Hello everybody. Here we are at RSC 2009, the Rational Software Conference in, as always, a lovely Orlando, Florida. And I've got another guest here with myself. Would you like to introduce yourself? You bet. My identity was stolen not too long ago. I used to be Brad Pitt, but I'm not now. This is Grady Booch. We talked last year, I remember, in a finely wood-paneled room, if I recall correctly. I think it was, and now you've got this wonderful pea-green kind of thing back here. You know, you've probably come across this notion. I'm always trying to figure out where I picked this up or if I made it up, but the sort of, well, I'll just say the sort of atrocious design that you see in carpets and conference rooms and things. Somehow I have in my mind that they do that because it's easier to clean up and hide stains. I think that's true. It's sort of this, you know, early Gothic bordello look that you see in a number of places. You just sort of string together all the undesirable aesthetic movements. And you reach the common mediocrity, not unlike what we see in software some days, but let's not go there. That's right. Well, one thing we were talking about before we were recording was this sort of, I guess it's all sort of fun ideas to talk about. There's this sort of, I don't know, messed up balance between how cheap software is, and sort of like the scarcity that you have to actually pay for that software, or just like money. You have one resource that's constrained, and then you have this other resource that's potentially infinite in supply, if you can do it correctly. And I'm curious, you know, we sort of stopped ourselves so we could actually get it on tape, but I'm curious to hear what the thoughts there are. And I'm really sorry we didn't get that on tape because we solved every known problem. Well, that's what always happens here. I know, it's a shame. So the theme I've been developing for the executive session here was the notion of the tension between the presence of a software abundance, and yet the presence or in the face of economic scarcity. So reality is the, in technical terms, the global economy sucks. The common reaction in such circumstances, well actually, let me go back.
2:02This isn't the first time. And so the bad news is the economy sucks. The good news is, I guess, is that this too shall pass. I saw a report once that in, since 19, no, 1885, going way back then, the market has dropped greater than 40% in value nine times. So it's not like this is the first time. You even go back further, looking at what happened around that time, around 1870 something, you had the, there was a panic around that time, usually because of speculation of stocks and, and railroads. There was a panic before that due to problems with the gold standard and so on. So you can go back to a number of timeframes and realize there are periods of economic scarcity. But we're a little bit different now in the sense that we have this material software, which is very fungible. It's very adaptable, very, very flexible. And it's not like the normal resources that we were pulling out of the ground or creating from atoms. So the question for me then is how does one attend to economic scarcity in the face of potential software abundance? And the natural reaction, the classic reaction in the face of economic scarcity is that you retreat and panic and you slash things. So this is what's happened with GM, of course, that their only means of survival has been well, not bankruptcy, but looking at eliminating debt and reducing cost. And that's applicable if you view software development as a cost center. But if you view software development as a source of innovation and a source of the power of your business, then you want to have a completely different reaction, which is to say that no, in the face of economic scarcity, I'm going to attack with software because it's actually something that's very fungible, et cetera, et cetera, and gives me a resource that I can use to get an edge. It seems like essentially it's sort of cheap, if you will, than other sort of physical commodities. And cheap, at least in the long term, in the sense that it's not going to sort of increase in cost as you run out of it. Right, you can't run out of it. And in fact, that's an important element that there was this
4:02delightful presentation done at one of Tim O'Reilly's conferences recently, Ethan, can't think of the guy's name, in which he was pointing out that there is a surplus of cognitive skills. So I think he put it in his presentation that if you look at Wikipedia, it represents probably around 100 million cognitive hours. And in a yearly basis, we Americans watch about 200 billion hours of television. So there's a cognitive surplus out there. And software being primarily an element that comes from the cognition and the mental labor thereof, it says there's a surplus of things we can draw upon that don't, you know, increase the carbon footprint. We're living and that's not going to increase if we're writing software or watching TV. And we can tap into that as a means of a competitive advantage. Makes me sort of tangentially connect to one of the sort of reoccurring themes I've been coming across here at RSC this year. You don't mean rustic, do you? You mean, oh, RSC. Or risk or whatever it may be. That's what we call it. But it seems like with a lot of the, uh, the higher level reporting and analytical tools and the, uh, I'm forgetting what it stands for with the MCIF framework and, and sort of the, I don't know, I mean the further evolution of, of RUP principles into more higher level business things, if you will, it seems like a lot of, or at least what I'm seeing a lot of what seems to go on there is the idea of giving business people, if you will, as a software people would call them, like the ability to more closely interact with software and do something with software more directly than just sort of tell the crazy developers over there to deliver me an application. It seems like what Rational is thinking about nowadays is sort of, I don't know, it's, it's, it's sort of going up against that, that windmill or holy grail, if you will, of like finally having business IT alignment, where, uh, we'll finally have some business guy drag and dropping something and it'll just work out perfectly. I'm not sure exactly that's how I characterize where Rational is headed in that space.
