XMind: Impressions and comments on the mind mapping market

It's been two years since I first looked at XMind. During that time I used MindManager at work and experimented with MindNode Pro at home. I mostly use the tools to explore new terrain, and as a visual aide to some teleconferences (share the mind map while discussing).

MindManager wasn't ideal, but it was a decent tool when we could buy it for $100 or so. Their current pricing is too high for team use, and I really did want the option of sharing maps. So when I switched projects I also switched to XMind. I don't have time for a proper review, but I can share some bullet points on why I chose it, what it's like, and what I would love to see.

Why I chose XMind

• It runs on Windows 7 and it's nice I can also use it on my Air.
• Price: Free for a very solid version, upgrade to pro was $80 for me. I don't like free software, but we can't afford MindManager - so this freemium model is a good balance.
• Longevity: It's been on the market for several years and just went through a significant update.
• Quality: it's got bugs, but it's tolerable so far.
• It's a simplified clone of MindManager so it has a good feature set.
• The base version is "open source". A weak form of insurance, but could be worse.
• Freemind lacks the corporate look and seemed a steeper learning curve for non-geeks.

Impressions, including problems

• Data lock: The inevitable for all but Freemind
• Java: The UI is native, but the back-end requires Java. That's bad enough on Windows, but for a Mac user Java installation feels like installing a malware-welcome sign.
• There's no built-in Help, only web help.
• It is slow to load what I consider a mid-sized map.
• It is pretty reliable, but I have run into a significant bug with string search. Search sometimes fails unless the map is fully expanded.
• It's made in China, and the language localization is imperfect. "Extend" is used in place of "Expand" for example, and the mouse-over tooltip text is quaint.

Thoughts on the mind map / concept visualization marketplace

 

I've seen cognitive-support apps come and go for twenty years, and I don't think we're making much progress. We're shuffling in place. This definitely isn't a technology problem -- we had similar apps running on the computing-equivalent of medieval tech. I don't think it's due to lack of imagination, though that has occurred to me. I think it's a business problem -- the market for high-end cognitive-extension concept modeling software is tiny; probably not more than 1 in 10,000 adults, perhaps 300,000 worldwide on all computer platforms. If we then ask how many can/will pay $30 a year for a product … we're talking a modest income stream for 1-2 developers owning a world market.

 

Yeah, this is a business problem. So we're not going to get what I want through traditional market-driven mechanisms. We're going to have to figure a way to grow something from modest means, and it's going to have to be built atop something else.

 

So here's how I think it could work. Start with the standard data formats used in other apps like Notational Velocity for the nodes. That means UTF-8 including "plain text", RTF, and markdown with a simple title, tag, date/time and text metadata model. That way the "nodes" can live in a simple Spotlight/Windows Search indexed folder and can be used by SimpleNote or Dropbox.

 

Now put the graph structure as XML or XMLized RDF in just another note in the same folder with a special name.

 

Optionally, allow the folder to contain other files, images, and so on (future).

 

That's the data. Now the app reads in the RDF and the nodes and renders the relationships. Ideally many different apps work with the same data structure. There's very little income here, so we're taking labor-of-love with a bit of cash to pay for a new computer. From this base, over time, with full data portability, we can slowly build a concept-visualization ecosystem with full data freedom.

 

Anyone have other ideas?

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: XMind: Software made in China for OS X and Windows: 11/2010
• » Fix for Xmind missing icon bug. Gordon's shares
• Gordon's Tech: Mac Mind mapping software: Inspiration, OmniOutliner and MindNode 6/11: links to related topics and articles
• Gordon's Tech: Tinderbox, Simplenote, MindNode and data freedom 10/2011

Computing 2012: The End of all Empires

I grew up in a bipolar world.

Yes, the USSR vs. USA, but also the bipolar world of Microsoft and Apple. One was ruthless and ruled by corporate power, the other was a stylish tyranny.

Times changed. The USSR fell apart leaving a Russian mafia state ruled by a mobster, and the USA fell into a spiral of fear, wealth concentration, political corruption, and institutional failure. China grew wealthy, but turned into a fascist state run by oligarchs and mobsters. The EU has Greece and Italy and the second Great Depression. India, Brazil, everyone has problems, nobody is a secure Power. Now we live in a multipolar world.

Weirdly, the same thing has happened to the world of computing (now including phones). Microsoft's slow collapse is this week's Vanity Fair special. Google joined the Sith and all it got was dorkware, a human-free social network, and a profit-free phone. Post-IPO Facebook is rich and frail looking. Dell, HP, Motorola, RIM and Nokia are history.

Ahh, but what about Apple? Isn't Apple going from power to power -- even in the old Mac/Windows wars?

