Some of my favorite stories about software or systems failures happen when a system is upgraded. My personal low happened when I worked at LAN Magazine in the mid-1990s. I was working in our LAN Lab, and noticed that the firmware on our main NetWare 3.x infrastructure server, called FS1, was very out of date. So, I installed new firmware, and rebooted the machine. It didn’t come up. We tried everything. It didn’t come up, until we dug deeper, and ultimately rebuilt the boot partition.

FS1 had been running continuously for a number of years; it was on a big UPS, it was a super-stable machine (a Compaq ProLiant, if memory serves) and there was absolutely no reason, until my upgrade, to restart NetWare. Nobody even remembered the last time it had been restarted. Over the years, the disk partition that contained the bootstrap code had become corrupted. Thus, a machine that wouldn’t restart, all because I did an (unnecessary) upgrade.

Remember the BlackBerry system failure in mid-April, just about a month ago? Caused by an upgrade that went wrong.

Remember the big crash of the AT&T telephone network in January 1990? Caused by an upgrade that went wrong.

Yesterday, I received an email from a friend of mine, who works at a Web design shop. She, her programmers and her company’s QA team was stymied by intermittent failures of a new app that they were deploying to customers. She wrote,

“Our first thought is that this is browser related, as some updates have been made to IE recently. There is nothing in common between those who are getting errors, and all are in separate locations. Do you know of anything on the wire that would cause a site to not open in some places but open everywhere else? Firewall issues? Windows updates?”

I couldn’t think of anything, but today she reported that it was the fault of a midmatch between a couple of load-balanced servers:

“The problem was solved. The team was able to replicate the problem and the problem was fixed. One configuration file was corrupted on one of our servers (i.e. the hosted servers). We don’t know when this happened but is possible that happened when the Microsoft update was installed on these servers on Thursday. We have to load balanced servers for the database access, i.e. there is a router that sends the requests from the application to one or the other. For all these people that had problems, the requests were sent to the server with problems for those who didn’t experience problems were sent to the first. This is one of those cases when many things happened the same day and we associated this with the Microsoft upgrade on the client computers, which was not the case.”

Was it the software upgrade? Was it the load balancer? Hard to know, and this certainly isn’t a knock on Microsoft. However, whenever software upgrades happen… bad things often happen.

After the heady euphoria of last week’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco, I’ve been inspired to release some data from BZ Research’s sixth annual Java Use and Awareness Study, which was completed in December 2006.

The study, which we’ve been doing since 2001, asked a wide range of questions to 758 software development managers. (I’m the research director for BZ Research.)

Among other things, the study showed that Java usage continues to increase. In 2003, 72.2% of respondents said they used Java, and in 2006, 74.0% said they would. However, the percentage of those who said they either use Java now, or expect to begin using Java in the next year, decreased a statically insignificant amount from 83.3% in 2003 to 83.1% in 2006.

One of the data points that many people follow is the use of specific of commercial Java application servers. This year saw a slight reversal of fortune for JBoss, slipping into second place. Last year’s number-two, WebSphere, also declined in market share – but not as much. And so, it moved into first place. Here are the top five since 2004:

1. IBM WebSphere
2006: 36.9%
2005: 37.2%
2004: 33.9%

2. JBoss App Server
2006: 32.0%
2005: 37.0%
2004: 34.8%

3. BEA WebLogic
2006: 23.7%
2005: 27.2%
2004: 28.7%

4. Oracle App Server
2006: 22.4%
2005: 27.2%
2004: 22.0%

5. Sun Java Enterprise Server
2006: 19.0%
2005: 19.7%
2004: 13.8%

Another popular data point is the installed base of Java integrated development environments. Eclipse maintains its whopping lead – but Sun’s NetBeans moved into the number-two position, pushing IBM down to third place. Here are the top five, again since 2004:

1. Eclipse IDE
2006: 69.6%
2005: 65.1%
2004: 56.2%

2. Sun NetBeans
2006: 23.3%
2005: 17.9%
2004: 18.1%

3. IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer
2006: 22.1%
2005: 20.0%
2004: 21.5%

4. IBM Rational Application Developer
2006: 19.5%
2005: 10.8%
2004: n/a

5. Oracle JDeveloper
2006: 19.0%
2005: 15.0%
2004: 16.5%

There’s tons more data available in this study, which is available for purchase for US$1,495, or for $1,795 with a full listing of verbatim comments. The study covers app deployment stages, the types of applications developers are building, the APIs/JSRs in use, performance, and more. There are also comparisons to our most recent .NET Use and Awareness Study. Check out the table of contents for more detail.

