Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Marathon disciplines for software companies, speed and heavyweights

Published on November 24, 2009 in Palo, Palo Suite and Palo for Excel. 0 Comments

Business life involves sprints and marathons. Product development, above all, resembles a marathon, especially in the software industry. The most important thing is finding the right people for your team. It takes good consultants and sales, people who understand the customers and know the market, strong developers.

We have been lucky to hire some new specialists with in-depth knowledge of business intelligence. The most important addition is our Senior Product Manager. Matthias Krämer has many years of experience in product development and product management of Business Intelligence software. Matthias was previously employed with Infor as a Product Manager with worldwide responsibility for BI products and their integration within the Infor ERP systems. He will therefore, at the interface between customers, consultants and the development process, from now on have responsibility for the development of the Palo Suite. Even if Matthias knows the market and the job perfectly well, being a product manager always remains a challenge. Product development inherently involves conflict. Apart from dealing with a founder like me, who has de facto been doing the product manager’s work and all the decision-making up until now, there might be conflict between purchasers and end users, sales and marketing, development and consulting. Addressing these conflicts productively is part of the product management marathon.

Development is another marathon discipline for software companies. We are also expanding our Development Department. In Prague, Jedox acquired an entire development team with combined 40+ years of experience in the development of multidimensional databases. The same team had in recent years been responsible for the development of the MIS Alea, now the Infor OLAP. With their expertise in OLAP databases, these OLAP specialists will help to increase the pace of development of our OLAP engine. Our R+D team is now about 30 people strong, while the company as a whole counts around 60 employees and 15 developers nearshore. The new OLAP specialists will also work on integrating our GPU research into the development of our in-memory OLAP software. So we are speeding up both our software by using multiprocessor GPU hardware to achieve exponential performance gains for number crunching in BI, and at the same time our development work by adding state of the art OLAP knowledge. Performance is a key point in BI and CPM, and the speed of development is a key factor for an Open Source software company competing against heavyweights. Speed and heavyweights, on the other side, don’t go together, which is even more true if it is a marathon race. As no other BI vendor is developing GPU based BI and CPM software, and as we’ve gained further momentum in development, I’m confident that we are in a good position for medal winning in the BI race.

Microsoft tries to patent Sparklines

Published on November 20, 2009 in Jedox, Kristian and Palo Use Cases. 0 Comments

In my last post I talked about the Pros and Cons of patents (admittedly more about the Cons). Now I just received the following link: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003Y1&topic_id=1 . Microsoft surprisingly filed a patent application for a technology called micro charts (also known as Sparklines). From my understanding there is a lot of prior art that stands against such a patent. I hope the USPTO will acknowledge this.

Patents are bad for the consumer

Published on November 3, 2009 in Jedox and Kristian. 4 Comments

Ever since the latest law suite wave by Eolas, everyone with a somewhat common sense must have realized that software patents are nonsense.

It is often referred to the fact that many software patents have the character of trivial patents and should therefore not be recognized as patents. But I am way more intrigued by the question of whether the generic patent concept as such is still of any use.

In my opinion, there is no point in arguing whether a patent is an advantage for the patent holder. By all means, it is favourable in that respect that the patent holder receives the lifelong monopoly for a particular technology. De facto at least, because during the 200-year-old history of the steam engine, 20 years may have seemed a reasonable period of protection; in today’s technological era, 20 years is an eternity.

It is often argued that patents are about protecting intellectual property. The inventor is to be compensated for his development work. Interestingly, consumers regard the idea of patents as fair thinking of the small-scale inventor whose idea is stolen by the large corporation, or the pharmacy industry, which – without patent protection – would supposedly not develop costly meds.

But the original idea of the patent was not about creating a fair and automatic reward system for the inventor. It was more about giving the investor an incentive to disclose his know-how to the general public. And in return, society would not reward the inventor in financial terms but with a time-limited monopoly. But here is the crucial part: the patent concept was not about an inventor’s fundamental right to receive remuneration for intellectual work. It was more about society being prepared to pay dearly (albeit cashless) for new knowledge during periods of scarce know-how and long development cycles.

Today, however, know-how is no longer scarce. Among the 6.8 billion people, there are plenty of intelligent or even genius people, many from aspiring countries like China and India. Each one of them has a desire to ultimately turn his know-how into cash. This can only be done by introducing the know-how to the market. And not as a pure patent exploiter, as, e.g., a manufacturer of tangible goods.

In case of intangible goods, which can be freely copied like e.g. digital products, it will be more difficult, though not impossible. What counts here is the speed of innovation. The one who innovates faster than the competition is able to capitalize on his intellectual property. While patents impede innovation, the cancellation of patent protection would be leading to an innovation race which would ultimately benefit society and the consumer. The following chart shows how the patent system decreases the speed of innovation.

Speed of Innovation - Patents vs. Open Innovation

The level of remuneration for innovation can and must be established by global competition. The time-limited monopoly has become inappropriate as a reward system. In light of the oversupply of know-how in the global market, it has become too expensive for society and ultimately for the individual consumer, too.