Vive la France?

Okay so recently I've read a bunch of articles about how France is becoming relaxed about the rise of English. It appears however this is just a front to make us relax so we won't see the real goal.

Unfortunately I've unearthed this plot via Apple, looking at the MacPro and going through the "HOW much could I spend on a PC?" test. I saw the following

See it?

What about now? Seriously its there in black and white

Yes you get a British keyboard, but you have to learn French to understand the instructions. This is a truly nefarious plot.

Now this actually has a good point from a globalised project perspective. You can't assume what language people are going to speak so you need to be very clear about what you are going to support (i.e. keyboard in English, but instructions in French) otherwise you can end up in a hell-hole of trying to support every language in existence.

Fortunately English in general remains the lingua franca ;)

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Web 2.0 Administration - let the users help

People might not see National Rail (The UK body responsible for the track and other infrastructure stuff on the railways) as at the forefront of Web 2.0 trends. But this morning their Website really pushed new barriers of Web 2.0 collaborative working. Not happy with users collaborating around ideas and content they moved to allow users to actually administer the site themselves.


Unfortunately as is often the way they forgot to tell everyone the username/password combination but I'm sure that was just a minor oversight in the move towards true Web 2.0 administration ;)

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Great parody on technical IT

Pete Lacey has a great parody on the technical focus of IT folks. Its a wonderful trawl through the way that business people ask for solutions and how IT in return focuses on technology.

In this hilarious romp through how businesses continued to ask the same questions and the IT department continued to offer them yet another technology that would this time solve the problem. There is a great bit in there where he demonstrates his comedic brilliance by pretending that he thinks that VOIP is a business requirement (rather than the requirement of course being to reduce the phone bill), this wonderfully highlights how technologists can't see the difference between a business requirement and a technology solution.

There are great bits in there to highlight, almost too many to mention, but for me the real bit that made me realise how great a parody was this bit

"And… Well, you know the rest. They picked the wrong technology again, despite the fact that the right choice was staring them in the face. Like CORBA before it, SOAP..."

Brilliant, a superb highlighting of the extreme arrogance of technologists in thinking that the next technology really will be the silver bullet. He then drives the point home by brilliantly misunderstanding SOA and equating it to network oriented computing (although I think just saying Distributed Computing would have underlined the parody a little better).

Thanks to Pete for the shout-out at the end to my BSA post. He hilariously pretends to misunderstand the difference between architecture and requirements gathering, a common problem for technical IT.

I don't think I've seen a better post that sums up the problems of technologists thinking that technology is always the solution and that anything more contextual is a bad idea.

Truly well done Pete, a great post on the issues of technologists focusing only on the technology and assuming that this will meet the business needs.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture