Poor organizational performance is often the result of a vicious circle. One example of such vicious circle in a product development organization is: poor product quality leads to a large effort spent on rework, customer support and bug fixes leads to lack of resources leads to poorly executed early phases Continue Reading
Be a nerd and be proud!
A nerd is a person who gets immersed in, and passionate about what he or she does [1]. One of the reasons for why there has been so little activity on this blog lately (in addition to that I am a “slow blogger”) is that I am a bit of Continue Reading
Technology that “just works”
I’m interested in many aspects of the world including politics, culture, and sports but if I have to choose one single identity for myself, I think it is that of an engineer. I guess one sign of that is that technology that “just works” makes me really happy. I feel Continue Reading
In tune with the theories or in tune with the times?
Some time ago I chatted with a colleague from South Korea at a global corporate training session. We have kids that are about the same age so it was easy to find shared interests. We ended up comparing what could perhaps be called the knowledge culture of our respective countries Continue Reading
I’ve seen the future
The future of music distribution that is! Streaming through the Internet, it’s simple, legal (hopefully), no DRM, and with ok sound quality (160 kb/s ogg). Native versions of the client exists for PC and Mac. It also runs well on my Ubuntu machine through Wine. Most of my old heroes Continue Reading
150 years of controversy
The Economist published an article in their Christmas issue commemorating the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species (and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on 12 February 1809) [1][2]. I was a bit surprised (or maybe not) about the fact that it still seems newsworthy to not Continue Reading
An ode to slow blogging
I had lunch with an old friend the the other day. He reads this blog from time to time. When we were about to say good-bye-for-now, he turned to me and said: “Arto, I really think you should post a bit more often on your blog or you will lose Continue Reading
The disruption is here
The book Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen discusses how initially inferior technologies may eventually displace existing technologies. Christensen calls these technologies “disruptive technologies”. Christensen’s favourite example is hard drives for computers in which market the incumbent almost never made the leap to the next level of miniaturisation successfully. It was Continue Reading
A Kōan
The blind watchmaker and the blind hen
The parameters of the universe we inhabit are incredibly well tuned to allow life to develop. All the constants governing the four known forces of the universe, the masses of the elementary particles etc. have exactly the required values to enable complex molecules and thus life to develop. With even Continue Reading