The Viamentis Blog

If you follow blogs closely on the internet, you couldn’t have missed SvN. It’s a blog with an attitude, written by the Basecamp folks. Here’s a posting by Matt Linderman about the excellent service he got from Sweetwater Sound. Damn, I would want Viamentis to get to that level of service some day. I know, I know, software engineering is a bitch and highly unpredictable science, but that’s where the magic is - creating the ‘feel good’ factor out of software delivery.

Here’s a very nice article by TEC (”Chief Executives Working Together”) about why ’stories’ about certain events in business are important. As the article says, “Narrative is a fact wrapped in emotion”. I agree. Good stories about how something worked out, narrated in the right fashion, creates powerful examples and people learn better.

http://www.teconline.com/www/newsletters/current/publicnews.asp?Id=3522

There was a time when getting your software shipped used to be like making a movie … or, for that matter, any other product launch. There will be hectic last-minute activity, advertising and finally a collective heave of relief when the product ships. Again, the cycle of new features & bug fixes continue.

However, things are changing. The ‘Desktop PC’ is no longer the platform. The browser is. Or, as Sun says, ‘The network is the computer’ is finally coming true. In these days, ‘shipping software’ is no longer the same as before. It normally involves a few days’ cycle time as opposed to months/years it used to take before. Perhaps this article by Mark Lucovsky is especially relevant. He explains how it’s not Microsoft that ‘gets’ shipping software anymore, it’s more and more companies like Amazon. He forgot to add Google. It’s amazing how Google churns out product after product in a lockstep march fashion.