I am now going to go on a rant about Twitter clients – mobile Twitter clients in particular (though some desktop clients are rant-worthy as well).  I am going to do this because I can’t understand why they are such a pain in the ass and work so badly, when they could so easily work so well.

Okay, first, don’t get me wrong.  I really like Twitter.  (If you want, you can follow me, I’m @nickhodges --  no surprise in that handle, eh?)  I like it because it’s a great place to keep up on news, find interesting articles, read funny stuff, and to post your thoughts in short, pithy statements of 140 characters or less.  It’s also a great time killer.  If you are waiting at the doctors office, it’s a much better way to pass the wait than looking at a two and a half year old copy of People Magazine.  It’s interesting, fun, never the same thing twice, and frankly, I’m a little addicted.  I do almost all of my twitter reading on my phone or on my wonderful Amazon Kindle . 

But yet reading Twitter on my mobile devices drives. me. crazy.  When it comes to mobile Twitter clients, I’m not addicted -- I’m inflamed with a rage that burns like the heat of a thousand suns.

I’ve tried just about every one out there. They all drive me insane.  And so here is  my rant:

• A twitter client should never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, at any time, ever, ever, EVER move my “cursor”.  EVER. And by “cursor” I mean my location in my Twitter stream.  I determine where my cursor goes, not you, you blasted twitter client that thinks you can just show me whatever you want when you want to.  If I am reading Twitter on my phone, leave off on a funny Pauly Peligroso post, go away to another app, and then I come back, you darn well better have my twitter client looking right at that same stinking Pauly Peligroso post when I come back.  I don’t care if I’ve been gone for five minutes, five hours or five years, you flipping better have your cursor right there where I Ieft it. Not anywhere else.  Where. I. left. it.  Leave a gap if you have to. I don’t care, just leave it. Don’t try to do me a favor and “catch me up”.  If I need catching up, I’ll get myself caught up. Give me an option to get caught up, fine.  But for the love of Adam Sandler, DON’T MOVE MY POSITION IN MY TWITTER STREAM.   Ever,  ever, ever, never, ever, ever. 
• Second, if you tell me that there are “143 new tweets”, and I say “Great, some new tweets”, put me at the freaking START of the 143 new tweets, not at the current time!!!!   Why in the name of sweet baby Dick Van Dyke would I ever, ever, ever what to start at the most recent tweet out of those 143 new tweets? Why would you tell me that there are 143 new tweets and then start me out at the point where there are zero new tweets? Why do I open up the fracking client and see some tweet from three seconds ago, when I want to read the 143 new tweets?  Why do I have to manually scroll down and try to figure out where the new tweets start?  What is that, some kind of sick, twisted joke?  Really?  I have to scroll?  Seriously?   I mean this is basically a variation of the “Never move my cursor spot”, but come on, this is ridiculous.
• Third – stop trying to shorten my shortened URL’s.  I’m smart – I can shorten my URL’s myself.  It’s nice you want to do that for me, but at least let me opt out of it.  Nothing says “wasted time and resources” as a link that is a Twitter shortened version of a bit.ly link that started out as a tinyurl.com link.  I mean, come on, I can keep my twitter posts under 140 characters myself.  I don’t want your help.  I don’t need your help.  Stop it.

Bottom line: Mobile twitter clients stink and they make me want to bash public monuments with a sledgehammer. (I’d never do that, really, but I want to when I go back from checking my mail and the stupid TweetCaster moves me to  a tweet that was posted 23 seconds ago.)

Phew, okay, I feel better now.

I have an Android phone – a Samsung Nexus S 4G which I love. It’s a "pure Google” phone in that it’s sponsored by Google and doesn’t have any of the vendor specific stuff on it that some of the carriers like to include.  And as you know, I just bought an Amazon Kindle which has a version of Android on it.  I’m still saving up for a full-fledged, 10 inch Android tablet.  I really like Android. 

And I have no interest at all in the iPhone, the iPad, and their accompanying operating system, iOS.

So I thought I’d explain why.  There are a number of reasons why I like Android and generally avoid Apple.  Here they are:

First, I really like that Android has the notion of a desktop similar to Windows.  On it you can place all kinds of things called “widgets’ – clocks, weather updates, twitter feeds, Facebook timelines, and shortcuts.   They are all available instantly on the pages of your desktop.  You can put almost anything you want on your multiple pages of the desktop.  I have one touch access to turning on and off things like WiFi and sound.  I can turn on the “Flashlight” (the camera flash) with a single touch of my desktop.  I can read news headlines just by swiping to my “news page”.  That’s a lot of power without having to hunt for and find a specific app.  The desktop on iOS (if you can call it that) is nothing but a listing of the applications on the device.  That’s fine as far as it goes, but the Android desktop provides a lot of very valuable and cool functionality.  I find that very useful.

Not only does Android provide the notion of a desktop with Widgets, it allows you to configure almost any aspect of the system.  You can choose from any number of configurable, intelligent keyboards that make typing easier.  You can pick from an array of desktop launchers that work in ways you might prefer.  You can choose launchers for efficiency, for visual appeal, or for configurability.  Or for all three.     You can even customize the lock screen if you want.  Again, this is really cool and I prefer it over the limited system that iOS provides. In the end, you have complete control over the appearance and functionality of your device – something I really value.

And the reason that Android provides so much flexibility and power to the user is that the OS is open source.  Developers can see how the OS works and build apps, launchers, and widgets accordingly.  And of course, they can even modify the operating system itself.  In addition to the Android Open Source Project, there are a number of alternative operating systems.  The most popular are CyanogenMod and MiUi.  Some handset vendors lock down their bootloaders, but most are wising up and allowing users to easy root their phones and modify them in ways of their choosing.  The stock systems customers buy are plenty powerful, but if one is so inclined, one can completely control what runs on the phone.  Sure you can jailbreak your iOS devices, but you are still stuck with the single, closed operating system.  Android users have no such restrictions.

Since the system is open, there are multiple ways to get applications.  Android users can get apps from the Google Android Market, from the Amazon AppStore, and other places like AppBrain, and they are perfectly free to “sideload” applications from any source if they so choose.  There is no single, controlled point of entry for applications.  That’s cool. And hey, maybe you don’t like Flash, but at least you can run it on an Android device if you want to. And oh yeah, you don’t have to pay for the privilege of distributing your apps, nor do you have to get “approval” from the AppStore gods.

And of course, Android customers have a wide choice of hardware as well as software.  The iPhone and the iPad hardware is cool, and yeah, you can have any choice of hardware you like -- as long as it is the hardware Apple provides.  Android phones and tablets come in many sizes, colors, and flavors.  Most come with removable and configurable storage. They come from different vendors and carriers. (iPhone initially launched with one (1!) choice of carriers, slowly moved to two, and now begrudgingly added a third.) They progress and advance more quickly.  Each vendor competes to out do the other in providing features and power.  You can already buy quad-core Android tablets.  

