Huibert Aalbers Portfolio

Jobs is wrong, R&D dollars do matter

May 17, 2007

Last February I bought a PS3. That is right, a Sony PlayStation 3. If I were to believe what seems to be the general opinion on the Net, I would have to conclude that I must be extremely stupid because I could have bought a much better console for half the price. That is at least what most of the Wii fanboys out there would want everyone to believe. Thank God I am old enough to be immune to peer pressure and therefore able to take my own decisions.

The Nintendo Wii may sport innovative controls and offer some fun games but it uses graphics that will make it obsolete before the end of 2008. Just compare any Wii games to games developed exclusively for the PS3 like Resistance: Fall of Man or Motorstorm on an 1080p screen and you will understand. It is clear that the Wii is less expensive than the PS3, but I would argue that it is simply a cheaper device.

Wii gamers tend to dismiss the fact that the PS3 supports Blu-ray. They are wrong, dead wrong. Since I started buying movies in this new format, I have never looked back. There is simply no way for me to go back to the traditional DVD format, the difference in both image and sound quality is so incredible that you have to see it to believe it.

My PS3 lives in my TV room, and is placed just under my 42” plasma screen. Three cables is all I need to enjoy an amazing multimedia experience. That is really important to me because the proliferation of cables is something you really want to avoid if you care about aesthetics. How many cable would I need to use if I had to buy a Blu-ray player in addition to my game console? How-much would that cost?

If you ask me, I will tell you that I am extremely pleased with my PS3 and that I totally recommend it. So, where do the negative comments come from? Short answer, kids who do not have the budget to buy a PS3 or a big flat TV for their room. You simply do not care about graphics quality or cable proliferation when you play on a small screen in your room or dorm. If you add to the mix a sense of treason towards Sony for producing an expensive console that most teenagers cannot afford, you get what we are currently witnessing, a violent, systematic backlash against the console.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand these kids. They are frustrated because they feel that a product designed for them can only be purchased by adults like myself. Sony probably made a mistake by creating a console not targeted at their traditional customer base. However, that does not mean that the Wii is better than the PS3, that is not true, there are no facts to back that claim. While I am aware that sometimes a cheaper product can be better than more expensive options it usually is simply not true, even if a legion of loyalists say so.

That takes me to a comment Steve Jobs made recently at the annual Apple shareholder meeting. He said that if effective R&D depended only on money, Microsoft would have been able to release great products. That may have provoked some laughs in the audience but it concerns me. If Steve thinks that Apple is winning against Microsoft because the Zune failed miserably or because the Mac market share has increased slowly but steadily over recent years, he is missing the whole picture. Apple faces multiple threats from Microsoft and most are much more serious than what they have been battling so far.

One of these threats is the XBox 360. The device has sold well over ten million units and is therefore much better positioned than the Apple TV to win the battle over the living room. The other significant threat is Silverlight, a recently announced technology that has the potential to change forever the way we interact with web applications and move content creators to the Windows platform. Both products are good examples of healthy innovation coming from Redmond and are the result of investing billions of dollars in R&D.

When I read that comment I felt that Steve Jobs was trying to cover the truth and use us, Mac loyalists, to continue spreading that tale that you can do much more with much less, much in the same way that Nintendo fanboys spread the tale that their cheap console is much better than the expensive one. Apple has grown a lot over the last year but R&D spending has not benefitted significantly. In order to remain competitive, Apple has relied a lot on open-source technologies to produce innovation. In fact, some of the most touted improvements that will be included in Leopard (ZFS and DTrace) actually were created by Sun Microsystems. That has worked well so far for OS X , but it is clear that Apple lacks the R&D punch to create and push new standards in new areas, unlike Microsoft or companies such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle or IBM which are perceived to be much larger but have a comparable market cap value to that of Apple.

Right now, the big technological battles are raging around the technologies that will be used for the next generation web interfaces. Adobe (Apollo), Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (Java) are the main players that are fighting for this strategic market. Apple is not participating in this war or even endorsing one of these technologies. Come on Apple, we all know that you can do better. Spend more on R&D, your future is at stake. Unless you move the puck yourself, it may become harder and harder to know where it will be.

Don’t ask don’t tell is not enough

May 16, 2007

In my family we never talked about sex. That did not surprise me, I thought that it was quite normal. I have since found out that other families are much more open about the subject. Whether this is good or not, is not really relevant to this post. What I want to write about is that probably because of that, I always thought that a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuality was enough to solve discrimination problems in the workplace. I was wrong, dead wrong. Problems do not disappear by simply avoiding talking about the subject.

At the company I work for, employees know that gays should inform their manager about their sexual orientation. The idea is that by disclosing this information, managers can make sure that they do not become the victims of discrimination.

