Z Trek: The Alan Zeichick Weblog

Measure twice, scoop once

If you don’t measure, you don’t know how you’re doing. You don’t know what works and what doesn’t. You can’t figure out what to fix. And you can’t determine if your fixes actually work.Or, as the well-known but oft-ignored saying…

What, exactly, is Android?

My mind is filled with little green robots… who are they, and where are they going?Earlier this week I attended O’Reilly Media’s debut Android Open conference, a “big tent” gathering that brought together a wide swath of the open-source…

The passing of Steve Jobs

A moment of silence, please, for Steve Jobs.I’m sure that many of you are – to be blunt – tired of reading about him already. The number of obituaries, tweets, Facebook posts, columns and remembrances treats Steve Jobs like he was a head…

The mobile world is taking over the desktop – or is it?

A friend of mine, Michael Willems, posted onto his blog, “…the more I see OS X Lion, Apple’s new OS, the less I like it. No – the more I hate it. It is a dumb downgrade, designed to make your powerful computer into a dumb iPad.”Meanwhile,…

With Windows 8, Microsoft may have its mojo back

Something funny happened to me down at Microsoft’s Build conference, held this week in Anaheim, Calif. Something rare. Something unusual.I wanted what I saw on the keynote stage, and I wanted it bad.I’m talking about the new look-and-feel…

BetaCity: Windows Phone, Android, iOS and the shape of the mobile landscape

Last week I had a great hands-on demo of Mango, the forthcoming update to Windows 7 Phone. The user interface is stunning. The integration of social media into the user experience is fast and intuitive. The incorporation of functions like OCR,…

Apple, and Computing, After Steve Jobs

We wish Steve Jobs good health and speedy recovery — but for the tech industry, his era is over. Jobs is arguably the most influential computer-industry executive alive today. While he certainly shares the top shelf with the likes of Oracle’s…

Google to buy Motorola Mobility – it may be a patent play

Google – the company behind Android – is buying Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion. Motorola, a U.S.-based telecommunications infrastructure equipment maker formed in the 1930s, spun off its Mobility handset subsidiary in January 2011.…

Memories of two keyboards: IBM’s Selectric and Personal Computer

The IBM Personal Computer was introduced on August 12, 1981. The IBM Selectric typewriter debuted July 31, 1961. What a world of difference between the two devices – but both made a tremendous mark on global business and on today’s society. My…

Perforce is now versioning everything

When you find what you’re good at, double-down. That’s the message from Perforce, a company that’s well-known for its source-code management system, also called Perforce. The company, reaching the milestone of its 15th birthday, faced…

Speling misteaks mattter

When my friends and family visit restaurants, one of our favorite games is, “spot the typos on the menu.” Now, I don’t claim to be the best proofreader in the world, but spelling and grammar errors jump out at me. And while I make tons…

Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" is not iOS

Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” began shipping on Wednesday, July 20. I use the term “shipping” advisedly – for now, the only way to get Lion is to download it from Apple’s Mac App Store for $29.99. It was a 3.7GB file, which fortunately transferred…

My take on the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

Let’s talk about the Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook. Google generously promised to send a Samsung Chromebook to everyone who attended its Google I/O conference a few months ago, and mine arrived this week. (So, full disclosure: I didn’t…

Media Scandals

Like many of you, I’ve been riveted by the expanding drama with News Corp.’s flagship British newspaper, News of the World. What started as an apparently straight-forward phone-hacking scandal (where journalists guessed voicemail passwords…

Summer reading: The Clean Coder

It’s a short book you can read at the beach. And like being on vacation at the seashore, Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin’s newest book is quite refreshing, if a bit pricey.Bob Martin, one of the key figures behind agile software development,…

Thanks but no thanks, Amazon

Amazon.com. What a bunch of jerks.Amazon is frantic to maintain their (to me unfair) competitive advantage that buyers don't have to pay sales tax in California. Because of that, Amazon's prices are automatically cheaper than those of brick-and-mortar…

Cutting waste by getting lean, but without getting mean

Look around. Think about how your organization gets things done. Is it the most efficient process possible? Doubtful. Is there room for improvement? Always. Are some parts of the process wasteful? Almost certainly. There are many ways to improve…

What’s black and white and scanned all over?

Let us spend a moment pondering the barcode. Barcodes are everywhere. Everywhere. Every time you visit a grocery store, cashiers use barcodes to ring up your purchases. That is, unless you choose the self checkout, where you scan them yourself.…

Take my credit card. Please.

“We don’t take credit cards, sir.”What? Get with the 21st century, my friend! Yesterday I was talking on the phone with a professional services company we use occasionally at BZ Media (which publishes SD Times and News on Monday). We worked…

Nobody is setting direction for our industry

IBM’s market capitalization has surpassed Microsoft’s market cap – for the first time in 15 years. While both companies trail behind Apple, IBM has re-emerged to become the largest enterprise computing company. What does this mean? Let’s…

Leaking the 2011 SD Times 100: The Mono Project

The Mono Project has been named to the 2011 SD Times 100 as an influencer. We recognize companies, organizations and projects in the SD Times 100 for their leadership and innovation in the previous calendar year, that is, 2010.What Novell and…

Novell is (was) super-stodgy; Microsoft, not so much

Microsoft is stodgy, but not very stodgy. But the company formerly known as Novell is super-stodgy. Salesforce.com is straddling the line. And Google is the last stodgy of them all.That’s the result of a highly nonscientific survey, conducted…

Remembering Adam Kolawa from Parasoft

Last week, my friend Adam Kolawa, founder of Parasoft, passed away suddenly. Adam, whom I’ve known for over a decade, was a young man, only 53 years old.In a brief statement, Parasoft described Adam’s legacy asIn 1983, Kolawa came to the…

Novell is gone, and yes, it matters. Here’s why.

Novell is now part of Attachmate. Should you care? Yes.The deal closed on Wednesday, Apr. 27. “Novell, Inc., the leader in intelligent workload management, today announced that it has completed its previously announced merger, whereby Attachmate…

Skynet didn’t take down Amazon Web Services

A few years ago, a multi-day power failure on Long Island left our offices in the dark – including the Microsoft Exchange Server in our server closet. After that experience, and a few others involving the local electrical grid, we moved our…

Thinking back on MKS Inc., aka Mortice Kern Systems

I was surprised to read that MKS Inc. was being purchased by PTC (a firm I’d never heard of).Most people today know MKS as a seller of enterprise application lifecycle management tools. The Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s flagship is Integrity,…

What is UX? An overloaded operator!

I was recently at a party – okay, the speaker’s party at iPhone/iPad DevCon last week – where it was obvious that the speakers neatly bifurcated into two groups. There were those who recognized Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells playing on…

If you can’t innovate, litigate

The lawsuits flying around Silicon Valley are getting ridiculous.• Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble because Microsoft says that Android infringes Microsoft patents, and B&N’s Nook e-reader is based on Android. Thus, B&N must be forced to…

Web resolution revolution as screens get bigger, smaller

When you’re building a website or a Web application – how big is the user’s screen going to be? That used to be an easy question to answer, but now it’s getting a lot harder. And that means a lot of extra presentation-layer work for…

Responding to tragedy

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan were horrific in scope. The subsequent challenges with the Japanese nuclear power plants has magnified the disaster. Where will it end? How many lives were lost, how many families shattered? As I write this,…