From the article, it seems like the platform already is pretty open:
No talk about complexities having to buy an SDK
No issues trying to become an "approved" developer
No need for an approval committee to decide if your app is worthy for the device
The main complexities seem to have to do with the sheer diversity related to the multi-carrier and multi-hardware aspects of the BB platform (e.g. the author mentions 10 different ways of getting a network connection and shortcomings of the built-in SDK UI widgets).
The more people who use a certain something, the more valuable (and widely used) it becomes. It seems to me that a network effect applies to operating systems (and the related skills).
Imagine you have a large population of Windows desktop developers out there. You're going to build a medical device with a UI (or perhaps even without one). If you build it using Windows, you can tap into that large population. Because you use Windows, that population then grows. Extend ad infinitum to device X, Y, and Z.
Certainly, there are other issues in the selection of an OS than the network effect. And when those gains exceed the value of the network effect, you make a different choice. You see companies try to optimize for the network effect all the time via standardization, but you also see companies adopting variances from the standard at times.
I think it's important to separate the issue of the network effect and the issue of Windows being crappy. One can rail against various negative attributes that Windows has and promote alternatives. Opposing the network effect, however, is like trying to oppose the rising of the sun.
If you're building a technology alternative, nuture that network effect. Make it easy for knowledge of your technology to be re-used widely and broadly.
Perhaps, but I suspect that similar to civil servants in most countries, you can't fire them just because they don't generate enough output; you can only fire them if they break the rules. Thus, more and more rules.
Plus, this is Japan, famous for structural rigidity in its labor market.
Verizon Blackberry devices in the US already have 3G-speed EVDO (1.5M downstream) network access and tethered modem capabilities, with much better coverage than EDGE in the US. (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=5 488)
Well, while I don't want to detract from the achievements of those who have worked their way up, social standing and the value of one's social network is worth a lot.
A company's success depends mainly on two things. Your ability to build a good product and your ability to sell it.
Building a good product involves all the work issues that have been discussed here for a long time. Respecting your workers, life balance issues, etc...
But that's only half of it. Selling deals in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars is no mean feat; it requires years of experience and social networking (particularly among other "C level" peers who can cut the big checks). If you can get an low-cost outsourced CEO from somewhere who has the network and skills to land and close $50M deals, you should mortgage your house and retain their services immediately!
The comments on this thread seem to vary widely from "lay it all out for them" to "put it into their terms (money/solutions/bottom-line)" to "keep your mouth shut." The problem here, is communication.
It'd be nice to say prescriptively "give them information X, Y, and Z organized in the following way" or "eat and say nothing, you're powerless." Following such a prescriptive solution allows us to place any blame for failure on the advice-giver instead of ourselves. However, any prescriptive solution is also likely to fail 80% of the time.
The situation is much more complex than just figuring out what to say and what will happen as a result. This meeting isn't an opportunity to lay it all out on the table. It's an opportunity to open dialogue with the executive(s) present. Before going into a diatribe over all the maladies in the organization or stuffing yourself so full of food that the blood all flows from the brain in the stomach, ask questions to the executive(s).
What are their organizational goals? What are the concerns and problems that are being perceived? What sparked the decision to have this meeting? On what level can you communicate with these people? Don't begin to offer your report until you understand their needs. In order to understand their needs, ask them. Clarify them and summarize them back so that you clearly understand. Then, based on your knoweldge, frame a response that feeds them your knowledge framed in terms of their need.
Stay safe and keep everything at a corporate level, making no assumptions about the positive or negative morals of the people you are talking to. Based on their needs, form your analyses based on a shared mutual interest (minimally you all want raises and advancement. maybe you also have stock options in common or other things). Maybe in the process, you can make a powerful friend.
Remember, for better or worse, this is the beginning of a process, not the end of one.
Damn, there was an article about this that I saw as a yahoo headline a while back; don't remember what news source it came from.
But it was mentioned Sprint Ion and how it was millions/billions overbudget and not making any progress because they vastly underestimated the problem of the last mile, getting from the CO's to the actual peoples' homes.
They'd planned to build this awesome infrastructure to route phone/fax/data over "whatever" it was that they were going to use for the last mile, but when it came to acutally finding a last mile solution, everything blew up on them.
It's sorta sad, since this problem is what plagues the entire country (perhaps the much of the world as well) in getting decent high-speed connectivity into the home. When I'd first lookup up Sprint Ion, I thought "wow, cool. I wonder how they get this level of consistent quality to the home" since for stuff like multiple lines of telephone, you'd need to have some guarantee of line quality since dropped landline calls are pretty unacceptable.
But it turned out to be a big disappointment when there was no great revelation in the solution to the last mile. They couldn't defeat it, it defeated them.
What are some real, commercially viable solutions to the last mile issue? How can we get real decent broadband to the home over long distances?
The job of making sure that students have a rewarding co-op experience really falls upon the school to perform, but as a participant, you should be in a good position to influence how future co-op arrangements are put together.
The experiences I'm about to describe are from my college co-op program, your ability to duplicate this in a H.S. environment may vary, although many of the principles should still be applicable.