5/15:07: I should add that the audience for this study was drawn exclusively from BZ Media’s platform-neutral sources, including subscribers to SD Times, Software Test & Performance and our News on Monday/Thursday newsletters. To minimize potential for bias on the IDE question, we do not include subscribers to our EclipseSource newsletter as a survey source for our Java studies. However, many EclipseSource subscribers also subscribe to our other publications — as do users of the other IDEs.

One of the keynotes at last week’s Software 2007 conference was S. Mahalingam, CFO of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the biggest IT outsourcing companies in India.

Mahalingam’s keynote was in the form of an interview with Steve Hamm, senior writer from BusinessWeek. Here are some of my notes from that talk; none of these are necessarily verbatim quotes, but rather my attempt to boil the wide-ranging discussion into a more tightly focused narrative.

Introduction

TCS is a big organization, with 89,000 employees, and is growing at about 600 employees per week, and with local offices in 32 countries. The company reported revenues for its last fiscal year of US$4.3 billion.

The company doesn’t just sell labor arbitrage – that is, there’s more to TCS than low-cost workers. The company believe that it has the advantage because it can offer a wide range of services, some of which are very labor intensive, and others of which pay off because TCS has a lot of strong expertise and experience.

How does TCS manage to retain its employees?

By investing in people over many years, with frequent training to upgrade their skills, by rotating assignments, and providing opportunities for travel and foreign assignments. There’s a lot of turnover for the first few years after an employee is hired, but once someone has been onboard for seven or eight years, they’re like to stay at TCS.

What about wage inflation, which is running at 12-15 percent in India right now?

The competition for talent is intensifying, not only as TCS grows, but as companies like IBM and Accenture open large R&D and service facilities in India. However, TCS believes that this high wage inflation won’t last for too long before it settles down; it should settle down in two or three years.

What’s the quality of Indian engineering graduates? There have been stories that only 30 percent of engineering grads are employable.

A part of the problem is there are many new educational institutions, and not all of them are teaching the graduates the right skills. Even so, they’re graduating bright people: you can’t get into an engineering school, even a new one, without the right examination scores. TCS is trying to help the schools fix this problem. Often, the issue isn’t a lack of engineering expertise, but more of a lack of “soft skills” needed to be a good employee of a service company. This often takes 4-6 months of on-the-job training for a new graduate to learn. Also, TCS is experimenting with hiring science graduates, in addition to engineering grads. If you can go outside the traditional engineering pool, the talent issue can be resolved.

Indian tech companies have been a disruptive influence for a decade – but as U.S. companies like IBM and Accenture open large Indian facilities, how can TCS differentiate itself?

Every company has its Indian story now. Our value proposition is that we can do everything from one shop, and can service multinational companies from many different locations and local offices. Ultimately, we’re a better value.

TCS is globalizing rapidly, and is expanding into places like China and Latin America. Will India remain central to TCS?

Yes. Someday I hope to 5,000 employees in China, but India will remain where we have the largest concentration of talent. That’s where we know how to scale, where we have solid processes for success, and where we have the trained workforce.

TCS has huge margins, of 25 percent or more – more in line with a software company than a services company. How can TCS maintain those margins when customers are driving you to cut costs?

The biggest challenge for our margins right now is the exchange rate. In the past two months, we had a 7% increase in the value of the rupee against the dollar. But even with that challenge, that, we can maintain margins because of the value that we provide. About 40% of our business comes from fixed-priced bids, so as we continually improve our business processes and leverage our own intellectual property as part of the solution, our margins can get better. On the wage side, yes, wages are going up, but Indian wages are still lower than what the customer expects.

We don’t hear much about innovation in tech services companies like TCS. What type of innovation is going on?

We have become a disruptive influence on services. We have changed the game by helping our customers define their business processes — and then outsource them. We are innovating around the services that we offer, the platforms we can create and how we create an ecosystem around our services and platforms. We also have a team thinking about the future: we’re not IBM, but we have 200 scientists dedicated to R&D.

