Software
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Widgets, those mini-software applications, that you can download and embed on web pages, are on a tear, and most of them are coming from third-party developers. Some examples are applications such as iLike, Bunchball Games and Picnik. Forbes recently highlighted the explosive growth of widgets in this recent article. To illustrate this growth, Forbes cites the story of Facebook, which opened its platform to third party developers in May of 2007 and now has nearly 13,000 widgets available that have been downloaded 765 million times.
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More information here.
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No matter whose IT predictions you look at for 2008, software as a service (SaaS) looms big. For those not familiar with this term, SaaS is software that customers do not pay to own. Rather, it is an on-demand system usually hosted through a third party and customers access the software’s applications via the Internet.
The SaaS model has seen tremendous growth in the last few years primarily because it is easier and costs less to implement than large enterprise systems that reside on a company’s own servers. Some fast-growing SaaS vendors include companies such as Salesforce.com, RightNow, and NetSuite, but there are many companies charging hard to catch-up in this sector including software giants Microsoft and Oracle.
There are a number of stories that have surfaced in the last few months indicating SaaS has reached a crucial tipping point, and 2008 may be the year that it begins its breakout to become the norm for most companies:
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One of the biggest problems with advocating Unit Tests is the fact that the return on investment is transparent and immeasurable. In his blog {codesqueeze}, Max Pool offers a simple but elegant way to increase awareness of how much time is wasted when you don’t Unit Test.
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The worst kind of bug is one that was developed into a software application by design. To better illustrate what I am talking about, take this example from worsethanfailure.com:
As the recent father of twin babies, Philip B. was relieved to learn that his employer’s benefit provider, Sun Life Canada, made the insurance process really simple. Adding the little ones on the plan required no more than a phone call to provide birth dates, names, and that sort of thing. All seemed so easy, until the customer service rep realized what Philip was trying to do: “I’m sorry sir, but we need a different birth date for each of your kids.”
“Uhh, er,” Philip stuttered, rather puzzled, “they’re twins? They were both born on the seventh of May, so they actually do have the same birth date.”
“Oh yes, I understand,” she said, “but our system cannot handle two people with the same last name born in the same month of the same year on the same plan.”
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