Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Morning Coffee 61

• Nick Malik wonders if architecture is code or if it's data? Frankly, I have nothing to add to this, but thought I should link to something Nick wrote since he's letting me share his office for the next few months while I'm engaged with one of the teams he mentions, though he begged me not to disclose which one. :)
• Ted Neward's Five Minute Management Lessons for Developers made me snicker.
• Xbox.com is running a new contest called "My Mom's a Gamer". Mine is. These days, it's mostly casual games on MSN Games, but back in the day she played both the Atari 2600 and Colecovision. She would play Space Invaders for hours. And curse. A lot. Most kids learned to curse on the playground, I learned from my mother.
• Mark Cuban claims the HDTV is the new PC. TV and PC technologies are certainly evolving as they merge, but will that platform be as open as the desktop PC or the browser? It better be.
• According to Nick Carr, Citigroup is looking to cut $4.6 billion in spending over the next three years and that IT will be one of the "cornerstones" (i.e. hardest hit) of that effort. I had a chat with an Meta analyst in Australia a few years ago who suggested that IT spending was going to go thru an innovator's dilemma phase. Huge companies (like Citi) with huge IT budgets are facing significant competition from small companies that can't afford huge IT budgets. These smaller companies get used to running a tighter ship and tend to be more competitive as they grow and are able to directly face off against the big fish.