A few weeks ago, I met with a senior partner of a mid-sized professional services company, whose 100-person firm was recently acquired by a much larger organization.

Prior to the acquisition, this partner had overseen IT for his company, as well as other professional matters. With the new management, he had no responsibility or significant input into IT functions, which was handled by the larger firm’s dedicated IT department.

This was a source of great frustration to the partner, who marveled at the pointlessness of many of the newly imposed policies, such as the new rule that restricted employees to using a single designated network printer, instead of being able to see and use all shared printers in the two-story office.

The annoyance was palpable: “In what way does restricting printers improve our security?” he asked. “In what way does it improve productivity? Nobody in IT can explain to me why we have to lock down the printers… but we have to lock them down anyway.”

The new policy came up because we were meeting in the company’s first-floor conference room, and his office – and the shared printer he was assigned to – was on the opposite corner of the second floor. You can imagine the inconvenience when, during the meeting, he wanted to print out a document to give me.

Policies are good things, and security policies are good things. However, all IT policies, whether security related or not, should to fit with broad business goals, such as “enhance or enable employee productivity.” An pointlessly restrictive policy like this doesn’t serve anyone’s best interest. Plus, a lack of understanding by employees of the restrictions caused by seemingly gratuitous policies breeds resentment.

In nearly all organizations, rank-and-file employees – and top managers – already have a visceral dislike of IT, which is generally seen as being aloof, cold, uncaring and more concerned about C-Y-A and hiding behind arbitrary policies than treating end users as customers. It reminds me of digital rights management: When the assumption is that your fellow employees can’t be trusted, is what way is IT a “service” department?

The next Software Test & Performance Conference is going to be our biggest and best ever.

Many of you may have attended previous STPCon events, including STPCon Spring 2007 held a few weeks ago in San Mateo, Calif. — the first time we brought the conference to the Bay Area. STPCon Fall 2007 returns to the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, Mass., on October 2-4.

We have more than 70 in-depth technical classes for software developers, software test/QA professionals, and managers involved in any aspects of the application development life cycle.

Registration opened for STPCon Fall 2007 yesterday, and we have super discounts for “eXtreme Early Birds” through June 22nd.

You won’t want to miss the opening keynote from Scott Barber (pictured), or any of the other classes and full-day tutorials at STPCon Fall 2007. Check out the program, and I’ll see you in Cambridge!

After years of self-righteous protests, “I ain’t gonna get one of those PDAs,” I’m now hooked on my Blackberry — and that’s with assimilation still in progress.

The drive toward the BlackBerry was oblique. First, there was the appeal of the mobile Internet: It would be neat to be able to access a Web page without schlepping my notebook PC. That was a low-level interest. Then there was the more urgent issue that my Motorola RAZR v3 mobile phone was malfunctioning. Half the time, when I took it out of my pocket, the RAZR had turned itself off, even with a fully charged battery.

When I mentioned both of those to my colleague, SD Times senior editor Alex Handy, he offered me his old BlackBerry 7230. Since it was unlocked for the same mobile carrier network as my RAZR, working with it would be as simple as transferring the SIM card and enabling the service. If I liked it, great; if I didn’t, no harm, no foul. In any case, it would be a learning experience.

To make a long story short, I’m hooked.

What do I like?

+ It’s a better cell phone than my RAZR. Reception is clear, the volume is loud, and it works well in areas where the RAZR had poor coverage. The address book is far easier to use. (I don’t care about the camera and “musical ring tone” features.)

+ The e-mail functionality comes in really handy. I have the BlackBerry interface at T-Mobile set to only forward messages from friends & family — I would be overwhelmed if my hundreds of work-related messages came to the device. Even that limited e-mail connectivity has proven to be invaluable.

+ Battery life is excellent, and I can charge the device with a USB cable.

+ Google Maps on a BlackBerry rocks.

What don’t I like?

– The BlackBerry 7230 doesn’t have speakerphone and Bluetooth capabilities. Those were features I used often on the RAZR.

– The Web browser is terrible. Part of the problem is the itty-bitty 240×160 pixel display, and part is speed/bandwidth.

– Google’s Gmail reader client for the BlackBerry sucks.

