bruno fernandez-ruiz

While talking this morning to the cab driver taking me to our EGL office in Bangalore, when for some unknown reason, the driver told me that his boss was paying him 3,400 rupees per month, and that after 22 years of service. That actually got me thinking..

The taxi company appointed by the hotel is paying a monthly contract fee of 60,000 rupees to the hotel. There are 30 drivers on contract. Each driver makes 3 to 4 trips a day, each bringing in 400 to 800 in sales. I’ll let you do the numbers, but even considering extremely expensive car leases, gasoline, insurance, etc. you’ll find out that this taxi business runs easily at close to 90% margins.

And apparently this is not unusual in India. The differences between the poor and the rich are huge. Whereas a taxi driver makes only 3,400 a month, a hotel general manager makes close to 100,000 rupees. Take into account that the taxi driver is not among the poorest in India, and you have right here an example of the remaining of casts in modern India.

But getting back to technology, I gave a TechTalk to the Indian office regarding architecture. I used the “seek vs transfer” example to show how we, as technologists, must sometimes solve technology problems that are strategic in nature and that the business is not necessarily going to think about, not to talk about spontaneously sponsoring. It is an architects job to identify these gaps, and ensure that long-term investment in technology is done.

The seek vs transfer problem and the work we are doing with Hadoop is just one example, but one that I find highly illustrating, and that most engineers associate easily once I walk them through Ebay’s publicly known strategy for databases, removing transactions, order, joins, foreign keys … to the point that Ebay even challenged whether a relational store was still useful for them.

I was reading today during breakfast the Economic Times of India when I came across a really interesting interview with the CEO of Airtel India, Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal. He was making the point that given the development cycle in which India is in mobile is as important as broadband. According to the CEO of Airtel, consumers expect in India expect a seamless experience from broadband to mobile, and from mobile to TV.

When we funded Meridea back in 2001, we commissioned a research survey among CEO/CIOs to understand their likelihood of mobile booming as the channel of choice for financial services. And back in 2001, the answer was a resounding yes. However since then, mobile has not really picked up due to a number of reasons going from device limitations, network limitations, bandwidth costs, and security issues. The end result was that Meridea struggled to sell in a market when only broadband was important. The key value-added of the software were its multi-channel features, but the market did not want to think multi-channel.

However, if Mr. Mittal would be right, and I believe he might, especially given the low penetration of copper infrastructure in Emerging Markets, a multi-channel solution like Meridea definitely makes sense to address both content distribution and interactive services.

The fact that TV is listed on the list make me wonder though, since good TV infrastructure with interactive features depends again on copper or fiber, not available generally in most Emerging Markets. So perhaps Airtel is thinking about adding mobile devices to TV sets? Now, that would be interesting.

After finishing breakfast, I got into a cab, and started heading down to the office in MGR. It’s an older building than EGL, and the age tells internally. The Yahoo premises are quite well-maintained anyway. Funny enough they have the same elevator problems as we do in London.

I did take a look at several projects, one of them being OurCity, which is beautifully minimalistic. If you have not had a chance yet, take a look at OurCity. OurCity works with the notion of modules, and a module repository. A module is a composition of a view and a data source, which will normally be a parametrized service call. You create modules and add them to a slot in a layout, which itself you can manage. Simple, elegant and efficient, it allows Yahoo! to quickly create local presence without major editorial costs.

For dinner I went with the team to a local Indian restaurant “apt” for foreigners. Really nice place in MGR, and great company. Believe or not, we actually spent most of our dinner discussing about architecture and design, the value of standards, technology strategy, etc.

After a peaceful flight, and a short sleep, we landed at 4.30AM in Bangalore. Getting through immigration in Indian airports is always a unique experience, but this I time I really flew throw passport control and customs, especially since I only had carry on luggage. Note to self: never check-in luggage.