Now let me be clear:  If you like Apple, love Apple, or even are an “Apple Fanboi”, that’s fine with me.  Knock yourself out.  You won’t get any argument from me.  We all have our preferences, and if you prefer Apple over PC’s and Android, that’s great.  I’m not going to get into a flame war over “My OS is better than your OS”.  I’ve been there, done that, and frankly, I’ve grown out of it.  I happily admit that I was an immature fool to engage in those kinds of discussions.  You like Apple?  Awesome.  I don’t myself, but live and let live, eh?    I know it is too much to hope that the comments won’t prove to be contentious, but I myself am not going to get into a debate.  I’m just expressing my opinions here, and am 100% fine if you disagree 100% with me.

And easily one of the coolest things about Android is the whole Google eco-sphere and cloud.  Android is completely integrated with all the Google apps that we know and love:  Gmail, Maps, Docs, Reader, Tasks,  Google+, Google Music, everything.  A single sign-on brings it all together on your phone, on your tablet, and on your desktop computer.  There basically isn’t a Google App that isn’t completely integrated with Android.  And because the Google cloud is completely open, third-parties can easily integrate into it and use its functionality to enhance what Google provides. For instance, gReader is a third-party app that leverages Google Reader to provide a better RSS experience on Android.  Integrating with what Google provides is easily one of the most powerful and valuable features of Android.  Okay, call me a Google FanBoi, but there is a lot of cool power there that I really like and  use.

But at a more basic level, one of the more fundamental reasons I prefer Android is that, well, it’s not made by Apple.  I do not – and never really have – liked the way Apple does things.  I don’t like how they strictly and ruthlessly control their eco-systems.  I don’t like the way that they treat developers.  I don’t like how they use lawsuits to try to stifle competition  (I thought the “look and feel” wars were over, but I guess not).  I’m perfectly happy to admit that Apple makes wonderful hardware and has blazed some important trails in many ways.  That’s all well and good – I just prefer not to do business with them.  Moreover – and I agree that this is harder to qualify --  I’ve never really like the “hipster, holier than thou” attitude that seems to emanate from the Apple community.  I know it’s totally my problem, but as far as I’m concerned,  the smuggest place on the planet is the center of an Apple store. And I don’t do smug.  I literally shake my head and snigger constantly when I take my daughter there (She has a Mac – despite my best efforts to persuade her otherwise...).   I know that’s not really rational, but that’s just how I feel.

So in summary, I like Android because it really doesn’t lock you in to anything.  It doesn’t lock you into hardware, application sources, carriers, or operating systems.  Just as DOS/Windows was more open flexible, and easy to develop for back in the early days of personal computing, so is Android currently the open, flexible, easy to develop for platform on portable devices.  I totally get that openness has it’s price – but I preferred the openness then, and I still prefer it today.

Last week I became the proud owner of a Kindle Fire.  I know that in my last post I spoke a few unkind words about Kindles, and so I wanted to write about why I decided to get a Kindle after all.

Here at our house, we are in Debt Assassin mode, so I have very little leeway for discretionary purchases like a tablet.  I get a monthly allowance to spend on anything I want, so if I want a new tablet, I have to save up.   I decided that I wanted a tablet earlier in the year, and I originally set my eyes on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 which at the time was the Android tablet to get.  (I have a blog post coming up about why I prefer Android over iOS…)  It is still a very nice dual-core tablet, but as things go in the tech business – and since it took me a while to save up my pennies – technology marches ever forward and I soon switched to wanting the more powerful and more feature-rich ASUS Transformer Prime. 

The Transformer Prime is a really, really sweet tablet.  It’s a quad-core machine using the Tegra-3 chip, with an amazing 1280x800, ten finger multi-touch screen.  It  has a flexible, add-on keyboard that effectively turns it into a notebook computer.  It even had a fifth core which would do minor tasks like check email and other background tasks while the screen is asleep.  It was priced right at that sweet spot of $499.  Interest was very, very high in this device, and all the Android blogs and news sites were abuzz with anticipation. 

It was supposed to be available just before Christmas, but pre-ordering the device was troublesome.  Amazon, which has a very good policy of not taking pre-orders unless it is sure it can deliver them, stop taking pre-orders in late November.  Delivery dates for other vendors were unclear.  When Amazon did start taking orders again before Christmas, they listed fulfillment as 5-7 weeks out.  Clearly ASUS had that good problem you don’t want to have – demand far outstripping their ability to deliver on that demand.  As a result, I held off on placing my order. 

But then a few hiccups began to occur.  I suspect that because it was the first tablet to use the Tegra-3 Quad-core chip, they had some problems with the product.  While initial quick-looks were very encouraging, reports started to surface of problems with wireless receptivity and the GPS.  Apparently the actual physical design of the case was causing reception problems.  These reports didn’t seem to dim interest in the device, however, as it’s still hard to get a hold of one, and as of this writing, Amazon itself isn’t taking orders, instead is is fulfilling the order via a reseller – who currently is jacking up the prices to over $600.  FInally, though it was short lived and ASUS pretty quickly backed down, word came out that ASUS had locked the bootloader for the Transformer Prime. 

Okay, so given all that, I decided to hold off and see what would happen.  ASUS was actually pretty good about acknowledging and fixing the problems, but I decided to defer my gratification (I was pretty jacked up for getting a tablet, and it was hard to wait…..) and let things shake out.  But then again, I wanted a tablet now.  And of course, as I’m holding off, Google announces their “Google Tablet” and that catches my eye, because I have a Nexus S phone and I’m a big fan of the whole “pure Google” concept. However, that isn’t coming out until the fall.   What to do?

Well, I took the advice of one of my co-workers and decided to get the Kindle.  His advice was this:  Tablets actually can have an impact on your life – you don’t know how it will fit or what role it will play. $500 is a lot to spend to find out, so get the Kindle at $200, find out how tablets work for you, and then save up for the Google tablet or whatever tablet is the “must have” tablet to get when I’m ready to buy.  Plus, the Kindle will likely hold it’s value, and I’ll be able to easily sell it when I decide to make the move.  In a sense, the Kindle is a “Starter Tablet” for me, and a pretty inexpensive one at that. 

And so far, I really like my decision.  I still have a pretty good chunk of change in my “saved up allowance” envelope (no sense putting it in the bank with interest rates hovering a hairs-breath of 0.00%….), and I can save for my next tablet.  I’m finding that I like the Kindle a lot (I’ll write about that in a future blog post) and the notion of “finding out how I work with a tablet” is definitely playing out.  I can now keep an eye on the market, and make a good decision on a good, quad-core tablet when the time comes.   Overall, it was outstanding advice, and I’m really happy with how things are working out.

