HP in a mess
05 months ago
by jan
in Uncategorized
As a former employee of HP, having worked there for 5 years with much pleasure and motivation, I still feel a quite emotional bond with this company when I hear news about HP in the media. Especially when it comes to cut and job-losses I can still remember the countless numbers of times when I felt insecure about my job myself. The news that has been popping up in the news has exceeded anything I have ever seen from HP before. Previously this kind of news trickled in, but now there’s a huge gush of bad news, that obviously will have its consequences for people within the company, its shareholders and maybe the entire industry. HP has made some dramatic choices and claims it is being affected by all kinds of external circumstances.
To recap the news, this is what happened so far:
- HP dumps Touchpad and webOS: “HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.” This probably means that the Touchpad is immediately discontinued and that HP will try to sell webOS. The remarkable thing about this is that webOS is killed a little more than 1 year after HP’s 1.2bln acquisition of Palm, the previous owner of webOS.
- It is remarkable how little the HP staff knew about this decision. One day after the mark of death, a white version of the HP Touchpad has debuted in HP’s web-store.
- HP also reported that it “will explore strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG)” after a decline in PC shipments. The drop in PC shipments is not something that can be blamed on HP alone, because all PC companies are reporting the same trend, but it is apparently a reason for HP to see if there is a possibility to sell PSG. However, because the size of the Personal Systems Group it is unlikely the entire unit will be purchased by one company.
- The usually ever-growing IPG division of HP claimed that it was suffering from components shortage because of the Japanese tsunami in March, and a slump in consumer spending.
- HP has lost confidence with enterprise customers in its Itanium processor after Oracle decided to withdraw itself of Itanium support. HP probably thought that customers would come to its aid and force Oracle to keep supporting Itanium, but those customers didn’t come to the rescue and many of them also decided to scrap Itanium based systems from their future purchases and even went to the extent of cancelled current orders.
- HP claims to be affected by Macro-economic problems and weakening demand in the public sector.
- HP acquires Autonomy for 10.2bln, which many analyst claim is far too expensive. Autonomy is software company with software that turns huge volumes of images, text, and video into useful statistics and insights for businesses. Although I don’t see what this company would add to HP’s portfolio, the numbers aren’t don’t look that bad. Autonomy gets close to $1 billion in revenue each year, so a price of 10.2bln might just be justified if HP has a great master-plan to blend this company in its existing suite of products and services.
I really wonder what is going to happen after all this news and decisions. It is evident that the stock market wasn’t very enthusiast about the recent feeds of news. HP had already lost 25% of its stock value in 2011 and plummeted to $23.55 (>20% less). It is noteworthy that HP has been buying back $4.6bln worth of shares this year, but this apparently also couldn’t stop the price slide. It has been said that Apple was worth more than HP, Microsoft, and Dell together, but with HP’s current stock value Apple is worth more than HP, Microsoft, Dell, Nokia and RIM!
Sources and related links:
Joining the SAP Mentors initiative
05 months ago
by jan
in SAP Netweaver
As of today it is official. I have been asked to join the SAP mentors initiative and of course could only say yes to such a great honor.
I really consider this a a great honor and responsibility, which I’m sure you appreciate, being among the “top” 100 of 2.5 million SCN members. SAP Mentors are considered the top community influencers of the SAP Ecosystem. Most of the ~100 mentors work for customers or partners of SAP. All of them are hands-on experts of an SAP product or service, as well as excellent champions of community-driven projects.
Related:
Great fun at SAP InnoJam NL
07 months ago
by jan
in SAP Netweaver
What an excellent event. I really loved the vibe of enthusiasm and dedication by so many extremely bright people, willing to sacrifice their Friday and Saturday to work on SAP’s latest and greatest and to support charity organizations with a tiny IT budget.
I learned a lot of new things during the 30 hours of wizardry and hacking:
- That “minority report”-like interfaces have reached us way before 2054, the year of the film’s story. And using Kinect they can even be operated without the little light-emitting thimbles Tom Cruise is wearing.
- That project River has a great potential and allows you to very quickly develop enterprise-level applications.
- That you don’t need to have your data ready one hour before the mobile solution utilizing that data needs to be finished, provided that the solution is based on BI On demand.
- That you need to be able to expose your River data to SUP, Flex builder or any other mobile solution platform a good 20 hours in advance.
