Software Engineering - Discipline Is Freedom

Smart people usually do the dumbest things. Smart people are confident, and confident people typically don’t check their assumptions. You build 100 floors on top of a weak foundation and…

A lot of my fellow techies are missing the point of the iPad. Techies are comparing the iPad to netbooks. They are talking about multitasking, and the absence of OLED display. All such technical comparisons remind me of when IBM dismissed the PC as not being a “proper” computer.

The iPad will enable a scenario I’ve trying for a while with “proper computers”, and failing miserably: private photo sharing. My mother still asks me to send paper copies of her granddaughters’ pictures. And that is a complex operation: I send the pictures to a brother, who then prints and gives those to her. My mother cannot stand having to wait for a computer to boot, open an application, etc., etc., etc., all this to look at he granddaughters’ pictures. He point is simple: with a paper album, I open it and can already see the pictures. Why you cannot make this happen with all such new technologies?

A few new digital picture frames can get pictures from the Internet, but most depend on you using some service to store the pictures. Even if that is at times “free”, you risk having your pictures shared with more than the intended audience. Now, I can create/use a simple application that will, on a peer-to-peer approach, connect an iPad at my mother’s house with some iPod/iPad at my house, and we then share pictures between the paired devices. My mother didn’t like the iPod, because the screen was too small. Now the screen is exactly at the right size.

Like my scenario, there will be hundreds of similar ones for which a “proper computer” would be an overkill, and the iPad will be exactly the adequate device. The price may become the only constraint for most people. But that is something that can only be solved by large scale production, what is always a good problem to have.

Although I’ll have this time to start with the disclaimer of being a Microsoft employee, I would prefer to consider that I’m mainly trying to share some more information to “avoid unnecessary panic”. This is by no means an “official company communication”, and information is provided “as is”, without any explicit or implicit guarantees.

On Saturday, January 16, 2010, 19:25-GMT, BBC News interviewed Mr. Alan Stevens, who was introduced as a Media Consultant and Computer Expert. Mr. Stevens went on to present opinions about news that the Germany government made an alert about vulnerabilities in some Internet Explorer versions. Mr. Stevens made some comments that may have confused even more the BBC audience.

• German government didn’t tell its citizens to stop using Microsoft products. The news presenter made correct statements about German government recommendations. Yet, Mr. Stevens made clearly a reference to a supposed recommendation by the German government to “…don’t use Microsoft products”, what is not correct.
• Mr. Stevens made an inadequate analogy about what security vulnerabilities in browsers are, how those are found and exploited. His analogy was that of having an open window in your house, and someone publishing a map and providing a ladder to help people get in. Proceeding with his analogy, one would have to believe that you live in crystal palace with millions of windows, and that the targeted window has been opened for years, without any problems. Mapping very technical concepts like “pointers to deleted objects” to the physical world is hard, yet possible. A closer analogy would be to give you the yellow pages and those having a certain ad with a phone number for a no longer existing service provider, which now happens to be the phone number of a “bad guy”. Yet, the value of such analogies is limited, mainly when incorrect.
• Mr. Stevens went on to say that Microsoft “obviously” was trying to downplay the importance of security vulnerability. The Microsoft Security Response Center has a blog (http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/) that has been publishing information about the ongoing investigations on the recent security attacks on several American corporations. There is no basis to affirm that the company is downplaying the importance of any security vulnerability. Mr. Stevens made it look like the recent incidents targeted general users, when those targeted only large corporations. Also, some recent incidents used techniques of social engineering, like thinking someone’s password from known facts about the person.
• Some minor details were wrong, and maybe a little “biased”. Despite being asked about how quick he thought that the company was working on a fix for the recently reported issues, Mr. Stevens went on a tirade about how IE was losing market share. While aware that a security advisory about how to improve security in IE6 to avoid the attack was published, Mr. Stevens made it sound like this wasn’t a valuable piece of information, even when in fact only attacks to IE6 have been confirmed so far. Finally, Mr. Stevens went on to say that “…they are going to be working like mad in Silicon Valley…”. Despite having offices in the Silicon Valley, Microsoft’s main development offices are in Redmond, WA, USA, where IE development happens.

That said, Mr. Stevens was making comments on live TV, and one would always be subject to make mistakes under such circumstances. It is always hard to speak publicly, targeting a general audience, about very technical issues. Yet, at times that is done, and it is even fun. Time to watch “Click”.

While I like sports, and like business, I usually don’t like mixing both worlds. I don’t see the many motivational lectures by successful sportsmen as having any effect in business performance.

