Skunkworks

One of the reasons I started this blog was to see if is possible to make a living from online advertising. Short answer: The way I do it, it isn’t . If you browse my site without an adblocker you will see that I have a sidebar with google adsense. You will also see that the sidebar is not respecting almost all the best practices in placement, format and so on. Without going into details is sufficient to say that in the almost 2 years since I have this site, I didn’t got any money from Google yet, because there are not enough in my adsense account . Also you need to know that the site is costing me almost nothing. Is something like 25 Euros per year.

Now that you have the facts let me give you some insight.
Some time ago I got an offer to publish some adverts on my site. I told that company that depending on the types of sites and the money offered I may be interested. I got an offer back. I presume is a decent offer, but I choose not to go further.
Why? Try to spot the adverts on these sites: http://www.rubyrailways.com/ and http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/10/70-expert-ideas-for-better-css-coding/ . I did not put the actual links here, because I do not want to back link to those sites. I am pretty sure what that company is doing is legal, but I am 100% sure is not moral.

I am sure you will have a hard enough time to spot the adverts. If you can’t just let me know in a comment and I will put you on the right track.

Everybody would say because the customers want it. After I have seen a demo of the Google services page optimized for Iphone I am sure that Google is the real reason. Is clear that by using the same web browser like Iphone (webkit) any Android based device would have access to any Iphone optimized site the same way the Iphone does. Apple had to release an SDK to try to match Google efforts in this area.

I am not sure how well the technology below scale, but in the worst case scenario would be the base for the ultimate enterprise level knowledge management system and in the best case scenario would replace google as the main search engine.

Google isn’t launching products anymore, is launching platforms. Last week Google launched Open Social,this week Google launched Android. These two platforms have two things in common:

• both appear to be not ready yet and rushed to the market. Probably this has something to do with getting the value of the shares as high as possible. If these technologies would have come from any other company, most probably would have been treated as possible vaporware.
• both are based on open source technologies.

If Open Social is Google’s move in trying to beat Facebook (it seems that Facebook is going to be able to target the adverts in a much more precise way then Google), Android is potentially a paradigm shift in computing experience. Is not clear to me yet if the software stack is based on Java or J2ME but Google will have an OS that will be able to run on any computing device from mobile phones to standard desktops PC. I can’t wait to have a device similar with Asus 399$ notebook or OLPC or something similar with the Ipod Touch or Nokia Tablet which will run Google OS and access Google or google compatible web services. (you should try to remember “google compatible”)

Slowly different pieces of the Google master plan are seeing the light and it seems that they are executing their plan almost flawlessly.

The most interesting thing of these 2 announcements is actually going to be the reaction from Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Facebook. Is obvious that Google is forcing these companies to play it’s game and these companies are in reacting mode which diverts important resources from trying to create something new and force Google to play their game.

If the game continues like this probably sooner or later the EPIC story will become true. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Is so funny how Gmail goes directly from Beta to 2.0 .

Read today something very interesting related to the office format wars. As it appears Sun does not care too much if ODF is going to be the winner of the format wars. The Open Document Foundation is talking now about a new format called CDF which has better chances to be inter operable with the Microsoft format. Do not know which of the 3 formats is better from technical point of view, but it seems that ODF (the format) is loosing traction.

Also another thing that I heard recently (a podcast from The Register) was the discontent that Mark Shuttleworth has regarding the OpenOffice as a whole. He is not happy that it take 9 hours to compile the source code (for that matter I think nobody is happy about it) and he says that if the guys at openoffice.org do not move the software in the right direction he (Ubuntu guys) will take matter in his own (their) hands.

Probably is the time for some sort of rewrite of the suite. The big problem is who is going to pay for this. I wonder if IBM will somehow take over from Sun and develop Lotus Symphony into the new open source office suite. And also I wonder if Mark is thinking to switch Ubuntu to Lotus Symphony or something based on it.

Read today at MacRumors that Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard in the first weekend. At 129$ per license they got 260 millions. At 85$ per hour programmer cost they can afford let’s say 3.000.000 programmer hours for the money they got in the first weekend. This will translate in 375.000 programmer days. Assuming that the development took 3 years this means that the money they got in the first weekend allowed Apple to pay for around 500 developers during that time. I know that the numbers are not very precise and I know there are other costs beside development but I still think the magnitude order is ok.

One of the biggest problems that appear during development of a piece of software is getting the requirements right. If you do a mistake at this early stage you will have big problems down the road. I found a site where you can develop prototypes and creating requirements whilst getting feedback from your customers and engaging them in the business requirements development process. The best thing on the site is that it allows the stakeholder to create the requirements himself if he chooses to. You should really take your time and take a look at the videos on that site. It is amazing how easy it seems to develop full working prototypes and in the same creating a full business requirements document (use cases and nonfunctional requirements included). I do not know how the guys from Simunication dit it but I really like their product. Most probably if I would have to manage a software project again I would pay the 129$ per month which is their most expensive plan.

Another problem that needs to be taken care of during development is creating and maintaining the project plan. The best web based project management software that I found is www.devshop.com . I really like the way you can control the software development using this site. Again take your time and watch the screencasts. I am not sure if there is a non manual way to transfer the requirements from Simunication to Devshop but I think this would be a minor annoyance anyway. The Devshop guys charge 24$ per month per user which is ok if you are going to create accounts for your project managers and team leaders only.

Add to this a secure subversion hosting service for 10-20$ per month and Skype based communication for every member of your team, and I am pretty sure the location of your programmers does not matter anymore.

PS The post above is not a payed post .