Bookstores are Cool

I love bookstores.  A lot of people love bookstores.  I love hanging around in a bookstore and seeing what is new, what is popular, and what is available.  I love seeing the cool games and other non-book stuff they have.   I love how most bookstores now have wireless, a café, and plenty of large cozy chairs to sit in if you want a closer look at a book. Bookstores are very cool, and I like having a good one nearby.

There are more than just superficial reasons to like bookstores.  First, they provide instant gratification.  If you want a book, you can get it immediately.  You can hold it in your hand and walk out of the store with it.  Another nice feature is the ability to browse – you can wander around, look around, and perhaps find a title that you didn’t know you wanted.  In addition, the ambience of a good bookstore is appealing and valuable as well.   The addition of café’s, music, and other products have also made bookstores much more appealing.  Clearly there is demand in the marketplace for bookstores, since whenever I go to one, there are always people there. 

Bookstores are in Trouble

But bookstores clearly are struggling.  Big player Borders recently went out of business (Anyone else notice where http://www.borders.com goes?)  Many smaller, independent vendors have been driven out of the market as well , though some of superior quality to survive (For instance, my sister loves Wild Rumpus, near her home, and they seem to be doing very well).  Online retailing has affected brick and mortar sales.  In addition, used book stores seem to have grown as well, putting market pressure on retailers of new books.  The Books-4-Less store near my house is a pretty good source of reasonably priced books, and they have a very nice selection.  They also accept “trade ins” for store credit, so you can clean out your basement and get a few new books at the same time. 

But people shopping online in the comfort of their own homes at sites like Amazon can get a much wider selection, recommendations, reviews, and all kinds of information available.  Online retailers can offer reviews, an almost infinite range of other books to “browse”, recommendations, and more.    If you know what book you want to get and aren’t feeling an urgent need to have it at this exact moment, dialing it up on Amazon’s site and ordering it with (often free) super-saver shipping can be a great time saver.  Plus, there’s non tax, and you save the gas and time of a trip.  I don’t have specific numbers, but I’m guessing that the ease of buying books online has hurt bookstore sales more than anything else.  For instance, books are always a popular gift, and the convenience of Amazon’s gift giving capabilities make giving a book as a gift vastly more convenient.  Amazon gets the book, wraps it in gift paper, and takes it to the post office for you.  Very convenient.  I’m guessing that I’m not telling you people something that you haven’t already figured out yourselves -- you are taking advantage of them in increasing numbers.

And if that isnt’ bad enough, adding to the online competition for bookstores are devices like the Amazon Kindle and other similar electronic reading devices.  Sales of Kindles and Nooks continue at a brisk pace, and every one of those represents countless book purchases that won’t be made in a bookstore.  Digital books don’t need a bookstore at all (Can you even have a bookstore of digital books?)  I know people that have Kindles who have bought many books, but haven’t held a new book in their hand in a long time – a fact good for Amazon, but not good for the brick-and-mortar retailers.  Why  even go to a bookstore?  Your friend at the local Starbucks can recommend a book and you can be reading it in just a couple of minutes – not something the owners of Borders were happy to realize. 

The Kindle is cool, but there are a few things I don’t like about it.  The top one is there isn’t any easy way to “peek ahead”.  Surely you do this – you are lying in bed reading, and you start feeling tired.  Do you just quit now, or is there a natural breaking point coming soon – a chapter ending, a sub-chapter break?  You can’t do that easily with a Kindle.  Second, (and this is why Amazon is so up on it), you pretty much have to pay for everything you want to read.  You can’t easily loan books to friends (the time limit is no fun – what to do if you have two chapters left when the time runs out?) Borrowing books from the Library has the same problem.  Amazon Prime does offer a lending service, but again, you pay for it. (See why Amazon likes the Kindle? )  There’s a lot to like about Kindle’s, but there are a few things not to like as well.

The Current Model Costs A Lot

One of the largest struggles of the average bookstore – and the broader book industry – is costs.  The current business model is staggeringly inefficient.  Huge boxes of books – most often more books than will ever sell – are printed at a central location, loaded onto trucks and shipped to bookstores all around the country.  Those boxes are opened, and books put out on the shelves.  The rest are stored somewhere at the bookstore “in the back”.  After a while, a certain percentage – hopefully a high one, but not always – of the books are sold.  The rest are put into the “bargain bin” and sold at a discount.  Eventually, the remainders end up at those sad little bookstores at the mall or destroyed.  The costs of transporting books – they are heavy, as anyone who has moved house knows – is high.  The waste of printing books no one wants is high.  Trying to figure out the right number of books to go to the thousands of different locations – some books may be more popular in Topeka, KS than in New York City – is pretty difficult to predict.  It’s the common problem of centralize planning – who can know?

The bottom line is that the costs involved with the current bookselling/bookstore business model are simply too high.  It’s no wonder Borders went out of business – they were a day late and a dollar short with their eReader – and it’s a wonder that Barnes & Noble have kept their stores, too.

Emerging Technology

Despite the aggressive onslaught of online retailing and eReaders and very high costs, I still think there is a future – a pretty cool future -- for brick-and-mortar bookstores. However, they are going to  have to change a bit, and adapt to some new and emerging technologies.

That key emerging technology bookstores need to learn to leverage is on-demand printing.  On-demand printing is a relatively new technology, but one that can be a positive and powerful inflection point for bookstores.  On-demand printing is the ability to print a book – cover, contents, everything (even hardcovers) – immediately and on demand.  Think of it as a copy machine for books.  I’m not intimately familiar with the current technology, but I understand that it is getting to the point where a book from an on-demand printer is virtually indistinguishable from a “real” book.  Services like lulu.com and other retailers enable authors to publish any content completely unencumbered by the established publishing houses.  Because books are printed as ordered, they don’t care about volume. 

In addition, the margins on book sales are much better, and so authors can make more money – much more money – on each book sale.  Delphi authors like Marco Cantu and Bob Swart have leveraged these services to bring you high-quality content while making more money in the process.  Sweet for everyone.  On demand printing is clearly an technology that will require some adjustments to business plans throughout the bookselling business.

The Bookstore of the Future

In the future, I envision a bookstore working very similarly on the surface, but very differently behind the scenes.  Bookstores will become a retail outlet for on-demand printing. On the outside and to the casual observer, bookstores will appear to be much the same – books on shelves, cafés, calendars, music, videos, etc.  But a closer look will reveal some differences brought about by on demand printing. 

First, a bookstore will have the ability to print immediately any book.   The shelves will be full of books as now, but a customer will also be able to ask for, and get, any book in the publishing system.  This feature will help bookstores match the online retailers by allowing a book buyer to get almost anything they want.  The ability to print any book immediately will be a big feature that will enhance a bookstore’s market appeal. 

