The World According to Tarp...

It is amazing: to connect our Ipod to a brand new Imac we need to learn black magic (it is well documented on the net), to connect it to an XP laptop, it is a snap.

A well known open-source project just got kicked in the rear because of quality problems.

So, MS' QA/QC outspends everyone in the industry to follow XP with a stinker, it is easier to connect an Ipod to XP than to Imac, and the open-source project does not seem to fall too far behind these two.

And then some americans are wondering if USA lost the "financial" leadership of the world.

After two humongous bubbles in less than a decade apart, and over-leveraged consumers (whose spending accounts for 25% of global GDP) isn't that question superfluous?

Patent me up, patent me down...

Well, MS and the FSF are at it again. It is a pretty interesting debate.

Having participated in open-source project and used open-source software, I have certainly enjoyed the benefits of both worlds.

I was reading the argument of both legal experts. On the MS side is nothing new. These are our patents and we want to protect our IP.

On the FSF, is where the legal fireworks are because they have/want to prove that software is not patentable. Thus it should be free.

Their argument is that software is a mathematical algorithm (this is my interpretation, and I am not expert in U.S. IP law) and such is made out of numbers and nobody can own numbers.

This argument kind of equates software to natural resources: air, etc. The problem with this argument, I think, is that one can not find Linux, GCC, or Windows floating in the atmosphere or growing in a field. Somebody sat and came up with the algorithm. And it is for this person to decide what it wants to do with it.

Should oil be free too? Could "joe doe" drill where Anadarko has spent thousands of hours of expertise and hefty amounts of money to find oil for free? At least natural resources are easier to spot.

This seems like going the tragedy of the commons route. Not even China is on that road anymore.

Like the lawyers around here say: "es mejor un mal acuerdo que un buen juicio"...

Insuficient Pleople V6 part 2

A couple of days ago, Fortune published an article that was pretty telling: how big tech companies need to grow.

The article argued that these businesses needed to find ways to produce more products , cheaper than they are doing it now, to sell them in less developed countries. But the first question that came to mind was: aren't they (people in less developed countries) already producing those goods?

So, the article left two choices: find a cheaper place to produce those goods, but then how do they buy the goods? The target customer is the white collar worker/business that has certain purchasing power and disposable income (I do not see, say, people from the favelas in Rio worrying too much about getting the latest Cisco router, they have bigger concerns)

So to sell them goods, the article argues to take the jobs away from them.

This point of view assumes that those countries just live from high-tech. Obviously, this is not true, there are an assortment of other industries in a country like Mexico or Chile.

But what would happen in India, on of the emerging super-powers of the future? Where high-tech is one of the major economic forces?

Gates meets Gabo + Sólo Pruebas

I have been off the blog a few weeks but alert. The MS developments, Gates announcing retirement plus some defections to Google, reminds me of "Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada" not because anybody died but because of the fatefulness.

I remember that right around the time MS started its war with Netscape, somebody from the WSJ, or the financial world for sure, wrote an article which stated that MS had already lost the www train. This was almost 8 or 9 years ago.

The PR machine launched "The Road Ahead", some "changes" happened at MS that aligned the company with the new reality, Netscape was blown off the earth.

But these days, it is the same story: somebody writing about MS not getting the gist of the www, etc. It's a little bit like deja vu...

Last week, I was in Madrid for an industry event called "Sólo Pruebas". It was a good opportunity to see what people is doing around Spain, look for prospective partners, and check the competition, etc.

It was funny to see how Acme calls B its new version of tool A. It is just tool A bundled with something else. Instead of making things simpler and more effective, the prevailing theme still seems to be keep on selling bloatware.

There were a couple of announcements made by Emca that makes this company look like a acquisition target by Acme. But this is just my impressions.

It is interesting to see how the big established players use the QA metrics. There was this talk on the first day where one of the slides pointed out that yes testing and debugging takes up to 80% of any project.

What they failed to mention was this figures was a lot smaller 20 years ago. I guess if they had mentioned that they would have to admit that their product has helped to grow that ugly stat...