The problem was outside. My driver from Le Méridean was not there. There was another driver from the hotel waiting, but for another guest. I had to wait. And after more than 10 hours on a plane, with little sleep, I was wondering why I had to wait for my driver. Anyway, after a few calls, he did finally show up, claiming he had had trouble parking. I mean, how difficult is it parking at 4.30AM in an almost empty car park? No tip.

On the way to the hotel I noticed how different Bangalore is from New Delhi. Whereas New Delhi is all upside down, full of works, cows, and messy as hell, Bangalore is relative tidy and developed. Even the thousands of trucks cruising during the night in New Delhi, since they are limited during the day, were not present in Bangalore.

I managed to catch an hour of sleep until going into the office. The hotel is alright, but I would not recommend it. You really don’t get much for your money, and there are better options in Bangalore, which actually happen to be closer to both Yahoo! offices in MGR and EGL. As much as I normally like both Le Méridean and Sheratons, this one simply does not cut it. The rooms were not very clean, some light bulbs were blown off, and you can smell the kitchen from the rooms. Also the shower-in-bath does not cut it, with barely any pressure and water getting all over the place.

The day at the EGL office was really good and productive. It’s always inspiring to meet the teams, and this time was no different. The facilities are also really good. It feels like being back in Sunnyvale.

On the way back I stopped by the State Cottage Emporium in MG Road, an (allegedly) safe place to shop for foreigners, with marked prices. Well, after bargaining a 25% discount on a traditional necklace, and walking out proudly, I feel strange at such a discount, and I am not sure whether I have been an artist of negotiation, or really, really, stupid.

Yes, you are right, not Malkovich, but Phileas Fogg. At exactly 10.30am sharp today, I popped into a taxi that took me to Heathrow Terminal 4. I am currently writing from the BA Business Lounge waiting for my plane and ahead of my tour “Around the World in 15 days”. And yes, I am beating Mr. Fogg by an impressive 65 days (although a good 137 years later to tell the truth)!

I am flying east, same direction as Phileas Fogg, with stops in Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul, Sunyvale, Toronto and back to London Heathrow. Obviously I am not Jules Verne, but I’ll be blogging each day about my trip.

I had a good start. Check in at Heathrow was nice and smooth, except the stupidity that I have to put my laptop bag into my carry-on luggage while going through security, only to take it out right after clearning security. I guess the queues if passengers were not limited to 1 bag would be even longer, but given that there are no queues in business class, why do the authorities keep enforcing this rule? I really fail to see it as a security measure, it’s just a workload problem.

When you put all three together, you’ll find out why. 1) Today is a bank holiday in the UK. 2) We don’t have and we can’t have aerial TV coverage, we can’t have cable TV, and we can’t have Sky because I am not willing to pay anything beyond what we already pay in tax for TV; 3) They are playing the 2007 World Champs in Athletics that we really want to watch. So, I have been assigned a little project: get us the games on TV.

Based on the position of the trees and the house, I am going to try to hit two satellites: Astra 1E at 19.2E and Astra 2D at 28.2E. With Astra 1E I can get Digital+ (Spanish Sky equivalent, but some programmes are free-to-view) and Eurosport DE free. With Astra 2D I can get most of the UK free-to-air (plus Sky Digital). I am not sure Astra 2D will work given the azimuth and the trees … but I’ll try it first.

For my reference:


Satellite at = 19.2 East orbit longitude (Astra 1E)
Dish elevation= 28.6, Azimuth= 158.7 (magnetic compass), Polarisation= -14.8
Polar mounts only: Main angle= 51.9, Downward tilt= 6.7



Satellite at = 28.2 East orbit longitude (Astra 2D)
Dish elevation= 25.68, Azimuth= 148.26 (magnetic compass), Polarisation= -20.76
Polar mounts only: Main angle= 51.9, Downward tilt= 6.7


I’ll be updating this blog entry throughout the day.

Update (11.23AM)

Hmm, it’s not going well. I can’t find signal on either one, I wonder if the trees are blocking all the signal (that’s what it looks from a visual, but I was hoping some signal to go through regardless). Anywa, the house has a flat roof, I have never been up there, but perhaps if I could set it up there … Time to explore!

