[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.]