Maintaining a good co-op program is hard work. The college needs to find a large pool of companies looking for co-op students, and a large pool of students looking for co-op companies. So the job of an office is already cut out for them, having to search all around for a large pool of companies, and surveying them to find out if they will actually give (or at least claim so) the students a worthwhile experience. Our co-op office was quite good at this, bringing in a large number of opportunities every year, and creating a very efficient interview system so that students could go through a large number of companies, and vice versa, in a very efficient manner, brokered by the school.
The second part, once the job has commenced, is oversight. About 1/3rd of the way through the work period, administrators from the office went out to all of the job sites (companies participating were required to comply with this) to check up on the students and on the companies. They'd interview the student's manager(s) and find out what they student was doing and if they were performing up to expectation. They had a survey sheet for them to fill out so that results could be correlated with other students at other companies. They'd then interview the student and find out how their experience was going, whether htye were satisfied, and also had a survey forthem to fill out. The point of this was, to make the program as strong as possible, they had to amke sure that poor-performing students were taken out of hte program in order to maintain a good relationship with the companies. This offered the companies protection against wasting money paying a marginal student (who was not really taking advantage of their opportunities) and helped bring companies on board. This offered protectino to the students also, since if they were being abused, used as cheap labor, or otherwise not getting a worthwhile experience at the company, they could return to school and the company would be terminated from the program.
The third part, was a post-work-session followup with both teh student and the company. The process was similar to the mid-work-review, except that it was usually done over the phone with the company and in writing for the student.
The goal of all of this, is to create a balanced program that benefitted all stakeholders. In order to get the best companies, they had to make sure that the students were a good fit and make sure that they were serious. In order to get hte best students, they had to make sure that they had the best companies who weren't going to use the studnets merely as "cheap labor". This creates a "positive feedback" scenarior where each strong point recinforces itself and makes the program stronger over time.
The difficulty, is getting such a system "jump-started". My school's co-op program has a long and venerable history as one of hte best co-op programs out there, and they have a great amount of effort invested in keeping it that way. Getting a program started is often difficult, becuase you need to "sell" the value of the program to new companies and students who haven't worked with your program before.
There's no easy quick fix to the problem you're encountering, because neither you nor your school is necessarily in a very strong position to demand changes yet. However, based on your description, this is probably not a company that your school would want to do business with again. A hard part is that your school may be afraid of losing companies, even if they really are no good for the program. It's hard to get into the mindset where you really try to build a strong program in the long-term, and are willing to give up short-term gains in favor of long-term goals.
Slashdot Mirror
The main complexities seem to have to do with the sheer diversity related to the multi-carrier and multi-hardware aspects of the BB platform (e.g. the author mentions 10 different ways of getting a network connection and shortcomings of the built-in SDK UI widgets).
The more people who use a certain something, the more valuable (and widely used) it becomes. It seems to me that a network effect applies to operating systems (and the related skills).
Imagine you have a large population of Windows desktop developers out there. You're going to build a medical device with a UI (or perhaps even without one). If you build it using Windows, you can tap into that large population. Because you use Windows, that population then grows. Extend ad infinitum to device X, Y, and Z.
Certainly, there are other issues in the selection of an OS than the network effect. And when those gains exceed the value of the network effect, you make a different choice. You see companies try to optimize for the network effect all the time via standardization, but you also see companies adopting variances from the standard at times.
I think it's important to separate the issue of the network effect and the issue of Windows being crappy. One can rail against various negative attributes that Windows has and promote alternatives. Opposing the network effect, however, is like trying to oppose the rising of the sun.
If you're building a technology alternative, nuture that network effect. Make it easy for knowledge of your technology to be re-used widely and broadly.
Perhaps, but I suspect that similar to civil servants in most countries, you can't fire them just because they don't generate enough output; you can only fire them if they break the rules. Thus, more and more rules.
Plus, this is Japan, famous for structural rigidity in its labor market.
Verizon Blackberry devices in the US already have 3G-speed EVDO (1.5M downstream) network access and tethered modem capabilities, with much better coverage than EDGE in the US. (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=5 488)
Well, while I don't want to detract from the achievements of those who have worked their way up, social standing and the value of one's social network is worth a lot.
A company's success depends mainly on two things. Your ability to build a good product and your ability to sell it.
Building a good product involves all the work issues that have been discussed here for a long time. Respecting your workers, life balance issues, etc...
But that's only half of it. Selling deals in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars is no mean feat; it requires years of experience and social networking (particularly among other "C level" peers who can cut the big checks). If you can get an low-cost outsourced CEO from somewhere who has the network and skills to land and close $50M deals, you should mortgage your house and retain their services immediately!
The comments on this thread seem to vary widely from "lay it all out for them" to "put it into their terms (money/solutions/bottom-line)" to "keep your mouth shut." The problem here, is communication.
It'd be nice to say prescriptively "give them information X, Y, and Z organized in the following way" or "eat and say nothing, you're powerless." Following such a prescriptive solution allows us to place any blame for failure on the advice-giver instead of ourselves. However, any prescriptive solution is also likely to fail 80% of the time.