That's how it looks - to the press. Today. But I'm just coming off an epic 1 week fiasco involving OS X Lion and iCloud. It ended with me deciding to keep my primary machine on Snow Leopard and reverting my iPhone to iTunes sync after years of MobileMe sync. I'll try again when Mountain Lion is out.

Yes, few people will run into the problems I have had (arising at least in part from an obscure geeky bug with OS X/Unix vs Windows "line termination"). Many people, however, will run into some problems. My experience shows that many months after Apple's grandiose iCloud launch and insane MobileMe/iCloud migration, they still don't have troubleshooting tools and procedures or, amazingly, any way to delete your iCloud.com data. It's as though they thought they'd get everything right the first time -- perhaps because everyone associated with MobileMe was purged.

That's a hell of a miss for a corporation with billions in the bank and a fifteen year history of bungling online services.

Then there's the Apple ID/FairPlay/iCloud problems. My friends are struggling with these. Other friends can't figure out how to manage Ringtones on iTunes.

Perhaps most worrisome of all, Apple is providing mega-compensation packages to its corporate executives because, apparently, they must be retained. An unavoidable step with inevitable consequences. Bad consequences.

Apple doesn't look strong to me. It looks vulnerable.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. None of them are serving me well. None of them are looking all that strong.

All the Empires are falling. My personal balancing act is becoming more complex all the time.

Browsing the blog backlist - we need a new app

I follow about 150-250 active blogs including the "Core" blogs I read religiously.

It's a good reading list, far superior to the days when I read The Economist (RIP 2006, but a bit better lately) and the NYT. Still, there's something wrong.

The wrong bit is that there's rich material buried in the backlog of many of those blogs, and in blogs that no longer publish but are still online. Obviously some of that material is better than what I'm reading now.

We need a tool to surface that material and make it available. A blog backlist browser tool.

I'd like, for example, to give Reeder.app a set of 20 or so blogs and have a convenient way to read posts from years back. I've tried doing this in the "new" Google Reader, and it really doesn't work. 

Has anyone heard of anything like this?

Where did Apple's Aperture 1.0 come from?

I've editing a summary post on my challenging iPhoto to Aperture migration. That's made me wonder, again, where Aperture 1.0 came from.

Aperture still doesn't use the native OS X tools for file browsing. It is the most un-Mac like product I've ever used.

The image framework was originally based on OS X Core Image, which was, I assume, a descendant of the NeXT imaging engine. So did Aperture start out as a NeXT photo management tool?

Unfortunately I can't find anything on the net about NeXT photo management software -- perhaps because NeXT died when the web was young, and also because "NeXT" is a useless search term (modern search engines are not case-sensitive).

Perhaps Aperture 1.0 was an acquisition, but I don't see any likely suspects on Wikipedia's Apple mergers and acquisitions list. Perhaps it was designed to be sold on Windows as well as Mac OS; but then why not emulate iTunes?

It's a puzzle. If I had to bet, I suspect it has roots in NeXT. I don't think it's de novo OS X development.

Why doesn't the world's richest company make better software?

People who make their money on selling shares claim Apple stock will rise ...

Apple expected to become world's first trillion-dollar company by 2014 

... Shares of Apple have been projected to reach $1,000 in calendar year 2014, which would give the company a market capitalization of about a trillion dollars...

Maybe they're right, though similar things were once said of Microsoft -- and probably Hughes in its heyday. Certainly I cannot remember a company like Steve Jobs' Apple.

Which brings me to a puzzle. With all of its vast wealth, why isn't Apple's product quality better?

Over the past few weeks, for example, I've spent far too many hours managing quality problems in OS X Lion, iMovie, Aperture, iCloud and Time Capsule. Not to mention iWork.

Apple's software quality isn't necessarily worse than Microsoft or Adobe's quality, but it's not much better. So why don't they produce better quality products? It's clearly not a matter of money. Perhaps more importantly, will they ever pay a price for their poor quality?

I remember when Dell's product quality fell. It was a few years before their share price declined ...

Apple's software maintenance problem

iMovie HD/iMovie. iPhoto/Aperture. OS X Lion. Final Cut Pro/FCPX.

By Darwin, Apple has screwed up a lot of Mac software products over the past six years. They can send a rocket ship to Mars, but they can't get manage a Cupertino to LA shuttle.

I don't care if they've put their OS X products on maintenance, I care that they can't do basic maintenance with $100 billion in the (offshore) bank.

What the #$@$ is going on with Apple?

I hope Niall Ferguson is spending that offshore money to fix their maintenance issues.

Update: Ok, that was fast. Messages is a big deal; it's another nail in the coffin of the carrier's SMS revenue stream.

My iPhoto miscalculation - whitewater world

iPhoto is dying.

That much is clear. iPhoto 11's launch bug problems followed the pattern of the past decade. Unlike past releases though, iPhoto 11 lost important capabilities -- just like iMovie and Final Cut Pro X regressed from prior versions.

