The last journey started in 1999 at a software start-up company Open Mind Systems and ended a month ago as part of Open Text. What happened between then and now is the stereotype story of the glory Internet hype (powered by a lot of VC money) followed by the crash (dot-com burst) and slow recovery to a substantive business (by being part of a larger company to use the distribution channels and global reach). I was Product Manager for an enterprise-aware web content management system best known under the name "Obtree". I had the pleasure to work with a highly motivated development team and create software that suck less. This thanks to an active community of users providing direct feedback to engineering. Conclusion: I learned how to make enterprise software and how not to manage a corporation.

The next journey is about to start. Again start-up like conditions and a bunch of good guys with bright ideas. Do you know how YellowPages look like in Web 2.0?

Posted by Cedric at 10/31/2005 02:20:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Express = less bloated software!

What do commercial software companies do when free software is eating their market share? How about getting rid of all the bloated extensions and add-ons most people don't use and reduce the package to the essentials? Congratulation - very good move.

Microsoft, IBM and Oracle have been releasing "Express" editions this year. My guess is that we are going to see more commercial software being released this way. How about Office Express in a 80MB download? Nice idea but unlikely to happened any time soon. I guess OpenOffice is not yet strong enough to force Microsoft to do such a move.

Posted by Cedric at 10/30/2005 12:16:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

People that are lot en-route and need network access everywhere love the Swisscom Mobile Unlimited solution - a PC card(s) that support all major 3G data protocols (UMTS, EDGE, GPRS, WLAN) and automatically choose the best available network (nice when travelling by train) - and this for an acceptable flat price. One backdraw - the package is only available for Windows.

A little research shows that the Swisscom branded cards are from Option Wireless Technology - GlobeTrotter FUSION and GlobeTrotter COMBO EDGE. To bad - Option does not provide Mac drivers. They though provide a link to a German company nova media in the FAQ. Nova media provide a software package to use GlobeTrotter PC cards with Mac OS X, but the versions without the WLAN support (fair enough - most Apple Notebooks have WLAN built-in by default).

I couldn't yet find out for certain if the Mobile High Speed 3G for Mac OS X package is able to on-the-fly switch to the best protocol. Looking at the screenshots in the Online Manual tells me it does not.

Read the article about Mobile Unlimited in The Register.

Posted by Cedric at 10/23/2005 02:21:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post