Bruce F. Webster

The KIN debacle (product canceled after five weeks; reports of actual phones sold range from 8,000 all the way down to 500), followed by Microsoft’s announcement of layoffs, has triggered on-line discussion among Microsoft employees, past and present. Even recognizing the self-selecting and inevitably self-serving nature of those comments, they still reflect serious, serious problems [...]

Many large-scale software projects, whether commercial, two-party, or internal, end up poorly matched to their intended use and fail to achieve their intended use. But the same factors that lead to such disappointments occur in all industries and settings. Though I never drove one (and probably only saw them rarely while growing up), as a [...]

I have written about the thermocline of truth, a phenomenon I have witnessed several times in large IT projects where the true status of the project (usually not good) gets blocked at a certain layer of management, slowly moving up the management chain and usually reaching the top just weeks before the scheduled release date.  [...]

My latest Baseline column  is up, and it talks about why you should read these five books now, if you haven’t already. And if you have read them, you should probably re-read them.  ..bruce..

The very first class I took when starting my computer science degree from Brigham Young University was CS 131. I forget the course title, but the teacher was Dr. Alan Ashton, a quiet, self-effacing but brilliant professor who would later become very, very rich by developing — along with Bruce Bastian (with whom I shared [...]