“History suggests the mobile Internet has potential to create / destroy more wealth than prior computing cycles based on 10x user multiplier effect (from cycle to cycle, the number of users / units increases tenfold). Regarding pace of change, more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.”

You don’t have to read between the lines to get that mobile is a *big* thing, and coming fast. Good read.

“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”

“[They] are using the tablet-style computer for tasks as varied as accessing work e-mail, approving shipping orders, and calling up on-the-spot auto-finance options.”

It takes time to change things, but now that Apple is bigger than Microsoft, one has to wonder how long corporate will continue to cling to the underdog.

“I never make technology-buying decisions based on future promises, rumors, or potential. I let other people be the bleeding-edge extremely early adopters, and I stick with what I know will work and stay out of my way. I don’t buy things that are “getting better”, because they usually don’t. Whatever caused them to be lacking in their current release will usually prevent them from being great in future releases.

I buy things that are great today. They’re usually things that have been great since day one. And, more often than not, they’re Apple products.”

So much could be said about the promises of the future vs the realities of today. You have to make your decisions based on todays reality, because tomorrow’s promise may never come.

Here are some of mine. Which do you disagree with? Why?

Workarounds are never a good thing. Short term workarounds are never short-term. They should be avoided. Do it right the first time, and if you can’t due to time or budget, delay the project. I hate technical debt.

Plan as you go is more appropriate to life and to projects, and returns better results, than planning everything up front (ie agile vs. waterfall). What we are talking about is predicting the future. Sure, you can be somewhat accurate, some of the time. But it’s just a guess. You’ll be more accurate if you don’t predict too far out. If you’re more accurate, you’ll be happier.

The problems of new are less than the problems of the old. On occasion you will run into a bug by upgrading software to the latest version. But I’ve found that on balance, I have far fewer compatibility & stability problems if I keep up to date. And as a bonus, new features!

Buy the well-built item once instead of the cheap thing multiple times. It’s eco-friendly, and you get to have the quality item to use every day. My wife and I had been wearing out a $10 garlic press once every 12 months or so with basic wear and tear — till we bought the Rösle Garlic Press for (at the time) $30. Five years later, it still looks good as new and works brilliantly.

Price is not correlated to the value. Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot. Conversely, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has no value. Open-Source Software, Wikipedia, a walk with your kids – these all have a lot of value, and they don’t cost you a dime.

Deals are rarely worth it. Everything is “on sale”. Everything is discounted. Of course, there are good deals to be had. It’s just that the effort to find and take advantage of the deal is more costly than any savings I might obtain. There is a reason why rebate forms are difficult to complete: it is in the company’s best interest that you never fill them out.

I believe in Scaling Software over Scaling People. See my blip on Techies and The Business, or the whole article here.

The most important attribute to any employee is their willingness and ability to learn. I’ve written about this one a lot. I think learning is the key to innovation, that through mistakes you get better, that Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever Learn, and that progress (and who doesn’t want progress?) is an act of discovery.

So!  What are some of your beliefs?

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success. – James Cameron, director of Terminator and Titanic, from The New Yorker [via SvN]

“Designs take a leap forward when you kill the things you didn’t know you were holding on to.” – Ryan @ SvN

“I embrace change like I trust confidence.” @Rands

“1-size-fits-all mission stmnt: We provide best of breed productivity solutions that help maximize ROI for your strategic initiatives.” @jeffpatton

“In agile we plan and we plan to replan” – Ronica Roth [via @dwhelan]

“[When robots attack,] I don’t think you want to be known as a human being that is against computers.” — Peter Thiel [via @dcurtis]

“Flow is the New Center” – Leif Larson

“To understand good leadership, think about how far you’ll go when someone you like asks you for a favor.” @Rands

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill

“frustration is just passion being slowed down by a conversation” @alshalloway

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  —Benjamin Franklin, 1755

The importance of a task is inversely proportional to the time you need to ignore it to render it moot. —Hugh Greenway

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. —Daniel Patrick Moynihan

1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions–coined at Grumman Aerospace during 60s lumbar module dev pgm. [via @dwhelan]

Here’s what I think would happen:

• The completion of work would slow down for a couple weeks. Maybe a month.
• New talents would form.
• Inter-team communication, understanding, and empathy would get amazingly good.
• Cross training would actually happen, and single-points-of-failure would disappear.
• The business would see fewer things down because ___ was on vacation.
• Then the completion of work would start happening faster than it ever had before.
• And new ideas for old problems would start cropping up all over the place.
• And a whole bunch of “broken” things would get fixed (poor processes, kludgy systems, etc).
• And the team would re- self organize, and perform like never has before.

It would be brilliant.

Illiterate may be too strong of a word, but the sentiment is correct. The key talent for people today is no longer to master a trade or a specific skill, but to become adapt at adapting to change. If you can anticipate change and react to it faster than your competitors, it doesn’t just put you a little ahead, it puts you an order of magnitude ahead.

When I started college, they said that 90% of the jobs we would be taking when we graduated 4 years later, hadn’t been invented yet. And you know what? They were right. If change is happening even faster now, what long-held perspectives must you shift to keep from being left in the dust?

