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.
Archive for the 'Kristian' Category
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.
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.
Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google says it, Chris Anderson says it, too: Digital products like music, news articles or software will be free in the long term. This is because the cost of a digital product drops down to its incremental cost in the interest of competition. And the cost to provide an additional unit of a digital product through the internet is simply zero.
Not a threat to Open-Source companies and certainly not a threat to Palo, but most definitely a lesson still to be learned by many other software vendors in the world.
This weekend we have the parliamentary elections here in Germany. The Internet with its free digital products will create challenges for many vendors in the digital economy, but on Sunday I am most interested to see what challenges our established political parties will face from the new and internet minded Piratenpartei (Pirate Party).
The Pirates talk about reforming the copyright and patent law, ending the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people conducted by Government and big businesses and they want to ensure that everyone has true freedom of speech, in the internet as well. Germany’s established parties don’t really have sufficient answers (or even awareness) of this problems. I would not be surprised if the Pirates became a political force in Germany, very much to the surprise of many people.
You’ve probably heard the shortest joke in the IT industry. It goes like this: “I’m almost done”.
When doing BI and Performance Management projects with our clients, we occasionally have the same problem. Projects take longer than we (or our client) anticipated and there is a variety of possible reasons: technical problems with the software or installation, data quality problems on the ETL side, or incomplete requirement specifications. Or different role perception: We see ourselves as coaches for the Palo-BI Suite and we expect the customer to do part of the work, especially at later phases of the project, while the customer expects to be handed over a 100% completed project.
20 years ago, to cope with this and similar types of issues, my brother Peter (former CEO and founder of MIS AG who unfortunately died in a car accident in 2004) came up with a surprisingly easy formula to calculate realistic project duration (both for internal software development projects as well as consulting projects with clients). Simply take the gut feeling of the developer or the consultant and multiply the number of days or weeks that he thinks are realistic with pi (3,1415). In other words, if somebody thinks 10 days are realistic, the project will most probably take 31,5 days.
20 years after Peter had told me about this rule, I finally had a look at the theory behind it. In my opinion it goes like this: If a person takes an educated guess about how long it will take, he will automatically just see the work to get 80% or 90% of the desired functionality done. He simply neglects the 10% to 20% percent that is needed to make the product or the project 100% perfect. But how long will it take to complete these 10%-20%? Very long as you can see in the following drawing which shows a typical curve based on the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Doing between 80% to 90% of the work will only take you around a third of the total effort (MD gf stands for man days estimated using gut feeling)
So if you only look at 80% to 90% of the total functionality you will come to the conclusion that the project will only take you 33% of the time it actually really would if you look at the 100% result. That is where pi comes into play. Multiply the number of days a developer or a consultant estimates for the project by the magic 3,1415 and you most probably have a realistic amout of time it will take to really get done 100%. The following drawing explains this.
PS: At Jedox we decided to multiply the “gut feeling” estimate by 2. This is not pi but then we also have a clause in our general terms of contract where we ask for an additionaly 60% range that we can charge above our original estimate. And 2 x 160% roughly equals pi.
Inspired by summer and vacation time, I figured it might be interesting to do a post about catamarans for a change. You may have seen on the Jedox website that we are sponsoring a catamaran sailing team. Palo is about speed and so are catamarans. This and the fact that our town, Freiburg, is home of a world and European champion seemed reason enough to back up and support this very successful team.
Let me introduce Sebastian Moser and Thomas Posch, here in their element on Lake Como in northern Italy:
Sebastian and Thomas as well as Sebastian’s father Alexander make up the Team Moser. Sebastian and Thomas ride the Topcat catamaran as well as the Tornado catamaran which is even faster.
Sebastian maintains an interesting website at www.team-moser.com, a worthwhile site to visit. You can learn a lot about catamaran sailing there and they also provide interesting links. The YouTube video which I came across on their page, gives a good impression of what catamaran sailing is all about.
You might also want to check out this video (if you have never seen a sailing boat tip over in forward direction).
After winning the Topcat World- and European championships the previous years, Sebastian and Thomas have had a very good seasons beginning and they are already leading the German Tornado Ranking. They are now preparing for the “German Open Tornado” which will take place in Hamburg on the 13th to 16th of August.
Talking about “Open” – this is a good opportunity to remind you of the Palo Open (previously known as Palo User Conference).
We offer an early bird special until August 31th and you can find additional information about this conference following this link.
PS: It was very nice of Sebastian and Thomas to take me to one of the trainings in spring 2009 as you can see in the following picture. Sebastian is holding the tiller … and yes, I do like sailing a catamaran.
Hello everybody. My name is Kristian Raue and I am the CEO and Founder of Jedox AG. Jedox is the leading Open-Source Performance Management vendor in Europe. Jedox sponsors the development of the Palo OLAP Server for Excel and the web-based Palo Business Intelligence Suite .
I live in Freiburg, Germany where Jedox was founded in 2002. In the meantime, Jedox has opened offices in Germany, France and the UK with additional development resources in Bosnia, Romania and Austria. 60 people currently work for Jedox.
The idea of this blog is to express the vision behind Jedox and Palo directly from the CEO perspective, to give additional insights and to talk about issues and ideas that go beyond what we could communicate over our website at www.jedox.com .
Expect new posts on this blog about once a week.
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