Software application development

OK so we all like to take pot shots at Microsoft right? Come to think of it, most of us like to take pot shots at most companies if they can be even vaguely accused of trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Well, I’ve just installed Windows 7 on an Acer notebook and I have to tell you that it was a remarkably pain free process.

Here’s the bit that really hurts; I also have to tell you that I was left feeling that Microsoft has been really clever about the way it has provisioned for install compatibilities this time.

My better half being an ex-Java programmer was full of scepticism. “It won’t just work, you’ll need to install new drivers and worry about the dependencies throughout,” she muttered.

This is a woman (the current Mrs Bridgwater that is) who used to work for defence contractors in Washington DC near the Pentagon (do I need to spell it out more clearly than that?) – so basically she’s someone who doesn’t defrag and clean up her PC once a month, she’s more like to format C: and rebuild from scratch.

So I read up and read up. I spoke to my colleagues about it at length to double check a few things. Thank you Simon, your advice was invaluable.

I installed the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta to do some pre-flight checks, which went well. Only to put the install DVD into the machine and find that the first thing it does for non-techies is offer to take you to the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta website, doh!

So it works and probably took a couple of hours all in once I had removed various programs that Acer seems to think people might want installed such as “Chicken Invaders” etc. But this was just my experience and I am just one user. Plus I was lucky as I have a press copy of Windows Ultimate, which is quite crucial as you have to match the edition of Win 7 with your version of Vista or XP.

The theory is, with the product available as Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate (all in 32- of 64-bit versions) you can not ‘trump’ Windows 7 Home Premium over Vista Ultimate. At least I think that’s what people are suggesting.

OK so there’s my little install experience – and, please remember, I am a Mac user at heart. So this was going to be painful from the start. Trouble is, it actually wasn’t.

Corporate news can be such a pain. All that backslapping and, “we’re delighted to be working with xyz,” malarkey is hard to swallow. It’s hard to cut through the chaff and find a few scraps of wheat to uncover any genuinely interesting technology developments.

After missing out on Sybase’s TechWave conference this year due to a corporate travel bungle I haven’t had a chance to mention the company much of late. Of course many of us in the UK still ask the “whatever happened to Sybase?” question. Knowing the company quite well as I do, I’ll just note again that it sells heaps into defence, financials and mobile infrastructure – so its stock is blossoming even if its position on the IT sexy-o-meter is waning.

So what’s new on the “oh god, not another boring partnership” newsreel for this week then? Well, Sybase is snuggling up with Siemens Enterprise Communications Group to provide mobile and fixed-line voice and data offerings. Ears pricked up yet? I thought perhaps not, let’s dig deeper.

Well, I work mobile aplenty and Forrester reckons that 73 per cent of the global enterprise workforce will be mobile users by 2012. Personally I think that’s a broad brush overstated stat, but even if it were 50 per cent – it would be a lot right?

Where Sybase is clever (in my humble opinion) is in the secure mobile data exchange arena. If an engineer needs to get info from a corporate data centre for a military grade job using an ‘occasionally connected’ device that retains security settings whether the pipe is open or not, then Sybase has an app for that.

So Sybase is fairly tidy when it comes to mobile-device management and Siemens just happens to have some fairly presentable fixed mobile convergence technology (which it snappily labels Siemens Fixed Mobile Convergence Technology) so the two together might be pretty interesting. Especially if, as in this case, there is a chance to provide IT managers with the ability to control key mobility-related functions via a web-based console - “Allowing governance over management and security of any network mobile device, in any location.”

From the corporate blurb machine, “By partnering with Sybase we can offer our customers the management capabilities for all forms of mobile devices that they require, enhancing the usability and the ‘industrialization’ of fixed mobile convergence technology,” said Marcus Birkl, vice president of mobility solutions, for Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN Group).

Hang on – he might have spelt ‘industrialization’ incorrectly with a Z, but he didn’t have a hint of corporate smirk once in that statement. Further, he talked about industrialising fixed mobile convergence now that we are all inevitably working towards a massively higher percentage of mobile work. That’s a de facto standard expression they should be trade marking now. Come on guys, take a lesson from Microsoft.

Anyway, that’s my little rant at what is actually a good story for my money. Sybase made some smart acquisitions in the mobile space of companies like Afaria over the last five years and the company is trading well on them now. I guess I just had it up to here this week when one PR firm sent me a press release telling me a new account manager had been appointed for xyz company.

Let’s keep it real people, please – for all of our sakes.

There's much talk in the development sector of the ‘write once – run anywhere’ concept and as we know, this is far from being a new notion. But with devices (particularly tablets perhaps) becoming really affordable now, and mobile devices from nifty netbooks to high end Smartphones and BlackBerry-style unit proliferating like wild fire, it is arguably something users are becoming more mindful of.

Early next month I am at Qt Dev Days in Munich (no honest, I don’t usually accept offers to go to Munich in Oktober) and no doubt there will be much talk of Nokia Qt Software’s take on the purported benefits of its cross-platform application framework. The company (if you buy the proposition) reckons that they their framework allows developers to build applications and user interfaces once, and deploy them across many desktop and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code.