And not only will a customer be able to get any book they want, the bookstore could offer any number of customizations to a book.  Kids could get copies of the Twilight series with a selection of different covers of their favorite characters.  Readers could choose font type and size, and perhaps even different colors of paper.  Each feature could cost extra, increasing margins.  I can foresee computer kiosks at the store allowing users to pick features a la carte.   Heck, I can even foresee bookstore branded kiosks at grocery stores much like RedBox.

The second subtle change that will take place is that the books available on the shelves will consist of fewer duplicates.  Since the books are printed onsite, they don’t need to stock up on multiple copies, leaving room on the shelves for a wider variety.  This will improve the browsing experience.  And of course the store can keep the shelves fully stocked.  The point of sale system would record each sale, and a book is sold, a replacement can be immediately and automatically printed. Efficient printing and stocking would mean that the shelves would be full, and a wider variety of books would be available on the shelves almost constantly. 

And of course, the printing of books right in the store means no more distribution costs – no more centralized printing with the subsequent distribution inefficiencies. New books will be distributed electronically of course.  Book stores will still need paper, glue, ink, toner, etc., but t’s much easier and less costly to distribute supplies than it is boxes of specific books.  And the waste of printing books that never get sold will be reduced because inventory will be wider and flatter with little over-stocking.

How it Will Happen

The transition to this new model will be interesting.  I don’t think that you’ll see it come from existing chains like Barnes & Noble.  Generally, a radical, disruptive change like this needs a fresh, upstart business to challenge the existing firms.  I also suspect that existing chains are too tightly tied to the existing publishing houses to allow them to be this flexible.  And I’m pretty sure that the existing publishing houses will not embrace this new model. The music industry has been glacial in accepting and understanding the changes brought by digital music, and I suspect that the book publishing industry will have a similar reaction. 

However, I think it will eventually happen.  The current bookstore model is clearly in trouble – even Barnes & Noble is having trouble in the marketplace despite the lost of major competitor Borders.  But in the end, the demand for the things that bookstores offer is strong.  The industry will be fine once they figure out how to leverage the advantages that on-demand printing offers.

Wherein I discuss how to do things that you should be doing and how not to do things that you shouldn’t be doing….

Sometimes you tweet something and it makes sense to you, but then you realize that it also kind of begs for more discussion. 

For instance: “Things move so quickly that doing the *one* most important thing means it's less likely that you'll do the wrong things in the long run.” 

I thought that a little more explanation would be in order.  Let’s say you have ten cool features on your “Things Customers are Screaming For” list.  There are two basic approaches you can take to getting them done: You can do them in series or in parallel.  If you do them in parallel, you’ll get them all done sooner, but you may not get them done as thoroughly.  If you do them in series, it will take you longer to do them all, but you’ll likely get each one done more thoroughly.

However, doing them in series – that is, sequentially doing only the most important remaining item – has an added benefit:  It can help you not do things that you shouldn’t do.  You may have ten things on your “We need to get these done right away”, but as time passes, some of those things may prove to be not needed, overtaken by events, or just plain dumb ideas.  Doing things in parallel may mean that you get everything done sooner, but it also means that you might do something that proves to be a waste of time later on.

For example, if you have a team of five folks, and you have five ideas that take six man months each, you might give each person one idea to work on, and then six months later, you have all five ideas done. Great!  But uh oh! -- as it turns out, over the course of those six months, things changed and events transpired in such a way that two of the ideas weren’t really good ideas after all, and at the end of the six months you regret ever starting on them.  So in the end, you have three things done that needed doing, but have wasted your time on two ideas that you should have left undone.  Furthermore, since you only had one person working on each idea, you may not get a fully fleshed out solution, but instead, one that may have missing features or is not complete in some way.

But consider what happens if you work on them in series: say that instead of starting in all at once on the entire list,  you pick the single most important of the ideas on the list.  You focus your whole team on doing that one idea.  You will likely be able to get it done somewhat sooner, say in one or two months instead of the six months in our example. (Five team members working on a six man-month project will likely take a bit longer because of transaction costs.)  In addition, you will get a “five-headed” solution instead of a “one-headed” one, and thus the solution would likely be more complete, fleshed out, and feature rich.  In other words, you might very well end up doing one thing properly and thoroughly instead of doing five things not so completely. 

The added benefit comes when, after doing the most important project, you realize that one of the ideas you had originally thought was awesome isn’t really that awesome, and that you can take it off the list and not waste time on it. You might add another item to the list, or another item that was on the list suddenly becomes vastly more important than it was at the start of the first project.  Instead, you can repeat the process and start working on the next most important thing.  You end up with a very nice implementation of each project you do undertake, and you don’t do the projects that shouldn’t be done.

In a rapidly changing technical environment, that which looks like a no brainer in January might be old news by July.  Obviously you want to avoid working on that project.  A practical example might be that you are a software tools vendor, and people are pressing you to do, say, a development tool for Windows Mobile 6.  You could choose to add staff and get that request done sooner, or you could stay the course and do more important things, only to discover with massive relief that you didn’t do Windows Mobile 6 at all when Windows Mobile 6 becomes a legacy technology.  (Sound familiar? ) 

Now, I’ll grant that if you follow this plan, you’ll end up with fewer features in the long run.   But you’ll also end up with more complete features with less wasted effort.  You won’t have spent time on things you ultimately should not have.  It might take a little longer to get any particular feature to market, but in the above example, you’ll end up with three really solid features and no time spent working on things that you should not have worked on at all instead of five half-baked features, two of which were a waste of time.

Repeat this process enough, and it becomes much more likely that you will end up with a product that has the right – and fully rendered -- feature set.  In many ways, inefficiencies are the result of choosing to do the wrong thing.  If you keep your choices finely grained – that is, always put your efforts only into the things that are obviously the very most important thing to do do right now – you will end up doing the right thing every time, even if there is slightly less of it. 

It’s often been said that knowing what you should do is easy; it’s knowing what you shouldn’t do that’s hard.  If you repeatedly focus on and complete the one single thing you absolutely should do and do it well, it will be more readily clear what those things are you should not do. So, I guess ultimately, you have to choose: More features done less thoroughly with time spent on things that turn out to be a waste, or fewer, more complete features with fewer projects that you shouldn’t have done.

Before I start, I want to stress that I am not a lawyer.  I am not an accountant.  You’d be a total fool to base any business or legal decisions on anything I write here.  Consult a an attorney or a fully accredited CPA or some other person who truly knows what he’s talking about before deciding how to make any decisions whatsoever about anything having to do with money, the law, revenue, etc.  I don’t know anything, and if you listen to me, you are making a big mistake. 