6:06Right. Because it brings to mind what happened with the CODASIL committee back in the 60s with COBOL, because one of the things that Grace Marie Hopper and others in the CODASIL committee were pushing is this notion that the great thing about COBOL is now that business people could actually write down business rules and make it executable. So the same argument was done back then. And of course it didn't come to fruition because you simply change the level of abstraction and the problems of building executable things and abstracting and all this, you're just shifting the language it's in and it haven't really solved the root problem. And so I would characterize or reframe your problem a little bit differently to say that no, what's really happening is that it's not so much we're interested in business people programming per se, but rather it's a recognition that there are so many businesses that depend upon software as their lifeblood. And insofar as I can couple the evolution of that software to the business needs and a wonderful dance between the two, that's the holy grail that I wish to have. There's a delightful book whose authors escape me at the moment that characterize market leaders and they describe that there are one of three categories. There's the ones who really worry about efficiency and they put Dell in that category. There are ones who focus upon innovation and they put Apple and IBM in that. And there's a third category that Amazon is in that deals with customer intimacy. And the point they're making is that if you look at any one of those businesses, there's software is a thing that fuels them and makes them possible. And insofar as they can couple where they're trying to head with the business with the software itself, then that's the dance you want to have happen. And so if I were to reframe it, is that what Rational is trying to do? Sure. But we're not trying to do what the Cobalt folks do. So on a completely different topic, when I was walking away from the keynote, I overheard you, you know, I guess I used dropped a little bit in the hallway. And you were telling someone that you
8:06have, you know, there's a lot of demands on your time and travel and things like that. And there's all these different input sources. And I'm kind of generalizing the problem here, if you will. And, you know, I think everyone in quotes has this problem nowadays that there's too much stuff going on. And I think that the, the thing that, that sort of made me remember this overhearing this conversation was you had this, this funny thing you said that even telling people no takes too much time. It takes time, narrowing down. I mean, I'm curious for, for as busy as you laid out that you were, like what, what are some of the coping strategies that you're going through at the moment to sort of deal with these things? Well, no, even sure. Even though it takes time. Um, there are times where I have to just shut myself off from the world. I shut off my email, I shut off my phone, I shut off everything so I can be alone to think for some period of time. And so in that regard, I'll crawl into a cave metaphorically and not quite literally, but almost so. The other coping strategy I'll do is I do a bit of a triage. I asked the questions like, well, does this travel involve going near a beach, which puts it higher in the priority for me? Right. Uh, does this, that's facetious, but well, maybe not entirely, but, but I also look at is, is it, is it something that I can make a difference by physically showing up versus doing something else more creatively? And to that end, I've actually been doing quite a few things in second life in the last year or so. I've probably given 50, 60 presentations in second life. And that's a means of extending my reach while reducing the cost of my time. And it's been absolutely wonderful because I can see more people in some ways by, by doing that. So that's made a big difference. So I guess I'd reframe that by saying one of the things I'll do is to really understand if they need to move my atoms or if I can just move my bits. Yeah. Well, I mean, it seems like you're spending a little bit more time upfront to actually evaluate if you're going to spend a lot of time by doing something, which I think most people go about something where they, they sort of want to clear out their inbox, if you will. Yeah. And so they end up over committing
10:10in the future to save a little bit of time in them. You also mentioned second life. And I'm curious, I mean, second life specifically, but it seems like there's been a lot more, uh, or I've seen a lot more emphasis on not only sort of like online meetings and stuff like that, but I don't know if it, I guess it's curious to me cause I'm not really into video conferencing stuff, but I've seen a lot of people doing more enthusiastically doing remote sort of meetings and things going down to second life. I mean, it's been a while since I've sort of caught up on what, how things have been going over in the second life. Yeah. But so, I mean, how, how has it been evolving over the past year or so? Wow. Tremendous, uh, strides in that regard. Um, as an example of how IBM's, uh, made a commitment in this case, we have a group called the Academy of Technology, which is the 3000 or so. I think that's the right number. Most senior technical people throughout the corporation. And last year was the first year we didn't do this, but we used to have a, an annual meeting where we'd physically get together. And due to costs, we said, we're not going to do