That's bad, but what's worse is that, after seven years of sort-of trying, Aperture is still not an adequate iPhoto replacement.

Bad on bad news, but the real sign of a dying platform is the echoing silence. When users stop complaining, a software platform is dead.

Fortunately I had planned from this the very beginning. I knew, nine years ago, I was taking a big risk putting my photos and data into an Apple product. Even then Apple had a reputation -- it didn't worry much about customer data. I figured Apple might abandon iPhoto, but I also figured the Mac community would come up with a migration solution.

I was wrong. There's no migration to Lightroom, there is no exit from iPhoto that preserves data.

Where did I go wrong? I missed this ...

Of funerals, digital photos and impermanence — Tech News and Analysis

... Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting or someone you are with or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to Instagram every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there is a filtering problem....

I didn't imagine that geeks would basically give up; overwhelmed by rapidly changing technologies. I didn't anticipate that the 'prosumer' computer platforms would die instead of reforming. I didn't imagine that OS X would go into maintenance mode. I didn't imagine a technology regression of this magnitude.

I expected rough waters, I didn't expect whitewater.

See also:

• iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work 1/2012
• Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums 9/2011
• Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011
• Aperture Projects descriptions and iPhoto Event descriptions - what happens on iPhoto migration? 12/2010
• Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
• iPhoto 11 and Aperture 3 - more bad news 10/2010
• Aperture keyword hierarchy does not support inheritance queries 2/2009
• Aperture 2: consolidating two iPhoto Libraries 2/2008
• iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
• Aperture: can't import iPhoto Library 3/2006
• Aperture woes - and iPhoto 6 image export 4/2006
• Why are Apple products so risky? 1/2006
• Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement? 10/2005
• iPhoto: A Potemkin Application? 12/2003 - shipped before it was ready.

Can Apple produce first class software?

I use most of what Apple makes. Their hardware design is top notch. Their iOS and OS X systems are better than the competitions. Nobody beats them at retail or operations. Their service was always pretty good, but I think it's improving.

After that, things get dicey. Consider iWork ...

C’mon Apple, upgrade Numbers! | ZDNet

… Numbers performance is anything but speedy. In fact, it’s abysmal. I have a relatively tame no-formula five column table with 6000 rows and changing a value in a single cell requires 20 minutes to update the graph. That’s 20 minutes – not 20 seconds. With all the processing horsepower of a MBP, that’s absurd...

I'm amazed performance is that bad, but I've never done anything serious with Numbers.app. I have done a bit more with Pages.app, enough to suspect it doesn't scale well either. Overall iWork is an excellent start -- that needed a major follow-up in 2011.

Reading this, I thought about the other Apple products I use. The latest release of iPhotos is dismal. Aperture doesn't seem to try to compete for the pro market any more. Final Cut Pro is being abandoned by power users.

Their bundled apps are similarly miserable. ICal. iChat. Address Book. It's a veritable Hall of Software Shame. Safari is stabilizing again, but its performance issues have driven power users to Chrome on OS X.

The only Apple product that seems to rule its niche is iTunes.

Really, Apple is no better at applications than it is at Cloud services. If it didn't own the OS, none of its products would survive in the marketplace.

This is a Steve Jobs legacy. Tom Cook can't do worse. I'll close my eyes and cross my fingers and hope Cook's Apple can do better.

How to replace Google Reader

Google Reader Social is dead. Thanks to its creators for showing what could be done, and thanks go Google for leaving room in the market to do this right.

Fortunately, it's not hard to do it right. At least, it's not hard for Reeder or NetNewsWire to do it right.

Even better, there's money in this market. We Google Reader infovores are ... different. Ok, not quite human. Whatever. We'll pay to reestablish what was lost.

The solution has the following components:

a. The shared item store: Posterous, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr (any blog-like thing will do)

b. The shared item data: Title and any one or none of: annotation, excerpt, url (all editable).

c. The tweet: Title, url (short), annotation.

d. Optional: A G+ pointer to the persistent shared item.

e. Optional: A Facebook pointer to the persistent shared item.

f. The platform: Reeder, NetNewsWire or a non-Google web based feed reader.

g. Bookmarklet to invoke the platform

This is how it works:

1. Using NetNewsWire or Reeder.app (iOS) or Reeder.app (Mac) I see an item I want to share.
2. I click a button or swipe, etc.
3. I get a Google Reader style data entry area - title, url, excerpt, annotation. (Note I can simply share a note).
4. On submission Write to the persistent store and create the Tweet.
5. Note the minimal action set is two clicks. One to show the data entry area, one to submit it. Optionally provide a secondary 1 click action that shares title, url, annotation.

