Product development
Link to post: how Nokia missed the smartphone boat
Again, via John Gruber at Daring Fireball, comes this story from a Norwegian journalist who wrote a letter of complaint to Nokia in 2008 about his new Nokia smartphone. An excerpt from his letter: Telephones – like all other devices – need to be designed on the terms of the simplest user. All of the […]
Remember Conway’s Law
Some years ago, I was called in to lead a team of three other people in reviewing a major project at a Fortune 50 corporation. This project, which I’ll call QUBE, was a major end-to-end re-engineering of that firm’s mission-critical systems, intended to replace all the existing legacy systems. The QUBE project was supposed to […]
IT retrenchment: performing IT project triage
The on-going economic turmoil in the U.S. and global economies over the past several years continues to force many organizations to freeze, trim or even dramatically slash internal budgets. If you’re an experienced IT manager, you already know that your budget may be among the first to be affected. And that means making hard choices, […]
The 5 books every IT manager should read right now
In a prior post I talked about setting up a reading program for your IT department. However, whether or not you can get your IT engineers to read, you yourself need to be aware of the fundamental realities of IT project management and software engineer that have been discovered again and again. In other words, […]
“Microsoft Windows Forever and Ever?” (Windows Magazine, June 1996)
[Here’s another article I published back in 1996, this one predicting the problems that Microsoft would face as it continued to advance the Windows operating system. While I didn’t anticipate in this article the rise of post-PC devices, nor the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and subsequent transformation of NeXTstep into OS X, I […]