The next step is syncing the BlackBerry calendar with my Web-based calendar. It’s not difficult, and are several ways to implement the sync. Still, it calls for careful thought and planning.

If my experience with the BlackBerry continues to be positive, I plan to upgrade to the newer BlackBerry 8700g, which supports faster EDGE networks, and has a 320×240 display, speakerphone and Bluetooth.

Interestingly, this isn’t my first experience with a BlackBerry. In mid-1999, I reviewed a very early model for InformationWeek. The weakness then was the poor integration with desktop e-mail software. The technology has certainly progressed significantly in the past eight years. But even then, co-author Logan Harbaugh and I concluded, “We grew quite attached to BlackBerry during the evaluation, particularly when out of town, and would recommend it to anyone who wants a mobile E-mail product.”

Update 8/26/07: As predicted, I bought a BlackBerry 8700g, and for many of the reasons described above.

The second and final day of Software 2007— CMP Media’s conference for software executives – was very much like the first day, with keynote discussions split between people who had things to say, and people who wanted to get the most value from the fees they paid for the keynote opportunity. (See this earlier entry for my notes about the first day of Software 2007.)

Today’s agenda consisted of four keynotes, from Motorola, Tata Consultancy Services, Microsoft and EMC, and then a brief wrap-up from a McKinsey principal consultant.

Scorecard of Wednesday’s keynotes:

Ed Zander, CEO, Motorola
Company pitchiness: high
Value of presentation: medium

Zander – a Silicon Valley legend – focused on innovation in mobile devices. Software companies and enterprises have to expect mobility everywhere, broadband everywhere, and content everywhere, he said. The challenges are to connect the unconnected, unify disparate wireless and wireline networks, build “wicked cool” devices, drive content to the edge of the network, and provide access to everything everywhere. He then explained what Motorola is doing in those areas. Overall, Zander (pictured) provided an interesting vision of a mobile-centric world from a mobile-centric company. Of coures, that vision is the same as Motorola’s marketing position.

The best quote was, when asked “How will you deal with the forthcoming $500 multimedia phone” – a clear reference to Apple’s forthcoming iPhone – Zander’s answer was, “The real question is, how do they deal with us?” (He then said, “Don’t quote me on that.”)

S. Mahalingam, CFO, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
Company pitchiness: low
Value of presentation: high

Mr. Mahalingam was a last-minute substitute for S. Ramadorai, TCS’s CEO; his keynote was in the form of a lengthy interview by BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm. This helped ensure that there was a lot of value in this discussion, which not only introduced this Indian technology giant to the conference’s attendees, but which also got into a lot of issues regarding outsourcing, the state of India’s labor market, the service economy, and the emergence of China. I will blog about this talk soon, but it was a highlight of the day.

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
Company pitchiness: very high
Value of presentation: low

Ballmer is fascinating to listen to. Even when he’s being a company cheerleader, his raw enthusiasm, exuberance and energy are breathtaking (and eardrum-shattering). I mentioned his comments about Linux and Novell in an earlier post.

The point of his keynote was to make the case for Microsoft’s “smart client” business model, which combines Microsoft servers at the back end (in this case, SharePoint), and desktop applications (Office 2007) running on top of Windows Vista. To prove his point, he had a customer, Dassault Systems, do an impressive demo that showed a 3D aerospace parts catalog running through SharePoint and InfoPath. (It was much better than the Salesforce.com demo that Marc Benioff showed yesterday.)

Ballmer lives in a 100% Microsoft-centric world, and his talk could be summarized as a pitch for writing Office applications. In fact, at one point, he loosely defined “Software as a Service” as using Microsoft Office as a front end to access disparate information services, such as those running on SharePoint, Salesforce.com or SAP. There was no vision of the future – only selling The Microsoft Way… that is, The Microsoft Stack.

Jeff Nick, CTO, EMC
Company pitchiness: low
Value of presentation: high

Nick’s presented the most technical of all the talks at Software 2007, and covered the inflection points between the key points of an enterprise IT system: information, application, infrastructure and interaction, all tied together with security. For example, the inflection point between information and interaction is context and semantics – that is, concept like metadata modeling, ontological navigation and extracting knowledge from information.