That's it. That's all we need. The rest is details. This implementation meets my replacement criteria. If I use Wordpress on Dreamhost as my persistent store, for example, I have the data and I'm paying for the service and for the platform. That's what I want.

No rights reserved for any of this. It's all public. Anyone can use it. Do whatever you want.

Does anyone seriously test Apple's iWork products?

I've been using Apple's Pages and Keynote for a few modest projects.

They're functional span is very good and the price is excellent.

Quality though, that's a problem. Once you move outside of the basic functionality there are big unfixed bugs and half built solutions.

I'm somewhat used to this from Apple. Their software quality is only as good as it has to be -- and their customers are notoriously compliant. (Though years of poor quality Aperture releases probably cost Apple the professional photography market.)

I'm used to Apple's poor quality software, but I don't like it.

We're into the Apple 4.0 era now. There are reasons to expect Apple's elegance and share price to decline. i'm good with that. I'd trade 20% of Apple's elegance for better quality products.

If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product

This Andrew Lewis meme surfaced on the net about a year ago: If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product. Lewis has since happily sold out, though the wording is evolving.

It's a good meme. Thanks Andrew.

I give Apple a lot of money, they give me products. I wish I were paying for Blogger, or that I could move all of my Blogger content to something I pay for. I'm glad Google charges me for my Picasa Web Album storage.

I don't invest in free things these days. Free is too expensive.

Forget process, it's the tools

It's a mantra in my world -- Concentrate on People and Process, not Tools.  It's not the tools, it's the process.

Bah, humbug.

Ok. I admit. Given the choice I'd take a good team, and a process that fits the team, over good tools. Problem is, that's a Hobson's Choice. It becomes an excuse to avoid investing in good tools. The phrase is particularly irritating when it's used to disparage the concerns of tool users by those who don't actually use the tools.

Those people feel very differently about the tools they do use. Try swapping their BlackBerries for a Kiln, or Eclipse for Turbo C, and see how how they feel about tools.

Tools matter enormously. They shape the work and the process. Software tools are notoriously "rigid" (software is a very misleading word); if they oppose a process the process will break.

Given the rigidity of software tools choices must be made carefully. Often complexity and power should be traded for flexibility, simplicity, data freedom and reduced switching costs. Early adoption is usually a mistake.

Choose carefully. Be modest about expectations. But never imagine tools don't matter.

Google Quick, Sick and Dead - 6th edition.

It's been only four months since the 5th edition of Google Quick, Sick and Dead - 5th edition. It's been a busy time though, with the launch of G+ and Google recently announcing another set of official closures. The terminations were of products I thought had already been discontinued, so I don't have them listed below.

As with prior editions this is a review of the Google Services I use personally - so Android is not on the list. Items that have moved up or are new are green, items that have moved down or officially discontinued are red, in parens is the prior state.

For me personally the news is not good -- both Google Reader and Google Custom Search are now on the Dead list (though Google has finally fixed the broken icon that was displaying with custom search). These are two of my favorite Google services, but neither of them deliver significant ad revenue to Google. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with relying on Google's cloud. G+ is mildly interesting, but so far it's not doing anything useful for me.

The Quick (Q)

• Google Scholar (Q)
• Gmail (Q)
• Chrome browser (Q)
• Picasa Web Albums (Q)
• Calendar (Q)
• Maps and Earth (Q)
• News (Q)
• Google Docs (Q)
• Google Voice (Q)
• Google Search (Q)
• Google (Gmail) Tasks (Q)
• YouTube (Q)
• Google Apps (Q)
• Google Profile (Q)
• Google Contacts (Q)
• GooglePlus - G+ (new)
  
• Blogger (S)

The Sick (S)

• Google’s Data Liberation Front (S)
• Google Translate (S)
• Books (S)
• Google Mobile Sync (S)
• Google Checkout (S)
• iGoogle (S)

The Walking Dead (D)

• Buzz (D)
• Google Groups (D)
• Google Sites (D)
• Knol (D)
• Firefox/IE toolbars (D)
• Google Talk (D)
• Google Parental Controls (D)
• Google Reader (S)
• Orkut (S)
• Custom search engines (S)
• Google Video Chat (S) - replaced by G+ Hangout

See also:

• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #1 (1/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #2 (11/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #3 (6/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #4 (10/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #5 (5/11)

Communication and collaboration: We have the pieces, but not the puzzle

The geeks of my tribe share two obsessions.

We are obsessed with managing and extending our knowledge.

We are obsessed with communication and collaboration (C&C).

These are good times for us, but they could be much better. We've seen the pieces of the C&C puzzle come and go, almost coming together than spinning away.

Things have gone better on the discovery/notification/subscription side of C&C. We have had email lists and usenet newsgroups (yes, I am old); now we have Atom/RSS Pub/Sub standards, Google Reader (tragically dying), Facebook, Twitter and Google+. There's even Yammer, a corporate clone of Facebook with some G+ thrown in.