- Not to believe people that say that an API based on REST is automatically very easy to use and definitely easier or less chatty than SOAP.
- Not to upload SWFs into a River application that you’ve just put a lot of effort in (The same lesson about customizing the Entprise Portal login page came to mind).
- That adding-up the points with only two only hands and too little sleep can be a quite daunting task (I think Chris’ Twitter supported calculations worked out better) putting the IDO team in 2nd place
- That lack of sleep doesn’t necessarily break concentration and good team vibes.
- That Innojams aren’t only great for participants, but events that SAP’s product managers can take a lot home from as well. The number of whys, hows and whatfors were almost overwhelming and I think it will be hard to come across a team as dedicated to get going in unreleased software as the Innojam participants.
- That Innojam judges neither like to see slides nor code. They like to see solutions that work and are plain, simple, yet enterprisy. Error handling is an appreciated bonus.
- That it is way more fun to work on a real business case for a good cause than on a made-up business case.
- That witnessing this tweet, I regret that I didn’t organize a relaxed after-party dinner to chill-down from this energetic 30 hours of hacking, exploring and learning.
- That there are some really good charity initiatives that could use a lot of support from a community like the SCN community. I’m very happy that the community has been able to contribute to these good causes and might even continue to support them in the future.
- That Innojams don’t go unnoticed by the Dutch press: evidence 1 and evidence 2
- That a great Innojam is very dependent on great people. But, if you leave it in the hands of SAP, VNSG and the SCN community, some serious synergy will happen!
Thank you everyone from SAP, VNSG and the SCN community that helped organize the SAP Innojam NL and congrats to the Hoogvliegers team that won the Innojam.
I absolutely had a great deal of fun and am sure that it will take me quite some time to digest all the new learnings and experiences. And although I don’t think I’m done digesting all learnings very soon, I really can’t wait for the next Innojam NL!
Medical passport on a stick?
010 months ago
by jan
in Healthcare
Central database vs USB stick for the Dutch nationwide EHR system
The Dutch government is about to introduce an national electronic health record system. The purpose of the EHR is to replace the widespread use of paper-based records and fragmented computer files, in order to exchange medical information quickly and easily nationwide. The original records are not centrally saved, but are kept with the original healthcare provider and are retrievable for others via the EHR system, but only if they are treating that specific patient. The government says that a nationwide paperless medical records system will save lives and costs while reducing medical errors and bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Although the bills that need to be passed to get this off the ground have already passed house of representatives, it is likely to be rejected by the senate. According to Marc Chavannes in his column “EPD in de eerste kamer: kans op twee vliegen in één klap“, the senate is likely to reject the bill because of privacy and security concerns with regards to hackers, but also the preying eyes of the government and DA. Marc states that if a database with health records would be available, not connecting it to other data such as internet behavior, telephony taps, passports, fines and psychiatric visits would likely be too irresistible.
Furthermore, the NRC column states that the system is probably outdated already the moment it is introduced and that it will be easy to hack the system. This is in fact the most commonly voiced objection against the EHR. People are concerned with the unsatisfactory guarantee of privacy and the assumed lack of security of this centralized system. In his column, Marc vows for a medical password on an USB stick instead, and I agree that this would indeed solve a lot of issues: Patients would have better control over who they share the information with and can review the information as and when they like. Security of the data would not be of the government’s concern anymore, but it would be the responsibility of the patient.
Although the medical passport sounds like like a brilliant idea, it may have its downsides as well. I can imagine that the moment the first medical passports are handed out, PHR providers such as Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault would be offering new “useful” tools to import your medical records into the cloud. And after that, Facebook and Apple might have an app for that as well.
A study by Oxygen Media en Lightspeed Research on the addiction to social media, revealed that 42% of the interviewed women think it’s fine to post pictures of themselves drunk on Facebook. I guess when you’re addicted to facebook, uploading your medical records into a Facebook app would probably be fine too. And it is not only Facebook’s reputation in the area of privacy that you should be concerned about, your friends on Facebook have just been nominated for a big brother award, an award for the most privacy violating person or company.
If the choice on a medical passport on a stick or a properly maintained and secured system were up to me, I would probably pick the latter. However, I hope a better alternative will pop-up in the very near future.
