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This is exactly what Oracle is doing. SAP is a ripe target -- they're doing well, but they're a lumbering giant, without the competitive zeal that Larry brings. Having said that, the sight of 10,000 Germans targeting you can be pretty daunting. :-)

I might add that Oracle is hedging this with their investment in their Fusion middleware. It's clear the Fusion strategy is a distraction; it's not their main thrust, otherwise they'd have much tighter timelines. But it's just enough to keep BEA and IBM on their toes -- enough to give BEA a headache due to its relative size, enough to trounce Sun where needed, but not enough to displace IBM. There remains the risk that there will be a middleware renaissance due to software-as-service, SOA, etc., where companies will realize they don't have to spend millions on a rip-and-replace with SAP/Oracle apps/Siebel/Peoplesoft.

I'd suggest collecting magazine clippings and/or URL's about other major companies that have successfully switched to Linux and Open Source. Here's a few links to get you started.

Etrade:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1916119,00.as p

Amazon, Ebay, Wal-Mart, Dell, American Greetings:
http://www.forbes.com/2002/10/08/1008linux.html

Cendant:
http://www.cio.com/archive/070105/cendant.html

Merril Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston:
http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html

Boscov's
http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/17/0717casestudy.htm l

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange:
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1397,1828002 ,00.asp

You've raised some good points yourself. I'm a management consultant, focused on HR management, and come across this from time to time. Not that often, actually, because firms that don't pay for training also don't pay for consulting.

It may be necessary to move to a more considerate/understanding employer, but I don't this alone would justify that. Make a business case that fully explains the benefits of the training, including discussion of improved ability to solve problems, avoid downtime, etc. It's not necessary to put numbers on things, and I wouldn't do so unless you can be very confident that you are accurate but conservative. Even one unsubstantiated claim or unreasonable statement can get the whole proposal thrown out. Identify the costs, including an estimate of the value for your time (talk to the cost accounting people to get your fully loaded cost / day, which is the right figure to use).

If you are fortunate enough to go on the training, keep track of the times you use something you learned there, and how much time it saved, or what it avoided. In six months or so, you might be able to document you have saved so many hours of your time, time of others, etc. and put a dollar figure on that. Also not intangibles, such as reduced downtime or whatever. Assuming the benefits are significantly greater than the costs, give the calculation to your boss to let him/her know that you were both right in deciding to send you on the training.

An interesting article on IT Training ROI is on cio.com. I can't seem to find quickly a good website explaining calculation of training ROI. If you want me to go through the steps, email me.

This is not a "single" bug but rather a train wreck. A botched Siebel CRM upgrade cost AT&T thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue. This eventually led to the sale of AT&T Cellular to Cingular at a less than optimal price. The article is great in explaining how management and big "personalities" lead to these kinds of disasters.
A full story of the bug:
http://www.cio.com/archive/041504/wireless.html

I'd agree that you want to do some reading outside programming but related to the industry you're working in. Outside of technical knowledge, you can advance your career knowing two more things -
*By better understanding your industry and its current climate, you can provide technical solutions that better meet your employer's needs. If you're a contractor, your clients will appreciate it if you understand some basics about their industry.
*By knowing about other players in your field, you can better identify opportunities both inside and outside your organization. Inside your company, you can better identify projects that will really affect the company (and provide you with opportunities for advancement). If you decide to change jobs, knowing your industry will let you find employers that have a strong business and may be doing things that interest you.

On the business side, CIO magazine's good (and CFO isn't bad if you work in the financial industry). While it's a little fluffy, Fast Company is both informative and entertaining. If your local paper has a well-edited business section, that can be useful as well. I also like The Economist both for it's general and business news.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).

http://www.cio.com/research/erp/edit/erpbasics.htm l

CIO magazine did a good piece on what happened.

http://www.cio.com/archive/041504/wireless.html

Hard to imagine...

I work in a *very* big company (can't say right now, in the office... but we're possibly the biggest on Earth by at least one metric)

Not hard to guess where.