“if you want to foster innovation, [let] people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about”

He’s talking about Dan Pink’s video, the surprising truth about what motivates us:

“My cloud extends my reach, my experience and my intelligence, making me much more effective as some sort of weird ‘colony individual’ than I could be on my own.   I have no doubt that within a few years, as the tools improve, nearly every decision I make will be observed and improved upon by my cloud.  Which is wonderful, incredible, and – to quote Tony Abbott – very confronting.”

He talks about a few specific incidents where he’s gotten some very useful and timely advice while traveling, and then notes that some industries have seen major shifts due to the ability for people to be hyper-connected. Specifically:

“There’s a direct correlation between the speed at which a motion picture bombs and the rise in the number of users of Twitter.  It used to take a few days for word-of-mouth to kill a movie’s box office:  now it takes a few minutes.  As the first showing ends, friends text friends, people post to Twitter and Facebook, and the news spreads.  After the second or third showing, the crowds have dropped off: word has gotten out that the film stinks.  Where just a few years ago a film could coast for an entire weekend, now the Friday matinee has become a make-or-break affair.  An opinion, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of connections, carries a lot of weight.”

3 days of movie sales down to one … all because we can get recommendations from each other that much faster. I wonder what other industries Twitter is altering?

I only have 167 followers on twitter (Mark has 6800), so I’m not sure that I qualify for the “hyper” prefix. But I’ve posted a few questions and gotten some  select responses. Nothing big, and certainly nothing that has changed my daily use. I can see the potential if I were to expand my social graph.

So then.

I find the technology-enabled social connections interesting, but not yet vital. What concerns me is that what happens when they *become* vital?

I’ve read about kids getting (accidently) left out of birthday parties because the invite went out over SMS and they didn’t have a cell phone. It’s stupid, unintentional, and yet a real problem. Staying plugged in takes time, but it takes cash too. Cell phones have a hefty cash commitment. I guess what I’m wondering: will “hyper” connectivity (and all of it’s advantages) become a class differentiator? Will there be the hyper-connected-have’s and the hyper-connected-have-not’s? The latter of who will be doomed to spend too much money on bad movies the 2nd day of it’s release?

Mark says:

“We can choose to be entirely connected, or entirely disconnected.  We can let the batteries run flat on our mobile, or simply turn it off and put it away.  But there’s a price to be paid.  Absence from connection incurs a cost.  To be disconnected is to cede your ability to participate in the flow of affairs. Thus, the modern condition is a dilemma, where we balance the demands of our connectedness against the desire to be free from its constraints.”

[emphasis added]

I have no conclusions yet, just interest, and perhaps some questions. Hyperconnected Health was a good read.

“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“

[emphasis added]

“For [the millennial child] the act of knowing something has become inseparable from the act of reaching for knowledge. She searches for what she needs to know; in a moment’s time, the answers are at hand. And anything known to anyone anywhere has become indistinguishable from what she knows for herself.”

Memorizing certain things has it’s value, but if you have the skills to find the answer to anything in 30 seconds using the smartphone in your pocket, what things are really worth memorizing? There are two things we should teach: the skill of searching and finding (ie, how to learn) and the skill to evaluate the quality of your sources. That’s it. Research and critical analysis.

“Apple makes $3B of profit from its iPhone while HP takes in a mere $500M on its PCs—that’s a 6x difference. The Center of Money has shifted.”

HP is one of the leaders in computer manufacturing, yet for all their expertise, they have to be pretty surprised how fast the center shifted.

“Design global navigation last.  Before designing global navigation, design screens with only local navigation–how people do the work of that screen.  Then, as parts of the system are ready to release, create an application map that shows hub and spoke relationships, selection screens, modal screens and links and build just enough global navigation for the current feature set.”

I like the idea. Seems like it would generate more a more natural organization in the tool instead of a lot of artificial constructs used to categorize and sort the functionality ahead of time.

“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.”
- Watts S. Humphrey

From Wikipedia: “Watts S. Humphrey (born 1927) is an American software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality.”

He has a recent book out that looks like it could be good, Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself.  Has anyone read it?

[via @jurgenappelo]

“A tendency to overvalue the ends of technology has become one of the most persistent features of these heady times, but so much technology has been piling up for so long that we are now beginning to see how it transforms the way we thing. We are different for using it. This qualitative change can be seen most clearly in the World Wide Web, which grew from a simple, if subtle, idea into a global unification of all human knowledge, and, perhaps, a catalogue of human experience. Confronted with a space of ideas that has grown well beyond the ability of any person to “know” it, we find ourselves navigators in a familiar but impossibly vast sea of facts, figures, and fiction. Every individual who has become a web surfer has changed the way he thinks and the way he uses knowledge. Every business, as it encounters the Web, changes completely.“

[emphasis added]

“Focus and perspective are our bread and butter. We have to think carefully about problems in multiple fields in the course of a standard workday, and poor quality of thought invariably leads to disproportionately significant repercussions later. There’s almost no limit to what I’ll pay to increase my focus and productivity without a corresponding increase in pain; iPad would be cheap at three times the price.”

“Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates. Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. “My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. “But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.” “

I also tend towards using it as a positive: “modern technology” “modern processes” “modern living” “modern project management” — these all carry very positive connotations in my mind. But a modern thing isn’t always perceived as a good thing to all people – you’ve heard their rallying cry “Tried and True”.

Do you see “modern” as being a bad thing? Why?

Introspective bonus points: what would cause you to change your opinion to favor modern things?