Satan’s birthday
2
And on the 14th of februari, Satan sent down his dark angels Greed, Commerce and Hypocrisy to fulfil his evil master plan and behold; Valentine’s day was born.
People all over the Western world started celebrating their love in the name of Money, which was more than occasional even more than their fragile relationships could handle. Women were corrupted into thinking that no gift is good enough for this “special day” and it made singles feel inadequate.
Satan leaned back and saw that what he created was good. “From now on, Valentine’s day will be my birthday”, Satan muttered satisfied.
Related: I hate Valentine’s day
My father is going to be a movie star today
011 months ago
by jan
in Other Penninkhofs
My father is going to be a movie star today. He’s featuring in a show about people needing help with their finances.
I don’t think I need to say how proud I am. He’s 73 year old and still doing volunteers work on an almost daily basis. In the documentary that EO (Dutch public TV) is recording, he and one of his clients are interviewed about the 6 years that his client got counseling from him. In these 6 years he helped a 17 year old traumatized boy with no parents and a roof over his head to become a strong 23 year old man that now has his own apartment, is studying for a better future, saved up for a nice financial reserve and is even on track in terms of a nice relationship.
Kudos for my father and the other folks at IDO that actually make an effort to make this world a better place!
Update (24 feb 2010): Here’s the video:
Twitter vs Facebook
0
I have been on Twitter for a while now and have been expressing thoughts, discoveries, rants and various other things through this channel. And believe it or not, some of my tweets have actually been read by real people flesh and blood. Although I have been trying to get @MrsPenninkhof on Twitter as well, I have never been succesful, resulting in the fact that the person nearest to me was never able to know about the things I expressed through this channel.
Haseenah is often checking Facebook for new messages, so I could reach her through Facebook. However:
- I would have to start posting all messages into two channels (Facebook and Twitter)
- And I would have to open a Facebook account (and I don’t trust Facebook)
- Facebook is for girls (in fact it was actually girls-only when it was still called facemash)
And then there was “Selective Tweets”, an add-in to Twitter that reads your time-line from time to time to see if you posted a twee containing #fb. When it finds such tweets, it will automatically send the tweet to Facebook as well.
Getting started with Facebook, made me realize one important difference between Twitter and Facebook. Folks on Twitter can easily be unfollowed, not so for friends on Facebook. This is not because it’s technically not possible to unfriend them, but it might just bring relationships to the edge. It doesn’t matter how much blabberish someone post on their status, I just can’t unfriend them, because they’re e.g. family. And that’s really too bad.
A feature that Facebook should copy from Twitter is its lists. It allows you to add people to personal lists that e.g. represent a certain topic. Using these lists and adding the most interesting friends to them would also be a perfect possibility to do a 1st-level filtering of the amount of chatter. Unfortunately this feature seems to be missing, or just haven’t found it yet.
If this feature exists, but I haven’t found it yet, I think I am excused. Trying to get to understand Facebook was quite challenging. I’m amazed at how many of the basic principles of good usability design we’ve all been taught are violated by Facebook. It’s chaotic, non-intuitive, inconsistent, not easily predictible, visually cluttered, etc.
So, don’t expect too much fireworks from me on my Facebook page and I still find that it’s made for girls. So for now, I will only be using it as an extension to Twitter to reach out to folks, especially Haseenah, that I can’t reach through Twitter.
There you have it: my justification for being on Facebook and how I plan to use it.
Stop software patents in Europe
02 years ago
Today we face an unprecedented patent bubble of poisonous software and business methods patents. Most patents are stockpiled for strategic purposes. These poisonous assets generate no measurable benefits or insignificant licensing revenue for their holders. Large industry is aware of a patent inflation crisis but it seems too hard to march to the beat of a different drum.
Soft patents are still land mines for software development and stifle innovators. Under the EU Lisbon treaty a new instrument is set into force, the European Citizens’ Initiative. The EU-Commission is now obliged to present a legislative proposal when a critical mass of citizens demands it.