Alas, the publication side of C&C has stalled. We have had these pieces wax and wain:

• Vermeer/Microsoft's FrontPage 98 (RIP @1999) -- a true ancestor of the Wiki
• The wiki. I've largely used Sharepoint, which is more than a little similar to FrontPage.
• Blogs with APIs that support rich editing tools (sorry, web tools aren't there yet).
• Onfolio/Microsoft's Windows Live Writer and Red Sweater's MarsEdit (OS X). The former is in maintenance mode (at best), the latter is much less capable but is being actively maintained.

It's frustrating to have the pieces, but not the puzzle. We want a solution that has these features

1. The power and authoring speed of Windows Live Writer/FrontPage 98 client.
2. Content display that support both item based and web-like navigation. We had much of this with FrontPage 13 years ago and you can see much of this in Sharepoint 2007's odd wiki. It's very easy to imagine a set of articles appearing as both a blog and a wiki.
3. Change notification.

Incidentally, we also want this publishing platform to be easily used as a personal platform and a public platform, and we want to the two to optionally synchronize via Dropbox or the equivalent.

Oh, yeah, and it needs to have a published and open API (though it doesn't need to be open source).

This isn't so hard, really. Give me $30 million and I'll make it happen. I promise.

See also:

• Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki (6/08)
• Chaos at Microsoft: the story of Windows Live Toolbar, Onfolio and Writer (10/2006)
• RIP Onfolio - the last of the standalone XP feed readers (9/2008)
• Gordon's Notes: Lessons from Microsoft SharePoint (5/2008)
• Front Page 97/98/2000, Personal Web Server: my old FP web page. Lots of prior art there for better or worse.
• MarsEdit 3.1.3 - Still not Windows Live Writer, but definitely worth the money (5/2010) - it continues to slowly improve. The image management is still minimal and the editor still struggles with Google quirks (WLW doesn't have problems).
• Blogger's text editor: I make another plea for a rational approach to paragraph formatting (3/2011) - I'm not in love with Blogger.
• Project Xanadu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Old ideas aren't necessarily wrong

Update: Since writing this I decided to install the latest version of WLW, which is version 2011. It's dead. I feel the pain of the original Onfolio team. Seeing quality software die is a bit like watching a good kid turn into a career criminal.

What killed Intuit's Quicken?

Quicken is dead.

Yes, you can still buy something called "Quicken" for Windows -- though not in the UK where the produce was terminated four years ago. No matter, Quicken is dead. The failure to produce a reasonable product for OS X is just another nail in the coffin.

Intuit itself may well continue. Their share price has done well over the past two years, and the company has moved well beyond their original product line. They may even be earning money (one way or another) from Intuit's Mint.com, a read-only Cloud product with a few *cough* privacy and security issues

It's not just Quicken. Back in the 80s and 90s personal financial software was a hot product niche. At one point Microsoft Money was a serious player, until antitrust concerns and a failed acquisition left it mortally wounded.

So what happened to personal financial software? Why did it become a niche market for vendors like iBank for OS X?

I suspect it was more than one thing. This would be my guess ...

1. The banks stopped cooperating. I've worked for ventures that relied on transaction and interface agreements; it can be hard to keep both parties motivated and the transaction system healthy. Perhaps at some point in the 90s the banks wanted this business for themselves, and saw internet banking as a competitive advantage. Why cooperate with a vendor that put all banks on a more-or-less even footing?
2. The ability to visit web sites and find current investment values was sufficient for a significant fraction of Intuit's customer base.
3. The American middle class fragmented as wealth concentrated in less than 1% of the US population.

The last of these is, of course, the most interesting.

Quicken is not an interesting product for people with millions of dollars to manage. They will largely use professional money managers. Quicken is not an interesting product for people with very limited savings and investments, particularly if the investments are largely concentrated in 401K accounts. The natural market for Quicken was individuals and families with significant financial complexity but not wealth.

Over the past fifteen years that market went away. The saving grace for niche Mac vendors is that, insofar as some remnant of that market still lives, it's now largely using Apple products.

In the end, I think the collapse of the American middle class killed Quicken.

See also:

• Why Wesabe Lost to Mint - Marc Hedlund's blog 2010 - Privacy, financial habits and entertainment. A cautionary tale for those trying to both do good and win.

Beating the odds - a software story

For the second time in my career I had the great privilege of imagining a software product and seeing it through to release. It started out as a key toolset for another product, then ended up, at the end of its initial product cycle, being repurposed for a significantly larger role.

This isn't the kind of software story you usually read about. We weren't a startup group of young developers, we were a small group of grizzled veterans in a large publicly traded company. We didn't have to worry about VCs, but we had our own version of funding uncertainty. If 37Signals is Superman, we were Bizarro. In a mirror world of software development, we faced our own set of grim obstacles.

