April 25, 2007

business is change

6 Comments

business128765.jpg
[Another old car­toon I’m adding to the Blue Mons­ter Series. Espe­cially after what Michael Neel said in the com­ments here:]

Mic­ro­soft will grow in the future buy con­ti­nuing sup­port of agile soft­ware methods and the tools to sup­port those methods. Team Sys­tem is awe­some, and the first real soft­ware aimed at making my life easier (I’m the guy who wri­tes soft­ware). .Net 3.0 offers great options like WPF that let me create apps *exactly* as the user inter­face desig­ner wan­ted.
A key idea in agile methods is there is one and only one mea­sure of soft­ware suc­cess: how the users like the pro­gram. The tech­no­lo­gies that will be hot in the next decade will be the ones the sup­port the agile mind­set.
The comic — I get it totally. I go into a mee­ting and say “I don’t give a crap about the OLAP details of your data warehouse, this ‘dash­board’ is ugly as hell.” It’s not the users that think I’m crazy — it’s the other IT peo­ple.
BTW Hugh, if you figure out how to mar­ket tech without trig­ge­ring the fire and brims­tone you get in the com­ments… there is a job for you in the Middle East ;)

Thanks, Michael, though I’m not too worried about the “fire and brims­tone”. It seems to go with the terri­tory… plus it’s good to be kept on one’s toes. But I do agree with your “agile mind­set” idea. Per­fect.
Secondly, all this vigo­rous Open-Source com­pe­ti­tion is good for Mic­ro­soft long-term. A good gene­ral never unde­res­ti­ma­tes the enemy [Though I doubt Mic­ro­soft sees Open Source as its “enemy” per se, if this recent blog post from Microsoft’s Sam Ramji is anything to go by]. One thing I lear­ned from wor­king with English Cut, there’s a lot to be said for res­pec­ting and yes, even prai­sing one’s com­pe­ti­tion. From a mar­ke­ting pers­pec­tive, it works won­ders.
[N.B. The car­toon ori­gi­nally appea­red in The Hugh­train, back in 2004.]

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6 Responses to “business is change”

  1. Walter Schwabe says:
    April 25, 2007 at 8:25 PM

    thanks for stop­ping by my blog…that was cool, it makes me want to go out and buy a finely tai­lo­red suit while sip­ping fine South Afri­can red wine…i don’t know why…

  2. Troy Worman says:
    April 26, 2007 at 4:52 AM

    I feel Michael’s pain.
    Unfor­tu­na­tely, there are a lot of peo­ple in IT who don’t give a shit about IT, much less the busi­ness they are sup­por­ting. For­tu­na­tely, we won’t have to put up with their shit much lon­ger as their jobs will be offsho­red. These are those, uns­pe­ci­fi­cally, who oppose Agile, SOA, BPMS, etc., because they are dif­fe­rent. They are somewhat, more con­cep­tio­nally than tech­ni­cally, beyond their current para­digm. They are change. And it sca­res the shit out of them. Because they are com­for­ta­ble.
    Of course, open-source is good for ever­yone. This inc­lu­des Mic­ro­soft for obvious reasons.

  3. Clive Birnie says:
    April 28, 2007 at 10:32 AM

    This car­toon sums up neatly my expe­rience over the last 4 years since we com­ple­ted our MBO. Change is now a way of life. The daily cha­llenge how to cons­tantly rein­vent. What a fan­tas­tic way to spend you days!
    Sorry — no com­ments on the rest of the post. The car­toon just hit one of those chords.

  4. Frank_tg says:
    June 13, 2007 at 10:59 AM

    Ciao!
    Check this out!
    *

  5. Brian_gy says:
    June 13, 2007 at 11:00 AM

    And some more..
    *

  6. Danny_is says:
    June 13, 2007 at 11:00 AM

    At last…
    *