Currently, a new platform is built to get a new directive which bans software patenting once and for all. I would like to ask you to sign this new petition on:
http://petition.stopsoftwarepatents.eu
10 Reasons why I’m not an Apple fan-boy
12 years ago
A few days ago, I had a twitter conversation with @molier about why the iPhone wouldn’t be my choice. I promised to get back to him about this in a blog:
So here are my reasons:
Developers are unhappy: Apple’s App Store is a mess for small and independent developers. Very few developers are making even a livable wage, and the approval process is a black box. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, the man behind the immensely popular Facebook application for iPhone, said that he quit the project entirely on Apple’s tyrannical App Store approval policies.- Anti-competitive policies on the iPhone: Apple is disallowing applications because they “duplicate existing functionality”. This means that applications from competitors that offer similar functionaliy are automatically banned. What Apple does is 100x worse than what Microsoft does, although Microsoft also bundles a set of their own applications, at least Microsoft still allows other application to be installed. Recently, Apple lifted its ban for internet browsers.
- Apple prohibits Voice-over-ip: Apple prohibited the Google Voice or other Voice over IP applications from being distributed on its iTunes application store with no public explanation of why, a refusal to offer any suggestions that could permit the application to be distributed, and no process for appealing the decision. Apple also removed third-party Google Voice-compatible applications by explaining that they violate a policy against applications that duplicate native iPhone functionality, despite this rule being wildly inconsistent in its enforcement. Again, Apple refused to offer any suggestions for how developers could comply with the guidelines, and offered no process for appealing the decision. Only very recently Apple has started to allow VOIP applications, provided that they use wifi only.
- Telecommunications choice is gone: If you want to buy an iPhone and through the official channels, it is compulsory to do business with T-Mobile too (Or O2 in the UK, AT&T in the US).
- Apple sues bloggers: Once Apple found out that there was a leak in their development organisation, they went to the extend of sueing the bloggers that were reporting the novelties. In their opinion online journalists have less rights than offline journalists. Fortunately EFF jumped in and Apple lost.
- Exploiting trivial patents: Apple has filed and has been rewarded trivial patents, and isn’t scared of using a bunch of them to squeeze their competitors (yes a bunch, so that it will become very difficult for their opponent to invalidate all of them). They have 2,000 patents and if they want to start a battle, it’s quite likely that they can find a patent that applies. This also says a lot about the patent office that doesn’t care whether a patent existed before or whether there is prior act, but that’s a completely different story.
- Apple violates statutory warranty: Apple ignores the legal warranty rules in The Netherlands, as it refuses free repairs or replacements of their products after a one year warranty term. It is said to reverse the burden of proof and tries to sell expensive extended warranty packages to give consumers what they are already entitled to by law.
- Denying liability and trying to silence owners of exploding iPhones: Numerous press reports are claiming that iPhones are exploding or catching fire in the US, UK, France, Holland, and Sweden. If this wasn’t bad enough Apple managed to write one letter that both denies liability and offers an owner money to keep quiet. Even the European Commission has turned its attention to Apple and their mysteriously exploding iPhones.
- Will all Apple products going to display compulsory ads?: Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
- Apple is over-priced: It is a public secret that Apple devices are over-priced. Currently (19-12-2009) the iPhone is exclusively available at T-Mobile. If you want the one that connects to the 3G network, prepare to fork out €99.95 for 24 months. The 32MB version will set you back €4800 in the 24 months that you’re under contract. That’s the price of a small car!
What a excellent holiday story…
02 years ago
by jan
in Amazing stuff
Out of sympathy it seems she made 117 transfers between 2003 and 2005, moving more than €7.6m (£6.9m) from richer accounts at a rural German branch to people who were suffering financially. Already, she has been dubbed “Die Robin Hood Bankerin”. Click here for full article.
- “The accused hasn’t put one cent in her own pocket. She did it purely out of sympathy with people who were suffering financially,” the woman’s lawyer, Thomas Ohm, said. She was a “good samaritan” with a ”Mother Courage” nature, referencing the Brecht character who believes she can do good in a bad world. The employee was accused of allowing overdrafts for customers who would not normally qualify for them. She then used the money from richer customers to temporarily disguise the loans during the bank’s monthly audit of overdrafts
- The woman knew most of the clients of her small rural branch and had access to their accounts, German TV station WDR reported – “They couldn’t get credit in a conventional way,” the woman told the court
- The judge said: “It’s difficult to find an appropriate punishment here. On the one hand we have big losses. But on the other hand we have here this altruistic behaviour, which makes the case very different from the norm.”