My father works as a manager for the systems programmers for a bank (I work there as a DBA intern). The bank recently migrated Lotus from a bunch of small servers to a mainframe, and he says that the company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year now. On the other hand, you have a fine example of companies migrating from mainframes to servers to save tons of money. I brought this up to him, and he was baffled by how this company could save money on the deal. So I am undecided as to the superiority of either the little server cluster or the mainframe monolith.

Personally, I'm a Linux guy and I like servers, but after reading this article I'm thinking about heading into the profession that my father got into!

and possibly even Microsoft Office

Two of those above, Photoshop and InDesign are from Adobe. And while Adobe hasn't released versions of these for Linux, as I said I wouldn't supprised if they did come out with versions of these for Linux. Afterall as I pointed out, so it's incorrect to say I only pointed out alternatives, they did release Acrobat Reader for Linux and offer other Linux support as well. Another example of who has versions for Linux is Oracle. Microsoft products for Linux on the other hand I would be supprised to see unless it's migration software from Unix to Windows as Linux poses a threat to Windows, however it is possible to get MS Ofiice to run on Linux. Here's an interesting article from "CIO" magazine on "How to Run a Microsoft Free Office. Sure not every, not even most, commercial or proprietary software companies have Linux versions. Not all even have versions for Windows or Macs. But as more people use Linux more applications will be ported to Linux.

As for the part about people being able to install software on Linux I totally agree. Software needs to be as easy to install in Linux as it is in Windows if not as easy as MacOS. But as pointed out elsewhere dealing with this topic, there are solutions developers can use to make it easy to install their software.

Ooh and so you don't get the idea, or the rid of it if you do, I'm not a diehard Linux fan. The computer I'm using now is a PC running WinME and I plan on making my next one a Mac. Yes I've got a computer with Linux on it, a DEC Alpha setup as dualboot with Window NT 4.0 and Linux but I haven't used it in at least a couple of years. And then I used mostly NT. The computers I've used that are my fav are Amigas with Macs being next.

and possibly even Microsoft Office

Two of those above, Photoshop and InDesign are from Adobe. And while Adobe hasn't released versions of these for Linux, as I said I wouldn't supprised if they did come out with versions of these for Linux. Afterall as I pointed out, so it's incorrect to say I only pointed out alternatives, they did release Acrobat Reader for Linux and offer other Linux support as well. Another example of who has versions for Linux is Oracle. Microsoft products for Linux on the other hand I would be supprised to see unless it's migration software from Unix to Windows as Linux poses a threat to Windows, however it is possible to get MS Ofiice to run on Linux. Here's an interesting article from "CIO" magazine on "How to Run a Microsoft Free Office. Sure not every, not even most, commercial or proprietary software companies have Linux versions. Not all even have versions for Windows or Macs. But as more people use Linux more applications will be ported to Linux.

As for the part about people being able to install software on Linux I totally agree. Software needs to be as easy to install in Linux as it is in Windows if not as easy as MacOS. But as pointed out elsewhere dealing with this topic, there are solutions developers can use to make it easy to install their software.

Ooh and so you don't get the idea, or the rid of it if you do, I'm not a diehard Linux fan. The computer I'm using now is a PC running WinME and I plan on making my next one a Mac. Yes I've got a computer with Linux on it, a DEC Alpha setup as dualboot with Window NT 4.0 and Linux but I haven't used it in at least a couple of years. And then I used mostly NT. The computers I've used that are my fav are Amigas with Macs being next.

CIO magazine is indeed a good read. It's not expensive, though. It's free. Soul-sucking registration is required.

In another example, Vass received a mysterious note that a major system had been disabled and had stopped production on a hardware chip. Although Vass had no knowledge of this, he soon discovered the system in question was in fact the desktop machine of an engineer who had recently left the company. The desktop had been reformatted following his departure, cutting off 600 users who had over the last three years depended on it for network services.

If the deal went through, I am sure that Microsoft would clean up any issues with Claria's distribution practices. After all, they have Windows Update and don't need no steenkin' drive-by downloads. My concern would be with the data that Claria has collected so far. They have the seventh largest data warehouse of "consumer behavior"; it's 12 terabytes and growing.

