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To: Don Mosher who wrote (38509)	1/27/2001 11:26:43 AM
From: Drake	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Don, et al, does Kevin Landis have a web site or publish a newsletter? If so, please post. dc

To: Don Mosher who wrote (38509)	1/27/2001 11:50:30 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

how would you attempt to quantify how long it might take a rival to code an equivalent or better set of software programs? I probably wouldn't since it would require too many assumptions about the rival to be meaningful. As a rival with a known level of understanding of the problem and known resources, I might estimate how long it would take to replicate someone else's product. Take, for example, my existing product which consists of about 1.75 million lines of Progress 4GL. It probably has about 20 person years of development invested in it. Typical productivity for a "good" Progress shop is about a 100 lines a day, which suggests that it would take that shop about 8.75 years to duplicate, assuming they had the industry knowledge and design. In practice, they don't have that knowledge or design expertise and would take longer to produce something of lower functionality and quality. But, with my existing tools, industry knowledge, and design, I could erase all the code and recreate it in less than a year working alone. How do you recognize who has high-level programming skills? Is it speed, accuracy, abstraction, creative solutions, or what? How do you, as an expert, recognize from examining code or by interview who is skillful and creative? What were the breakthroughs or inflection points in you own skill development? Did you have a strategy for improving your skills? How do you develop or recognize deep understanding? What qualities or strategies make for unusual expertise and deep understanding? To really answer that would require a dissertation. Let me just say that it isn't as if we are talking about one skill family here. E.g., there are master programmers who are fabulously productive, as long as they are fed the design, but who could do nothing without that design. There are people who are great at handling the complexities of empirical design as long as someone feeds them the right domain knowledge. And there are domain experts who translate the problem space into an architecture. This latter group is the rarest and is more often missing than present in the typical team. Instead, the team relies on domain experts who don't understand the computer architecture with the expected impedance mismatch problems. And, of course, there are also the toolmakers who make it possible for other people to be much more productive. How does one recognize such skills? Experience, I guess, I certainly can't tell you how. How does one develop them? In part, I suppose, by thinking about the problem before thinking about the solution. It has always been important for me to have a good understanding of the real world business problem before trying to come up with a solution rather than depending on that which is usually done. I do think it helps to develop many different perspectives for looking at a problem. I've written in something like 40 programming languages in my career, many of which provide a particular way of dealing with a problem space which can be a useful perspective, even when not working in that language. Most to the point on this thread, I think, is that a company that has a deep understanding of a problem space and how to deal with it computationally has a barrier to entry that has nothing to do with the number of programming hours required to create the code. An imitator without that understanding will always be playing catch-up.

To: Don Mosher who wrote (38509)	1/27/2001 7:53:40 PM
From: ratan lal	Respond to of 54805

Writing code is not as imporrtant as understanding the problem and creating a unique architecture to code the solution to that problem simply and modularly so that enhancements can be easily made without trashing a lot of the code. I have a friend who was one of the founders of an old mini computer company called General Automation in Anaheim, Ca. He was the chief software architect, hated coding, and practically a genius and a madman. To this day I trust his architecture implicitly.

To: Don Mosher who wrote (38509)	2/1/2001 1:28:07 AM
From: Judith Williams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Don-- What an incredible amount of work your Wind report represents. Wind clearly enjoys network effects! You might be interested in a take on the Fool on today's BREW announcement out of Qcom. Argument goes that the Q is trying to establish a 3G CDMA operating system while Wind is after a wireless internet applications operating system. I don't know enough about the technologies to judge, but I suspect the battle will be fought not just on the basis of the technology. boards.fool.com Thanks again for sharing your Wind ideas so generously. --Judith