behind Contagious Behaviour – This video from Stanford’s Always On summit has some fascinating discussion about contagious behaviour, implementing innovation and working out how to give up control of marketing and products to your customers. My favourite phrase from it probably has to be “fragile fires”. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla, Perry Klebhan – inventor of the modern snow shoe, and Gil Penchina of Wikia discuss how to get users doing the work for you. Moderated by Bob Sutton of Stanford and Diego Rodriguez of IDEO.

Collaboration doesn’t Work – if you’re afraid of the Kool Aid, this article from inc.com suggests teamwork and collaboration doesn’t work. I think the conclusions drawn here are all wrong (obviously) but for a simple reason: the author thinks that collaboration can be done by anybody, without training. It’s a skill that needs time to develop, much like the skill of being able to write software, write a PR release or do a cashflow forecast. Asking people to just walk in a room and start brain-storming without any prior training is asking them to behave in a business context using skills that to this point they had only learnt in social contexts, i.e. contexts where being polite is more important than being right.

Wikipedia Forks – It’s quite common within open source projects for groups within the project to reach disagreement and one set walks off with a copy of the project (which is legally OK for them to do), set up camp somewhere else and create a new project with the old code as a base. This is known as ‘forking’ and it happens a lot more than the media would have you believe. Now a group from Wikipedia believe it’s time to create a new project that has the good bits of Wikipedia but with the oversight of experts, and so off they march. Initially we as readers won’t see much difference, but the proof of the pudding will be in the long-term eating. I wish them well.

iPod users prefer CDs to iTunes – and who can blame them? The issue here of course is ‘DRM’ or ‘Digital Rights Management’. If you buy music through iTunes, Apple get to tell you which devices you can play that music on and how. If you buy a CD and rip it into iTunes you get a physical back-up, you can play the music where you want, and the ripped files can be copied to any device including ones not made by Apple. I genuinely think that within the next 3 years there will be a massive consumer revolt at DRM and the only way to deal with it will be to completely restructure the way music labels (and in the future, Hollywood studios) make their money.

8 Steps to better IT meetings – In fact, not just IT meetings, but any meeting. A nice round-up of how to keep meetings on track. Personally, I think meetings should be avoided completely – individual conversations work much better and if kept to the point can be a great deal quicker and more productive. Having everybody in the room really is as productive as having nobody in the room. However, if you insist on meetings, this is a great way to make them less brain-dead.

The 25 Worst web-sites in the World, ever – I remember most of these when they launched. Truly horrendous, and in my opinion the number one spot holder deserves it – utterly awful website (I won’t spoil the surprise for you though). That said, none of these were as bad as Microsoft Bob in the ‘I… don’t… believe… they… did this…’ stakes.

50 favourite design resources – for those of you who, like me, find design something that has to be worked on as a skill rather than something that comes naturally, here’s a crib sheet.