eCENTER: Finally, a picture of the whole team

Finally, we managed to take some pictures from the whole team in Zurich, Switzerland! The 13 crazy guys of ecenter solutions. So great :-)

Standing up:
Constantin, Laurent, Roy, Nick, Rolf, Cédric, Thomas, Peter

Kneeling:
Didier (oh, it is me ;-), Philippe, Lorenz, Oli, Bojan

Tags: ecenter solutions

BUSINESS: 10 things to know anout marketing (for SW-engineers)

[via Seth Godin]

My dear SW-engineer-friends, a MUST-read for you ;-)

1. Marketing is not rational. Programming is. Works the same way every time. Marketing doesn't, almost in a Heisenbergian way. If it worked before, it probably won't work again.


2. Marketing is even more difficult to schedule than bug fixes. Marketing expenses are easily timed, of course, but the results are not. That's because there's a human at each end of the equation.


3. Most marketers have no clue whatsoever what to do. So we do unoriginal things, or stall, or make promises we can't keep.


4. Just because Sergey is both a brilliant programmer and a brilliant marketer doesn't mean that all brilliant programmers are good at marketing.


5. People often prefer things that are inelegant, arcane or even broken. Except when they don't.


6. Truly brilliant coding is hard to quantify, demand or predict. Same is true with marketing.


7. There is no number seven.


8. Unlike mediocre programmers, mediocre marketers occasionally get lucky. When they do, they end up with a success they can brag about for a generation. But that doesn't mean they know how to do it again.


9. Just because some marketers are dorks doesn't mean your marketer is a dork. Some programmers aren't so great either. Be patient.


10. Without marketing, all your great coding is worthless. Push your marketer to be brave and bold and remarkable. Do it every day. Your code is worth it.

Tags: software - seth godin

PRIVATE: Emphatic win, Spain - France 1-3 :-)

First of all, congratualtions to our "has-been too old" French football players :-) You did a great job, you offered us so much emotion yesterday, as in 1998. Just magic.

And my dear Spanish colleagues, friends and non-friends, journalists, trainer and players, sometimes, as in the business field, it is *definitely* better to keep a low profile and to respect your opponents, and more especially before playing a match, even if you have won your last 26 games.

Some examples....

What about the shameful behaviour of the Spanish fans during the anthem?

Striker Thierry Henry described the rival supporters' behaviour as shameful.

"I've never seen that before in the World Cup. It's shameful that their supporters reacted like that during the Marseillaise.

What about the reaction of the trainer after the match?

"I don't think the final scoreline was an accurate reflection of what happened," insisted coach Luis Aragones after Spain's first defeat in 26 games.

What about the racist remarks of the Spanish trainer (for a while) and supporters?

Aragones and Henry are not the best of friends after Aragones’ used a racist remark in referring to the France striker while trying to motivate Jose Antonio Reyes, an Arsenal teammate of Henry.

Domenech also suggested that some Spain supporters had made monkey noises when the bus carrying the France players arrived at the stadium.

For chance, our next opponents' behaviour, Brazil!!, is great, with a lot of humour. I am sure it will be a great match, as all the confrontations France vs. Brazil.

Allez les Bleus!

eCENTER: Venice, some pictures (06)

Hotel Laguna Palace

Hotel NH Laguna Palace in Venice, very particular architecture and roof.

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

Tags: venice - picture

NEWS: Creative Commons add-in for MS Office

[via BetaNews]

Very good initiative! Good point for MS to have integrated this add-in. Free download here.

[...] "The goal of Creative Commons is to provide authors and artists with simple tools to mark their creative work with the freedom they intend it to carry," founder Lawrence Lessig said. "We're incredibly excited to work with Microsoft to make that ability easily available to the hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft Office."

Users of the add-in would be able to select from a variety of licenses available from Creative Commons. Additionally, the add-in could be used to allow work to become part of the public domain.

"The collaboration of Microsoft and Creative Commons to bring Creative Commons licenses to Microsoft Office applications underscores how for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations can work together to bring innovative ideas and tools to the public," said Alan Yates, general manager of the Information Worker Division at Microsoft.

Tags: microsoft - creative commons

BUSINESS: Time to quit?

[via Seth Godin]

Wow, again a great post from Seth about the right timing for living your job.

[...] Doug needs to leave for a very simple reason. He's been branded. Everyone at the company has an expectation of who Doug is and what he can do. Working your way up from the mailroom sounds sexy, but in fact, it's entirely unlikely. Doug has hit a plateau. He's not going to be challenged, pushed or promoted to president. Doug, regardless of what he could actually accomplish, has stopped evolving -- at least in the eyes of the people who matter.