He discussed the need for developing new methods of innovation which involve process pipelines which engage the customer in a virtuous cycle spanning multiple product lines. He talked about the need to drive collaboration across the enterprise, and linking customers and companies together with tools like blogs, wikis and forums where ideas can be freely shared.

While Nick mentioned that “EMC is doing all these things,” he didn’t focus on EMC products or services. He also acknowledged that innovation of this sort was happening all over the industry; he didn’t claim any special role for EMC as a provider of solutions for those inflection points. Perhaps because Nick is a CTO, and not a CEO, his talk was refreshingly direct. And informative.

Ken Berryman, Principal, McKinsey
Company pitchiness: none
Value of presentation: high

Berryman wrapped up the conference with a ten-minute presentation that made the following points:

• Disruptive change sparks waves of innovation
• The innovative wave of software is on the upswing
• Don’t think that innovation only moves one way: Old business models might work in the future
• Think bottom-up, not top-down, and use communities to build software
• Despite the fad-of-the-month, there are many, many models for building a software business
• Always look for new source of value: Who would have imagined that advertising revenue would be driving software companies?
• Celebrate success: the software industry is growing fast, with 30%-50% margins
• Investment in software companies from venture and private equity is at an all-time high

It was a high note on which to end a fairly good conference.

Next year, CMP is merging Software 2008 with its Interop network infrastructure conference, which will be held April 28-29 in Las Vegas.

The Software 2007 conference, going on yesterday and today down at the Santa Clara Convention Center, got off to a great start, with a opening keynote address from Hasso Plattner, an SAP co-founder who now also teaches at Stanford.

However, the day went downhill after Plattner’s talk. He was followed by keynotes from HP and Salesforce.com, which weren’t as good, and by two panel discussions, one good, one not.

Still, there was enough value in the event to make it worth coming back for a second day. I hope today has more information and fewer sales pitches.

(When I looked more closely at the conference schedule, I saw that there is a solid correlation between the keynote speeches and the biggest-paying exhibitors. There were six Platinum Level sponsors: EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, SAP and Tata Consultancy Services. There were seven keynotes, from EMC, HP, Microsoft, Motorola, Salesforce.com, SAP and Tata. I guess some of the keynotes wanted to get their money’s worth.)

Scorecard of Tuesday’s keynotes:

Hasso Plattner, co-founder, SAP
Company pitchiness: Medium-Low
Value of presentation: High

Plattner talked a lot about SAP’s drive toward software-as-service, and was frank in talking about the drawbacks of SAP’s traditional client/server model. Seemed to be genuinely interested in sharing his observations about how software can be built, using SAP’s ongoing development efforts for context, but he wasn’t selling SAP software, or bashing competitors.

Shane Robison, chief strategy officer and CTO, Hewlett-Packard
Company pitchiness: Medium
Value of presentation: Medium-Low

Robison talked about why HP is investing in software, and how the organization uses software in three ways: to embed into its products, to add value to commodity hardware that it sells, and as a product line in itself. Discussed the de-emphasis of OpenView as the centerpiece of HP software, such as with the Mercury acquisition, and of the economic benefits of doing R&D into software, which is more cost-effective because it’s less capital intensive. While Robison didn’t provide any advice or guidance, it was worth listening to this talk as a snapshot into the fast-changing HP.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com
Company pitchiness: High
Value of presentation: Low

Benioff (pictured) gave his standard sales stump speech about why Salesforce.com is so great, why you shouldn’t buy software from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, and why Salesforce.com is so great, why you should build software on their Apex platform, and why Salesforce.com is so great. One of his marketing people gave a really lame demonstration of their Appxchange platform. He just gave a sales pitch, nothing more, which added no value for the attendees.

Beyond the keynotes: The first panel covered “innovation,” was moderated by a Forbes reporter, and had panelists from Ingres and WebEx. Nothing interesting was revealed there. The second was a CIO panel moderated by a consultant, with CIOs from Unilver, FedEx, Motorola and Walt Disney. There were good insights, which I’ll blog about later.

Let’s hope that today’s talks are more informative, and less pitchy. As you can see, yesterday started well, but trended downwards.

Whenever you have the opportunity to listen to a co-founder of SAP talk about innovation, it’s worth listening. SAP is unusual among the Giant Software Companies in that it’s reinvented itself many times: from a big mainframe enterprise resource planning provider, to a purveyor of massive client/server software, to a maker of a Java application server platform (NetWeaver).