Update (18.16PM)

Right, I figured out setting the dish on the roof was not an option, at least not for today since I need a very high ladder, which I don’t have. I think I will try next week end to install it by the east side of the garden. That should help to reach elevation and go over the trees.

To be continued …

Sun is changing its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, as announced in Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog on Thursday 23rd August. There has been a lot of mixed feedback. Most techies and engineers inside and outside Sun are criticizing the decision, as they see it narrowing Sun to Java technology. However, Wall Street did not seem to care much.

The stock went up 1.62%, while the Nasdaq index recovered 1.38% so one can possibly assume the market was insensitive to the change. While the volume was double the average, so was the market’s, so again no change.

This seems to be a change purely driven by brand awarenes. As Schwart’s puts it in his blog:

What’s that distribution and awareness worth to us? It’s hard to say - brands, like employees, aren’t expenses, they’re investments. Measuring their value is more art than science. But there’s no doubt in my mind more people know Java than Sun Microsystems. There’s similarly no doubt they know Java more than nearly any other brand on the internet.

It strikes me that as much as this change might help Sun’s marketing strategy, it will likely damage its ability to hire and retain smart engineers. Time will tell.

Have you have ever been part of the inception of a software system that later became big and complex? Have you later felt the frustration of not being able to make further changes to the core architecture? Did you end up being taken hostage by the software? I did.

We hope as developers to be able to adapt software as requirements and bugs arise, and to be able to organize our software releases accordingly. By doing incremental releases we hope to work with a stable code-base where we can release often. We then receive feedback more often and we are therefore agile and responsive to business needs.

Until one day we become legacy. A competitor starting from scratch has been able to innovate and quickly implement these new cool features the market really wants. We can’t catch up with them, because they don’t have the legacy we have: the other thirty thousand features we need for all revenue-generating customers we have.

We set ourselves to large regeneration plans, greenfield development. “This time around, we’ll do it right”, we say. Two to three years later, after again a cycle of incremental releases, we become again legacy.

And this is how the software industry is run. Competition between those entering the legacy stage and those on the startup curve is what keeps us employed. And yet this continuous hostage situation by incremental releases is what annoys me most about software.

There are two realistic approaches to solving the problem. You could plan upfront for a software life of 2 to 3 years and not 5 to 10 as some would hope. Or you could take the red pill.

I would rather see more people taking the red pill. It ain’t easy, I admit it, but it is possible. Architectural refactoring is extremely painful - you are basically breaking the system as hard as it can be broken before pulling it up together again -. I have done it, but don’t take my word for it, and look at Linux going from 2.4 to 2.6, at Windows going from 98 to 2000, at Mac OS going to X. They took the pain, and it paid off.

Let’s stop building software and let’s start thinking of software reconstruction. After a few incremental releases, do an architectural release. I know you need it. You know you need it. It’s your choice, the red pill.

LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman promised at the end of June to open the LinkedIn platform, very much aligned with Facebook’s publishing its developer APIs, and surely trying to experience some of the same growth Facebook is receiving thanks to opening their APIs. I hope however that LinkedIn is thinking about all the risks associated with opening up a business community.

LinkedIn will need to review and approve every single application out there consuming their services. The last thing you want is a pile a lawsuits on your desk because of misapproprated data, especially personal data covered by the EU/95 Privacy Directive, also implemented in the UK via the Data Protection Act, and somehow applicable to US companies under the Safe Harbor Agreements.

LinkedIn should focus on opening the APIs for its users. One of my main complains with LinkedIn is that it is very good at sucking my data, but it’s very hard to get some of that data back, let’s say synchronizing with my phone’s address book or even the more simple operation of importing my contacts into my Outlook calendar. That’s where I would like to see LinkedIn going, allowing developers to write such plugins, for us to access our own data. Anything beyond this very personal use of the data might end up hurting LinkedIn, and what is worse from a business perspective, possibly dillute it into another, smaller, does-it-all, Facebook.

