When Microsoft launched its PerformancePoint Server family back in November 2007, it was a big deal in the business intelligence (BI) community. Companies like Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion were all suddenly put on notice. Microsoft was bringing its compelling licensing terms, vast platform play and commoditization mantra to the once-sleepy BI market space.
But a funny thing happened on the way to BI dominance: The product known as PerformancePoint Server 2007 flopped.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/27/20091 comments
Tuesday's blog
reported on a conversation I had with Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg on the future direction of C# and how programming languages are increasingly breaking out of traditional boundaries like imperative versus functional, and dynamic versus static typing.
In the case of C#, the language has already picked up functional programming attributes found in languages like OCaml, Haskell and F#, while the upcoming C# 4.0 is being outfitted with dynamic typing capabilities. That addition should help solve a lot of thorny type interactions with COM, among other benefits.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/22/20095 comments
When Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, it turned the scientific community on its ear. His theory of natural selection fundamentally changed our understanding of the development of living organisms.
Darwin's theory can apply just as well to the world of programming language development. Over the decades we've seen languages evolve from elemental machine code and assembler constructs, to higher-order 3GL and 4GL languages that let developers economically perform increasingly complex tasks. Just as a single-cell bacteria ultimately gave rise to sea- and later land-borne vertebrates, so has the early work on machine code given rise to Java, C#, Ruby and Python.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/20/20095 comments
For months, Apple and its CEO Steve Jobs have parried growing rumors about Jobs' declining health. Jobs' alarming weight loss was ascribed most recently to a "hormonal imbalance" that Jobs himself said could be simply rectified without impacting his day-to-day duties at the company.
But now we hear Steve Jobs is sick. Sick enough to take a six-month leave of absence from Apple.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/15/20095 comments
A pair of IT industry organizations worked with a broad panel of industry and security experts to create a list of the
top 25 most dangerous programming errors
. The list is intended to give developers, dev managers, trainers and others the ability to target common mistakes and produce more robust code.
The project, headed by the not-for-profit MITRE Corporation and IT certification and security outfit SANS Institute, published its findings yesterday. A brief look at the list reveals plenty of well-known flaws, like "CWE-89: Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure (aka 'SLQ Injection')" or "CWE-79: Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure (aka 'Cross-site Scripting')."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/13/20091 comments
When the going gets tough, the tough get lame.
At least, that's my read on the Microsoft's latest ad tactic, inserted in the print edition of yesterday's Wall Street Journal. It's a full-page ad insert masquerading as a "draft" of a Microsoft corporate letter, complete with marked-up text and presented on ivory, heavy-stock letterhead. The letter, dated Jan. 12, 2009, opens:
It's not personal, it's just business.
Sorry, but what moron idiot wrote that?
It's personal to CJ the CEO, who mortgaged her house and her mother's house to start her cappuccino empire.
It's personal to Hideo the IT guy, who's been sleeping in his cube and wrestling with the latest intranet outage fiasco
…
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/13/20090 comments
Few companies in the software business have been as widely admired as Borland Software. Founded in the 1980s, Borland gave us the modern integrated development environment (IDE) with Turbo Pascal, the Delphi programming language and even the SideKick personal information manager (PIM) software, which introduced task-switching and a limited windowing interface to DOS users.
The company rightfully earned a reputation as a developer's development outfit. Programmers today still speak fondly of working with people like David Intersimone and Zack Urlocker. As RDN reader Dr. Dave Dyer, an independent consultant in Houston, Texas, said, Borland fostered a vital developer culture both inside and outside its walls.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/08/20094 comments
If anyone attended, or tuned into
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote
at the Consumer Electronics Show last night for news on Windows Mobile, they were surely disappointed, though probably not shocked.
With Windows Mobile 6.5 not due out until later this year and Windows Mobile 7 not likely before 2010, apparently there was little to say, other than the announcement of an agreement with Verizon Wireless to offer Live Search on all phones shipped by the carrier in the United States. Perhaps Ballmer is saving his arsenal of news for next month's annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where he is slated to speak?
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/08/20090 comments
Regular readers of
RDN
might recognize the name Peter O'Kelly. He's a former Burton Group industry analyst who has frequently appeared in our pages, offering expert insight on a wide range of developer-oriented issues. As editors, we rely on bright and available people like Peter to pick up the phone and offer incisive commentary on the news of the day.
Well, it looks like we won't have Peter to kick around anymore. He's taken a job at Microsoft working on enterprise collaboration optimization. As Peter describes in a blog post, he'll be working with a team on communication, collaboration and information architecture for large organizations.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/06/20090 comments
In the business of IT journalism, the car analogy has become so overused and impossibly tired that many shops I've worked in have banned the use of the comparison outright. Still, the old joke positing if Windows were a car is a classic.
So I got a chuckle when I read this bit on a blog site focused on a subtitle editing package called Aegisub. The entry offers a tongue-in-cheek comparison of programming languages to various world religions, as well as some fantastic suggestions for additional languages and religions. You can also find some great comments at Slashdot here.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/18/20081 comments
Time was, even bloated software got faster thanks to constantly increasing processor clock speeds. Those days may be gone, but developers are finding they can take advantage of increasingly powerful multi-core CPUs to speed their apps. The problem is, nowadays developers have to work at it.
Intel lead evangelist James Reinders has been urging developers to start working on mastering parallel programming concepts for years. Intel has long offered cross-platform products like Threading Building Blocks and OpenMP to help native-code Fortran and C/C++ developers parallelize their applications.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/16/20081 comments
One of the remarkable things about Microsoft has been its willingness to
fail. By that, I don't mean that the company welcomes or admits defeat to
competitors. One need only glance at efforts like Microsoft Network (MSN) or
products like Microsoft Money and the Zune media player to realize that Redmond
will invest what it takes, as long as it takes, to challenge incumbent
technologies.
What I mean is that Microsoft is happy to pit competing, homegrown
technologies against each other. It's the sort of tough-minded digital
Darwinism that has helped make Microsoft a technology powerhouse, and should
help ensure that it remains dominant for years to come. Consider the dueling
32-bit operating systems of Windows NT and Windows 95, which ultimately merged
into the Windows XP OS. Or more recently, look at the multiple data access
methods Microsoft has developed to support the growing demand for efficient,
data-driven programming.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/11/20085 comments