Why would managers need to know the sexual orientation of their staff? After all, it is our responsibility to make sure that no discriminatory behaviors happen in our teams? I think that this makes it more personal. A couple of weeks ago I was in a meting where someone started to make inappropriate sexual jokes. Knowing that I had gay members of my team present made me stop her immediately. I knew that she was hurting them. If I had not known I would probably not have realized the gravity of the situation. That is why “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work. Nobody should have to hide any personal characteristic in order to avoid discrimination while suffering in silence.

Don’t get me wrong, while the policy works it also generates some problems. Many straight persons in the company believe that gays are over protected and that some managers are scared to fire homosexuals because they can be accused of homophobia. I can see that happening with unexperienced managers but overall I do not really buy it.

Chapeau!

May 7, 2007

Over the last few years, in most countries, statistics have shown that, in general the trend is pointing towards lower participation in public elections. In some cases, a particular election can break the trend, specially when important matters are at stake, people live in fear or when the country is highly divided on a particular subject. However, analysts usually assumed that citizens had progressively lost interest in politics. As a result, in some countries it has become usual to see participation scores well below the 50% mark. This obviously raises a lot of questions about the legitimacy of those elected under these circumstances.

Raising participation numbers in local, state and national elections should be the primary goal of every true democrat. Too often do we see a candidate win because it’s supporters are more committed than those who back the opposition. Some may consider that fair but I disagree. We should only be satisfied with election results when they are accompanied by high participation rates across the board. That is why I was so glad to see an amazing 85% participation rate in France’s Sunday presidential election. This result really deserves a standing ovation and we should all work in our countries to make sure that we obtain similar results in future elections.

Even though France cannot claim to be the oldest modern time republic (that honor goes to the Dutch), it is well known that many of the ideals that inspired both the US Constitution and the French Revolution, came from French thinkers. That leads many to consider France to be the cradle of democracy. Seeing that 218 years after the French Revolution, democracy is still alive and well in that country is something to cheer about.

More on productivity

May 1, 2007

According to this BBC article, the authorities in India’s premier engineering institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay (Mumbai), have cut off internet access to students in hostels at night. They apparently feel that 24-hour internet access is hampering students’ academic performance and overall personality development.

I agree. I am most productive when I do not use the Internet. Opening a browser window is just like opening a chocolate box (if you are into chocolate), there is such a wealth of interesting and entertaining information available that it is hard to just look at what you really need. Fast Internet connections only make this problem worse. A slow connection helps people realize that they are wasting their time. With fast Internet connections, you do not have to wait and therefore time flies. Before you realize it, you have spent too much time surfing the web.

Shutting down Internet access is not a good solution to improve sound Internet usage. Reducing the bandwidth is. Modem speeds are generally decent enough to allow students that require critical information at 3AM to complete a term paper, to access Google and Wikipedia. However, slow access will make sure they do not waste their time on YouTube or other Web 2.0 sites.

Once again, I’m headed to WWDC

April 29, 2007

After Apple announced two weeks ago that Leopard would be delayed until October, I was disappointed, like almost everyone else. I expected to be able to play with the new APIs in June, as promised. Even though I had much fun last year at WWDC, I had decided not to attend this year. I thought that it would be much cheaper to read the online documentation published by Apple, which I expected to become available in the same timeframe.

The fact that Apple’s WWDC will now happen well before the actual OS launch suddenly makes the event much more interesting to me. The Leopard innovations track seems specially interesting for developers who want a small head start.

Last year, WWDC was really only about discovering the future of the Macintosh platform. The Leopard preview distributed to developers was much too far from completed to be any useful. This year’s WWDC, with a feature complete OS, should be all about how to use the new APIs in existing or new applications. To me, that is a very compelling value proposition.

So, just when it looked like I would miss this year’s WWDC, I changed my mind. Once again, I’m headed to San Francisco. See you there.

Good question

April 24, 2007

I am a big podcasting fan. I usually spend about two hours a day listening to mainly tech personalities interviews. This is a nice way to understand industry trends and learning about cool new projects. Here is a list of some of the podcasts I subscribe to:

IT Conversations (In particular Technometria)
Late night Cocoa
TWiT (This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte)
The Scoble show and other podcasts from the podtech network

The more I listen to interviews, the more I get upset when I hear that most interviewees follow the exact same pattern when asked a question. They usually will start answering by saying something like “Excellent question” or “That is a great question”. That feels so fake when you hear it over and over again. It is obvious that there is some form of consensus in the US (I haven’t seen signs of this spreading to other countries yet) that this is the correct way to behave during an interview. I understand that by acquiring this habit you some additional time to think about your answer and you may even please the interviewer. However, while this technique may have been effective at the beginning, when few where using the technique, now that everyone has learned it, it just feels unnatural and even plain silly, specially when the question isn’t that brilliant.