Claria's already said that they are moving towards an Adwords-style advertising network, and this is what Microsoft wants. They are planning to buy inventory from big web sites in bulk, then display ads in that space based on their monitoring of where the user has been and what they bought. The genius of this is that it turns web publishers from enemies into customers. The only losers are the users.

First of all, Microsoft tried a subscription scheme back in 2001 and no one switched, mostly because it was more expensive than the current pricing schedules (Microsoft got greedy and was trying to lock in their ridiculously high profit margins to the end of time). Plus, to make a subscription model make sense, businesses would have had to update on Microsoft's schedule. That idea will never fly with a business.

It is a very expensive and time consuming process to update the system for businesses because they have to test and probably update lots of other programs as well as the system. Some of the programs you don't find in the consumer market and there is no guarantee that the vendor has an updated version that works with the latest system. If the business is using programs in that category, then they have to either wait on the vendor to create an update or they have to switch to another program. Switching programs can create even more problems. All in all, upgrading the system when there is no real reason to do so just isn't done. Forget Windows 2000, I know of businesses still running DOS for some of their programs simply because the function the program provides still works just fine.

Bottom line, the goal of the last few Windows upgrades has been more to generate hardware sales for PC vendors and cash flow for Microsoft than it has been to introduce real innovation and savvy businesses recognise that. Longhorn doesn't look to be any more than an enhanced DRM platform that will require faster hardware at this point and that is not likely to make it a compelling upgrade for the average business (nor for an informed consumer). Microsoft is stuck in a rut, in the sense that it looks like Longhorn will be "more of the same" from Microsoft, and that just won't cut it anymore.

Part of the problem is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been lax in granting patents, said Mitchell Kapor, a founder of Lotus Development Corp. and a prominent backer of the Mozilla browser. "There have been tens of thousands of bad software patents issued which never would have been issued if the Patent Office had actually been following its own rules," he said.

Ultimately, these bad patents may come back to haunt the open-source community, he predicted, saying that Microsoft Corp. will eventually be driven to launch wide-ranging patent lawsuits, which he called "patent WMDs" (weapons of mass destruction) against open-source projects. "Their business model no longer holds up in an era where it's clear that open-source is simply an economically superior way to produce software," he said. "Of course they're going go unleash the WMDs. Why would they not?"

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/8757.html
http://www.cio.com/archive/021501/fine.html
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

You should join another 12 step program.... the one you're in doesn't look like it's helping much.

One of these should help you out ;-p

http://www.theclairefiles.com/ms12steps.html

http://www.cio.com/archive/010102/shop.html

Ill? Then don't read that an article suggesting that part of the resolution to secuity problems on the Internet is to pry PCs from our cold dead hands.

Or at least read Ars Technica's response to help you feel better.

Sorry. I tried to dig up the details earlier but gave up. Aha! A web search for "AT&T wireless CRM" turns up this article in CIO magazine that says it was a horribly botched upgrade of their CRM system (viciously customized Siebel) combined with a Federal deadline for number portability. They had trouble from December 2003 through February 2004, lost many thousands of customers, were for a time unable to sign up new customers, were completely offline for a whole week, and lost $100M. HTH.

The IRS does so well with internal IT project (http://www.cio.com/archive/040104/irs.html), I'm sure you'd have no problems trusting them to safely and securely accept an online return.

And given how well the IRS knows the taxes that they're to collect (URL: http://www.freep.com/money/business/taxhel12_20040 412.htm>) you'd have no problem believing that what they calculate is correct.

During 1995 and 1996, TransQuest reengineered Delta's systems to migrate them from Hitachi mainframes running Natural, Adabas, and DB2 to an open systems environment. The new systems are written in C++ and access Sybase databases of reusable and distributed objects. The systems run primarily on Sun, HP and AT&T servers under UNIX with clients running under UNIX, MS-DOS, and Windows. The clients are connected to the servers over high bandwidth TCP/IP frame relay networks.

Job titles for the company's 1,100 computer professionals include Systems Engineer and Software Engineer 1 through 8. Staff members recently developed an aircraft weight balance system that can be accessed by pilots to determine how luggage and fuel have been distributed within the aircraft for balance during a flight. This system was developed in C++ on AT&T and HP UNIX servers and will be available on 40,000 devices to 2,000 users.

