A slow start to the year – but its business as usual now
Well I’m sitting in Miami International Airport as I type this on my way back home after the Qumas User Conference. I last visited Miami for the 1st ever Momentum (Documentum user conference) back in the mid 1990s. Back then there was a tropical storm. This time the temperature is a very pleasant mid 80s oF (~29 oC) and it’s only the end of February. I think I’ll avoid it in the summer!
The Qumas conference was, as always, a great deal of fun and I am suffering from a severe lack of sleep. The social side is just as important as the business side as it cements personal relationships which make for better business relationships. Well that’s my excuse for never knowingly ducking an opportunity to party and staggering into bed at 3:00am last night – it was 2:00am the night before! Luckily I have an 8 hour flight on which to sleep on my way home.
I’m then back in the UK for 2 days before heading off to Barcelona for the Annual Euro DIA conference. Readers of my blog will remember I was in two minds as to whether we should do it (see 30th March 2007 entry). Well I decided we should and we will go and take our chances. This comes back to my belief that we should be doing more in Europe whilst at the same time struggling to cope with the cost of doing business in Europe. This is one of my recurrent themes. I really don’t know the answer and this explains my vacillation.
With the US dollar losing value by the day (or so it seems) and the Euro gaining value, Euro income would be nice as all our costs are in UK pounds and Malaysian Ringit. However, it’s the USA where we are making most of our sales. This is why I was surprised to read in the FT that “American companies are falling behind in technology”. The article starts:
“There has been a lot of talk about technology companies facing a squeeze. But a more worrying international trend has emerged. US companies, once viewed as early adopters in corporate computing and the internet, are now falling behind global competitors in driving productivity and earnings growth because of technology shortfalls.”
There is a link to the article here but you may need to register to read it (I believe that registration is free): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee07c4c6-d980-11dc-bd4d-0000779fd2ac.html). This is certainly not my personal experience and it was only a last year the press were reporting that UK companies were 18% less productive than US companies due to the adoption of information technology. A brief Google search has found the following:
“In line with this hypothesis, Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen (2007) find that US multinationals operating in the UK have much higher productivity than other multinationals in the UK and that this is explained by US companies’ better use of IT. Furthermore, they find that establishments that are taken over by US multinationals increase the productivity of their IT, whereas establishments taken over by non-US multinationals do not. They argue that these patterns are consistent with the idea that USfirms are organised in a way that allows them to use new technologies more efficiently than other UK firms and non-US multinationals.”
A link to the article: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/briefings/pa_uk_productivity.pdf
I remember thinking at the time that this would explain our success in the USA and the comparative lack of success in the UK – our ‘backyard’. Who is to know?
We have however, started to see some ‘tightening of the belts’ in the USA and its looking like a couple of income opportunities (one a roll-out and one new business) will at best be delayed. So I suspect it could turn into a tough year. The commentators are saying that the USA can not avoid recession which will affect the budgets and, thus, our revenue. So depressed US$ earnings with a depressed US$ ……………..
However, I’m a great believer in ‘whatever will be, will be’ and the year will be what it will be. We’ve done our sums, looked at the downside and concluded that we would have to have a disaster not to at least break even. The ultimate effect will be to suppress our growth and we are certainly playing our hand cautiously. So, enough navel gazing …...
The year seemed to start very slowly. Most of January was like a giant hang-over on 2007. We did have a rush of ‘fall over’ orders but personally I just couldn’t seem to get going. Reality hit early February with the DIA Electronic Document Management (EDM) conference held every year in the 1st week of February in Philadelphia. This is always a good show for us and it was again this year.
As previously discussed, our lead profile at shows has changed. It’s no longer all new business but a chance to meet with prospective clients, clients and partners and gain the odd lead along the way. The valuable thing about shows is the face-to-face time you get with people. This may be just simply picking up the latest industry news (aka gossip) or having people walk past who have heard of you and have some misconception on your product and what it does. You also are able to get a hands-on feeling for your own status. The good news is that we certainly appear to have entered the mindset of people and are definitely on the agenda. One can ask no more.