After my move away from Gnome and Evolution, I have now been running KDE for three weeks straight and still going. I have found KDE to be a surprisingly stable and reliable platform. It’s hard to find something to criticize in KDE. It’s a really nice desktop setup: well oiled machinery where everything seems to run smoothly. Inter-application communication and integration of all the KDE applications is simply superb, and I don’t think there is any other desktop out there, proprietary or open source, where you can see such tight integration of its parts. And this is mainly thanks to Trolltech’s fantastic toolkit, Qt

Qt is a first class toolkit which has turned to be be a fantastic choice for KDE. Qt is probably the best graphical and utilities programming toolkit that truly looks like a native application on any target desktop: OS X, Windows or KDE. Developer productivity is probably as good as you can get with a C++ toolkit. However, Qt is GPL, and a GPL toolkit library is not a good thing if you are looking for mass adoption.

Qt’s commercial non-GPL license fee is actually not high at all, and most professional developers and software houses should be able to buy the licenses. The problem however is that if you start using the GPL version and then you figure out you want to go proprietary, you simply can’t. You must buy the Qt commercial license upfront. The problem lies with the grassroot developers: they won’t pay for the commercial license since the prospect of revenue is non-existent in the beginning.  When individual developers are faced with writing an application, many will avoid Qt because of its viral licensing nature. As a developer you want to have the choice of whether to make your app GPL or not, you don’t want your choice to be restricted by a license. Some of those grassroot developers turn to be writting the most popular applications for Linux, such as Mozilla Firefox, Gaim/Pidgin, OpenOffice, Evolution, etc. Guess what, the leading office, personal information management and groupware applications don’t run on Qt. And that’s where the users (and the money) is.

Many open source software houses sell software that is not GPL, and derive their revenues from support contracts and some professional services. It’s surprising that to date Trolltech has not moved in this direction and introduced a more commercially friendly license for Qt. This would be a complete change to Trolltech’s business model, and the dramatic increase in developers entering into support contracts for Qt would quickly offset any short-term loss of revenue from traditional licensing fees.

Sadly, it might be almost too late for Qt: Gtk+ has matured to become a good-enough toolkit, and although not yet as stable and tightly integrated as Qt, Gtk+ is sufficiently portable and usable. We have today because of that two opposed Linux desktop communities, with neither having sufficient momentum to be competitive with Aqua or Aero. It’s sad to see how and why Linux has lost the desktop war. The community had a unique chance to make Linux a valid choice for the desktop OS, especially with Microsoft leaving such a big gap between Windows XP and Windows Vista. Linux missed it and Apple took it to its advantage. If the Linux desktop had united forces years ago, Trolltech might had become the next Apple.

Perhaps it’s not too late. I am challenging Trolltech to license Qt on a royalty free commercially friendly license. I am challening the Gnome community to consider a radical merge onto Qt and KDE. I am challening the KDE community to open its arms towards the Gnome developers and the Gnome software. We can still make GKNOME a success.

After moving to KDE three weeks ago now, I am staying. At least for now. If I had to pick on something, my main point for feedback would be that the graphical user interface feels crowded, and its usage metaphors, albeit consistent, are rather complicated.

In KDE, configuration options are scattered all around the place. KDE is a great platform for the power user, familiar with tweaking and working with plenty of configuration options, but for the rest of us who just want to get on using the applications and not waste our time fighting with configuration options, a simpler paradigm for desktop and programs alike would be more useful. That simplicity is one of the design goals of Gnome: sane defaults, clean UI and few configuration options. Unfortunately Gnome has gone too far, and makes it sometimes either impossible or very hard for the power user to configure the desktop or an application to its own liking. While preserving for KDE’s power users the current ability to configure practically anything, the majority of users would however benefit from a cleaner and more modern user interface metaphor.