Introduction

Developers and other people involved in the software business have heard a lot about “Sarbannes-Oxley” (SOX) and “revenue recognition” and how it effects what Embarcadero can and cannot do with respect to updates, upsells, promotions, and all kinds of issues surrounding selling and releasing Delphi.  SOX was a significant, game-changing piece of legislation here in the US, and it affects virtually every public company in the country.  It also affects private companies that might someday want to be a public company.  It affects software companies in particular, because software is not a physical good in reality, but “acts” like one in the marketplace. 

When I was at Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero, it took me a while to come to grips with what SOX meant and how it altered our business and what we wanted to do.  Frankly, I found it all very frustrating.  On the face of it, the rules and limitations seemed ridiculous. At first I complained bitterly about it.  It took a while, but finally I came to accept them and realize that SOX and the ensuing rules were the “field we had to play on”.  Finally, I think I actually gained enough insight into it that I was able to come to grips with the new rules and understand why things work the way they do.  As a result, I thought I’d share a bit of that with you fine people.

What is Revenue Recognition?

First, it might be obvious, but let’s be sure we know what the term “revenue recognition” means.  Revenue recognition is the process by which a business says “Yep, we actually earned that revenue”.  Note, it most decidedly does not mean “We got the cash”.  In an accrual accounting system – common to businesses of almost any size – the receipt of cash can actually go down as a liability. Think of taking an advanced payment for services: If you take half the money up front for a job, you have it in the bank, but you still owe the services. Revenue can’t be “recognized” until you do in fact deliver that good or service for the money you’ve received.  So if you are a software company, you can recognize revenue only when the software you sell is actually delivered. But software is a strange product in this regard, as we’ll see. As a result, The rules for  revenue recognition for software are somewhat cloudy and definitely untested in a court of law.

Why it Became an Issue

When it comes to software, one of the main roots of the revenue recognition rules stem from the (previously) common practice of "pumping the channel".  Near the end of the quarter, firms would "sell" lots of stuff to their channel partners.  For example, lets say that there was a software company called TrollWare.  Selling for a given business quarter started looking a little thin, so TrollWare would "sell" $1,000,000 of product to their favorite online/catalog retailer.  (And remember, this was actual, physical boxes back in the day.)  Then, they'd claim $1,000,000 of revenue on their books.  Wall Street, creditors, and anyone else interested in a company's revenue would think "Hmmm -- that's $1,000,000 in revenue more than we thought!  Buy TrollWare stock!” Obviously, this wasn’t a real sale, and could actually end up being a net cost because of the need to actually ship (and maybe even actually destroy) physical boxes of software.  This was a common practice throughout the industry, and many companies that we have all heard of did this.

Of course, most often, TrollWare would only really sell, say, $100,000 of all of that "shipped" software by the end of the month and have to buy back $900,000 of it at some point, but hey, revenue is revenue!  Clearly this is not a practice laced with clarity, openness, and integrity with respect to people looking at the viability of Trollware.

New, Tougher Rules

This kind of thing was one of many reasons that prompted passing of SOX.  The results of SOX are varied, but the results of interest to us software developers were new Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) rules for software companies that defined revenue as truly delivering something to the customer.  Now, for a hot dog company, it's pretty clear when a box of hot dogs has been fully manufactured and when that box has left the warehouse on the way to a consumer or a business, or whomever is the "end user" of those hot dogs.  For example, if you are a rake manufacturer and sell rakes to Home Depot, you can claim the revenue when the delivery truck leaves your loading dock heading to that big orange building.  Retailers of rakes like Home Depot can claim the revenue when the rake is scanned across the Point of Sale on its way to clear someone’s lawn.  In the first case, Home Depot is the "end user" and in the second case, the guy with the leaves on his lawn is.

But then the question becomes:  What does it mean to "deliver a completed software product to the end user"?  Well, that's tricky.  There are two things here, of course.  First, when is the product really “completely produced and manufactured”.  Is a beta good enough?  What if a promised feature isn’t quite finished? How about a feature that was promised but isn’t there at all? Second --  assuming that you can define the first item -- when is that completed software product actually delivered? Who *really* is the end user?  As it turns out, it’s not quite analogous to the rake manufacturer/Home Depot relationship described above.  Because software companies were actually fairly guilty of the dubious “channel pumping” practices described above, the rules about what constitutes “final delivery” of software are fairly restrictive, and certainly different than those dictating gardening tools.

There is a lot of accounting literature about this (I’m not thrilled about the fact that I've read a lot of it.  It’s not exactly scintillating).  For instance, do a Google search on “revenue recognition software licenses”  and start reading.   The rules are pretty complicated and hard to qualify exactly. And further complicating things, no software company has yet been brave enough to test these rules in court, so they are even murkier as companies work hard to stay well away from the borders of where the rules end and a call from the US Department of Justice starts. 

Thus, software revenue can only be recognized when said software is fully and completely delivered to the end user.  For a "normal" sale like most of us think of it, revenue can be recognized when the end user has the ability to install the software -- a license is delivered and the user installs it.  (For physical software, it's still the truck leaving the loading dock to the actual end user  and not merely the reseller). 

There's a catch, though:  It has to be the complete, finished package.  As mentioned above, revenue can only be recognized when a completed product is delivered.   If you deliver a "preview" of your product or even a feature of your product, this can imply a commitment to deliver something at a later date.  If you even implicitly promise that the purchase today will result in a delivery later, then that probably means you can't recognize revenue until that implicit promise is met.  Again, I say “probably” because this is turning out to be the common interpretation of the rules in a world where no one wants to test this in court.  This is a unique problem for software because no one normally buys a “preview lawn mower” with the promise of more functionality later.

An Example

So, for example: Troll Software delivers a Trollware 1.0 in mid-February.  Their spell checker isn't really quite ready, but they need to ship because their main competitor has already shipped a version with a spell checker. Or maybe the need to get some Q1 revenue to keep from not making any money and having to to massive layoffs is a driving factor in the decision.  So they ship the product with the label "Spell Checker!!! (Preview only)”.   Then, a week into April, they deliver their fully ready Spell Checker to all existing purchasers and update their downloadable ZIP file.

They sell $1,000,000 worth of Trollware by March 31, and think "Yay! We have $1,000,000 in revenue in Q1! Wall Street will love us!"

Oops, not really:  They actually have $0 of revenue in Q1 from Trollware.  That’s right:  $0 in revenue. All of those sales become Q2 revenue, because they didn't actually complete the delivery of any Trollware versions in Q1, but instead in Q2.(This brings about the interesting situation where a company can have $1,000,000 in the bank and $0 of revenue on 31 March for Q1).