Frankly, I'd rather face the obstacles of my startup days but, still, we did succeed. We succeeded because we had a great team (seriously great) and, at critical times, we had close collaboration with a great customer.

Here are a few of the things I learned in the process, in no particular order. In a small way, they were a recursive version of a far more ambitious project I read about many years ago - The Data General Eagle ...

• The core of our team was local, but we had key contributors that were remote. Our collaboration technologies were phones (and teleconferences - 1970s tech) [6], email, a Sharepoint 97 wiki [2], LiveMeeting screen sharing [4], and Rally [3]. When I ran meetings with remote contributors I had everyone dial in. We developed some good techniques for managing remote discussions, including sharing MindManager maps to record and organize discussions. The main lesson here is that you can get good results out of some very limited tech tools -- if you thing hard enough about how work around their issues.
• Early on I spent a lot of thought solving problems we never got to. Some of those imaginings led to patent applications [1], but they didn't have much impact on the product. In a few cases though, those solutions were critical. It was time well spent, but it's worth remembering that the real challenges are likely to be surprises.
• What we ended up with had a lot in common with my earliest designs. I don't know if that means they were good designs, but they did persist.
• The curse and joy of software is that there are so many different ways to solve a set of problems. The trick was figuring out what compromises to accept, even when two good alternatives combine in a troublesome compromise. This wasn't hard within our group, but it was challenging when we had to fit into other models. A mediocre compromise, however, is better than a breakdown in critical partnerships. We threaded the needle.
• Our best decisions weren't coming up with solutions to tricky problems, they were deciding what to keep and what to drop. We had to choose between throwing the seats overboard, or the luggage, or dumping fuel. We couldn't afford to get those choices wrong and we mostly got them right.
• Everyone contributed everywhere. I did everything but write Java code. Our engineers did designs. We were all analysts.
• I like Agile. We couldn't do it fully for several reasons, including the world in which we lived. I think though, we stayed true to the sprit of Agile. Rally helped, though I fear the developers have been too responsive to their customers. There are quite a few rough corners left over. Nothing's perfect, but Rally is pretty good.
• I liked the Agile philosophy of just enough architecture. The key for us was deciding where we needed solid foundations and where we could put up a low cost shed that we'd happily tear down when it decayed.
• There's a trick to choosing between a range of reasonable options. It doesn't matter so much which one is chosen, only that we don't spend a lot of time choosing.
• In the absence of proper resources, a well crafted email with an edited thread attached to a Rally story can be a reasonable stand in for a requirements document.
• Inbox Zero was very important form me. When I cleared my inbox and scheduled my Rally tasks [5] into my calendar I was usually in good shape. When either fell behind I was in trouble.
• No emotion. I worked hard to stay balanced. Things were tough when we were repurposed [7].
• No death marches. We are too old for death marches, it's not an option when you're over 40. Quality goes off a cliff. We rescoped or invented easier solutions rather than pulling all nighters.
• I reported out probabilities of success to management rather than predictions like "we'll do it" or "we won't do it". Somehow that worked better.
• I kept a complexity budget in my head for everyone on the team. We spent our complexity capacity carefully, targeting high value work.
• We kept moving. When we bogged down we stopped and moved on an easier path. There were quite a few obstacles we couldn't control, rather than try to knock them down we went around.

We had fun. It's satisfying to beat the odds.

--

[1] Software patents are a curse upon civilization.
[2] Once you figure out all the traps (don't paste rich text into the rich text editor!) and the trick to embed images, you find out the search is pretty good and that SP's wiki isn't all bad. SP as a document management system is pretty bad, though less intolerable with Office 2007 than 2003. This project made me a Wiki convert. (See also: Gordon's Tech: Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki)
[3] Also, alas, StarTeam. I try not to think about StarTeam.
[4] Only the screen sharing.
[5] I got to write the stories and the tasks then do them. A bit inbred.
[6] I tried very hard to get Google Video Chat working. It failed for us. Partly due to bugs, partly due to a remarkably poor UI, but mostly because the corporate net connectivity was overloaded. This is a more common problem than most realize.
[7] Would have been helpful if I'd done the Conversations - From emotional confrontation to dialog class a year ago, but I'm not sure it would have made that much difference. Managing genuine conflicts and power struggles by phone is less than ideal. We had no travel budget.

Epsilon breach: the iStealer and CyberGate mystery

A marketing (legal spam) firm was hacked and a bunch of our "private" (hah!) information was stolen. We can now expect more personalized phishing attacks (yawn). We might see more identity theft, but I've read that the identity reseller market has collapsed -- perhaps because there was too much cheating going on. (This is why civilization can win -- crooks can't trust each other).

