Vishnu Varadaraj's Blog

Microsoft doesn't seem to have changed it's strategy a little bit even though many have hailed this as a 180 degree turnaround. It is again copying what other startups and market creators have done (cloud computing, internet as a platform etc) and then executing on the plan so well that it is cheap(?), superior and accessible to everyone. At the same time, it also tries to win back the developers and defend its platform. So, what is new? For those who missed the announcement, Microsoft came out with a comprehensive cloud computing platform for developers and organizations which can be used to host applications developed for the platform. To its credit, the platform is so comprehensive and well integrated that Google's equivalent AppEngine seems like.. well, something that was built on 20% time. (But, note that the Sql Data services seems awfully similar to the Google Bigtable model.) It also seems to have pulled the entire company including Office, SQLServer, Developer ...

Thought Networking (from Primal Fusion) This may be unknown to anyone outside Waterloo, but yesterday a local startup (Primal Fusion) which was in stealth mode for over 3 years talked about what they are doing for the first time. It was interesting to watch the understated local hype since it was run by Yvan Couture, who had succesfully sold his startup to Agfa for a good profit and is also quite active in the community. The only reason I was interested was because I had listened to a talk by Yvan recently at UW. He seemed like a genuine and trustworthy guy which is rather rare in business nowadays. The core idea behind the company is related to thought networking. They hope to define what it is and be the leader for a new market category. The simple example given was to go from the approach of searching for something to have the required information delivered to you once you have defined your thoughts. Their goal is to capture your thoughts and represent them as semantic networks. Af...

Product quality - Dev & QA synergy. Quality is a problem which every software development team has to deal with. We have the usual bell curves etc which we use to gain confidence regarding overall stability before we ship. But, here are some observations based on the timelines of the curve & potential dev/qa synergy. There are some projects where many bugs are found after the 'code freeze'. This is a clear indication that the dev & qa team had issues. It is possible dev didn't unit test properly or many changes were made late in the cycle and either QA took time to ramp up and understand the changes or were busy with other things. There are some projects where many bugs are found immediately after 'code complete' and then taper off quickly. This may be the case with many projects and might be a good thing. It means the QA team was able to understand the changes quickly and cover new areas thoroughly. It might also mean that the Dev team didn't have e...

mobileMe - Wow! The sleeper announcement at the Apple WWDC was probably mobileMe. It is what MSFT, GOOGL etc. would have loved to build. I had earlier blog entries indicating that I liked .mac & how synchronization is the key to merge the web & devices (eg. SharpCast). Microsoft tried it with LiveMesh but failed before it even took off.(To be fair, I never tried the service) The seamless integration with iPhone, Desktop, Web & even PCs in mobileMe was amazing. No doubt it will be copied by many - it is true that even mobileMe concept is based on Exchange! And yes, I need to get a 3G iPhone this July - now, if only mobileMe was free!

Google App Engine - First impressions * It is free, but with quotas. The business model is probably to get others to build apps so that Google can get users, searchable data & then eventually offer a business edition. * You don't have to worry about hosting, load balancing & scaling which is indeed huge since writing the web application is the easiest among all of the above. * The initial release is not ready for business apps, it doesn't have an SLA nor does it have a good support for authentication & authorization. * You need to learn Python if you haven't already, but future support for ruby or php could be expected soon. * There are no issues in hosting flash or flex application except for the login to google account issue. * Python frameworks like Django are natively supported, but you can use your own framework as well. * It is possible to do GQL queries and Google full text search support. * And there is the full offline sdk for those who can't get an...

iPhone SDK - First impressions. This is probably the most comprehensive SDK released for a mobile OS, even though Windows Mobile probably is similar. It must have been easy for Apple since most of the functionality was already in in Mac OS, throw in a different UI framework & a bunch of innovations on touch, acclerometer and location sensing you have the mobile SDK. RIM's blackberry SDK is many years old but is so immature compared to this. It is not without it's own set of problems though. The reliance on old Mac tools means you need a Mac computer running Leopard to use it. The support for favorites like Java(upcoming from Sun)/C# is minimal and programming in Objective C is closest to programming in Win32. So, developer productivity takes a hit and would automatically reduce the number of developers who can produce business applications for example. It also doesn't expose some of the phone & SMS functionality to prevent misuse unlike similar offerings from compet...