Another example:  Say you are a Trollware subscriber, and sent them $1200 a year as part of your subscription, receiving updates, improvements, and new features during the term of the subscription.  Troll Software can only recognize $100 a month for the 12 month term of the subscription.  And consider this:  What iff Troll Software wanted to move exclusively to subscription model starting the first of the year?  They might have the same number of customers buying, but now their revenue for the first month would immediately be 1/12 of what it normally is, despite having a lot of money in the bank as noted above. 

Bug fixes to existing functionality is actually excluded from this -- this is why you normally don't see new features in bug fix updates.

The same might go for "Special offers to registered users".  Say they sell a bunch of Trollware in the first half of the year.  Starting July 1, they say "Free Grammar Checker to anyone that buys Trollware 1.0!" and in the small print it says "... and if you already have Trollware 1.0, you can have the Grammar Checker, too".

Well, now, if this is the case, have you actually delivered the software to the buyers who purchased before the special offer?

That's why I said "might".  As I understand it, this particular issue isn't exactly clear and hasn't been tested in court as far as I know.  And of course, no one wants to be the test case for the SEC or the Department of Justice.  So in the end, it seems that no one is willing to risk such a deal.

Revenue is King

And of course revenue is everything in business and finance, because it represents the value that you have actually delivered to customers.  Revenue is the only real way to measure the accomplishment of a company.  And that's fair if you think about it -- that is where Enron is a great example.  They weren't actually delivering anything to end customers, but still racking up revenues like crazy.  So in the end, measuring accurately what is really, no kidding delivered to end users is what finance people are interested in knowing.

Sarbannes-Oxley was sort of the root of this.  One of its main features was to actually hold the corporate officers of public companies criminally liable for their GAAP compliance.  The threat of prison time has a tendency to focus the senses.  As a side result of SOX, the definition of revenue recognition – and more importantly the desire to strictly follow that definition -- really became an issue, and the need to know a companies real revenue was one of the main fallouts.  CEO’s wanted to be 100% sure that they were recognizing revenue correctly because, well, they don’t want to go to jail.  Now, there is a lot not to like in SOX, and I personally would like to see it repealed, but the end result being that software company CEOs became far more focused on correctly recognizing software revenue.  It's still a bit unclear, and the software industry is still very wary of all of it, because it is untested in court, and as I said, no one wants to draw the attention of the US Government on the matter. 

In the end…

Every public company that produces or sells software has to follow the rules set up by SOX.   Any business that wants to get a loan from a bank or otherwise interact in the general community of businesses needs to follow GAAP.  It's not always  fun, but that is the way it works.  These revenue recognition rules can result in companies having to do some strange things and, more importantly, not being able to do things that they might want to do and which might even make good sense.  But in the end, all organizations in the software business have to follow these rules. 

However, in the end, I have no problem with their being clear, concise rules about what "revenue" really means.  Really, I think it is hard to disagree.  Revenue is a measure of actual, delivered value, and thus a measure of the real value provided by a corporation.  That's something that is really good to know.

More content from my old Embarcadero Blog.  I think this is even more true than it was when I wrote it a few years ago, especially with the rise of the Kindle and Tablets.  Those new devices are changing publishing, but I still think that what I wrote here is germane.

I’ve blogged about this before — the programming book industry continues to fascinate me. Jeff Atwood comments this week on it, talking about how "The Internet has rendered programming books obsolete."  Lately, there has been a resurgence of Delphi books, lead by Marco Cantu and others, but these guys are not using traditional book publishing channels.  Instead, they are taking advantage of the  budding "on demand publishing" industry, most notably on lulu.com.   I know that I first do a Google search if I have a programming issue, and if I want to learn to do something new, I tend look first to the Internet rather than for a book.  But that doesn’t mean that books aren’t valuable — they are.

I still buy programming books, but I find that I don’t buy the books that "teach you to program <insert language name> in <insert ever shrinking period of time>." Instead, like Jeff Atwood, I tend to buy books about the practice of software development — my latest is Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass.  This is a cool book. Easy to read, and full of terrific nuggets of wisdom.  Probably my all time favorite is The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.  Atwood makes a great, great point when he says, "If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books."   I think he’s dead on about that.  (I’m happy to note that the two books I mentioned above are in his list of top five programming books. I need to get Peopleware and Don't Make Me Think .)

I have been involved with the publishing of a few books done in the "old-school" way, and I dare say it is really, really inefficient.  Really inefficient.  Really, really inefficient.  There were editors and more editors and them some other editors.  And they don’t know one thing about programming.  (I remember a book in the early days of Delphi where an editor decided that the word "Pascal" should be replaced with "Delphi" everywhere.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  In any event, it wasn’t pretty.)  You have to submit your work to them in a special MS Word template, and then they comment (generally very ignorantly), and then you do a huge back and forth with them.  Then of course, once the book fiiiinally gets past that treacherous gauntlet, they print up boxes and boxes and boxes of them, ship them all around the country, put them on shelves, sell a few, and eventually box the remainders up again and send them back to the publisher.  They pay the author a very small royalty relative to the book price. This whole thing simply does not make sense to me.

Marco Cantu was here last week — and he graciously gave me a signed copy of his new "Essential Pascal".  This book was printed on demand by Lulu, and is a nicely made and bound as any book I have.  Marco has been very pleased with the way his Lulu publishing as gone.  Julian Bucknall has said the same thing about his The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures.  There is a nice collection of Delphi books on Lulu, including a number of them from Dr. Bob as well. (Ray Konopka, call your agent!)

On demand publishing is clearly the future.   It’s a classic case of cutting out the middle man.  A guy like Marco makes a lot more money per book sale, so he doesn’t have to sell as many books to make it worth his while.  This enables authors to publish books of smaller and tighter scopes — that is, books that the traditional publishing industry wouldn’t touch in a million years.  This is good for authors — they make money where they wouldn’t have been able to previously.

It is also good for customers — they get books that they want that would never have been published under the previous model.  Prices are lower, too, because with the overhead gone, authors can charge less and still make more.  It’s simply a vastly superior business model.  And the cool thing is that anyone can publish almost any book at all, and sell it to anyone.  You could, quite literally, take that paper you wrote for a conference a while back, work it up a bit, and be selling online in a week.  I don’t know why I haven’t done it.

Why haven’t you? 

Another “reprint” from my Embarcadero blog.  Funny thing is, I was thinking of writing this exact blog post yesterday.  Right now, I’m doing something that would have seemed crazy ten years ago:  I’m listening to a wonderful personalized radio station on Pandora through my television via my Blu-Ray player.  I can honestly say that paying for Pandora was some of the best money I’ve ever spent.