I got back from Philadelphia on the Friday morning and immediately flew out on a family vacation to Spain for a skiing at Bacqueria Beret. This is Spain’s best resort. It was a bit of a last minute compromise on our part but met the requirement. It’s a pleasant resort but was suffering a lack of snow and, frankly, not at all challenging. We hadn’t skied for almost two years and thought that it would take some time to get back on game. However, most of us had skied the mountain by the end of day 2 and everyone had skied everything a day or so later. It was at the end of day 2 that I made my big mistake! I allowed my eldest son to persuade me to try snow boarding. He had spent a week snow boarding in the USA a few years ago. So three of us (eldest & middle sons & I) swapped our skis for snowboards and arrange a morning of lessons. The plan was to spend the next three days on the snowboards and have, at least, come down the mountain by the end of the week.
I think the only word is ouch! Suffice it to say that I do not recommend one’s late forties as the ideal time to try and learn snow boarding. There was a point during the afternoon when I thought I’d cracked several ribs. By the end of the day I hurt everywhere, had a splitting headache from smacking my head hard on the piste during one of my many wipe outs and was not looking forward to the next day. Moreover, as I hadn’t even left the enclosed nursery slope, I suspected that I could do myself serious damage if I were ever to take the snowboard on the mountain itself! In fact, after a mid-afternoon pause to lick our wounds, number 2 son & I decided to beat a strategic retreat and return back to skis – with considerable relief all round.
I’ve been trying to think of the business lessons on this little episode. Several vaguely interesting thoughts cross my mind. Firstly, it’s interesting to be in a position when you are starting something entirely new. Kids face that experience all the time but as adults we rarely enter a state where we know absolutely nothing about the situation and have no experience to fall back upon. All I can say is that, whilst I made progress and was able to control the snow board, it was not a pleasant experience – perhaps you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Secondly, its clear to me that if it becomes obvious that a plan isn’t going to work or is causing disproportionate pain, it makes sense to kill it immediately rather than throw good money after bad. It was clear that I was never going to be able to safely get down the mountain on a snowboard by the end of the week, it would have made for a miserable remainder of holiday and there was a good chance I would do myself some serious damage in the attempt. Therefore the sensible thing to do was realise this, accept it and change the plan – even at considerable loss of face within the immediate family!! As they say, ‘the best decision is the correct decision, the next best decision is the wrong decision and worst is no decision at all’.
Moving on ……….
From a product perspective we are still struggling to put v3.5 ‘to bed’. It’s in preliminary testing but is a complex challenge and is fighting back. I have previously discussed the fact that, as software developers, we do not have control of our environment. We have control of our product but not the environment in which it is expected to operate and the associated dependencies. It’s like trying to hit a constantly moving target. At each stage you need to pause, access the impact and then make a decision as to whether to accommodate the change or leave it until next release. Ultimately you have to draw a line, test against it and release otherwise nothing would ever be released.
In this respect I’m a great fan of the concept of ‘defendability’. Basically, can I defend our position when faced with reasonable questioning from a knowledgeable person? So whenever we have to make assumptions, consider hard-coding something into the software and/or ignore a ‘latest’ development for the immediate future, the question we ask is ‘is it defendable’?
We have been fighting on multiple fronts on the development/testing/release side of things. The integrations we offer make for a complex environment with multi inter-dependencies. For example, we finally got our Open Text Livelink v9.5 sp1 integration released. From a user perspective the Livelink 9.7 and 9.5 integrations look identical but they are fundamentally different ‘underneath the hood’. This is one of the problems in making estimates. It was reasonable to assume that, in back porting PleaseReview from Livelink 9.7 to Livelink 9.5, the code changes would be minor – not so! But as I have previously pointed out – if it was easy everyone would do it!
So the plan is to pin down PleaseReview v3.5 get it tested and released and then start work on a bigger 4.0 release. There are several integrations running in parallel. However, in theory, v3.5 will not affect the apis and be able to slot directly into the integrations with no further changes. I’ll let you know how it goes.