If he leaves and joins another company, he gets to reinvent himself. No one in the new company will remember young Doug from 10 years ago. No, they'll treat Doug as the new Doug, the Doug with endless upside and little past. [...]

Our parents and grandparents believed you should stay at a job for five years, 10 years or even your whole life. But in a world where companies come and go -- where they grow from nothing to the Fortune 500 and then disappear, all in a few years -- that's just not possible.

Here's the deal, and here's what I told Doug: The time to look for a new job is when you don't need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable. Go. Switch. Challenge yourself; get yourself a raise and a promotion. You owe it to your career and your skills.

Tags: seth godin

eCENTER: Venice, some pictures (05)

Venice!

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

Tags: venice - picture

NEWS: Google's infrastructure

[via nytimes.com]

Gosh , if these figures are true... Wow, we are talking about 450'000 servers around the world... Impressive.

Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky. [...]

Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.

Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers - known in the industry as the Googleplex - that is a singular achievement.[...]

The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000.

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years. [...]

Microsoft's Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers, and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its most aggressive forecast, according to a company document.

Tags: google - googleplex - nytimes

OPEN SOURCE: Who gives and who takes

[via InformationWeek]

Some very interesting insights from Charles Babcock about the difference between developpers from the open source community and normal Corporate programmers. This article also tries to explain why companies, although they are using massively open source components, are not contributing back to the open source community.

Status quo

[...] This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they're getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development.

Big companies are "great consumers of open source. They're very good at pushing the limits of what open source code can do," says Carl Drisko, leader of the data center consulting practice at Novell, which distributes SUSE Linux. But when it comes to pounding out code, Drisko says, "they don't have a lot of people contributing back." [...]

More than 10,000 people have made contributions to Linux alone in the past 10 years. [...]

More than 100,000 projects are under way on the SourceForge.net open source site, ranging from the Stellarium desktop planetarium to the Pentaho business intelligence system. [...]

But business participation is the exception rather than the rule. The Open Source Development Lab, one of the leading groups behind Linux, has seen its membership triple to 86 organizations over the past two years. All but 8% of those members come from companies that sell technology or from educational institutions. Among the exceptions are Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Google.[...]

Only a fraction of open source software is written by people paid to write it, usually programmers working for companies that have a direct interest in a project. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems all sponsor such programmers. But they're a tiny minority. Out of 250 contributors to the PostgreSQL open source database, only seven are paid for that work. The Subversion project had about 200 contributors last year, and only 10 were paid to work on the software. [...]

Some factors to explain the "non-participation"

But contributions from businesses are small, partly because of a cultural divide between the open source crowd and corporate software developers, says Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and CTO at software company CollabNet. In contrast to the bottom line business world, Behlendorf says, open source developers exhibit a "willingness to challenge authority, the passion to work on an interesting problem well past the end of the workday, and the time and space to be able to build the right solution to a problem rather than just the most expedient."

That highlights one reason some companies aren't contributing to open source: They want to maintain rights to the software they develop, something they must give up under the General Public License that governs the use and distribution of much open source. Any new twist they might bring to an open source application would become available to competitors.

Workload is a factor, too. Managers reason that if their IT staffers have time to contribute to an open source project, they don't have enough "real" work to do.

Conclusion

Open source programmers make their mark "with thoroughness, tenacity, a desire to solve interesting problems, an ability to take criticism, and they communicate well," Momjian says. While such attributes are common in the business world, they don't necessarily exist in the right blend to survive the rigors of an open source project. "Eighty percent of corporate developers won't have the skills," he asserts. Hard criticism, for sure. But the onus is on corporate America to prove him wrong.

The key ingredient is passion. Open source contributors have to become "emotionally involved, committed," Momjian says, but they can't expect much in return. The goals of the project are more important than the goals of individuals or companies.

Conflicting interests mean the coding will be left to others.[...]

Tags: open source - community

eCENTER: Article from Russia

You perhaps remember (post), Nick and myself were in Moscow, Russia last November for the first International Life & Pension conference.

An article about this conference was published in a Russian newspaper called The Insurer. Have a look, specially p19!

The Insurer - Breeders of Life (p14-19)

Technological aspects of life insurance were discussed broadly, then in considerable detail. The ins and outs of multichannel distribution were covered by Didier Beck, CEO of e-Center Solutions, Helvetia Patria Group, Switzerland and his colleague Nick Stefania.

Tags: ecenter solutions

eCENTER: Venice, some pictures (04)

Second evening at a Venecian Palazzo

[click]

[click]

Tags: venice - picture

BUSINESS: Microsoft challenges

[via Knowledge@Wharton]

Some thoughts about some strategic moves by Microsoft.

