I say: Where were you at the demo jam? 
Cool though the rocking Wii demo was, I was absolutely gobsmacked by the widgets, flex, Air and webdynpro, VOIP Speech recognition, BI-powerpoint integration, Eclipse and ABAP…. (Videos and details to follow in the next couple days.)
But seriously,when I see people who make their living out of building customer solutions on SAP this happy…
I say to the naysayers.
(photo Flickr, from the super flickr Hoobygroovy)ยด
Redmonk, arbiter of cool gadgets raved about the Jawbone. So Dan kindly brought one over. In short, I’m very impressed. Noise reduction, excellent sound quality, dead easy set up. The packaging is striking, but the device is simply awesome. It enables me to feed my mobile addiction in a new and cool way.
Go buy one. now.
Here is a close up.
On my ear.
Is this tech or is it fashion?
Some brief reflections from yesterday’s community day. (By the way you can watch the sessions over on SDN.)
1. There are close to a million SDN-BPX members, and it is still growing. (lots of stats for those interested in social network dynamics)
2. You can connect SAP to almost anything you like. (WordPress and Twitter for instance) And there are some reasons why you might find this useful.
3. There is some really cool open source innovation at the edges of SAP. (BSP Flex generator, ruby, saplink….)
4. Adobe rocks
5. SDN is Von Hippel’s democratising innovation in action.
6. If you are a customer, and you don’t send people to teched, you are missing out.
7. People actually watch the live streaming.
8. Transparency wins.
9. The Mentor programme. A small committed group of people, well supported makes a huge impact.
My regret. I didn’t really get to chat to Bruce Sterling.
live blogging this session. (well sort of)
James Governor introducing Matthias Zeller from Adobe. James talking about co-innovation and the excellent SAP-Adobe relationship, and the power of the community, moving beyond press-release partnerships. James mentions T-Mobile’s use of flex with SAP HR.
Matthias spends some of his time evangelising Adobe tools within SAP, and also in the broader community. (he is also a twitter king)
Adobe is about engaging experience…
Business applications are ugly, because it is serious stuff (roll laughter) , but this world is changing because of the casual user. Adobe is everywhere.
Adobe integrated Runtime. (AIR) (used to be called Apollo)
Why do you need the browser? The browser is a document paradigm. This reminds me of what Allan Cooper said about the browser. (alt-tab over to google and voila)
The browser is a red herring; it’s a dead end. The idea of having batched processing inside a very stupid program that’s controlled remotely is a software architecture that was invented about 25 years ago by IBM, and was abandoned about 20 years ago because it’s a bad architecture. We’ve gone tremendously retrograde by bringing in Web browsers. Now we have an infinite variety of computers all around the world and an infinite variety of remote sites all around the world. That’s the power. And the power would be greater and the capabilities would be three orders of magnitude greater if we could get rid of this old, stupid, stinking technology of browsers. We have stepped backward in terms of user interface, capability, and the breadth of our thinking about what we could do as a civilization. The browser is a very weak and stupid program because it was written as essentially a master’s thesis inside a university and as an experiment. Internet Explorer is nothing more than a master’s thesis program.
Air runs on windows, mac and linux.
Some demos. Ebay Desktop Client. Salesbuilder. Very interesting visualisation options, well beyond what a traditional browser can do. ooooooooooooh. Sweet. Drag the graph and it updates the pipeline. No data entry. Looks remarkably easy to use. Next demo, google analytics frontend using Air. Looks awesome, mashups…..
SAP Briefing book demo. hooks into SAP procurement app (spend analytics) , developed with flex, for the demo, now embedded in AIR. Drag back and forth with excel. Very very sweet charting features.
You can develop AIR either with Flex or HTML AJAX…Matthais demoed the development environment in Flexbuilder.
Business model. Air is free. but goals are to.
1. Drives design tools sales
2. Drives server and synchronisation tools. (lifecycle data services)
3. Use it to develop their own applications. (Amp, photoshop online,….)
(similar to the pdf reader model I guess)
Matthias presents really well and he knows his stuff. Time to get him in a corner and talk HR related specifics.
The more I look at this Adobe stuff, the more impressed I become.
Here at SAP teched, I’m sitting next to Ed, one of the Colgate twins.
I’ve ranted before that today’s user interaction in enterprise applications is constrained by the table and column. The database is in your face. It is time that we start to think differently.
The wii hands, Majority Desk experiment is is a good starting point to kick the table and column domination of the UI into touch. (excuse Rugby metaphors)
Cartoon from Hugh. This may seem a long way from enterprise software, but it shouldn’t be.
Oddly, one of my most popular posts has been my coverage of SAP executive dress at Sapphire. I casually mentioned that I might start another blog looking at software industry threads, and a couple of colleagues and friends have mailed me saying please do. So today, dear reader, we’d like to announce an attempt to be the software industry’s answer to thesartorialist, trinny and susanna and of course gofugyourself..
I’ve asked a few friends to take lots of photos of software types, be they geeks, suits, software celebs, multi-billionaires or wage slaves. We’ll post them on the blog, and sometimes pass a critical eye over the sartorial state of the software industry. Your contributions, either as fashion photographer, commentator or victim are welcome. For the moment I’m not going to stray into the minefield of female fashion, but I would welcome a co-editor who could cover the geekgirl angle.
We will start out as the dedicated followers of fashion blog on wordpress.com, Aka DFOF. This is partly homage to the immortal Kinks song, and partly that all the other cool names we could think of were gone. (Plus, we geeks like a good acronym.)
They seek him here, they seek him there,
His clothes are loud, but never square.
It will make or break him so he’s got to buy the best,
‘Cause he’s a dedicated follower of fashion.
If you post photos to flickr that you’d like to see on the site, just tag them with DFOF, or drop me a mail.
SAP tech ed in Munich will be a source of rich pickings. See you there.
A bit of an airport ramble…
Everyone who demos enterprise software day in day out would be advised to watch the SAP Tech Ed demo jam.
For two reasons.
1. The obvious and fierce passion that the developers doing the demo have for their product. Presales people are paid to present, yet most of them (myself included!) lack the stage presence of the Colgate Twins, who code for a living. Following a script is not the answer, but telling a story with commitment is.
2. The six minute deadline. Can you show the key messages in six minutes?
A few weeks ago I put a short powerpoint together to help me explain my views on presales and demos, nothing secret or profound, just common sense really.
It may be a little cryptic, and I’ll expand more on the African storytelling theme. And if Craig Tarantino Cmehil has some time at teched we may try recording something.
I’m by no means an expert, but Isibongo is the Xhosa (and Zulu) tradition of the Praise Poet.
The Xhosa word “Isibongo” refers to what is usually translated as praise poems, although some of these are more critical than giving praise to the traditional chief of the tribe. The praise poet, an oral poet, has an important function in the context of traditional society, as its conscience and its memory.
Often this is done with music, called Maskanda.
Another great example of the storytelling tradition in African music is Johnny Clegg. (here below a recent performance)
This was a huge hit in my youth.
And while I’m on the African story telling riff I’d really like to learn a bit more about this company. (hattip Mike)
When you can tell a story that gets others telling your story, then you have really nailed it. Dan and Ed did that at teched in Vegas. if you have a look at Craig’s post here you’ll see some of the link love.
I’m looking forward to hearing and seeing more in Munich.
Vendorprisey 