Random thoughts and reads

By Vivek | June 1st, 2007 at 02:39 pm ET         

Just had few observations to share from the past few days of reading:

Old Enterprise and On-Demand: Driving around the web, came across an issue from a Lotus Notes 8 user in their forum - drag&drop between months does not work. Not a big deal. More of a developer oversight. Just for comparison purposes, this part works perfectly in Google Calendar. Still, that is not the problem that i want to discuss. The real problem is how quickly a bug like this can get fixed and how much time it eventually takes to deploy the patch. Experience tells - it takes 1 day just to open the case, and get the first response. After that the issue is tossed around in front of bunch of people and finally identified as an issue for real. Give and take - 10 working days. And then the product team works on patching, and testing the problem and rolling out the patch. Another 3 days at best. After that Technical support emails the patch to customer - 1 day at best. Customer requests downtime across all it’s environments - another 10 working days before the patch really gets deployed on all machines. On the whole, the process takes 25 days. And these are minor bug-fixes we are talking about that were easy to discover and fix. As compared this process, On-Demand service would result in total cut down on downtime hours and the coordination required. Fixed maintenance hours every 2 weeks would result in easy patch deployment. And not to mention, since all the startups are always out there to prove themselves, the actual issue identification and patching cycle typically takes much shorter time.

We are Version 10.x. Ha! : Few days back, I got contacted by a company who was at a release 5.x. Now that is a first one for me. Typically I talk with startups operating in their 0.x release phase or those who have just starting moving into 1.x path. And suddenly i realized how “uncool” it is to talk and write and think about apps that are operating in 5.x+ version group. It’s almost a sin, i would say So what could be the next trend? Versions coming down so that enterprise vendors can get into the buzz life?

Startup Life: As i had mentioned before, lot of guys are helping out startups grow. But is is always good to hear things from a new team who are on their way to success. So read “And then there were four.” from the Xobni team to get your lessons in the startup world.

Google has core values   : I was surprised to know that even Google has core values. Last time i heard about that, only the most fucked up companies came up with those billboards to brainwash their employees. Why does Google want to symbolize those kind of settings?