WatTF? – Jim Murphy

Progress issued a press release and updated FAQ today further describing the acquisition of Mindreef.  Updates include the strategic rationale and intentions for the future.  Stay tuned for the webinar July 22nd for details.

As of Saturday June 28th here is what I’ve been able to collect:

• Mindreef acquired by Progress Software (Jeff Scheider)
  
• Progress makes another SOA acquisition: Mindreef (ZDNet)
• Progress Software Acquires Mindreef, Inc (Webservices.Org)
• Progress Software Announced Its Acquisition of Mindreef at SOA World Conference (SOA World Magazine)
• Progress makes another SOA buy (NetworkWorld)
• Progress now eats Mindreef … must be hungry (InfoWorld)
• Progress Software continues SOA buying spree with Mindreef acquisition (Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct)
• Progress Acquires Mindreef, Producer of SOA Collaborative Software (Joe McKendrick’s SOA in Action)
• SOA acquisition week: Progress adds Mindreef (SearchSOA)
• Progress Buys Two SOA Tool Vendors In Two Days (InformationWeek)

As Jeff Schneider rightly mentioned Mindreef has been acquired by Progress Software.  Much more information will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead. For now we’ve setup a FAQ page to handle some of the basics.  I’m excited to see Mindreef in its new home and now fully to realize what a great new home it will be.  Stay tuned for more details as we go.

OK This on is a serious PIMA.  Why doesn’t ruby’s require involve the requiring files directory int he LOAD_PATH

1 require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../foo')

You see this all the time at the top of Ruby source files? This is the Ruby Way?

I would expect to write:

1 require "../foo"

and have require – try matching against the requiring files directory first, then delegate to the LOAD_PATH array.

Help me see the light.

Progress Software (NASDAQ:PRGS) announced today their intentions to acquire IONA Technologies plc (NASDAQ: ADR) for $162M.  Its clear Progress is going for a SOA industry roll-up and I’m excited to see the breakout from among the non-mega platform vendors: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun.

IONA has struggled to redefine themselves in the post CORBA, SOA world and I know that isn’t for lack of technical horsepower.  It will be interesting to see how Sonic/Actional + IONA develop the ESB market and how other SOA infrastructure evolves.

Just caught the TC post launching TechCrunchIT.  It will be nice to have TC style energy in this space – the encumbant news sources seem so formulaic and still not quite adapted to a non-print media way of life.  Subscribed.

I love Ali’s customer service framework used at Well.ca.  I think customer service is a very misunderstood concept.  I’m amazed how common the push back I get from people in service roles (which is EVERYONE) thinking customer service is about ass kissing – and that’s something they don’t like to do.  Thinking that good customer service is somehow bowing and scraping and being subservient to your customer is doing you and your customer a disservice.  To me customer service is about goal alignment

If my goals as a service provider are aligned with yours as a service consumer then good customer service is much more likely then if I view our relationship as adversarial – yet it seems that’s the normal case.  How many times have you asked someone in an obvious customer service capacity a question and are greeted by blocking and avoiding tactics instead of aligned effort at resolution?  This is often not the fault of the front line staff but a broken business process, with those responsible for its implementation and potentially fixing it tucked safely out of the way of reality.  If you’re tired of bad service or and/or are tired of fronting for a bad business process lets start looking upstream at the business culture and management practices that make this prevalent.

So this in ancient history at this point but I’ve been sitting on a draft post for months and I need to “clear the pipes” so I’ll post it into the archives.

I attended Comunitech’s CEO Dinner last March and was hauled on stage for a lesson in humility by Marshall Goldsmith (along with Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz now of ParkVu (I hear ParkVu is hot new hansom cab startup in the area)).

The lesson of the evening was: “Do you treat your spouse as well as you treat your customers?”  Well, do you?

I just read Randall Howard’s post: Early Adopters versus Business Models: Shooting Yourself in the Foot?

My liked the end when Randall raises the issue of mobile data rates and the inevitable dampening effect it has on Canadian (and American) mobile software development companies – startups especially.

The problem is more pronounced in Canada but the US has the same structural flaws – its just so much more pronounced here due to lesser competition, higher complacency, and more monopolistic tendencies.  But, in either case we are effectively giving up on wireless innovation in North America if we don’t have a startup ecosystem and fertile early markets to try out products and business models.  The only thing I see in the mobile space that is fertile these days is the bullshit in the ads.

Java is an enterprise software language and almost never used “out in the wild” where Web 2.0 style sites and services live. At least that’s what I keep hearing. Most web types think in terms of PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby it seems.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that there is remarkably few multi-lingual programmers out there. You usually find people attached to a programming stack the way a baby duck attaches to its mother. Programmers follow around their stack quacking that its best/only way to solve their particular problem. I know we would like to think this doesn’t apply to us but I think most of us have been “baby ducked” early and that shapes how we look at the world for a good long while.

If you’re under 30 and build web stuff then you probably know PHP. Why is that? More than likely because its always been there and its free. Every cheap host has a PHP runtime available so that’s what you were “baby ducked” on. As you got more sophisticated you might have started to look at newer environments like Python or Ruby. Thats what everyone you talked to were talking about.
Alternatively if you work in a corporate environment theres a pretty good chance that you’re writing in Java or .NET. You don’t signup on godaddy + cheap host for these projects because you have an IT operations group that takes care of machines, app servers, databases and provisioning for you. YMMV.

These are 2 completely different worlds that have nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the stack and people around the stack. Web 2.0 style projects don’t use Java as a rule NOT because the syntax is wrong or its slow or anything like that. I don’t know of many cheap hosting providers that make Java or .NET available unless you get into dedicated or virtual private setups where you control the entire stack. They exist but are far from the norm – and they aren’t comparably cheap. Instead the model is around FTP of text files and interpreted languages since its easier to manage those environments in a shared host environment. So the ecosystem of people in that world have different expectations.

Enter Amazon EC2 and the larger cloud computing approach. We’re “baby ducking” a new generation of developers that think in terms of cheap utility cloud computing where you don’t FTP text files to a shared hosted server – you have control over the entire stack by default. You own the whole thing.

This shift makes Java development in the cloud a viable option especially to ex-enterprise developers that are de-siloing their applications, systems or selves to reach beyond their firewalled-gardens and out into the Internet at large. Mix-in the emerging renaissance of new languages that target the JVM but offer technical or programmer productivity advantages and the JVM may not look so staid and corporate as it used to.

So we may see an increasing number of enterprise Java developers (ducks) that participate in Web 2.0 style projects after all.

Disagree?