I’m a huge fan of Pandora.  If you haven’t discovered it yet, Pandora is a music streaming service that has a terrific knack for playing music that you like.  You can create stations simply be telling them one of your favorite artists, and then they start playing music from that artist, and then music similar to that artist, based on the input of other users. As they choose different songs for you, you can give them the thumbs up or the thumbs down, and the  I have a great station based on the GooGooDolls, and something like 98% of the songs they play on that station I like.  After a little tuning, I only very rarely give the thumbs down to a song they play for me.

The service is free, and I will occasionally try to click on some of their ads in support of the service.  But maybe the best thing is the number of new artists that I’ve discovered.  If not for Pandora, I’d have never heard of Colby Caillat or Sara Bareilles or Matt Nathanson.  And because of Pandora, I’ve purchased many new CD’s that I otherwise would not have.  The same thing happened to Julian Bucknall when he discovered Pandora.

Now, given the above, you’d think that the music industry would be delighted with Pandora.  Sadly, the opposite is true.  They are putting the thumbscrews to Pandora.  Pandora is still on the air — I’m listening right now — and hopefully that will continue.  I’m not familiar with all the details — I gather that they may be working this out so Pandora and other broadcasters can stay "on the air".  I’m all for artists and the record companies getting paid, but it seems to me that this is another example of an "old economy" business not realizing how things work and how they can benefit from the "new economy".

• “ As with any other form of writing, there is a skill to writing good comments. Much of the skill is in knowing when not to write them”. “Comments should say something code does not and cannot say.”
• Rosetta code is a pretty cool project – it proposes common programming tasks and asks for solutions in as many different languages as people are willing to support.  There seems to be quite a few – but not enough – Delphi solutions there.  It’s a wiki, so let’s see if we can't flesh out every task on the site with a Delphi solution. 
• Another opportunity to get me free cloud disk space!  SpiderOak is a similar yet more secure service to DropBox.  Sign up for 2GB free!
• I’m saddened to see that Mike Rozlog is leaving Embarcadero.  Mike was my able successor as the Product Manager when I moved to manage the R&D team.  I know that Mike had recently moved to Sales (The Product Manager job has been open for a while….) – perhaps that wasn’t working out for him.  I have a lot of respect for Mike, and he’s a Championship Caliber Good Guy™, and so I wish him well.
• There are now more than 10,000 questions on StackOverflow.com with the tag ‘Delphi’.  The number of questions there appear to be accelerating.  There’s a strong cadre of folks that answer questions there routinely, with many others chipping in less frequently.  I find answers to a wide variety of questions using StackOverflow – I believe it is the best place to get an answer to your Delphi questions.  The Embarcadero newsgroups are still a good resource, but StackOverflow is the place that pops up the most when using Google.   
• Eric Sink has finally written a book on Version Control.   I’ve been a fan of Eric’s writing for a long time.  He has a great blog and I’ve long admired the way he runs his company. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and talking with him a couple of times.  His knowledge of how version control works is vast – mainly from owning a company that sells such a best – SourceGear.  I’ve been working through Eric’s book, and it is highly recommended.

There are a bunch of things that I’d like to see Embarcadero do.  I’ve listed and discussed some of them below.  I’ll probably think of more later.    They are in no particular order, and they are not grouped in any particular way.  They are a bit random, and range from business decisions to minor technological decisions. Where it makes sense, I’ve linked the titles to the entries on http://delphi.uservoice.com/ so that you can vote for the items if you see fit.

I’d like to see Embarcadero:

1. Provide an Enterprise-level MVC web framework for Delphi.  This almost seems like a no brainer to me. Ruby on Rails has had a profound impact on web development and development in general.   In the .Net world, MVC has become the leading ASP.NET development method,winning over hearts and minds from WinForms.  The general idea of MVC is becoming the norm for much of the development world – separate those concerns!. Delphi’s new RTTI capabilities would actually make this kind of framework very, very possible and very, very cool.  And Delphi already has a very powerful and capable web infrastructure to build on:  good, old, and venerable WebBroker.  There are even existing frameworks out there that could be leveraged, including the G Framework.   There is a business opportunity here for Embarcadero, if not for an enterprising third-party Delphi developer.  A native, ISAPI based MVC framework in Delphi?  That would be very, very sweet.
2. Stop trying to do other stuff and invest in Delphi.  This one has been one of my huge frustrations over the years.  Delphi is a profitable product, but no matter who owns or runs the show,  the profits always seem to get skimmed off to fund other “next big thing” projects of, well, questionable benefit at best.   Remember “SDO” taking the market by storm? Yeah, me neither. AppWave seems to be interesting and have a lot going for it, but I personally would rather have seen that effort invested back into Delphi.  I hate to think about where Delphi might be today if it hadn’t been used to fund other projects and instead been allowed to use it’s profits for it’s own development.  Delphi could use a year or two of un-distracted attention from its owner. 
3. Create a Javascript/HTML development tool.  I’ve always said “As assembler is to the Intel chip, so Javascript is to the browser”.  James Governor has it right:  “Learning Javascript used to mean you weren't a "serious software developer". Today, not learning Javascript means the same thing.”  A powerful, feature rich RAD development tool for Javascript and JQuery would be really cool and a great new product for Embarcadero.  Maybe RADPHP could be steered in that direction?
4. Make Dependency Injection part of the RTL: If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a big believer in Dependency Injection.  So much so, that I think that if you aren’t doing Dependency Injection, then you are doing it wrong.  Incorporating a DI Container into the Delphi RTL would be very cool.  Again, Generics, anonymous methods, and the new RTTI makes is very easy and powerful, and there are open source projects to leverage and build on (like my favorite, Delphi Spring).
5. Do one thing at a time and do it really well:  This is the one that I wish they would do the most:  Take the product forward one step at a time. For instance, the next release should have as it’s main focus 64-bit Delphi and only 64-bit Delphi. That’s it.  Other improvements can be made, of course, but clearly that should be the “big one”, and it should be the only “big one”.  Don’t try to do two or three “big ones” in a single release. Make each release focused on a big, single step forward, executed thoroughly and solidly.  The product will be fine as long as it shows steady, sustained improvement.  Many large improvements executed all at once is not what the market wants.  Focus and deliberately move forward.

That’s all for now – I’ll probably have more as I think of them, but that ought to be food for thought for while

I love open source code.  I love the notion of sharing and working together for the betterment of a community. I love the free stuff that I can use because of the generosity of open source developers. 

Open source development often can be bogged down by licensing decisions.  I don’t know how many bits have been spilled arguing over the exact meaning the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL), or whether the GNU Public License (GPL) is one step away from a socialist worker’s paradise or not, but surely it’s a lot of bits. 

Well, I’m going to spill a few more.

I totally get the GPL – I respect it, and I laud the folks that do work on GPL-based projects.  They are really giving away for free (as in speech) their work to others.  Linux exists because of the GPL. I get why the license exists. I understand the whole “Free Beer/Free Speech” thing.   Some amazing, awesome things exist because of the GPL.  It’s all good.