The good news is that, once v3.5 is release I’ll be relatively relaxed as, finally, I’ll be happy with the product. It will be where I would have liked it to be back in 2005 when we first released it.
The Qumas conference was, as always, a great deal of fun and I am suffering from a severe lack of sleep. The social side is just as important as the business side as it cements personal relationships which make for better business relationships. Well that’s my excuse for never knowingly ducking an opportunity to party and staggering into bed at 3:00am last night – it was 2:00am the night before! Luckily I have an 8 hour flight on which to sleep on my way home.
I’m then back in the UK for 2 days before heading off to Barcelona for the Annual Euro DIA conference. Readers of my blog will remember I was in two minds as to whether we should do it (see 30th March 2007 entry). Well I decided we should and we will go and take our chances. This comes back to my belief that we should be doing more in Europe whilst at the same time struggling to cope with the cost of doing business in Europe. This is one of my recurrent themes. I really don’t know the answer and this explains my vacillation.
With the US dollar losing value by the day (or so it seems) and the Euro gaining value, Euro income would be nice as all our costs are in UK pounds and Malaysian Ringit. However, it’s the USA where we are making most of our sales. This is why I was surprised to read in the FT that “American companies are falling behind in technology”. The article starts:
“There has been a lot of talk about technology companies facing a squeeze. But a more worrying international trend has emerged. US companies, once viewed as early adopters in corporate computing and the internet, are now falling behind global competitors in driving productivity and earnings growth because of technology shortfalls.”
There is a link to the article here but you may need to register to read it (I believe that registration is free): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee07c4c6-d980-11dc-bd4d-0000779fd2ac.html). This is certainly not my personal experience and it was only a last year the press were reporting that UK companies were 18% less productive than US companies due to the adoption of information technology. A brief Google search has found the following:
“In line with this hypothesis, Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen (2007) find that US multinationals operating in the UK have much higher productivity than other multinationals in the UK and that this is explained by US companies’ better use of IT. Furthermore, they find that establishments that are taken over by US multinationals increase the productivity of their IT, whereas establishments taken over by non-US multinationals do not. They argue that these patterns are consistent with the idea that USfirms are organised in a way that allows them to use new technologies more efficiently than other UK firms and non-US multinationals.”
A link to the article: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/briefings/pa_uk_productivity.pdf
I remember thinking at the time that this would explain our success in the USA and the comparative lack of success in the UK – our ‘backyard’. Who is to know?
We have however, started to see some ‘tightening of the belts’ in the USA and its looking like a couple of income opportunities (one a roll-out and one new business) will at best be delayed. So I suspect it could turn into a tough year. The commentators are saying that the USA can not avoid recession which will affect the budgets and, thus, our revenue. So depressed US$ earnings with a depressed US$ ……………..
However, I’m a great believer in ‘whatever will be, will be’ and the year will be what it will be. We’ve done our sums, looked at the downside and concluded that we would have to have a disaster not to at least break even. The ultimate effect will be to suppress our growth and we are certainly playing our hand cautiously. So, enough navel gazing …...
The year seemed to start very slowly. Most of January was like a giant hang-over on 2007. We did have a rush of ‘fall over’ orders but personally I just couldn’t seem to get going. Reality hit early February with the DIA Electronic Document Management (EDM) conference held every year in the 1st week of February in Philadelphia. This is always a good show for us and it was again this year.
As previously discussed, our lead profile at shows has changed. It’s no longer all new business but a chance to meet with prospective clients, clients and partners and gain the odd lead along the way. The valuable thing about shows is the face-to-face time you get with people. This may be just simply picking up the latest industry news (aka gossip) or having people walk past who have heard of you and have some misconception on your product and what it does. You also are able to get a hands-on feeling for your own status. The good news is that we certainly appear to have entered the mindset of people and are definitely on the agenda. One can ask no more.