Today, SAP trying to reinvent itself again, into a SOA-driven software-as-a-service company that offers whole new hosted application platform.

As the Software 2007 conference, which took place earlier this week in Santa Clara, Calif., Hasso Plattner spoke about drivers for innovation. Plattner, a former IBMer, helped found SAP in 1972, served as its CEO, and today, he’s chairman of their supervisory board, as well as their Chief Software Advisor – a great job title.

Here are seven points that I extracted from Plattner’s fire-hose presentation, which alone was worth the price of admission to the conference:

1. Focus on user requirements, instead of thinking only about business requirements. In the past, Plattner said, SAP talked mainly to high-level executives at its customer companies, and built software (like R/3) which addressed what those executive said the business needed. By doing that, he said, SAP missed a lot of features and functions that its software should have delivered. For its new SaaS products, SAP’s new emphasis is on figuring out what its users need instead.

2. Separate user interfaces from applications – and be willing to have multiple user interfaces to an application. R/3 had a single user interface for all customers, no matter how big or small they were, what industry they were, or what type of tasks the users were doing. The company has learned that it’s better to separate the UI from the core application. Have a single application, with a single code, but build GUIs that fit the customer, instead expecting that one GUI model fits all.

3. Hosted software works, and works well, even for business-critical applications. Google and Salesforce.com have demonstrated that SaaS works, Plattner pointed out. “The complete enterprise can run in the cloud,” he said, “and every year it becomes more obvious that the cloud is a viable alternative to on-site computing.”

4. In-memory databases matter. Plattner explained that with one query system they’re using as a test case, SAP consolidated five years worth of data from an accounting application – 36 million line items – from requiring a 116GB relational database to a 1.2GB in-memory database. The average time to complete a query against all that data: 1.2 seconds. “Think about machines with multiple processors, multiple cores, and a hundred gigabytes of memory,” he said, “and imagine what this can do for putting information at your fingertips.”

5. Application response time, aka speed, matters. Plattner wants what he called “Google-speed” for application response time. Enterprise software, whether it’s running on-site or in the cloud, should be as fast as Google, he said, and this will change the nature of queries, he said: if it only takes a second to get the results from a query, you can make a first query; if there are to many results, you can refine and filter, and keep making iterative queries until you get the results you want. Contrast that, he said, with older systems, which took sufficiently long to return results that it was worth putting a lot of up-front effort into constructing the query to get it right the first time. Users are very comfortable with making iterative queries, he believes – if the response time is fast enough.

6. Don’t make it pretty, make it functional. When you’re trying to convey information, Plattner insist, “the most minimalistic form is the best. The more you put colors, three-dimensional images and fancy interfaces around the information, the more you convolute it.” Again citing Google’s search engine as a ideal, he said, “Beautification is the wrong way. Google does it the right way; other companies beautify and the response time drops to 2 seconds, 3 second, 4 seconds, or worse. Google stays focused on speed.”

7. SOA will accelerate software development. A Google-speed hosted environment in the cloud, coupled with the modular reuse enabled by SOA, and widely available software interfaces, will accelerate the pace of software development tremendously. “We could come back to the speed we had in the early 1990s, when we could roll out a new release every three months,” Plattner predicted.

Stodgy old SAP as the new Google: Who’d have thought it?

One of the most popular classes at our Software Test & Performance Conference is Rex Black’s “Identify and Mitigate Software Risks Through Testing.” The class is always packed. But because not everyone can make it to STPCon, we’ve decided to bring this class to you.

Please join Rex for our first SD Times Live! Training Web Seminar, on Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 2:00pm Eastern, 11:00am Pacific. Rex will be conducting his class exactly as he does it at STPCon. There’s a small fee for this training, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s worthwhile.

Learn more and register… and yes, you can watch it after the live presentation, but you won’t have the opportunity to ask questions or interact with Rex. This is a great opportunity, and I urge everyone involved in software testing to attend!

If this story had come out 24 days ago, I’d have called it an April Fool’s hoax, today’s story from ExtremeTech, “New Amigas On The Way, Company Says.“

The story reads,

Virtually nothing was released as far as the new designs were concerned, other than the PCs will be based on the PowerPC architecture and hit two price points with two different machines: one selling for $500, and the other for $1,500. Amiga Inc. said this week that the first Amiga computers since the 1990s are “on its way”.