However…..

The GPL is completely incompatible with commercial software.  Totally, utterly, and completely incompatible.  If you use GPL source code in your commercial application, you are obligated to release your entire application as a GPL Open Source project.  Everything.  Obviously, if you sell your software, you very likely don’t want to do that.  (I recognize that there are folks that will, and more power to them…..).

Now, Delphi is a development tool used by a whole lot of businesses – businesses that are likely not to want to make their source code available under the GPL.  And so open source projects that are aimed at Delphi developers make a very limiting decision if they release their code under the GPL.  A Delphi library of code with the GPL attached to it will severely limit the number of Delphi  users that can or will use that library. 

Many of the popular open source libraries for Delphi use a much less restrictive license.  All the Turbopower code was released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) which is much less restrictive, only requiring you to share any changes you make to the MPL project itself.  Others use the Apache License which is very permissive.  But some do use the GPL.

Now, I’m going to give some advice to those folks who publish Delphi source code under the GPL:  Issue it under an alternative license – one that businesses can handle.  I’d recommend MPL at the most strict end of the spectrum.  We are going to start using the Delphi Spring Framework, and that is licensed under the very friendly Apache license.  I’d love to use the Emballo framework as well – particularly for the Mock object classes, but it is licensed under the GPL, and so we really can’t touch it. A project like the Emballo project is also available for use under the LGPL and worth considering.

The GPL is great – it works well in the Linux world and where other open source development tools reign supreme.  But for more commercial-based eco-systems like Delphi, a business-friendly license is much more in order. 

Hey, if you do a Google Search on “Borland Delphi”, you get a result that find kind of pleasing:

Nice to see Embarcadero grabbing up a good collection of words and searches on Google and directing people to the right place. 

Here are some facts, thoughts, and a conclusion concerning AppWave.

• Embarcadero has announced their latest thing called AppWave. 
  • Marco has a pretty good article about it on his blog. 
  • It appears to be sort of a “AppStore for Windows”.  You can sign up for the AppWave store and publish your wares.  It looks like Embarcadero will provide the tools to virtualize your application, as well as to provide sales support.  You just write the app, post it, and watch the cash meter go up.
• Amazon has an interesting announcement this morning,
  • They are creating a “CloudDrive” for storing your music out in the cloud.  You’ll be able to play your music from any computer, as well as from your Android phone.
  • You can get 5GB for free (I signed up already).  You can get more storage by buying songs and music from them, and the storing of Amazon-purchased MP3’s doesn’t count against you.
  • This follows closely on their announcement last week of their own Android marketplace.

Amazon started out as bookstore online, but they have expanded to selling almost anything that can actually be shipped  via UPS or Fedex, and more importantly – electronically.

And in the last few years they’ve moved beyond even that to being a leading player in the cloud space.  They have their own digital book platform in the Kindle. They are knocking on Netflix's door with their own Instant Video offering. Their EC2 platforms are pretty cool – you can basically own a computer out on the cloud for a very reasonable price – probably less than you would spend on purchasing and maintaining a physical box.  You can remote into the machine and manage it like it was your very own.  You can clone the machines with a click of a button.  Pretty powerful stuff.  And a pretty compelling, forward thinking business. 

I think it is safe to say that Amazon is not fooling around.

Apple and Google both should be looking over their shoulders.  Apple should be concerned about Amazon cutting into the iTunes arena, and Google should be feeling the pinch on the cloud computing side of things.  Amazon is coming strong into their space. 

Okay, so here is the conclusion I promised:  One of Embarcadero’s end-game plans for AppWave is to get bought by Amazon. 

Amazon is the only one of the players in this space not tied to their own OS, and thus can be the one that provides an AppStore for Windows.  (Google is OS neutral at best, but obviously interested in promoting Android and ChromeOS, and Apple, well, they are Apple, aren’t they.)  AppWave theoretically could be something that launches Embarcadero into the big-time, but it’s also something that the big-time players could very well want to buy.

And of course, one has to believe that Microsoft won’t be silent in all of this.

Thoughts?

The software of today is really made up of a rather long series of layers, with each layer reducing the complexity and increasing the capabilities of software developers.

The first developers literally programmed in ones and zeros.  They had nothing more than that – pure binary. Heck, in the beginning, the notion of “programming” didn’t even really involve software, but rather the manipulation of hardware – actually flipping switches to physically alter the bit settings on the device. 

But soon enough, along came an assembler, which is basically a layer of abstraction over binary code.  Then Grace Murray Hopper invented the notion of a compiler, and this brought about human readable languages. (Some argue that assembly is human readable – I guess I mean “readable my mere mortals”). 

But of course, every language has to have an operating system to code against.  Once we had that idea down – that of writing a human-readable language against the operating system (OS) - we wrote Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make calling into the OS easier.  Instead of coding against interrupts in DOS, we had a neat, fairly easy to use thing like the Windows API. 

But naturally, we weren’t happy there.  We needed another layer!  So along came things like the VCL and MFC.  They were layers on top of the OS’s Windows API making it easier to write Windows programs.  (Of course, if MFC makes it easier, I’m not sure what word to use to describe what the VCL does for Windows programming.  )

But that wasn’t good enough for us, now, was it.  We needed yet another layer.  So along came things like Java as a cross-platform layer, and for Windows, we now have .Net.  At its base level, .Net is another level of abstraction on top of the Windows API.

So (crudely put) we have .Net on top of the Win32 API on top of the OS on top of Assembler on top of binary code on top of physical switches.  Layer after layer. As a result, we have managed to tame the immense complexity of the computers that we have today.  Without all these layers, we’d never be able to write the software that we use today.

So the question that pops into my mind is this:  What is the layer that we are going to put over things like .Net and the VCL?

I myself have no idea, despite having thought about it quite a bit.  I’m guessing that it will be something that we haven’t even really conceived of yet – or something that only people way smarter than you and I are thinking about today.

Nevertheless, I bet you have an idea.  What is it?

Hey, I want to give a shout out to the folks at RemObjects and Developer Experts and their upcoming conference focused on Delphi – the Developer Solutions Conference. It’s taking place February 8 –10 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Now, I can only assume that the vast majority of you are always looking for an excuse to go to Vegas, and now you a have one. 

Sadly, I won’t be able to attend, as the conference is falling right around the time of a major release for us.  I really would like to be there.  I always love hanging around with Delphi Geeks, and so I hate missing this opportunity. 

More information:

• The DSC Website
• A detailed Agenda for the Conference
• Follow the DSC on Twitter.
• They are even on Facebook

If you are looking for a stimulating conference and even better, a reason to go to Vegas, why, you should register and go!