I got back from Philadelphia on the Friday morning and immediately flew out on a family vacation to Spain for a skiing at Bacqueria Beret. This is Spain’s best resort. It was a bit of a last minute compromise on our part but met the requirement. It’s a pleasant resort but was suffering a lack of snow and, frankly, not at all challenging. We hadn’t skied for almost two years and thought that it would take some time to get back on game. However, most of us had skied the mountain by the end of day 2 and everyone had skied everything a day or so later. It was at the end of day 2 that I made my big mistake! I allowed my eldest son to persuade me to try snow boarding. He had spent a week snow boarding in the USA a few years ago. So three of us (eldest & middle sons & I) swapped our skis for snowboards and arrange a morning of lessons. The plan was to spend the next three days on the snowboards and have, at least, come down the mountain by the end of the week.
I think the only word is ouch! Suffice it to say that I do not recommend one’s late forties as the ideal time to try and learn snow boarding. There was a point during the afternoon when I thought I’d cracked several ribs. By the end of the day I hurt everywhere, had a splitting headache from smacking my head hard on the piste during one of my many wipe outs and was not looking forward to the next day. Moreover, as I hadn’t even left the enclosed nursery slope, I suspected that I could do myself serious damage if I were ever to take the snowboard on the mountain itself! In fact, after a mid-afternoon pause to lick our wounds, number 2 son & I decided to beat a strategic retreat and return back to skis – with considerable relief all round.
I’ve been trying to think of the business lessons on this little episode. Several vaguely interesting thoughts cross my mind. Firstly, it’s interesting to be in a position when you are starting something entirely new. Kids face that experience all the time but as adults we rarely enter a state where we know absolutely nothing about the situation and have no experience to fall back upon. All I can say is that, whilst I made progress and was able to control the snow board, it was not a pleasant experience – perhaps you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Secondly, its clear to me that if it becomes obvious that a plan isn’t going to work or is causing disproportionate pain, it makes sense to kill it immediately rather than throw good money after bad. It was clear that I was never going to be able to safely get down the mountain on a snowboard by the end of the week, it would have made for a miserable remainder of holiday and there was a good chance I would do myself some serious damage in the attempt. Therefore the sensible thing to do was realise this, accept it and change the plan – even at considerable loss of face within the immediate family!! As they say, ‘the best decision is the correct decision, the next best decision is the wrong decision and worst is no decision at all’.
Moving on ……….
From a product perspective we are still struggling to put v3.5 ‘to bed’. It’s in preliminary testing but is a complex challenge and is fighting back. I have previously discussed the fact that, as software developers, we do not have control of our environment. We have control of our product but not the environment in which it is expected to operate and the associated dependencies. It’s like trying to hit a constantly moving target. At each stage you need to pause, access the impact and then make a decision as to whether to accommodate the change or leave it until next release. Ultimately you have to draw a line, test against it and release otherwise nothing would ever be released.
In this respect I’m a great fan of the concept of ‘defendability’. Basically, can I defend our position when faced with reasonable questioning from a knowledgeable person? So whenever we have to make assumptions, consider hard-coding something into the software and/or ignore a ‘latest’ development for the immediate future, the question we ask is ‘is it defendable’?
We have been fighting on multiple fronts on the development/testing/release side of things. The integrations we offer make for a complex environment with multi inter-dependencies. For example, we finally got our Open Text Livelink v9.5 sp1 integration released. From a user perspective the Livelink 9.7 and 9.5 integrations look identical but they are fundamentally different ‘underneath the hood’. This is one of the problems in making estimates. It was reasonable to assume that, in back porting PleaseReview from Livelink 9.7 to Livelink 9.5, the code changes would be minor – not so! But as I have previously pointed out – if it was easy everyone would do it!
So the plan is to pin down PleaseReview v3.5 get it tested and released and then start work on a bigger 4.0 release. There are several integrations running in parallel. However, in theory, v3.5 will not affect the apis and be able to slot directly into the integrations with no further changes. I’ll let you know how it goes.
The good news is that, once v3.5 is release I’ll be relatively relaxed as, finally, I’ll be happy with the product. It will be where I would have liked it to be back in 2005 when we first released it.
posted by David Cornwell, PleaseTech Ltd at 9:02 AM
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