"an example of an external service provider that handles a wide range of back-office functions for the airlines. AFS handles sales, refund, traffic and cargo; performs fare audits; manages yields and revenues by performing departure and post-departure processing checks; books crews; deals with overbooked flights and wait-lists; adminsters frequent flyer programs; draws up flight navigation charts; such as landing or route facility charts; and provides customer care." This according to ebstrategy.com

I was under the impression any license agreement was not valid anyway without a notary present for a signature. Clicking a botton can not be interpetted as signing a document. Especially if no lawyer or notary is present.

Actually, as of October 2000, in the US clicking a button can legally be acknowledged as accepting a contract. The little thing that makes this possible is called the Electronic Signature in Global and National Commerce Act. President Clinton signed it into law on June 30th, 2000.

It was at that point commonly accepted that click through eulas were valid agreements. Questions about the validity of eulas have primarily focused on whether the wording of the eula itself invalidated the contract not the legal binding of the click through.

A short little article on the acthttp://www.cio.com/archive/011501/fine.html didn't see an entry on wikipedia on the act itself.

...and I'm glad that some AT&T Wireless execs are out of jobs. Maybe they can become a contractor. :P

Whatever happened to the reasonable sounding conspiracy theory that AT&T Wireless bungled their CRM upgrade last year in order to sell the company? Upper management overrode their IT dept's plan for a gradual, piecemeal upgrade that would allow fallback and concurrent use of the older rev of Siebel. Instead, they were ordered to whack it in across the board and grab the oh shit handles.

It's not super in depth, but over at cio.com they have interactive maps comparing different parts of the world for outsourcing.

In one word: bullshit.

Just like the "face recognition systems" used to spot terrorists, or the "child protection" software that's supposed to recognise porn.

Not only is the success rate well below 90%, but, more importantly, it spits out thousands of false positives.

And this is without even considering their admission that their technique does not work on JPEG images, even at "90% quality". In other words, they admit it won't work at all in 99% of digital pictures.

These are all tasks that need so much computing power such smart algorithms, that the only system that can perform them with acceptable reliability is a trained human brain.