I approached the book “The Last Amateurs”, by Mark de Ronde, with special curiosity. Mark presented a good class on Negotiations during a training session I recently attended at the University of Cambridge, doing an effective job in very little time. It has been my belief for a while that we miss the use of more Ethnography in Software Engineering, and reading this book confirmed my impression. Yet, it may not be an interesting book for everyone. I wonder if some content left out of the book wasn’t a little more interesting than a long discussion about a certain body part. Mainly, I find the final decision about the coxswain change to be conveniently not as documented as other trivialities.

The book, for me, is worth reading. Even more worthwhile are certain posts from the book’s blog, mainly the one on The Relevance of Rowing for Business.

If a Zune comes out with these, I will buy one.
1) Sold and supported outside the USA.
2) Better resolution. It doesn’t make sense that the iPod Touch has 480×320 pixels and the Zune HD still has 480×272 pixels.
3) Infrared support. If the Zune can be used as a kind of universal remote control then I offer to write the application on my spare time!

Let’s start the decade with some useless data. After some automation, I found that, on average, the birthday of my contacts in social networks happens on the 4th of June. Would it be adequate to just send a birthday card to all of them on my newly defined “average contact birthday”? Obviously, I’m not considering a real card, since that wouldn’t be ecologically friendly. Maybe a simple e-mail would suffice. But there is the risk of getting the message into the junk e-mail folder. Better not to do anything…

Nowadays, a lot of “applications” are quickly delivering to users, in push or pull mode, an amazing quantity of useless data. Some of such data is probably harmless, like the just cited average contact birthday. However, there are some pieces of data that are not as harmless as that one. Most people in our society don’t really follow the rational model of enumerating several options for a given choice, doing adequate investigation of pros and cons and, after making a first choice, thinking a little more through its consequences, having a plan B ready, etc. That is time consuming, and the reality of life is that most people just want a quick reasonable answer, instead of a delayed best choice.

Suppose, for example, that a manager is already “targeting” a certain employee. This manager somehow gets data showing that such employee is the one that most quickly answers e-mail messages in his team. If the manager is targeting the employee for promotion – not all “targeting” is bad – then this would go into a promotion justification as “this is the most responsive employee in our team”. However, if the manager’s goal is to show that the employee is incompetent, then the same data can be presented as “… data that shows such employee can be easily interrupted, and delivers answers to e-mail messages without doing enough investigation. Indeed, over the last year, these two examples…”.

The problem is that the disconnected pieces of data being thrown at people are suddenly being considered relevant. It is as if not having such information yesterday, people couldn’t make a decision, whereas with this isolated data suddenly it all comes into place. Being an economist with a PhD doesn’t prevent the use of single piece of data as the anchor for a decision or opinion. Some economists are picking the latest released numbers for job creation, number of houses sold, etc., and quickly pointing out: “You know that recession that I previously told you that wouldn’t happen, which was caused mainly by that housing bubble that I told you that never existed? It is now over!”.

5) iTunes could not connect to this iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000001). That is probably because… I don’t have an iPhone. I just have an iPod. Or maybe it can make phone calls and I just never correctly used that dial!

4) You don’t currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to permanently get access to this folder. Why would I, an administrator of my own machine, click on the folder if I didn’t want to get access to it?

3) InsideFlash. Warning: You are about to update BIOS. Please be adviced: a. Be sure your computer is running on exteral power. b. Before continuing, close all applications. c. Your system will automaically shut down after update. These are not typos I made when copying the text. The typos are really there in the application (adviced, exteral, automaically, etc.). Hard to miss, considering the application has just a single dialog! I almost had the desire to follow item b, and close the application.

2) The relationship between Oulook and Exchange continues its saga of interesting and useless messages. I’ve selected some of the odd moments during 2009. Microsoft Office Outlook. One or more items cannot be moved because items you previously moved are still being processed by the server. Was this information helpful? Not really. The Exchange server issued an unexpected response (440). Very informative! Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. I rest my case.

1) The Dell frozen registration dialog. Thanks for choosing Dell! Get the most of your new computer. Registration is quick and easy. But.. wait, no so quick and easy. Indeed, the dialog has three buttons (Register, Remind Later, and Decline) that won’t produce any result when clicked. Testing anyone?! Worse than the error was the time it took for it to be solved, and workarounds to be posted to the Dell Community forum.

Social networks are not just being used to rejuvenate the population, making old and mature people look like teenagers. Apparently, someone else has noticed the shortcuts being taken by social network sites and the applications based on their frameworks. And this is finally getting the attention of mainstream media.

It is a fallacy to think that such shortcuts are new. Many years ago, and long after the famous Nigerian letters were well-documented to be a scam, I watched a TV show about how easy con artists got lots of money just sending bogus bills to businesses. With a million letters asking for U$95.00 for some bogus service, getting 10% of the business recipients to just pay without checking is a great return on the investment on stamps!

