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IBM is opening up a small part of it's patent portfolio to drive SOA adoption. The article has a quote - "This is telling people go for it and code using these open standards,". What exactly is open here? If it is open, why does IBM have patents on it? I haven't seen the patents here (you know the lawyers actually ask you not to do a patent search!) but it rather seems odd that you have patents on open standards that you make it available to the developers and actually get credit for them. The article also says - "I'm not sure how much developers worry about this stuff anyway," - right on. This is absolutely true. This is a pure PR play and demonstrates some of the issues with our current patent system and the patent stockpiling tactics that organizations employ. The actual impact of the patents to SOA adoption in general is questionable.

The innovation is sort of like Paris Hilton. She's everywhere and nobody really knows why. This is what Krisztina Holly, a serial entrepreneur and engineer tells us in a plea to preserve the true meaning of innovation . I liked the definition of innovation - " true innovation is the process of translating new ideas into tangible societal impact.” I couldn't agree anymore. The innovation is not just about the product or a process and it should certainly be not confused with an invention. I am not sure if innovation is a buzzword yet, but to me, it is nothing but common sense.

I haven't seen the search results user interface change a lot in the past few years and I don't expect any significant changes in coming years. Jakob Nielsen talks about what search results interface would look like in 2010 during a recent interview . I don't like to predict what will happen in 2010 but I do like to spot the trend and identify the opportunities to improve user experience in general and help improve search semantics. I firmly believe that the search results relevancy is likely to get better and better and we will certainly see more heuristics and machine learning to personalize results based on user's needs and importantly to understand the user's intentions in that moment. The search engine improvements are likely to shift from pure indexing science to better understand the search criteria to achieve relevant search results and there are plenty of opportunities in this area. The “Did you mean this?” correction is just the beginning. This is an are...

"How can I do Apple"? I liked Cordell Ratzlaff's quotes in this Business Week article. "The most successful products I was a part of at Apple started with only a few people with no formal structure or hierarchy and little corporate oversight." Cordell managed Apple's Human Interface group in 1990 and now he is a director of User-Centered design at Cisco. He also says "Democracy works well for running a country and choosing a prom queen. The best product designs, however, come from someone with a singular strong vision and the fortitude to fend off everything and everyone that would compromise it." Yes, we all know and I agree that Steve Jobs is the king. To "do an Apple" you can either hire Steve Jobs or you ask your C-level executives to do what he does. Apple does not sell products, it sells user experience and apparently they are doing a good job marketing and selling this experience. We all can learn from Apple and understand the c...

If you are a SOA enabled enterprise application vendor trying to sell SOA to your customers you quickly realize that very few customers are interested in buying SOA by itself. Many customers believe SOA investment to be a non-differential one and they compare that with compliance – you have to have it and there is no direct ROI. A vendor can offer ROI if the vendor has the right integration and interoperability strategy. For customers it is all about lowering the TCO of the overall IT investment and not about looking at TCO of individual applications. SOA enabled applications with standardized, flexible, and interoperable interfaces work towards the lower TCO and provide customers sustainable competitive advantage. Generally speaking customers are not interested in the "integration governance" of the application provider as long as the applications are integrated out-of-the-box and has necessary services to support inbound and outbound integration with customer's...

It is both . SOA governance is not much different than any other kind of governance in an organization. Successful SOA governance cannot be achieved without people framework. Socioeconomic factors such as organizational dynamics (I think it is a good synonym for politics) drive the SOA strategy for an organization.This is especially true for IT organizations where the organizations are on the supply side of SOA for their product offerings. Many people miss the fact that the governance efforts are not only limited to the internal employees in an organization but are typically extended to customers and partners. Many organizations co-innovate with customers and partners and these partners and customers significantly influence the SOA governance policies of an organization. Many architects view SOA governance as a technical challenge, but I beg to defer. Strategic SOA governance is not just a technical problem; it is a business and process problem that has socioeconomic implicatio...

I have seen and participated into this debate many times - what design we should tackle first, visual or interaction? There is no one answer, but here are some thoughts. What we really need is a good framework in place during the design phase before we work on the details of any of these designs. The actual design cannot be accomplished until we have idioms, metaphors (for interaction design) and brand, visual theme (for visual design) etc. flushed out and agreed upon. One designer describes visual design as skinning the wireframes to prevent the end of wireframes and hence death of interaction design. This is a bit extreme and many visual designers won't be thrilled with this opinion. Wireframes are good tools to document interactions and to get a quick validation via cognitive walkthroughs. Visual design is horizontal and it should be made sure that it is consistent across all the parts of an application so that they have the same visual appeal. Interaction design is vertical an...