Upon 2020

Upon2020 (archive)

  • The Open Stack or Mere Plumbing?

    So what exactly are we all building here? OpenID? OpenID plus OAuth plus Yadis/XRD(S) plus Portable Contacts plus OpenSocial plus activity streams? That’s a handful, so some have been calling it the “Open Stack“. Is that what we are building? But what about RSS (and syndication in general), iCal feeds, widgets, mash-ups and so forth?…

  • Burton Group: Evaluate Identity Services Now

    Bob Blakley at the Burton Group just published a report on “The Business of Identity Services”. He focuses on services at the identity provider side and outlines possible identity services businesses on the identity provider side in some detail. It seems he is more optimistic about new identity services business opportunities than I am at…

  • On Identity Business Models or Lack Thereof

    Martin Kuppinger, leading analyst of all things digital identity, based in Munich, Germany, called earlier this week for a conversation about business models for identity product and service companies. A good reason to ponder what we’ve learned in the past year or so about those business models or, more correctly, lack thereof. Here are my…

  • Tom DeMarco: Software Engineering’s Time Has Come and Gone

    Imagine the pope declaring that perhaps god doesn’t exist. Tom DeMarco just published a short, but equally shocking article in IEEE Software. Recall he’s as much as the pope of software engineering as one can imagine, having authored influential works such as Peopleware and influenced virtually any methodologist and software architect since. His article culminates…

  • We Will Miss You, Nick

    Nick Givotovsky was one of the smarter people I ever met. To this day, I only ever understood half of what he said. For years, I was debating with myself whether the other half was just nonsense or whether I simply didn’t manage to understand it. Well, when I finally realized that the first half,…