Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

While the release of Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is getting all of the attention this week, version 2.0 of the Microsoft Sync Framework was also released this week and can be downloaded from here.

An interesting article published in the Gallup Management Journal posits that workplace socializing actually increases work productivity.

Here’s the sides of the debate:

Every March, we hear dire warnings about workplace productivity lost to water cooler chats. In 2008, Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated that the productivity lost to NCAA March Madness in the U.S. would cost the economy as much as US$1.7-billion. Idle chatter, it seems, is an expensive waste of workplace time.

Well, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, PhD., of MIT would beg to differ. In fact, Dr. Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and the faculty director of MIT's Digital Life consortium, and Benjamin Waber, a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab, have found that workplace chatter, even the idle kind, increases productivity.

What has been your personal experience?

Included below is an article regarding strategic outsourcing of R&D that I recently came across. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts and/or plans in this area.

Technology companies are increasingly partnering with Offshore R&D providers to surmount the challenges posed by rapidly changing market dynamics.

There is a considerable shift and restructuring in the way companies are approaching R&D. Rapidly changing technologies and market dynamics, increasing competition, and availability of similar types of products are some of the factors that are making product differentiation at faster time-to-market, an absolute imperative for businesses. Technology companies are consequently requiring their R&D function to significantly enhance their innovation yield so as to drive innovation, surmount these challenges and remain competitive.
The enormous pressure on the R&D function is further compounded by shrinking R&D budgets, rising costs and increasing complexity of the R&D process. Further, the current economic downturn is only making matters worse.

Faced with this scenario, a large number of technology companies are increasingly outsourcing product R&D to address this situation and achieve greater efficiencies at economies of scale. A leading research house notes that, on an average, 40% of the R&D work can be potentially executed by using external resources. And, this would mean a contraction of R&D expenses by about 20%, conservatively.

This increasing trend towards leveraging Offshore R&D and Outsourced Product Engineering Services is substantiated by the KPMG International / Economist Intelligence Unit Survey. The survey expects the proportion of companies with at least some R&D activity taking place abroad to reach 84 percent by 2010. Similarly, the number of companies outsourcing R&D to third parties is also expected to grow to 75 percent.
Networked R&D or Collaborative R&D offers a plethora of benefits to significantly better performance per R&D dollar.

A few of the benefits that companies are deriving from Outsourcing R&D / Offshore R&D include:
- Leveraging the know-how and key development strengths of partners for faster time-to-market and additional revenues.
- Using global talent for skills in shortage at a definite cost arbitrage.
- Optimized asset utilization, enhanced focus on core competencies and increased customer-focused research/listening more to customers.
- Enlarged innovation capacity with new knowledge and experience across the globe.
- Getting new and innovative products to market faster with enhanced efficiency and productivity.

If you are involved, or considering starting, your own technology business, I strongly recommend you invest half an hour to watch this video by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals.

It is full of sound observations and advice and quite entertaining as well. 

My key take-away:  Don’t shoot for the stars (selling out for billions of dollars) – but a sustainable and growable business.  The odds of your success are much great.

Do you agree?

Check out all of the details on Scott Hanselman’s blog

1. Windows 7 includes .NET 3.5SP1
2. Visual Studio 2008 works great on Windows 7
3. You can write a single app for XP, Vista and Windows 7
4. You can code to Windows 7 features today using the .NET Framework
5. PowerShell is built-into Windows 7
6. There's an extensive Windows 7 UX Guide
7. There are Free Book Chapters for Upcoming Windows 7 Books
8. Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers
9. There's a new "Windows on Channel 9" Site
10. Boot to VHD Saves You Time

The Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos designed to help you learn how to build applications that are compatible with and shine on Windows 7.

Overview
The Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is based on Windows 7 RTM and it is designed to help you learn how to build applications that are compatible with and shine on Windows 7 by utilizing key Windows 7 features such as:

• Taskbar
• Libraries
• Multi Touch
• Sensors and Location
• Ribbon
• Trigger Start Services
• Instrumentation and ETW
• Application Compatability

• Version Checking
• UAC Data Redirection
• Session 0 Isolation
• Installer Detection
• User Interface Privilege Isolation
• High DPI

Check out the growing set of video and text interviews with leading VB developers at the I’m A VB site.   You can find my interview at Jackie VB.

I came cross this video on Antonio Chagoury.

It is one of those “Very funny, but painfully true” videos that depicts how ridiculous it would be if the same negotiating tactics used with software vendors were used in other scenarios.

How many of you deal with these tactics on a regular basis? 
How do you respond to them?

While we try to be flexible and “creative”, we normally do expect to get paid not only for our time, but also our expertise.  I also know how much (actually, how little) I can rely on promises of future deals and/or compensation. If potential clients can’t appreciate what we bring to the table, and how much they need to pay for it, then I don’t want them as a client…

We have just posted a very cool video showing off some of the work we have been doing with Voice Recognition.

At Renaissance, we try to allocate time for our developers to explore new tools and technologies that are not necessarily related to their current projects. This speech application is the result of one such project developed by Kim Major (http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/kim).

The video (http://www.renaissance.co.il/VSSpeech.aspx) offers a glimpse of our thinking and early implementation of extending Microsoft Visual Studio to allow programmers to write code in C# or VB.NET using mostly speech recognition. We believe that this unique approach could be a real boon for handicapped programmers, temporary suffers of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), or programmers who just want to program while lying on the beach.

This is a work in progress and we would very much like to hear your comments and feedback either over here or at speech@renaissance.co.il.

A very interesting interview with Steve Balmer in yesterday’s New York Times.  Particularly good advice on how he now likes to run meetings, which is applicable to technical meetings as well.