Inconvenient solutions

April 20, 2007

There is no doubt that the movie “An inconvenient truth” was able to change the perception of where our world is heading if we fail to act. The movie, combined with high gas prices and the war and Iraq was able to shake consciences and get our society moving. I am amazed by the incredible amount of business initiatives related to new renewable energy, plug-in vehicles, recycling and conservation in general and I am sure that everyone gets excited at the prospects these new technologies create.

I think however, that we are being misled. Most people seem to believe that we can solve the problem by changing slightly our behavior and applying new technologies. The truth is that we will need to go further. Initiatives like ethanol adoption may reduce foreign oil dependency in the US but consequences on the environment are far from clear. The Brazilian experience with bio-fuels is far from conclusive with many experts blaming in part deforestation in that country on the growth of the sugar cane plantations which are needed to produce that fuel. Other fuels perceived as alternatives to oil like diesel or hydrogen have their own issues. With really clean energy sources such as wind or solar growing too slowly, our only real option is to reduce energy consumption. Besides energy, the world is facing other problems such as lack of drinking water or food. How is that possible? Never in history has so much food been available and the same applies to water. The problem is simple, there world population is now six billion and counting. Since we cannot easily increase food, water or energy supply, the solution has to come from reducing the last variable, human population.

Do not worry, I am not proposing at all to start World War III or executing minority groups. What I would like to see is an open debate around the subject. What people should understand is that if for one generation (25 years) each woman only had one child, all the catastrophic prophecies mentioned by Al Gore would probably not happen. I am really puzzled by the fact that a solution as obvious as this one (although extremely hard to implement) is not even mentioned in most discussions. However, if we do not discuss the matter, it is very unlikely that parents will even consider the impact on the environment of having a large family.

Over the last few decades, in most countries (even the emerging ones), birth rates have been decreasing steadily. One reason has been the fact that parents have been bombarded with (not always obvious) messages on TV, movies and radio telling them not to have more children than they could afford. As a result, parents in those countries feel that they have the obligation to provide their children with good education, long vacations, and abundant clothing. As a result, couples have reduced the number of children they decide to have. That message has been good for children, parents and society in general. Why not slightly update that message now and include the fact that small families are good for the planet too and repeat it all over the world until everyone gets it?

We all know why. Such a message goes against the holy scriptures of most large monotheistic religions. Of course, at the time, the goal of their leaders was to outgrow their competitors to convert non-believers, by force if necessary, which made large armies a necessity. Today we face a planetary crisis. We need to discuss the options with an open mind. If this means upsetting some religious bigots, I personally don’t care much. More important issues are at stake.

The value of Product Certification

April 20, 2007

During this week Technical Leadership Exchange, attendants could take up to three product certification tests for free. On day 1 I decided to take the “Developing WebServices with Rational Developer 6.0” exam since it was a topic I was quite familiar with. I found the exam to be pretty easy, specially considering the fact that many questions were related and that some questions provided the answer to others.

The same day I passed that exam, one of the members of my team failed the “DB2 version 9 fundamentals exams”. That was totally unexpected, since he is an experienced Information Management IT Specialist. I decided to take the same test the next day to find out how hard the exam really was. Just for the record, most of my database experience has been working with Informix. I am a DB2 certified professional but I took the exam four years ago with version 7.1 and I have never installed or used DB2 version 9. To make thing worse, I had to complete the exam in 45 minutes (instead of 90) because I was running late for dinner. So, how did I do? Not extremely well, but I was able to pass the exam.

So, how is it possible that I could pass the exam while a more experience engineer failed. One explanation is the test’s heavy focus on SQL. Despite being called DB2 fundamentals, few questions are really DB2 specific. Anyone with a solid SQL knowledge can obtain a good score even without having used that particular database engine. That is a serious problem, we cannot expect employers to know the contents of a particular exam. We should expect the title of the certification to clearly describe the skills being tested. However, that does still not explain why an experienced professional can fail such a test. The answer is quite simple, English fluency. Most product certification tests tend to be quite confusing with many answer options looking very similar. That is fine if English is your primary language, but not for those who are not fluent in English.

I feel that this is unfair. Although I do not care much about product certification when evaluating candidates, many managers do. Candidates who do not speak English well are being double taxed, first when being evaluated on their foreign languages skills and later when asked about their technical skills. Now that I am thinking about it, I wonder if the fact that a country like India is known for the technical skills of it’s people this is due to the fact all students speak English and therefore have easier access to technical information. Having lived in many countries around the world I can tell you that, in my experience, stupidity is evenly distributed and so is intelligence.

