Have you heard of Google and Apple? I think 99.9% of people will say “sure”.

Yes. Google and Apple should be among the world’s most valuable and popular brands now. Today I want to talk about a new celebrity:  Android.  It is supported by Google but is the largest competitor of Apple in the mobile phone (iPhone) and tablet PC (iPad) market. Soon, it will be one of popular names the world.

1. What is Android?

The Mythical 5% comes from Bruce Eckel, the author of Thinking in C++/Java. It says that 5% of programmers are 20x more productive than the other 95%.

Most of the programmers seldom write technical blogs, attend technical conferences and salons. They do not do continuous learning and seldom read some books.  So, most of these kind of guys don’t go to big companies or attend great projects.

The blogosphere was flooded with sarcastic comments when Microsoft announced the future Windows Azure Platform Applicance offering at WPC earlier this month, quickly dubbed “Azure-in-a-Box”. eBay and large datacenters will implement Windows Azure cloud infrastructures in large server centers, supported by HP, Dell and Fujitsu.  But cloud in a box sounds like a contradiction, right? Cloud computing was supposed to provide endless scale and elasticity, how could you get this if confined to a single container? 

 I think the more dogmatic cloud prophets are missing the larger point. Yes, global clouds provide scale benefits and reduce cost– but the BIG disruption is the potential of a standardized application platform across public and private domains. So, what will this do?

Often times, a client will bring to me a great idea and ask for an estimation. The problem is, for me to make a good estimation, I need to imagine the product from the back: at the last day of delivery, looking back to the project start, what happened? I need to also be able to see the product on that day. "How many buttons on each page and where did they go." All of this gets put into the estimation. Of course, you can imagine that many things catch clients by surprise.

Lately I've been having thoughts about polymorphism. Let's get this straight, I'm not talking about the Object Oriented principle in Programming. I'm talking about good old-fashioned Biology 1A - Polymorphism. It's been decades since we've studied it, so here's a summary:

Sometimes a gene mutates and you see two different variants in the same population. The classic example is the peppered moth.

Having been working on building R&D teams both for Chinese customer and western customer for many years. There are lots of debates about how to build a innovative and efficient team in China. Here are some tips for western companies when considering building operations especially R&D force in China.

1. Think before take action

Even though I’m more interested in both economics and politics than the average person, I have to admit that most often I find macro-economic analysis fairly abstract, communicated in numbers and percentages that seem distant from the reality of everyday life. But traveling between China and Europe these days I certainly don’t need a chief economist to tell me the story. 

In enterprise collaboration the mantra has generally been to make any information available. The idea has been that if you store all knowledge in an indexed electronic format, knowledge will prevail and add value to the organization. And it has. But is this really collaboration?

What has been built is generally the enterprise Google. But fundamentally Google is a library. Documents transfer information between the user and provider of knowledge. It’s not a dialogue. And it certainly isn’t personal.

There was a time when enterprise software was cutting edge and state-of-the-art. In fact, until the last couple of years, enterprise IT was pushing adaption into consumer IT. Most people had their first experience with mobility, internet, email and document software in a corporate environment before becoming direct consumers.