The company’s Web site adds that, “After months of designs and negotiations Amiga, Inc. and ACK Software Controls, Inc. are pleased to announce that new hardware is on its way for Amiga users,” but doesn’t say much else.

Gosh. The Amiga… the dead platform that generates emotional responses even stronger than that of OS/2 users… back from the dead.

The smell of global warming is in the air – and no, I’m not talking about greenhouse gases. The second half of April has seen some changes in the somewhat glacial economy that’s bogged down the IT industry for the past seven years. This is a welcome change.

The most visible sign of the thaw, of course, is in the stock market. While stock indices aren’t always the best indicators, there’s no hiding from them, especially when the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit new highs this week and last, and on Wednesday, passing 13,000 for the first time ever — largely driven by technology stocks and their huge profit reports. The technology-heavy NASDAQ index also is in recent-record territory, doing better at any time since the bubble burst.

Not satisfied with stocks? On Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “For the first time since the state lost tens of thousands of jobs after the dot-com collapse, California companies have added tech workers to their payrolls, according to a report that tracks nationwide employment in the industry.”

The story continues, “The Cyberstates report unveiled today by the American Electronics Association said the state added 14,400 net jobs, an increase of 2 percent that boosted the tech industry total to 919,322 in 2005, according to the most current state data available. California’s gains mark “the first net increase in jobs (here) since the tech bubble began to burst in 2000,” the association said.”

That’s good news all around, and is cause for cautious celebration. Does that mean that the tech economy is truly turning around, or is this just a blip? Stay tuned.

Closer to home, we’ve had a number of interesting deals just in the past couple of weeks, though it’s hard to assess their broader impact.

• CollabNet bought VA Software’s SourceForge Enterprise Edition software for a deal that includes some money and some stock; we don’t know how much. This is potentially a big shift in the collaboration software business, as VA focuses more on its online communities. It’s unclear how customers will be affected by putting both the Collabnet and SourceForce EE applications under one roof.

• Oracle snapped up AppForge. Okay, is was an odd one, because for a while it looked like AppForge just went out of business, and even now, Oracle’s not talking. But it’s noteworthy, just the same
• Sun picked up the intellectual property from SavaJe, which sold embedded Java SE software. This deal also looks like the acquisition of assets from of a failed company, and it’s unclear if there’s any benefit to Sun beyond boosting its patent portfolio.

What do you think about software climate change… is it real, or is it illusionary?

David Worthington reported today in on SDTimes.com that Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas,” the next version of Microsoft’s developer toolchain, may be delayed until next year. While Microsoft is increasingly non-committal about deadlines (and for good reasons), the expectation had been that Orcas would ship this year. Instead, according to Soma Somasegar, we should expect to see Orcas beta 2 as this year’s big milestone.

Microsoft isn’t the only one to disappoint. As has been widely reported, Apple will not be shipping Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” this summer, at its World Wide Developer Conference. Instead, it will come out later this year, probably in October. The reason, according to Apple, is that resources were diverted from Leopard to the iPhone project.

That’s two big bummers.

Do you use Eclipse?

EclipseWorld 2007 is coming up Nov. 7-9 in Reston, Virginia. Right now, we’re reading through many class proposals and speaker abstracts. We’re weighing ideas for keynote speakers, social activities, Birds of a Feather. We’re also planning how to publicize this year’s conference, to make sure that we clearly explain to everyone what EclipseWorld is, and what it’s not.

To help us with this task, the EclipseWorld 2007 team has put together a brief survey. We’re asking questions to learn a bit about you, what you find appealing in technical conferences, the types of classes you like to attend, and so-on. We also ask about what think your colleagues and development team might find appealing.

If you use Eclipse, or have an interest in the Eclipse ecosystem, please take a few minutes to help us with this survey. As a thank-you, if you complete the survey, we’ll send you a discount code for US$50 off the price of attending EclipseWorld 2007. (We’ll send those out once registration opens in a few months.)

Even if you’re not sure that you’d attend EclipseWorld, we still would appreciate your input. Our goal is to make sure that EclipseWorld 2007 provides an exceptional experience for everyone, and we truly value your input.