wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

Eric Sink of SourceGear has a new article on MSDN in the “business of software” series. This one talks about the function of proactive sales in a small ISV (Independent Software Vendor).

This part struck me as very relevant based on my current experience:

“Reason to Have a Sales Guy – #3:
Your product is no longer being improved
As a software product matures over the years, it tends to gain sales guys and lose developers. For a product that is nearing its twilight, it is not uncommon to see a company with lots of sale guys and no developers at all. The reason for this is reasonably intuitive: The product is no longer moving toward the customer. Closing the gap requires us to constantly be dragging customers over to the product.”

March 25th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

This will turn out to be a statistics obsessed month…

Brightmail has useful charts showing spam statistics for internet email. Note the linear increase in spam in the past year. Of course it will have a ceiling, but not before it becomes cripplingly expensive in terms of server resources and time to deal with it.

In the short term, I need a combination of SpamAssassin rules, blacklists and whitelists, integrated within my mail client (Outlook 2003) with an easy way to tweak settings, and automatically update spam detection rules from a central source.

March 24th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

“According to the election-year bluster of politicians and pundits, the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries has become a problem of epic proportion. Fortunately, this alarmism is misguided. Outsourcing actually brings far more benefits than costs, both now and in the long run. If its critics succeed in provoking a new wave of American protectionism, the consequences will be disastrous — for the U.S. economy and for the American workers they claim to defend.”

Daniel W. Drezner has written a good article countering the current ’sky is falling’ hype around outsourcing and its effects on the American economy.

This was an excellent example of policy backfiring:

“SPLENDID ISOLATION?
There are clear examples of jobs being sent across U.S. borders because of U.S. trade policy — but not for the reasons that critics of outsourcing believe. Consider the example of candy-cane manufacturers: despite the fact that 90 percent of the world’s candy canes are consumed in the United States, manufacturers have sent much of their production south of the border in the past five years. The attraction of moving abroad, however, has little to do with low wages and much to do with protectionism. U.S. quotas on sugar imports have, in recent years, caused the domestic price of sugar to become 350 percent higher than world market prices. As candy makers have relocated production to countries where sugar is cheaper, between 7,500 and 10,00o workers in the Midwest have lost their jobs — victims not of outsourcing but of the kind of protectionism called for by outsourcing’s critics.”

March 24th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Now, this article on hard disks thrown away or sold while still containing sensitive information is food for thought.

“In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized.

Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register.”

via Boingboing.

Here goes yet another wish-list item for the next version of Windows. A scrub utility to truly erase sensitive data. Until a tool is freely available and easily visible to end users, awareness of the security implications is not going to do much good. The barrier for adopting better security practices is too high right now.

March 23rd, 2004 | | | Comments Off

These statistics are very interesting, at first glance.

As a program manager I often have to deal with decisions that include extending or dropping support for a particular platform or resolution. Information sources like DAS and the Google Zeitgeist are only indicators of trends, but still very valuable ones. I’m particularly relieved to see the trend in using higher resolutions. Now if only we could get the remaining 30% off from 800×600.

Statistics like these are only of value if taken in context. For example the end users of the variable print industry segment that buys the products I work on, would not be represented by the statistics above. They have an install base of older machines and even older operating systems. Many of these don’t even have a live connection to the internet. Platforms used for mission critical or enterprise production needs are not exactly going to be used to read blogs. Software upgrades other than security patches are rarely applied once the system is put in production.

So the question remains… how do I get hold of relatively accurate figures on the platforms distribution for server class machines as opposed to workstation and desktop machines?

March 23rd, 2004 | | | Comments Off

This post on Chris Pratley’s blog about fledgling program managers got me thinking. After a year and a half’s experience of being a program manager, both for a legacy mission critical product and for its next generation replacement, I can relate to his observations.

It’s even worse when you’re inheriting a decade’s worth of patches, conflicting and short-sighted design decisions, customers with a large investment who absolutely can not tolerate problems with backwards compatibility and of course highly vocal demands to bring the product kicking and screaming into the contemporary era.

But it’s more than worth it in the end. You may have built up all your individual skills program management skills in other functions before this, but there’s no substitute for domain knowledge if you want to be effective. You do need project management, communication, decision making, risk analysis, problem solving and design skills, but becoming a subject matter expert is key. And that takes time.

March 19th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

The end of an era… the Cerebus graphic novel series ended this month at issue 300.

What is Cerebus you ask? It’s an independent comic book about an aardvark by Dave Sim. A single man’s effort to successfully write, illustrate and publish one issue a month, since 1977. Hey, that’s when I was born!

Buy the series from Amazon.com or bum a copy of the TPB from a friend.

March 19th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Port Reporter logs TCP and UDP port activity on a local Windows system. It runs as a service, so it’s an alternative to netstat for troubleshooting.

via Dana Epp’s ramblings.

March 19th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I found a pointer to this on INGdirect.com of all places. Gasbuddy.com is a portal to local city sites that show gas prices. The site for my locality, venturagasprices.com, shows the following price chart for the last two years:

More proof that California is an expensive place to live. Damn the sunny skies!

March 10th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

It’s that’s time of the year again. Tax returns. Someone just pointed me to the IRS US Tax Guide for Aliens (Publication 519 for 2003). I guess that means me.

66 pages of mind numbing, densely packed text. Should be fun reading.

March 8th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Listening to Maroon 5 – “This Love”, from the album Songs About Jane.

Watch video, read lyrics or buy the album.

March 6th, 2004 | | | Comments Off