RMN
~~~

Nah! Tinkering with production code is done by many major coding shops...

Chicago Tribune: Link
Additional: Hasn't missed a paper since the Chicago Fire...All I received Monday was the Business section. Didn't bring the company down...but hurt big!

Sprint: Link
Additional: Sprint had to outsource it because if you own a sprint phone and ever called customer service, half the time they couldn't help you because the computers were down! Almost brought the company down.

A&TT Wireless: Link
Additional: DID bring the company down.

Microsoft: Link
Additional: Brought MANY companies down...

I'm sure I can name more production bungles...Slashdot 503 for an hour isn't a company crasher though.

-Electrawn

Well. He has spoken out against software patents and he feels strongly about RFID.

My answer was, I took a job with a smaller company where they understood my position but gave me responsibility and room to grow. Of course.. less salary, but it is a good starting position. I once met the "first CIO" in the United States, Duwayne Peterson - his advice was simply to "get your foot in the door" somewhere!

Good luck to you! -6d

The story of a botched CRM upgrade that cost the telco thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue. Hard lessons learned.

http://www.cio.com/archive/041504/wireless.html

This tells of the very bad process of AT&T switching CRM systems.

As a professional software tester, I can say that I have seen the same mistakes happen more than once, but not to this degree.

Yes they did, and no, using a cell phone is not a certainty to cause problems.

It does, however, carry the potential to introduce errors in various systems.
Would you want the altimeter to read 200 feet too high, or have an uncommanded left turn, because some numbnuts is yakking on the cellphone?

"DC-9 flight crew experienced an involuntary turn by the autopilot during cruise. Autopilot reacted normally after the captain asked passengers to turn off any personal electronic devices. Crew later learned that a cell phone in an overhead bin was heard during the time of the autopilot problem."

I don't mean to be rude or anything, but take a look at Stallman's photo. Now look at the FBI's Most Wanted list. I almost expected to see that picture there with a reward leading to the arrest and capture of this communist member.

As an example of copyright law, Zittrain cited a case that involving the manufacturer of the Teddy Ruxpin talking teddy bear. The company sued when someone created a "new" Teddy Ruxpin doll by removing the tape inside the doll that simulates its speech, re-recording the tape and inserting it back into the doll. The judge found that the individual had in fact created a derivative work that infringed on Teddy Ruxpin's copyright.

D McBride

Of course they all look alike to me...

do you really want to move to India just to get a job?

You can't anyway. We spend millions bringing Indians to the US for IT education at our best (publicly funded) universities. We allow indians to move here. Yet, Americans are not allowed to move to India for work.

There was an article from CIO Magazine earlier this month which dispells some of the myths surrounding open source from a CIO viewpoint. An interesting read.

Articles like this on /. and LinuxInsider are great. But they're preaching to the choir. Great articles like The Myths of Open Source being in CIO Magazine (yes, a great article about OSS in CIO magazine), are far more influential.

I would guess at least 90% of the readers of /. and LinuxInsider already know the many things which differentiate Linux from Windows. What's needed is for good articles on these topics to appear in places of primarily proprietary software users (MSDN? ;). They're finally appearing regularly in business publications. But I know far too many technical people who read Microsoft-only magazines amd web sites. We could blame them for not being inquisitive enough, but if they saw these articles in the right places it could be very influential.

Interesting read: http://www2.cio.com/consultant/report2214.html

They suggest a policy dividing OSS in three tiers where tier one applications would include Apache, and Linux. These are apps with substantial commercial backing and professional support offers. These apps can be used with relatively small risk.

Tier two apps include Mozilla or MySQL. They have commercial support but are less wide-spread. Depending on your own policy/risk-taking-ability you can decide to use these apps or only allow them for internal or development purposes.

Tier three applications include all the rest. They might be great, but it will be hard or impossible to get support and they might be unmaintained. For internal/development use only.

They also give a lot of other information about OSS policies.

It is unfortunate that an otherwise healthy piece of software has been found to have a problem of this scale. However I do have good news for software users everywhere: in two years, there will not be any more buffer overflows.

To understand why buffer overflows are going away, it is important to understand current trends in the software industry. Much has been read and published about what Americans call "outsourcing", which is the practice of hiring more competitive priced labor.

Where I work in Tirupathi India there are approximately 100 paid programmers, including myself. In addition to us, there are approximately 250 unpaid programmers working on the lower floors. They have "read-only" access to our source code, and may browse from the source code repository at will. Because of the abundance of Computer Science graduates here and the scarcity of jobs, only the best are able to move from unpaid to paid labor. As each of the paid programmers checks in code, the unpaid programmers review it, probing for weaknesses and security flaws. If a buffer overflow is found, it is reported to a head programming manager. The programmer who found the security flaw is promoted, often from unpaid to paid. The programmer who made the error is demoted. In the case of buffer overflows, which we are told at the beginning are the worst, worst, worst thing, the offending programmer is removed. This, actually, is how I moved from unpaid to paid. And I spend at least half of each of my days (about six hours) at work inspecting my own code to insure that I cannot be removed. I do not make security mistakes ever. To put it in simple language, I have a family to feed.

