Terrorism Strikes Close to Home
It's been a long time since I have posted here, but today's bombing in Manila gave me pause. My company has an office in Manila, soon to be our largest office. The bombing was at a mall quite close to our office and also very close to the hotel that visitors would stay at. An employee of mine had travelled there to train in two new recent hires, so my first thought was of him. Before I got in touch with him I was saddened to learn that the wife of an employee based in Manila was killed while waiting for her husband at the mall were the bomb went off. What struck me was how similar this was to my own day as my wife in kids came to my office today and we went out to the lunch at the local mall.

After returning from my lunch, I was relieved to have an e-mail from my employee as well as a long IM session. Here is his e-mail, unedited:

I am ok. It was a little close for comfort as the hotel I am staying is not too far from the blast site. I was in a different mall at that time having lunch when this happened. We were returning from lunch when the folks here got SMS (they are real big into it) and casually -:) said there was blast "next to your hotel". I thought they were kidding but since realized the magnitude of it. The malls appeared less crowded in the evening - usually Friday evening is the crowded night.

Left the office late last night and hunkered down in the hotel room for an in-room dinner.

More later ...

Terrorism affects us all regardless of our location. Today, I am thankful that it's affect on me is this indirect, and I'm only left to ponder those that it affects very directly.

Is Everything Social and Not Technical?

This was the subject of are recent post. Before re-reading this I had been thinking the thought was everything cultural and not technical. I think the danger of this thought in a Globally Competitive world is that we see cultural differences when we shouldn’t. Two recent stories illustrate why I think this way:

• My company had a previous outsourcing agreement with a consulting agreement in India. More recently opened up an office in the Philippines and began hiring full time employees. When speaking of the progress on this business development, my Vice-President, who is French, fielded a question from a fellow employee who is of Indian descent.

“Why are we moving away from India and towards the Philippines?”

“I would expect this question, coming from someone from India”

“I’m not Indian, I’m American”

This was met with subdued applause.

• When meeting with some of my colleagues in Sweden, they were somewhat down about some discussions that had with my group in St. Paul. A discussion had gotten derailed on a single word. Expressing to me that they felt this was due to their poor English skills. My response was that this individual could get derailed on a single word, regardless of nationality or language skills.

My recent thinking be sensitive to social and cultural issues, but don’t assume that it explains everything.

Nothing to with Outsourcing -- Again

Another personal experience that had me laughing very hard recently -- my son had two loose teeth that were scheduled to be pulled. He had not lost any yet so he was excited about the Tooth Fairy coming and leaving him his first financial reward. That combined with his desire to avoid getting them pulled by the dentist had him working quite diligently to remove them himself. The fist one got pulled out quite late at night. My comment was, “I guess the Tooth Fairy has already made the schedule for the night.” So he waited for the second night. He stayed awake late that night and rose before I did in the morning. He realized that the tooth fairy had not arrived. He left his tooth on a chair in the family room. My wife and left the money on the chair with some explanation about why the tooth fairy did that.

That same day he worked hard on the second tooth and got it out. After the rough experience the previous two nights, I made sure I put the quarters under his pillow after he fell asleep. He awoke to the find the money while I was in my shower. When I came downstairs, he rather excited said, “Dad, I got a Crown”. Realizing that one of the coins was not a quarter but a single Swedish Crowns from my trip to Sweden, my wife and I could barely contain our laughter. As I walked out the down, my wife and I realized that the Tooth Fairy was in line for a Performance Improvement Plan!

Cultural Differences

In a previous post, I referenced a book that said all problems are social and not technical. This article describes a study that goes into this topic in more detail. Cultural differences cause offshoring problems. Still more later.

Outsource Contracts - Large Adjustment Costs
SDA Asia Magazine - I think this quote (while focused on contract negotiations) says volumes about a the how short sighted some businesses (not all) can be:

Many buyers of outsourced services are approaching the contract negotiation process without a full understanding of the issues that negatively impact their bottom lines

'Nuff said?

Nothing to Do with Outsourcing...

Everything to do with the demise of the Developer Tools market and potentially commercial software in general..... I've always had a fondness for Borland's products and hence Borland as a company. However, I've often wondered how they manage to stay in business.

I went to Comdex in 1994 which at the time was the show in the industry -- Windows '95 was unveiled there, and who could forget OS2 v3.0? Anyway, if you were a vendor this was the place to be. The conference was huge. It took me until the 2nd to last day of the show to get the Borland booth on my agenda. When I got there, the place was completely empty. I asked the neighboring vendors and the response was, "they went home".

For at least the 2nd time in the history, Borland is walking away from developer tools:

Borland will reduce its workforce by approximately 300 employees, or about 20 percent of its regular full-time staff. The majority of staff reductions will come from the re-scoping of Borland's international operations. Upon completion of the workforce reduction, geographic consolidation, and planned divestiture of its Developer Tools Group (announced February 8), Borland anticipates annualized cost savings of approximately $60 million.

A followup conversation ensued about what happened to JBuilder that shows where developer tools are heading (or are already there).

Lately, Eclipse, an open source platform/IDE that is modular and highly extensible, has been taking over. Borland was one of the founding members of the Eclipse Foundation. In February of 2005, Borland significantly increased its support of the Eclipse platform and joined its board of directors as a strategic developer [1].

In the first half of 2006, Borland will move to Eclipse as the underlying integration platform for JBuilder. Similar to IBM's Rational Software Architect built on top of Eclipse with a lot (14 CDs) of IBM content, Borland will add value at a higher level (creating Eclipse plug-in modules for modeling, visualization, team collaboration, etc) in its JBuilder.