that. So instead the Academy meeting was held in second life and it's not quite the same. And we have the new, you know, startup kinds of things, but the ability to still interact with people and have these water cooler conversations. If we cancel the meeting, we would have had nothing, but by doing it in second life, you get some degree of that value. Um, the other thing that's happened, I think it's, it's pretty profound is that IBM and Linden have worked together to allow us to take the, the server for second life and separate it from the public grid and put it behind the firewall. So we can now have a truly secure virtual experience. So you don't have your own second life. You can have your own second life. Some people have flippantly called it your third life. That's right. Your first and second life aren't good enough. Your corporate life or something. Exactly. And so by doing so, you built an air gap around everything there. And this is to some degree where the, uh, the same time three D folks have had that headed. So, you know, at the same time, I can, you know, bring up a chat window and say, Oh, you three or four people come join me. You can now click a button and say,
12:10come meet me in second life. And you come to this, this meeting room, which has little post-it notes and whiteboards and things around it. So it's just like being there, but at a third, uh, third dimension. Curious that despite the fact that we're doing a video here, I tend to be a pretty plain text oriented guy, a pretty, pretty text oriented guy. Sure. I do a lot of instant messaging and email and all this sort of stuff. And, and since obviously you do a lot of second life stuff. And then like I was saying, I see a lot of people interested in video conferencing. Sure. And I, and I wonder in doing all these things, like what, what do you feel like that extra visual dimension adds that something like whether you are IMing or IRCing or whatever, it doesn't quite have, doesn't quite have on its own. Both the general video and second life offer me, uh, some visual cues of body language. And especially if I am working with someone adept in second life, I can see where they're looking. I can see what their attention is. And I can pick up cues like I'm doing with you here in real life. The other great thing that second life offers to me that I don't get from video conferences is that it deals with serendipitous connection. Uh, last week I gave a presentation to 65 people in world to a group in DC. And I was in, where was I? Kansas city at the time. And I did the meeting and did the presentation. And it was very cool. Just like a real meeting, but I don't get from a video meeting is that it breaks up and people come gather around in small groups. So you have these spontaneously created groups that form that you can't get in a video presentation because you just don't have that kind of clustering. And the cool thing in second life is with the three-dimensional audio, I can pick up conversations at a distance and say, I'd like to walk over there and see what's happening. Ah, right. So you get some of the same kinds of things you can in real life without, you know, getting near enough to smell somebody, which is not always necessarily a downside. That's right. And we haven't perfected, maybe, maybe you guys in research are working on this, but we don't have the, the smell of thing, the peripheral smell device. Small trivia, David Harrell, who was the inventor behind state charts,
14:11was apparently working at one time on the notion of, of smell phenomes. Ah. So you could come up with the discrete units of smell and attach that to a website. Well, one thing I'd like to highlight is, is the notion of the master thing that I showed in the keynote as well. Yeah, yeah. That was very cool. But basically a universal translator kind of thing. And the fact that we've been able to given, I think we gave 10,000 copies to the army to use in Iraq. That's, that's pretty cool. You know, you have, you have 10,000 units running around there. So there's some certain confidence that it actually works, if you will. And, and the demo was, it was pretty funny. There was, there was a, a guy speaking Mandarin. He's obviously having a heart attack. I'm having a heart attack, but I'm going to spend the time punching this one. And then maybe I, I might've been over interpolate, but it seemed like the guy who was talking with us was actually speaking English as a second language. I mean, he had some sort of accent. He was, I think he was Swedish. Yeah. Yeah. Which was kind of funny in itself. But I mean, I'm curious with these kinds of devices, because I'm, my assumption is they're somewhat expensive per unit. And, and, and I wonder what you, I mean, how, how long do you think it would be before they get to be sort of affordable devices? Like even, you know, sort of iPod, you know, affordable. Yeah. Great question. Because the cost of them is not the hardware. It's just pretty stock hardware, just the research behind it and the software. I mean, even IBM's via voice is largely a, a software intensive kind of application. And master is pretty much that as well, too. Yeah. Master has master for those you hadn't followed. It stands for multilingual speech translator. I think it is. And as it turns out, there's an open source framework to some degree behind it as well, too. That's, that's out there. Great. Well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time. So I appreciate you spending all this time. I'm happy to do so. Yeah. It was a pleasure to do so.