Yawn. Another day, another semi-legal enterprise hacked. it's a boring story [1], not nearly as interesting as the far more sensitive, and far less discussed, RSA hack.

The story is boring, but there's a curious angle. The attack was prosaic ...

Epsilon breach used four-month-old attack - Security - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au

...The link in the body of the email took the user to a page that downloaded three malware programs – one that disables anti-virus software, another (iStealer) that is a Trojan keylogger to steal passwords, and a third (CyberGate) which offers hackers remote administration of the infected machine....

But the curious angle is how the attack trio are described: iStealer, CyberGate and an anonymous tool for disabling system defenses. I can't find out anything about them!

A google search on iStealer turns up lots of hits -- but they're obviously from shady sites I wouldn't visit without a VM constrained self-destructing browser. The only Wikipedia hits are on Russian language pages. In fact, as of today, this blog post is probably going to be the only legit result in many searches! (Sorry, I don't know anything.)

Why this curious silence?

[1] The firm is called Epsilon -- a silly name right out of a Bond flick. I think that's why this got so much attention.

Turbulent world, rigid software

One of the fringe benefits of playing professor is that I can insert my idiosyncratic observations into relatively innocent minds.

Last night, during a health informatics lecture, I described the remarkable rigidities in an intersecting set of vertical software systems I know well. Some of the applications are older than the younger students, others are just maturing. They're all strung together by a rickety set of interfaces and interdependencies; even routine data configuration is problematic. It's an interlocking and rigid system of brittleware. When business conditions change, brittleware breaks.

That's not unusual. We see it even on solitary desktop applications. PowerPoint 2007 is clearly senile; it needs a long cruise on a railing-free ship. Brittleware is everywhere.

Problem is, the world changes. Of course that's not new; the 20th century was packed with change. For most of that time, however, we used people and paper. People and paper are relatively easy to change. Even hardware is easy to change. Software though, software is hard.

So what impact does rigid software have on the ability of businesses to adopt to changing conditions? Does it become a true impediment to adaptation?

Resolution 2011: Managing complexity

I'm good with resolutions. Mostly because I know how to pick 'em. I make 'em doable.

Consider sleep. I like to exercise, but in my life sleep is more important. So I've resolved to sleep at least 52 hours a week [1]. I think I can do that if I track the numbers and identify where I fall short.

That's one for 2011. The other resolution is about managing technological complexity.

I've been on a complexity reduction kick for a few years , but this year my focus is on technological complexity. I'm starting with the plausible assumption that we all have a personal "complexity budget". Some of us can manage more complexity, others less, but we all have memory and processor limits -- even the AIs among us.

We can spend our complexity capacity figuring out how to adjust product development to available capacity, or we can spend it figuring out what parts of SharePoint are worth using [2]. Both tasks will be equally draining.

At some points in my life I had complexity capacity to spare - perhaps because I wasn't using it wisely. That's not true now.  Gains from improved productivity techniques [3] and growth of mind [4] are offset by entropic neurons. Most of all though, my life overflows. I'm not complaining -- it's an overflow of good stuff. It means though, that I need to use my complexity capacity wisely.  I can't be spending limited firepower figuring out which of my 15 Google identities is running a feedburner bot linked to a pseudonymous twitter account.

It's not easy to reduce technological complexity. It often means making do with less; giving up tools and solutions I really like. Often it means declining new incrementally better improvements -- because a 10% gain isn't worth the learning curve and failure risk. Sometimes it means giving up on old tools that still work but are increasingly unsupported. Yes, it's a lot like software portfolio management.

Looking at how technological complexity grows in my life I can identify four broad causes....

1. Taking on too many simultaneous tools and solution sets.
2. Failure to clean up. Ex: Abandoned user identities, google accounts, etc. Creates noise and clutter.
3. Premature adoption of technologies and solutions. Ex: Any new OS X release, any new Apple hardware, trying to get Contact synchronization to work with both Google Contacts, OS X Address Book and iPhone, OS Spaces. Above all - Google Wave.
4. Prolonged use of increasingly unsupported solutions in a world of forced software evolution [6]. Ex: document-centric web tools, wristwatches, printers.

I've gotten better at the first one, but the next three all need work. The 3rd and 4th are particularly tricky. My heavy use of Google's multi-calendar sync solutions is clearly premature [5], but it's been very valuable and relatively bug free. On the other hand, I think my jury-rigged Contact integration solution may be a bridge too far. On the other hand, I stuck with Outlook's Notes feature long after it was clearly dead.

Cleaning up is the least interesting measure, but one of most important. There are 1,575 entries in my credentials database, extending back to August 1995. Sure, most of those sites are long gone, but I still have too many active identities and credentials. I need to gradually cull a few hundred.

