Amy Wohl's Opinions

Speaking Events, Meetings

I'm getting ready to leave for IBM's Impact Conference (think WebSphere) in Las Vegas, April 29 to May 3rd. I'll be speaking at two sessions, in case you'll be there:

One is the CSCC (Cloud Standards Customer Council) session on Monday, April 30 at 3:15 for a discussion on the state of cloud standards and the important role the CSCC plays. Melvin Greer, senior fellow and chief strategist, Cloud Computing, Lockheed Martin; chair, CSCC steering committee, and Amy Wohl, principal consultant of Wohl Associates (me!); CSCC steering committee member will lead the discussion and share their perspectives on the cloud computing standards landscape.

Also, I'll be presenting with Rob Sawyer of IBM on Wednesday from 10:15 to 12 on SOA and the Cloud.

Please consider joining me and my colleagues at both sessions.

Back on the home front (for me, that's New Jersey), I’m planning to attend the Vintage Computer Festival East 8.o, May 5-6 at the InfoAge Science Center, 2201 Marconi Road, Wall, NJ. They will be presenting six lectures, eight technical workshops, and two dozen hands on exhibits plus a book sale, a consignment sale, lunch, and museum tours. There will be keynotes on Saturday and Sunday at 12:30. On Saturday, Dr. Thomas Kurtz, who co-invented BASIC will be there and on Sunday, Daniel Kottke, Steve Jobs’ college buddy and Apple engineer. Details at http://www,vintage.org/2012/east/

Hope to see you there.

SOA Governance - What are Your Company's Plans?

I'm going to be speaking on SOA Governance at IBM's Pulse Conference on March 5 and have created a short survey to understand what are your company's plans for using SOA Governance.

Please do me the favor of completing this survey - it will take you three minutes or less and will be most valuable to me. 

Take the Survey by Clicking Here.

Thank you. 

A Ride on the Hybrid Bus

Amy Wohl is currently guest blogging on IBM's Impact site.  We will be posting links to each of those blogs here. The new post is available here: A Ride on the Hybrid Bus

Master Data Management, Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture

Amy Wohl is currently guest blogging on IBM's Impact site.  We will be posting links to each of those blogs here. The new post is available here: Master Data Management, Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture

Computing for Everyone

Grady Booch, an IBM fellow and esteemed software engineer is working on a project to bring a series to television and the web which will approach Computing the way Carl Sagan approached the universe.

Daryl Taft has written an excellent article explaining the project and its goals.

They will use Kickstarter to fund the initial startup (that comment papers over the fact that Grady, his wife Jan and a number of others have been working on the project for four years).

The part of the project I particularly love, beyond the fact that Grady is a great storyteller and the subject is endlessly interesting, is the fact that they are going to try to make it accessible and exciting to middle school kids. That's important, because if you don't start taking classes in computing and math at that stage, you'll fall behind and probably decide not to look at math, science, engineering, or computing as you enter college and the job force. This is particularly critical for girls and minorities, who often are not urged to take the initial steps that will later qualify them for careers in the sciences.

Personally, I can't wait to see the results (scheduled for 2014), but in the meantime, I think that hanging out at the Kickstarter site will help inform us of the progress to date -- and let you make a small donation to speed it on its way.

SOA Federation

Amy Wohl is currently guest blogging on IBM's Impact site.  We will be posting links to each of those blogs here. The new post is available here:  SOA Federation.

Making WebSphere Message Broker Available to the Mid-Market

Amy Wohl is currently guest blogging on IBM's Impact site.  We will be posting links to each of those blogs here. The new post is available here: Making WebSphere Message Broker Available to the Mid-Market

Epic Technology Failures

I just read a great slide show by Eric Lundquist about Technology that failed -- because it wasn't really well thought out or perhaps because it was just ahead of its time. Not surprisingly it included lots of tablets and operating systems.

It reminded me of a class I used to teach at the University of Pennsylvania in a graduate program on Organizational Development. The class was about Winning and Losing in technology markets and I picked about a dozen examples of a technology failing abysmally in one case and (the same technology) succeeding beyond anyone's imagination in another case. Then I got the students to prepare a presentation comparing a winner and a loser in their own industry.

The point, of course, was to understand what happened. Often, it was a lack of insight into what customers might want to buy and how much they were willing to pay for it. At other times, it was simply a matter of being ahead of what the technology could do or what the market was ready for.

Lots of Lundquist's failure were, in fact, half of my pairs. In some cases. he's got a more modern example of a failure. For example I compared the success of WIndows 3.0 to the failiure of IBM's OS/2. He talks about Vista -- I would have compared it to Windows 7 and its success.

The real question, of course, is whether you can take away a lesson and avoid failing. So with operating systems, I was speaking about the fact that technical superiority does not trump great marketing and the creation of a vast ecosystem.

Today you could use that same issue to compare Motorola's Xoom tablet to the iPad. I have both (I got the Xoom because at the time I got it I would have had to renew my relationship with AT&T -- I was waiting for the iPad to be supported by Verizon.) The Xoom has some features that are missing on the iPad but nothing trumps iPad's long battery life and the AppStore which has everything I'm looking for.

I suspect that some of the other tablets that are in the wings will have similar failings, especially in the area of how many apps they attract how soon. I'm waiting for my KindleFire to arrive, to see whether I think it will be a winner (cutting into iPad's market share or forcing Apple to consider some repricing) or whether it will fail to attract apps and be the new failure to replace the Xoom.

I think of this as a never-ending lesson on how to predict winners in advance. Maybe I'll take all those class notes I have, update them for the latest examples, and turn this into a webinar. Might be fun.

More Reliable and Secure Data Transfer with WebSphere MQ Messaging

Amy Wohl is currently guest blogging on IBM's Impact site.  We will be posting links to each of those blogs here. The new post is available here:  More Reliable and Secure Data Transfer with WebSphere MQ Messaging.

Is Microsoft Buying Yahoo

I had two interesting pieces of information cross my desk this morning about Microsoft and Yahoo.

The first was a Wall Street Journal alert that Microsoft might be putting together a deal to buy Yahoo (and that a number of other companies had been in for a look).

The second was a link to a post about Ballmer saying at a conference, in answer to a question, that perhaps he had been Lucky not to get Yahoo a few years ago, right before the economic crash, at the then inflated price of $44 Billion.

The current estimated worth of Yahoo today is probably half that, although some premium is likely to be paid.

The real question remains:  What would Microsoft do with Yahoo?  Integrate it with Bing?  Keep it separate?  Might they have a not so obvious goal in mind?

I think we'll hear more about this pretty fast.  It sounds like Yahoo wants to get sold and Microsoft already has partnerships with them and a desire to expand its market share in Search.