What does a software program manager do anyway?

Asking what a program manager (PM) does in the software industry is a bit of a trick question because so many different and only tangentially related positions are called PM. So I can't provide a universal answer but I can explain what the PM groups I have worked with over the years have done/do. The short answer is that we are the conduit between the core Development team (e.g. Development/Test/PM) and the rest of the known universe. Our job is to bring data from the outside world in, bring the core Development team's ideas out to the world, negotiate a "contract" between the two as to who is to do what/when and then be held personally responsible for making sure everyone honors the "contract".

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Interoperability Wars – Episode 6 – Part 1 – Revenge of Babble

Nothing said in this post (or on this blog for that matter) reflects the views of the blog owner's employer of the moment.

Dedication: To George Lucas for as Harrison Ford once said to Mr. Lucas, "You can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it."

Announcer: Join us for the exciting first part of episode 6 of the Interoperability Wars – Revenge of Babble!

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Babble

Apple Machine Support Sucks

The minimum system requirements for iLife '08 requires either a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0Ghz or iMac G5 1.9 Ghz. My machine is a Power Mac G5 dual 1.8Ghz and my wife's iMac is a G5 1.8 Ghz. I bought my machine in 4/2004 so after just 3 years and 4 months the machine is, in so far as Apple is concerned, obsolete. We bought my wife her iMac in 6/2005 so in her case it only took 2 years and 2 months for her machine to be declared obsolete by Apple. I think that is insane. Apple takes thousands of dollars and gives us just over 2 years before declaring our machines obsolete? I am not a happy Apple customer.

And yes, I know, it is possible to run iLife '08 on these machines but we wouldn't have any official support and if there is a problem we can't even return the software since, it is my understanding, that Apple won't take back open software boxes. So we're screwed. I typically upgrade my computers every four years or so, so I was planning on upgrading my box in 2008 but even then I can't move to iLive '08 because we won't be upgrading my wife's machine until 2009 and we share iPhoto by file synching (as in, my wife's machine is the 'master' and I synch off her drive). And no, terminal serving in to my machine from her machine won't work. The whole reason we got my wife a Mac is to make her life simpler, not more complex. Besides, she downloads the pictures to her machine, not mine.

Normally Apple makes me really happy but I feel seriously screwed by iLive '08. Obsoleting a main line machine in under 3 years is just wrong.

Making LY X Produce Decent Hyperlinked HTML & PDF Files

As someone who writes for a living I have used a whole slew of word processors and generally haven't been all that happy with any of them. When I write I want to focus on the content, not the presentation. So the whole WYSIWYG generation of word processors left me cold. In fact, I spend most of my time in outline mode in Word. LyX takes a different approach. It focuses on What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM). In other words, it doesn't worry about formating, just content.

When I first reviewed LY X a year ago I decided it was good enough to use (and have done so regularly since) but still painful. With the 1.5.1 release I can revise that review to say that it's only minorly irritating to use LY X but it's good points are so numerous that it's more than worth the pain if you need to deal with large documents, with math formulas or with large bibliographies. And thanks to the efforts of folks like Dr. Richard G. Heck (who has my undying gratitude for fixing HTML generation in LY X) LY X is substantially better at generating HTML.

LY X does have a learning curve and one is well advised to at least read the tutorial (Help->Tutorial). But I believe that the modern versions of LY X have vastly improved over their predecessors and the learning curve is well worth the effort.

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APP and Dare, the sitting duck

So poor Dare made the apparently unforgivable mistake of questioning anything about APP. First he suggested that maybe APP doesn't solve all the world's problems. Then he clarified that GData isn't APP. And then after a particularly appalling article by Mr. Bray that was so rude that I refuse to contribute to its popularity by linking to it, Date finally tried to explain that Microsoft isn't trying to destroy APP. I'm going to ignore all the heat because I suspect my handful of readers have already read Dare's articles and the various responses. Instead I'll try to explain what's actually going on at Live. I know what's going on because my job for little over the last year has been to work with Live groups designing our platform strategy. So I know where the bodies are buried and in many cases helped to bury them.

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Portable Reputations – Reputations Want to Be Free!

Imagine if you could find a random store on the Internet and get reputation data about it regardless of where it had previously sold goods. Maybe it has a great reputation on Yahoo Shopping but a lousy reputation on EBay? Maybe it has an outstanding reputation on MySimon but hasn't really established itself yet on MSN Shopping where you happened to find it? Shouldn't we be able to find all the reputation data without having to be held hostage to some reputation intermediary? The same applies to reputations about people. Imagine if a website with a comment section could collect reputation data about a user from every site they have posted at and use that to figure out how much moderation, if any, they should apply to that person's posts? Why should someone have to start building their reputation from scratch on every website they go to? It's out reputation data, it's about us or its generated by us and it's bloody time we set it free!

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But That's Not RESTful!

Many years ago a former boss of mine (Peter Ford, I believe) told me "Anytime someone says to you 'that won't scale' during a design argument what you should hear is 'Yo Mama!'". [Ed. Note: For my non-American reader(s) "Yo Mama!" is a generic American insult, it is considered very tame and would be acceptable, if said jokingly, in a professional environment.] Lately I've run into another design argument that needs to join the "Yo Mama!" equivalency list – "That's not RESTful!"

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Windows Live Data Wants To Be Free – Or A Gadget In Every Pot

I walked into my boss's office on my first day back working for Microsoft in April and he asked me for a favor. Four months later, including one month spent working 7 day weeks, the "favor" is finally over. Microsoft just announced the public availability of the Windows Live Contacts Gadget beta. The gadget allows any website, anywhere, without filling out any paperwork, just by including some Javascript, to allow its users to use data from their Windows Live Contacts (i.e. their address book including e-mails, phone numbers, physical addresses, etc.) on the site. But, of course, that's not even half the story.

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Personal Web Services – The Unnecessary Business

When I think of say e-mail or IM or web pages or personalized home pages or single sign on or address books, I realize that there is really no good excuse, certainly not in the long run, for these services to be delivered in a centralized fashion. Why can't I just have a little box off in a corner of my house hooked up to my Internet connection that provides these services for me? Why can't I have my own little e-mail, IM and web server that hosts all of my content? At the very least I would maintain my privacy, something I have no hope of maintaining when a 3rd party hosts my content for me (even if the hosting service doesn't peak, doesn't leak and isn't hacked, I can safely assume the government is looking). But in addition to privacy I would also get better functionality since my little box would 'over provisioned' compared to the processing power allocated to users in a typical centralized service.

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