Copacetic

Aehso drew my attention to this article in Harpers entitled “The Next Bubble : Priming the markets for tomorrows big crash”.  Ireland is a FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) economy too.

Couple this with the hilarious and informative tutorial on the subprime crisis on tax123.ie and you are ready for your economics degree.

Robert Cringely (in his new blog format) talks about IPV6 as the way the world is moving. Most particularly how China has moved to IPV6 as a way of escaping the addressing constraints imposed by the limited amount of addresses it was allocated using IPV4.

As a result this a federally mandated move afoot to move the US to IPV6 which has cost implications for backbones based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode).

There is a huge opportunity for Ireland to steal a march on our natural competitors in the IT space (India, Rumania etc.) by moving to an IPV6 platform. We are small enough that the costs would not be huge and we could reap several significant benefits,

• Clearly identify ourselves as a global technology leader
• Create invaluable IPV6 expertise in Ireland that can be exported overseas
• Create an environment for where companies with technology based around IPV6 can thrive
• Create an environment where startups can grow based around the IPV6 expertise garnered during the conversion process

Who do we call to get this started?
IPV6 tutorial gives the dirty details.

These are rules I’ve gathered in my head over the past ten years. I can’t claim ownership of them all and I’m sure they have been articulated in many other places. A conversation at lunchtime about how hard it is to do commercial software development prompted me to do a brain dump.

By commercial software development I mean making a piece of software in order to sell it to many customers (as opposed to a handful) or to provide a service used by many customers.

1. 100-1: This a good ratio of end-users to developers to aim for as a starting point. With less than this you don’t get feedback and the feedback you do get will tend to take you in strange directions. Remember if you build a stadium you have to fill it every weekend to make a return, software works off similar ratios.
2. Build it - Then Sell it: The corollary sell it, then build it, is a different business, called consultancy. A Consultancy business doesn’t scale the way a software business does because you build a different product for each customer and sales is related to the number of associates you can recruit to do the heavy lifting. Building it means finding a niche and timing it just right so that the market is ready for your product. Irish software companies can build the stuff but their timing is usually off (they often suffer from being too early).
3. 6 months - 12 months: It takes 6 months to build anything worthwhile and it takes another 6 months to raise the quality to the level where you can let it out of the house without a curfew. But what if I hire really great people, I hear you say? Well if you hire really great people, then their and your ambitions will be greater too, so you end up building something more complicated which takes 6 months…
4. Show and Tell: Get the development team to demonstrate progress every week, by running a demo of the current code base. If they miss a week, then make doubly sure you get a full demo the following. Do it from a full install of the kit, not a development environment.
5. Build the Installer first: Installers keep you honest, stop you fudging development problems with patches, isolate you from the development environment and force integration early.
6. Project Plans are good: Microsoft project gets a lot of stick (and I’ve given it some myself in the past) but I can’t think of a better tool for giving you a ball park view of how long a piece of work is going to take. See a future post for how I plan. Remember the map is not the terrain, the best value of a plan is to be able to assess when half the time is gone, whether half the work is done.
7. Using is Testing: Unit test suits are good, automated test suites are good, user acceptance test suites are good, but there is no substitute for sitting down and using the product. Better still, get somebody else outside the team to sit down a use the product. One hour watching a novice user with a new piece of software is worth 24 hours of automated test.
8. Don’t extend the date - cut the features: You have to ship it, otherwise you end up like Vista or worse DECnet Phase V, constantly revising your feature set to meet changing customer requirements. XP has lots to say about this and its prioritisation mechanisms allow you to make cuts easily.
9. Fire the asshole:You have a team, its working pretty well, you have this one super guy, but hes a bit of an asshole, rubs people the wrong way, gets abusive when asked for help, schedules, dates etc. Get rid of him. Software development is a team activity.
10. Its a marketing function: Commercial software development is about supplying a customer’s unmet needs and/or desires. Its not about J2EE, Spring, Web-Services, Python, C#, Design patterns etc. etc. That is software engineering which is a sub-discipline of commercial development.

David McWilliams deflates our wealth illusion, with a salutary comparison with the property bubble in Japan,

A good example was the fact that in 1988 the land on which the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo sits was valued at more than the entire real estate of the State of California or Canada - the world’s second largest country. By that benchmark, Japan was indeed the wealthiest country in the world. Needless to say, it was all nonsense - not because the Japanese were not wealthy, they were; but the property bubble (which burst in 1990 with dire consequences) had overstated that wealth enormously. The Japanese had income which had been built up over generations from making stuff, but they were not as wealthy as they thought they were.

David goes on to state that when the bubble burst at least the Japanese had a wealth creation industry (manfacturing) to fall back on, what will we do when the so called softlanding catapults us out of our seats and into the aeroplane bulkhead?

Is this greed or lunacy? $550 million clams! Is social networking the next dutch tulip craze?

Chilling Map of Road Deaths in Ireland in 2006.

Myhome.ie an excellent example of a defensible business that doesn’t need patents. Its got the estate agents on the hook and the punters are following. Very difficult to compete against and even more difficult to dislodge. However if I was to start a myhome.ie clone tomorrow here is what I’d add in order to compete.

1. Add free text search based on Street name, area, county. Use smart search capabilities to guess the appropriate search
2. Allow users to personalise search by geography so that searches are limited to on or more geographic locations (e.g. clontarf, Dublin) and a specific price zone (€800K to €1.2m) or house type (terraced) or other feature (south facing, back garden, off street parking)
3. Place search screen next to AJAX map of search area and blip properties on and off the map as search criteria are entered
4. Mousing over a house location on the map pops a DHTML window with a thumbnail of the property and the price. You can click from here to the brochure
5. Attach a PDF copy of the brochure to the web description
6. Provide an RSS feed for houses meeting my search criteria and support the use of multiple searches for this feed
7. Post selling prices of houses on the web when available
8. Allow searching of history of house sales (e.g. when was this house sold before and for what price)
9. Shrink the top banner and in general make the adverts more inobtrusive
10. Produce price graph and stats for areas and house types

Robert Cringely’s latest article Google On is more about IBM than Google. My IBM contacts tell me its burning up bandwidth all across IBM. Further to quote one insider (from an Irish perspective at least) ‘He nailed it”.

Here’s how he describes whats happening at IBM,

The heart of a company culture can be discovered if you look at the compensation system. IBM’s major incentives right now are for signing business and cutting costs. In many IT firms, IBM included, billable hours are important. This results in a system where little is done to improve service efficiency, because doing so would lead to fewer hours and less revenue. Efficiency kills, so at today’s IBM it is generally avoided.

David McWilliams predicts downbeat (but realistic) economic future as China focuses inward.