The situation is much more complex than just figuring out what to say and what will happen as a result. This meeting isn't an opportunity to lay it all out on the table. It's an opportunity to open dialogue with the executive(s) present. Before going into a diatribe over all the maladies in the organization or stuffing yourself so full of food that the blood all flows from the brain in the stomach, ask questions to the executive(s).
What are their organizational goals? What are the concerns and problems that are being perceived? What sparked the decision to have this meeting? On what level can you communicate with these people? Don't begin to offer your report until you understand their needs. In order to understand their needs, ask them. Clarify them and summarize them back so that you clearly understand. Then, based on your knoweldge, frame a response that feeds them your knowledge framed in terms of their need.
Stay safe and keep everything at a corporate level, making no assumptions about the positive or negative morals of the people you are talking to. Based on their needs, form your analyses based on a shared mutual interest (minimally you all want raises and advancement. maybe you also have stock options in common or other things). Maybe in the process, you can make a powerful friend.
Remember, for better or worse, this is the beginning of a process, not the end of one.
Then you should be happy with 2.1. Configurable keybindings is one of the most awaited features that's present in this version.
Damn, there was an article about this that I saw as a yahoo headline a while back; don't remember what news source it came from.
But it was mentioned Sprint Ion and how it was millions/billions overbudget and not making any progress because they vastly underestimated the problem of the last mile, getting from the CO's to the actual peoples' homes.
They'd planned to build this awesome infrastructure to route phone/fax/data over "whatever" it was that they were going to use for the last mile, but when it came to acutally finding a last mile solution, everything blew up on them.
It's sorta sad, since this problem is what plagues the entire country (perhaps the much of the world as well) in getting decent high-speed connectivity into the home. When I'd first lookup up Sprint Ion, I thought "wow, cool. I wonder how they get this level of consistent quality to the home" since for stuff like multiple lines of telephone, you'd need to have some guarantee of line quality since dropped landline calls are pretty unacceptable.
But it turned out to be a big disappointment when there was no great revelation in the solution to the last mile. They couldn't defeat it, it defeated them.
What are some real, commercially viable solutions to the last mile issue? How can we get real decent broadband to the home over long distances?
The job of making sure that students have a rewarding co-op experience really falls upon the school to perform, but as a participant, you should be in a good position to influence how future co-op arrangements are put together.
The experiences I'm about to describe are from my college co-op program, your ability to duplicate this in a H.S. environment may vary, although many of the principles should still be applicable.
Maintaining a good co-op program is hard work. The college needs to find a large pool of companies looking for co-op students, and a large pool of students looking for co-op companies. So the job of an office is already cut out for them, having to search all around for a large pool of companies, and surveying them to find out if they will actually give (or at least claim so) the students a worthwhile experience. Our co-op office was quite good at this, bringing in a large number of opportunities every year, and creating a very efficient interview system so that students could go through a large number of companies, and vice versa, in a very efficient manner, brokered by the school.
The second part, once the job has commenced, is oversight. About 1/3rd of the way through the work period, administrators from the office went out to all of the job sites (companies participating were required to comply with this) to check up on the students and on the companies. They'd interview the student's manager(s) and find out what they student was doing and if they were performing up to expectation. They had a survey sheet for them to fill out so that results could be correlated with other students at other companies. They'd then interview the student and find out how their experience was going, whether htye were satisfied, and also had a survey forthem to fill out. The point of this was, to make the program as strong as possible, they had to amke sure that poor-performing students were taken out of hte program in order to maintain a good relationship with the companies. This offered the companies protection against wasting money paying a marginal student (who was not really taking advantage of their opportunities) and helped bring companies on board. This offered protectino to the students also, since if they were being abused, used as cheap labor, or otherwise not getting a worthwhile experience at the company, they could return to school and the company would be terminated from the program.
The third part, was a post-work-session followup with both teh student and the company. The process was similar to the mid-work-review, except that it was usually done over the phone with the company and in writing for the student.
The goal of all of this, is to create a balanced program that benefitted all stakeholders. In order to get the best companies, they had to make sure that the students were a good fit and make sure that they were serious. In order to get hte best students, they had to make sure that they had the best companies who weren't going to use the studnets merely as "cheap labor". This creates a "positive feedback" scenarior where each strong point recinforces itself and makes the program stronger over time.
The difficulty, is getting such a system "jump-started". My school's co-op program has a long and venerable history as one of hte best co-op programs out there, and they have a great amount of effort invested in keeping it that way. Getting a program started is often difficult, becuase you need to "sell" the value of the program to new companies and students who haven't worked with your program before.
There's no easy quick fix to the problem you're encountering, because neither you nor your school is necessarily in a very strong position to demand changes yet. However, based on your description, this is probably not a company that your school would want to do business with again. A hard part is that your school may be afraid of losing companies, even if they really are no good for the program. It's hard to get into the mindset where you really try to build a strong program in the long-term, and are willing to give up short-term gains in favor of long-term goals.