There is also the cold room, where the programmers who make buffer overflows go before they are removed. I have not seen it. But I know that they make sure not to leave marks. They put you in a metal room, and there is cold water and a hose. It is motivating. I will not go there.

-Srividya.

Oh, so you're on the management track, then?

You're proposing a browser that's not even out of beta for corporate use? I wouldn't consider that a particularly good idea

Oh really.

Why You Should Switch to FireFox

"Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS"

Secunia Internet Explorer System Compromise Vulnerabilities. Solution: "Use another product"

The Twenty Most Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities IE: Number four.

"we are not aware of any vendor-supplied patches for this issue"

Patch for 'critical' IE vulnerability doesn't work

IE full of holes, unsafe: Security experts

AMS Vice President and CTO: Mozilla Firebird is a Tier 1, Best of Breed Open Source Application

I don't care if it's a beta. Firebird/FireFox/Whatever is simply a better product than IE in every conceivable way - with the pertinent exception of branding, but including stability and security. So what exactly makes its use at a corporate level a "bad idea?"

"First of all, I understand that there are two types of outsourcing:

1) Outsourcing jobs that otherwise would not have been created because they weren't cost-effective if filled by North Americans
2) Firing somebody who was doing a perfectly good job EXCLUSIVELY to save money."

There is 3rd type, which is the worst type and probably the most common type:

3) Firing somebody who was doing a perfectly good job to create the APPEARANCE of saving money, while losing money in reality.

The large salary differences can create the illusion of huge savings; however the total cost of outsourcing a programming job to India is multiples of the Indian programmer's salary. Although the labor costs might be around 1/10 of what American programmers earn, just about every other part of the equation is equal or MORE expensive than in the US.

There is a premium on office real estate that is well-equipped enough to support outsourced programming jobs (reliable electricity, Internet connectivity, etc), to the point that a square foot of office space in Bombay is now more expensive than one in Boston. Internet bandwidth in India is 2-4X more expensive. Computer and networking hardware is about the same, or slightly more expensive. On top of that, offshore projects generally require a number of technical leads and/or managers to be at the US client site (at US-level salaries) ... they are liasons that would not be needed if the developers were in the same building.

After you add up everything, you only save about 20-25% if things go right, and they often go wrong. It can be a very bad mistake for the company to fire programmers who have proven themselves for years, in order to pursue a shaky chance at 25% savings.

Here.

Right here.

Try going to India and getting a job. Several Americans have, and have been turned away.

well, you think wrong.

...More important, the economic payoff of off-shoring business processes and a portion of R&D can be so enormous that even reluctant corporations will have little choice but to follow suit to stay competitive. If a major info-tech, insurance, telecom, or banking company doesn't disclose any back-office center in India, Wall Street will soon start asking, "Why not?"

Wow, an admin who fesses up (within 24 hours of breach) when (s)he's been hacked. See, now that wasn't so bad was it? Now why can't other admins do this too? Or at least follow the donts of damage control.

I understand your frustration with what I agree is a raw deal for you. However, Americans are impeded from getting these jobs in India, according to this article in CIO Magazine, "No Americans Need Apply."

This is unfortunate because I would definitely consider moving to India to follow the IT jobs. Instead I will have to stay here and face unemployment.

From my weblog:

An article titled "IT Doesn't Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr published in May 2003 issue of venerable Harvard Business Review, announcing the elevation of IT into a mature infrastructure, in the same league as rail-road, electricity and hence incapable of providing any strategic advantage, seems to have generated good amount of controlversy. Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick wrote in his column Stupid-Journal Alert: Why HBR's View of Tech Is Dangerous: "One of the article's most glaring flaws is its complete disregard for the centrality of software." Pete Delisi wrote in SOUND OFF column of CIO magazine: "What I believe he misses is that IT is not only a transport technology, as are all the other technologies he compares it to. IT is also a "processing" technology capable of doing more than carrying electronic signals or goods, which basically arrive at their destination without major value being added by the technology in the transport process."

The HBR article defines IT (Information Technology -- if you are still wondering) as the technologies used for processing, storing, and transporting information in digital form. But still uses specific embodiments of IT such as number of hosts connected to the Internet as an indicator of IT's overall maturation. Conclusions drawn from state of a specific IT segment cannot be applied to the the whole of IT. I agree that the Internet itself may be in a fairly advanced stage of development. But then, the Internet, however important, is just a segment of IT and cannot be equated with IT. IT is much broader and has seen evolution of many such segments: Transaction Processing, Personal Computing, Desk Top Publishing, Multi-Media and so on. The Internet is only one among many manifestations of IT.

In my opinion, this is the biggest flaw of the HBR article -- It takes a fairly narrow view of IT. It may be okay to compare the Internet with Railroad but it is not fair to compare IT with Railroad. Comparison with the general category of Trasnportation would be more appropriate. Maturing of Railroad did not preclude aviation based transport or even the network of highways for the ground transportation!