This project should keep me busy for a while. It will, of course, suck processors in the short term, but I expect near term returns and long term gains. Feels like a good resolution target.

-- fn --

[1] It helps that recent research suggests that amyloid clearance occurs primarily during sleep, and I'm speculating that a 10-20% decline in amyloid clearance translates to 10 extra years of dementia.
[2] The wiki and, in the absence of alternatives, the document store. Don't touch the rest, even the stuff that seems to work is poison. 
[3] At my stage "GTD" is child's play.  I use a mongrel of Agile development planning methodology, GTD/Franklin, and a pocketful of tricks including calendar integration across family and work.
[4] For quite some time mind can grow even as brain more or less sucks wind. Not forever, but for a time. 
[5] The UI for configuration multiple calendars has been bizarrely obscure for about two years. This is not mainstream.
[6] It's predator-prey stuff. Software evolution was much more leisurely before human-on-human predation took off with hacks, frauds, identity theft, malware and the like. Now old bucks have to keep moving, or we become wolf chow. Software cycles are faster, products die quickly, and we have to keep buying whizzier hardware. If not for malware, the curated world of iOS would still be years away.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: tech churn
• Gordon's Notes: whitewater world
• Gordon's Notes: complexity
• Gordon's Notes: Why you will live in an iOS world
• Thunder in the Cloud: Lessons from my hacked Google Account
• Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud (6/2007)
• Are we experiencing a complexity collapse in software and finance? (11/2008)
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams (2/2009 - complexity facilitates fraud)
• Requiem for a gerserker - Gordon's Laws of Geekery (6/2009 - how I learned to look before leaping)
• Geriatric computing (6/2009 - old computers are too costly to keep)
• Tech churn: The Franklin Planner and Google Calendar
• Beware the traps of the Software World - 9/2009 - software allows new realms of complexity
• Left Behind: Ludd, Beck and the non-tribal roots of tea party rage - 11/2009 - Tea Partiers are left behind by the complex.

Why you will live in an iOS world

Five years ago, just before Microsoft Vista was released, our household CIO made a strategic decision. We would move to OS X.

It wasn't a hard decision. The cost of supporting both XP and OS X was too high, XP's security, debugging and maintenance issues were intractable, and OS X had a much more interesting software marketplace. Moving to OS X would dramatically reduce our cost of ownership, which was primarily the CIO's opportunity cost. Time spent managing XP meant less time spent on my health and on family joys and obligations. [6]

It worked beautifully. One of my best strategic decisions. Yes, I curse Apple with the best of them, but I know the alternatives. I'm not going anywhere.

Except I am going somewhere. I will fade. So will you, though there's a bit more hope for the under-30 crowd. We might be able to slow the natural deterioration of the human brain (aka "Alzheimer's" and its relatives [4]) by 2030. It's too late for the boomers though, and probably too late for Gen X.

Sure, I'm still the silverback of the geek tribe. I may have lost a step, but between experience and Google I still crush the tough ones with a single blow.

Not for long though. I give myself ten years at most. I won't be able to manage something like OS X version 20, and I don't want to be reliant on my geek inheritor - son #2.

We will need to simplify. In particular, we'll need to simplify our tech infrastructure (and our finances [1] and online identities [7] too).

So our next migration will be to iOS - a closed, curated, hard target, simpler world.

You'll be going there too -- even if you're not fading (yet). The weight of the Boomers [2] will shift the market to Apple's iOS and its emerging equivalents. Equivalents like ChromeOS, now turning into iOS for desktop device with its own App Store [5].

I still have a few years of OS X left, including, if all goes well, the 11" MacBook Air I've been studying. The household CIO's job, however, is to think strategically. Our future household acquisitions will shift more and more to iOS devices, possibly starting with iPad 2.0 (2011) [3].

I expect by 2018 we'll be living in largely iOS-equivalent world, and so will you.

-- footnotes

[1] I miss Quicken 1996 -- before Intuit went to the DarkSeid.
[2] The 2016 remake of Logan's Run will be a smash hit. 
[3] I bought iPad 1.0 for my 80yo mother -- same reasons.
[4] 1989 was when the National Institutes of Health needed to launch a "Manhattan Project" style dementia-management program. I wasn't the only person to say this at the time. 
[5] If their first netbook device doesn't come in under $150 with batteries Google is in deep trouble. Android is not an iOS-equivalent, it's a lot more like XP. 
[6] Pogue's 10 year tech retrospective is a beautiful summary of the costs of making the wrong household tech decisions. He misses the key point though. The real costs are not the purchase costs, or the immense amount of failed invention, or the landfill costs -- it's the opportunity costs of all the time lost to tech churn. I've a hunch this opportunity cost is important to understanding what happened to the world economy between 1994 and 2010. That's another post though!
[7] Digital identities proliferate like weeds. Do you know where all your identities are?