So, what is the solution? For starters, product certification tests should be available in multiple languages. This shouldn’t represent a large effort for companies such as Cisco, IBM or Sun. I am convinced that if this happened, the number of certified engineers in regions like Latin America, Europe and Asia would rise dramatically, unveiling new business opportunities in countries that currently are not seen as investment worthy.

However, that is obviously not enough. Universities in non-English speaking countries should acknowledge how key the proficiency in English is to their student’s success. Unfortunately, in many countries national pride is preventing government from taking serious actions. This is too bad as it is taking away opportunities from people that truly deserve them.

IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange (TLE)

April 16, 2007

I am currently spending a couple of days in California (Anaheim), attending IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange. This event is organized once a year to train technical talent and also to serve as a forum where participants can share ideas about the future of technology. It is an interesting event because unlike other events organized by different brands within IBM, here it is possible to meet people from all the organizations that form the company.

So far I have been enjoying myself. Besides being able to spend some time with my colleagues at Disneyland, I have been able to attend some very interesting sessions. Topics range from software to hardware to Web 2.0. Product certification is free and many are lining up to get certified. This may not seem very fun, but the truth is that I see it today mostly as a game. It is a challenge after all, just like playing Sudoku or Crosswords. Now that I am a manager I do not expect people to judge me on my technical certifications, but I still find it amusing to pass an exam once in a while.

The truth is that I feel very fortunate to participate in this kind of events. A couple of days ago I was interviewing a candidate for a job. He told me that his current manager did not give him any learning opportunities in the last three years. This may sound ridiculous to many, but engineers really enjoy learning new technologies and get quickly depressed when they feel that they are falling behind. IBM offers many learning opportunities to its employees. This year, most of my direct reports will spend four weeks on training. That is good for the business because customers want to deal with knowledgeable vendors but it is also excellent for the technical team’s morale.

We all saw the signs

April 13, 2007

Over the last few months several rumors indicated that Mac OS X would be delayed. Often, the alledged reasons were not really credible. The last rumor, that Leopard would be delayed because of lack of proper Vista support in Bootcamp, launched by Taiwan’s Digitimes , was simply laughtable, and as such was quickly dismissed by the Mac community.

However, there was a reason these rumors emerged. There were signs all over that Leopard would be delayed, and we all saw them. How many wondered why Apple hadn’t started touting the new features of Leopard just two months before the official launch date? Weren’t we surprised to see that recent builds still had long lists of known bugs? Come on, we all knew deep inside that this was coming, but we had faith, even after the AppleTV was repeatedly delayed.

What strikes me is the reason argued by Apple to delay the release of their next generation OS. Blaming the iPhone seems simply silly. If it is true, it sends the message to the Mac community that the iPhone is more important than Leopard, something that is not so smart to do, since many Mac users already feel some kind of iPod envy, not appreciating that the music device is taking most of the spotlight. Most Apple fans want Apple to be successful in order to increase their computer market share and fight Microsoft head to head. Whether this is realistic or not is another question, the fact is that that is exactly what they expect. Removing the word computer from the company name and choosing the iPhone over the Macintosh does not bode well with the core Apple supporters either.

The truth is that a four month delay is not something to be truly concerned about. In fact, this delay solves many problems for Apple. Launching two major products (Leopard and the iPhone) the same month is something very difficult to execute properly. By only showcasing Leopard in June at the WWDC they can focus their marketing machine on the iPhone launch while starting to create hype around the new OS to ensure a successful product launch, just in time for Christmas. Quality of the code is obviously a concern also, as mentioned in the press release. Mac users are used to the highest standards and a buggy OS would probably have translated into a major PR disaster.

However, what I think most die-hard Mac users fear is a slow death of the Macintosh platform. We all know that personal computers (both Macs and PCs) are an endangered species. The Internet is slowly but surely killing them. Since the introduction of the idea of the network computer, the need for desktop OSes has been declining steadily and most of us spend most of our time working online. However, people (specially Mac users) seem to like their personal computers. They do not want to lose them and are asking for reasons to remain passionate about a product that every (smart) analyst sees going the way of the dodo. People are asking for 3-D interfaces with gorgeous graphics and in general all those things that cannot be achieved by a browser. That means that until web browsers become able to offer a true rich user experience, there will be a need for desktop computers. I hope that Apple realizes this and does not start to milk the platform while focusing too soon on alternative platforms.

Fortunately, Apple clearly mentioned that the technical resources assigned to the iPhone were “borrowed”, not transferred which leads us to believe that they should be soon back working for the Macintosh division. However, the clear disappointment felt throughout the Mac community should be received by Apple as a clear warning sign that many loyal customers are feeling nervous and that they need to see a very strong commitment from Apple to the Macintosh platform. We will all be watching closely Steve at WWDC.