The expectation: any set-top box would get updates automatically “over the air”.

The reality: I had to find a computer with a serial port, and then a serial cable (that I had to borrow, since mine is nowhere to be seen after almost a decade without use). The update process itself wasn’t hard. Yet, the user experience was horrible. The “serial port” dependency is something that Humax needs to solve quickly. At a time when we are talking about USB 3.0, to be seeking for serial cables is almost as seeking for 8” diskettes. And many computer users have never seen a 8” diskette!

Some sites nowadays add “intermediate pages” with ads when you click on a link to some other content within the same site. Not that far away from the previously annoying “exit pages”, such intermediate pages are equally annoying, but I can understand the logic behind that approach. It gets a little worse now that sites will intentionally split a single story into several pages, hoping that you keep clicking until reading the entire story, giving the site owner new opportunities to display different ads.

A while ago, something very interesting happened when I was browsing at a certain online news site. I was sure that I clicked on a certain link, and yet I was taken to the site of a product announced by one of the ads. I was absolutely sure I didn’t click that ad. First, because I usually don’t click on online ads anyway. But this case was a little different: I was sure I had clicked outside the ad. How could I have been taken to the site of the announced product?

Being a developer, I “instrumented” my browser, and prepared to retry the scenario and take a look at the page source and its scripts. Yet, this time the problem didn’t happen. Everything happened as expected, and when I clicked outside the ad content, the browser just proceeded to the expected page. However, what if the page content sent to me this time was different from the one sent when the problem happened? Could I, as a developer, think of a way to make an ad look a little more effective than it really is, just using some technology tricks?

Suppose I have an ad that is being shown to 1 million visitors of a certain web site, and being clicked 10,000 times. Considering that my goal when showing an ad is to have visitors clicking on it, the conversion rate is at 1%. Doubling that conversion rate with more interesting content is possible, but extremely hard. Yet, suppose that for 990,000 visitors I show the ad, and only those that click over it are taken to the product site. All things still being the same, hopefully 9,900 visitors will now be taken to the product site. However, for the remaining 10,000 visitors I could show a page that has some script that will take visitors to the product site no matter where they click. This only changes the experience of 1% of the visitors, but it will now result on 19,900 visitors seeing the product page. Obviously, a few will be annoyed. But what if historically 5% of those that see the product page end-up making a purchase? Potentially, sales could go up from 500 units to about 1,000 units disrupting the experience of only 1% of the visitors. Would all those involved, from the ad agency to the content site, and finally the product vendor, resist the temptation of using such trick?

I recently noticed that soon it would be 4 years since my first blog post, and made an effort to list 4 things that I believe that got better and 4 things that didn’t get so much better over such period in the tech field. And huge thanks to the British for the fireworks! (Well, they call it Bonfire Night, but I just preferred to think they were celebrating 4 years since my blog started!).

Bad News First
- Customer Service. It didn’t get any better. And be prepared: I believe it will get worse. Most people were thinking that buying products and services online would be the next universal panacea. Hope they never had to return anything. Physical stores continue to be a non-sense for the technical people. Some are nothing more than cybercafés, without the café.
- Software Engineering. We have no silver bullet yet. Most software/hardware projects still depend on a few self-motivated employees, able to keep focus despite frequent changes in priorities, interruptions, poor management, etc.
- Business Models. Nothing new here. Either you pay for software distributed with “licenses” that you don’t have the time to read, or use “free services” full of ads that you don’t have time to pay attention to. What I heard recently in an event about hardware was clear: the current business model in which hardware is a commodity subsidized by long term contracts for attached services cannot continue.
- Government interventions. For some strange reason, legislators and judges in Brazil keep thinking they have the power to decide what content should be posted or removed from the Internet. Worse: other governments think the same too!

The Good News
- Better and cheaper hardware. Kudos to the hardware folks. Who would think that mobile devices would get CPUs of 1 GHz so soon? And some mobile devices already have a GPU, so that you can use it to enhance that 12 Megapixels photo from the embedded camera. It amazes me that some mobiles still make phone calls.
- Internet access. It is not everywhere, and it may be costly. But broadband is certainly in more places and far cheaper nowadays.
- Customer focus. It may be just a phase, but until about 2 years ago I was seeing a lot of projects based on ludicrous ideas being financed by venture capital or large companies just for the sake of “not missing an opportunity”. That still certainly happens, but I’m clearly seeing now more accountability and focus on what customers really want and are willing to pay for. On the long run, sustainable businesses are always better than cool but unsustainable ideas.
- Less is more. Less cluttered UI and simpler services are then new trend, based on an increasing focus on doing something for the user for immediate productivity or fun. Other than software for tax returns, I believe that most other software experiences got better, from game to spreadsheets.