So with beer in mind - - sorry, I meant -- so with consistent user experiences in mind, where should we look next?

Well, with Windows 7 cooking up a storm you’d expect Microsoft to have something baking in the oven on this topic wouldn’t you? It was only a couple of weeks ago that the formerly code-named “Quebec” project became the Windows Embedded Standard 2011 Community Technology Preview.

So you’re just a hop, skip and a jump away from giving your PC the best energy boost it has felt since XP (or so we’re told) and you want to make sure you feel the Windows 7 love, well, everywhere right?

No problem, Redmond’s latest baby delivers the latest Windows 7 technologies to OEMs, enabling them to bring specialised devices to market with the unique flavour of Windows 7’s own special sauce.

Kevin Dallas (for it is he) who goes by the designation of GM for the Windows Embedded Business at Microsoft is quoted as saying, “The availability of the Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP empowers our worldwide ecosystem of OEMs, partners and developers to take advantage of the next-generation platform’s enhanced Windows 7-based features and provide feedback prior to its general release to manufacturing.”

Ah, don’t you just wish you were in a job where you too could ‘empower a worldwide ecosystem’ eh? This guy must feel like General Zod when he gets up in the morning don’t you think?

But seriously, Microsoft is keen to push the ‘familiarity’ aspect of the Windows 7 operating system into a highly customisable and componentised form, enabling OEMs in markets like industrial automation, entertainment and consumer electronics to bring that consistent user experience to users, consistently, everywhere.

The argument holds water I suppose. If Microsoft makes embedded Windows 7 an easy route for the OEMs to consider; then the OEMs think they can spend more time on their core competencies and create product differentiation. The OEMs love Windows 7 all the more and everyone is happy, right?

Well, that’s the theory anyway.

It’s a shame that I don’t get fired more information about languages. In that my ‘beat’ is somewhat focused on software application development, the amount of news that seems to hit me that doesn’t really seem to feature any real aspect of a software LANGUAGE is, well, a bit of a let down sometimes.

Happy days then as today is the 50th birthday of one of the most pervasive software languages ever produced – COBOL.

COmmon Business-Oriented Language has for many slipped off the sexy-software radar-o-meter. But it is of course still underpinning many successfully installed long term legacy systems.

NB: a CTO once said to me, “There’s no such thing as legacy systems, it’s just older software that still works like it’s supposed to.”

You might like to know, given that this is its ‘special day’, that the name COBOL was chosen during a meeting of the Short Range Committee, the organisation responsible for submitting the first version of the language on 18th September 1959.

A meeting at the Pentagon where the guidelines for COBOL were first laid down followed that Short Range Committee shindig.

COBOL today underpins a huge amount of global ATM transactions, and according to enterprise application management company Micro Focus, is currently running nearly three quarters of the world’s business applications.

The company says there are over 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence today and in May this year, Micro Focus published research which showed that people still use COBOL at least ten times throughout the course of an average working day. Yet, despite using the technology so often, only 18% of those surveyed had ever actually heard of COBOL.

So then, happy birthday dear COBOL - how many other languages will make it to so such a ripe old age if they are born in 2009. Not many I’d bet.

There’s that thing about acronyms when it comes to technology that leaves the non-techies out there blank isn’t there? I had to explain ‘OEM’ to someone this week for starters! Then there’s my favourite geek party trick, which is to see if anyone else knows that NICAM stands for Near Instantaneous Compounded Audio Multiplexing.

Deeper tech goes one stage further doesn’t it? We use whole terms - or to be more accurate companies use whole terms - and expect us to take them as de facto standards right off the shelf.

Intel expects you to know what a Strategic Inflexion Curve is because Andy Grove coined the phrase in his (I will admit excellent) book Only the Paranoid Survive. Microsoft expects you to know what a Release Candidate is when it has really only been an in house term used by the company itself. Then there’s Gartner, who expect you to know what a Magic Quadrant and a Hype Cycle is.

I pick on Gartner somewhat unfairly as the Magic Quadrant has become particularly well known and the Hype Cycle ‘gauge’ (if I can call it that) pretty much does do what it says on the tin i.e. it measures hype.

I mention these comments in the context of the venerable research firm’s latest admonishments over cloud-based security services offerings in advance of its Information Security Summit 2009 in London next week on 21-22 September.

Gartner says that security services provided in the cloud (or, I kid you not, as they like to call them “Internet-fabric-based managed security services”) have the potential to provide cost savings and faster deployment compared with equivalent-capacity, premises-based equipment, but providers are yet to deliver on customer expectations.

In comments released today, Gartner managing vice president Ray Wagner is reported to say that, “Technologies at the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ on a Gartner Hype Cycle are there due to over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations and limited successful implementations, as the technology is pushed to its limits.”

It seems to me that Gartner is doing rather well out of the hype wave by branding it and using it as a platform for comment and consultancy. But fair enough then, why wouldn’t they? I wouldn’t be here commenting on it in return had they not. Perhaps it just seems a little rich to hype up a hype platform – do you know what I mean?