Indeed, Microsoft is a company in transition, and investors, customers and the entire technology industry would be wise to pay attention. At issue is whether Microsoft has grown too big to be nimble enough to compete with its long list of rivals on many fronts: Google in Internet search and advertising, Sony in video games with the launch of its Playstation 3 on November 17, Linux inside the corporation, and Apple Computer in digital media, to name just a few. [...]

Kaplan, however, argues that Microsoft should be experimenting with new markets and that even a failure isn't a waste of money. "A big company like Microsoft should be running a lot of (potentially conflicting) experiments. Only some will work out. Creativity must almost by definition involve failed experiments. That's why creative destruction is the essential dynamic of the marketplace." [...]

Microsoft is worth $236 billion as of May 12. If a startup becomes a company with $2 billion in annual revenue, it is considered a success. Microsoft would need more than 100 successful business launches just to keep its current market capitalization if the Windows and Office franchise were eroded. "There's nothing you can do to be offensive when you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars," says Metrick. "All of these new ventures are small potatoes if you lose Windows and Office." [...]

Tags: microsoft - wharton - - strategy

MUSIC: Concert Placebo on October 6

Meds is the great last album from Placebo. Yesterday, it was annouced that Placebo will bring a concert in Zurich, Switzerland on October 6, 2006. This time, I have managed to buy two tickets, one for Laurent and one for myself.

I am sure, this will be a great experience ;-)

Tags: placebo

eCENTER: Cross you fingers - part II

It seems that enough of you have crossed their fingers to help us :-) The migration went well during the week-end, the System Acceptance Test was ok for all the Application Owners. And this infrastructure is ... FAST (factor 3 to 4, based on the first statistics).

A lot of our 12'000 users wanted to test the new infrastructure, so that it seems that we had one of our highest load of the history of the platform. As proof-of-the-pudding, not bad!

More to come till the end of this week and the end of the first stabilization phase.

Tags: ecenter solutions

eCENTER: Venice, some pictures (03)

First evening at the restaurant Cipriani

First wonderful evening at the restaurant Locanda Cipriani. This special restaurant is situed on the Torcello island at the northern end of the Venetian lagoon.

Me eating....fish :-)

Tags: venice - picture

BLOG: Comments ... or not?

[via Seth Godin]

Some interesting points from Seth.

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters. I'm already itching to rewrite my traffic post below. So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I'd have to choose the latter.

So, bloggers who like comments, blog on. Commenters, feel free. But not here. Sorry.

Tags: blog - seth godin - comments

BUSINESS: Market your vision, sell your product

[via Jeff]

As one of our marketing consultants, Richard Currier, has always told our portfolio companies, "you market the vision, and sell the product." If you get too locked into talking about a product, then your partner or customer gets stuck into thinking about who else does this and why are you different. Getting into a feature/function battle in the first meeting is not a great way to start. Sure enough, our prospective partner started naming several companies asking us how we differed from them. If you start with a vision first and clearly talk about your view of the market in the future and how your product evolves from where it is today to a roadmap of the future, then it is easier to differentiate your company and bring the discussion to a higher level.

Tags: marketing - strategy

eCENTER: Please cross your fingers for us :-)

My dear readers, as you were more than 81'000 (unique visitors) last months to access/read my blog, which means, on average about 2'500 visitors per day, I would like to ask you to cross your fingers for us. Just in case ;-)

Our infrastructure (dev, pre-prod, prod) is now 5 years old (!) and we are completely at the limit of its capability... Time to change ;-) And what for a change!!

We are finalizing this week-end the following migration:

• from HP L2000 (RISC Processor, 32 bits, 440MHz) to HP DL385/DL585 (AMD Opteron processor, 64 bits, 2.6GHz)


• from HP-UX v11 to SLES 9 (64 bits)


• from Apache v1 to Apache v2.0.49


• from Tomcat v3 to Tomcat v5.0.19


• from JDK v1.4 to JDK v1.5 (64 bits)


• from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g (64 bits)


• from a Frankfurt - Germany location to a Basle - Switzerland one


• with a two datacenters concept (as Business Recovery Service)


• and about 650GB to transfer (net)

The "old" infrastructure is now stopped, we are transferring and importing the data on the new Linux infrastructure. On Sunday, System Acceptance Test for all the applications and Go/No go for the launch of the new environment.

So, again, if 2'500 people cross their fingers on Saturday and 2'500 people on Sunday, this should *help*.

Thanks in advance!

Tags: ecenter solutions